Book Adjacent Income - The Plan

Back in October the Authors Guild released survey results on author income. No survey is perfect, the numbers will always be skewed one way or another, but the main take away I got from this article was that successful authors seem to be tapping into incomes other than only writing books. 

A SFF Seven alumnus, Charissa Weaks, has a lovely Etsy store filled with her bookish merchandise. She does well with these sales and it’s a non-writing creative outlet for her. It’s book adjacent, but it’s not writing income. 

Jeffe shared her various income streams on Sunday. Check out her post. It’s informative. She’s at a place I aspire to be: hybrid with outside writing opportunities. Jeffe has a wonderful podcast you can watch on YouTube, First Cup of Coffee. She shares the realities of being an author and what it really looks like beyond the bonbons. I appreciate her candor as she shares the ups and downs, because as writers we all have the ups and downs, but no body quite gets it like another writer does. And as she has enough subscribers to warrant adding it to her non-writing income list! 

And one thing that both Charissa and Jeffe have: Patreon. If you go back in history, say the middle ages, artists were paid a living wage by the nobles, kings, or the church. Patreon uses this idea and provides a platform for creators to run a subscription service to their subscribers. Think in terms of the cost of a cup of coffee per month. If you have enough patrons chipping in on Patreon in exchange for excerpts, bonus material, newsletters etc. you have another revenue stream. A brilliant option if you have a fan base. 

Etsy, YouTube, and Patreon. Three income options that aren’t book writing and don’t require you to do any public speaking. If standing before a crowd doesn’t make your knees shake then you can add a fourth option to your list. 

For me, I’m keeping tabs on the options and paying attention to what successful authors enjoy and say works. I'm not driving blindly into the dark, there's light at the horizon. Once I have a fan base I’ll try my hand at some writing-adjacent income streams. Do you have plans for future side gigs? 

Beyond Book Sales: Other Ways to Earn Income as an Author

 This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking about book-related income that is specifically not from book sales.

There was an asterisk to that, specifying that the question was in relation to the Authors Guild 2023 Income Survey, which I didn't read. (I have Opinions about that survey, which I won't go into.) But I assume the question comes from the survey dividing author income into book-related and not, and the person asking is wondering what the "not" might be. It's a good question because I'm a firm believer that long-term success in this fickle business relies on diversifying income streams. 

I actually have a line on my income spreadsheets that says "Other Writing Income," as opposed to the "Book Sales" line. What kind of income is that?

1. My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JeffesCloset. This is how I offer mentoring and coaching to other writers. Plus, it's a great little community that's truly supportive and positive in a non-toxic way.
2. Other kinds of coaching. I also offer various kinds of one-on-one mentoring and coaching.
3. Workshops, presentations, and master classes. I love giving talks and I especially love it when they pay me!
4. Articles and similar nonfiction writing. Love getting paid for those, too!
5. YouTube. I have a podcast, First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy, with enough subscribers that I earn income from the views. 

Websites as Crutches

For the most part, I aspire to keep away from distractions. However, I find that good ambient sound works well for creating a cone of privacy around me while I'm writing. Especially when there are noise cancelling headphones involved. Therefore, I usually have YouTube up in the background. I'll run 3+ hour dark scifi, dystopian, or horror ambient tracks. I have specific needs for those - they need to run long and not allow ads. They can't have a ton of melodic line. These things are more a vibe than they are music, and they're just enough to keep my critical brain busy and out of the way of drafting while they also provide cover for the other noises of the household.

I'm a big fan of Wordhippo.com for word finding. My rule for this is that I must open and close the browser window for every single look up. It's an attempt to keep me from sheering off of making words with rando look ups. Some days, I don't open the site at all. Other days, I may need a little mental jog or two. Those days, I need to find just the right word before I can unclench and move on.

My final favorite website while writing is a website for writing. Consider this my ongoing plug for 4theWords.com. Timed writing, gamified, stripped down to a basic text editor so I can't get too precious about how stuff looks while trying to get x amount of words before time runs out. It's a great place to fast draft and a great place to write about writing. It's a perfect venue for doing a bunch of the prework of writing - compiling research / noodling how that research impacts plot and characters, getting characters hashed out, getting GMCs worked through, etc. I'm on the site every single day.

Once I have a draft, no matter how skeletal and bloody, I shift out of websites into Word. Edits and rewrites happen with fewer website interruptions. By the time I'm in edits, I pretty much know where we're going and how we're going to get there. I no longer need to anesthetize the critical portions of my brain like I do with drafting.  Until that point, though, websites are my crutches, and I lean on 'em.

Social Media Trap or Marcella Goes Off the Deep End

"I wanna be where the readers are.
I want to see them reading.
Carrying around those -what do you call them? Oh. Right. - BOOKS.
Out in the sun. Or in the shade.
On the beach or in a cafe.
Read in a bar.
Wish I could be a Tik Tok star."

My apologies to The Little Mermaid.

Social media is hailed as The Way to sell books. You need to know Facebook ads, Amazon ads, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, the rotting corpse that was once Twitter. . . It gets overwhelming fast. Publishers push authors to do all the things! Yet experienced indie author Kristine Kathryn Rusch likes to remind authors that the best advertisement for your current book is your next book. Cal Newport argues that your best, most creative work  comes from flow state and that flow is achieved best in deep work - those times and places where the external world goes away and you descend into deep brainwave activity wherein you lose track of time and are absorbed in your material. This state is predicated on not being interrupted, not having your attention fractured by anyone or anything. He argues that readers shouldn't necessarily have access to you. You have a job. Writing.

I suppose if you compartmentalize extremely well, you could make an argument for engaging in deep work for a few hours each day and then indulging in a little social media promotion. Fair enough. I'm having to think a little harder about that because I don't compartmentalize well. Maybe not at all. It doesn't help that earlier this week, I heard someone mention that cell phones are black mirrors. This rocked me. 

If you aren't familiar, black mirrors are scrying mirrors used in ritual and divination. They are powerful tools and most of us familiar with them keep them carefully wrapped and hidden away from casual glances. This is because a part of you travels when you scry. Part of you goes bye-bye. It's one thing to do that intentionally and for a purpose and then to shut down the mirror after and to reclaim every part of you that went traveling. 

Black mirrors drain energy. It's not malicious. It's just part of the work done with them. They don't have intent, but their utility is the emptiness that draws practitioners out of their human shell to journey for answers to a question or for a vision of something. Used consciously and safeguarded appropriately, they're harmless and helpful. 

If cell phones are black mirrors, they are black mirrors that are used utterly unconsciously. They aren't warded or guarded. We stare into them without regard for where we go when we do. Just try to get the attention of someone absorbed in their phone. Where do we go when we stare in that black mirror? Where does our energy go? I'm not saying that cell phone are traps devised by the Fae. I am saying that if the Fae wanted to build irresistible traps for mortals to fall into, they could have done worse than to have invented cell phones.

Social media, cell phones not withstanding, isn't evil. There are plenty of benefits: engaging with people you enjoy but maybe have never met in real life, finding new-to-you info and books and music, in a world still constrained by pathogens, social media can be a glimpse into a larger, more diverse world. We should absolutely enjoy and contribute to those things. But if we're going to social media *just* to sell books rather than build relationships we enjoy, we'll do more harm than good.

So before you stare into that black mirror in your hand, think long and hard about what you want to get out of it so you know exactly what and how much to put into it.

Keeping Up with the Virtual Joneses

I just returned from a week with my family on Lake Coeur d'Alene. So lovely and relaxing! During some conversation, I mentioned Ed Sheeran, and my aunt - who'd never heard of him - asked me how I kept up on discovering new music.

It was an interesting question, and one I had to think about. Finally I said that I see a lot of recommendations on Twitter. Instagram, too. People share Spotify lists or post YouTube videos. She nodded a little at my answer, clearly a bit daunted at the prospect of emulating me there. So, I sent her two Ed Sheeran albums for her birthday.

Coincidentally enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Keeping up with trends and changes in social media." Not an easy thing to do for any of us.

It's true, in fact, of most technology. As a member of the generation that transitioned in high school and college from typewriters to word processors, I'm keenly aware of how keeping up with advances in computer technology poses greater challenges for me every year. It's a simple factor of aging that learning new tricks gets more difficult, and it seems to be true of tech that it morphs rapidly.

Also, as with slang and other forms of social interaction, social media changes even more rapidly. The youth drive the "in" form of communication - and the older generations struggle to keep up.

The good news is, I firmly believe that keeping up with trends and changes in social media helps to keep us mentally youthful. It's good to learn new things, and communicating with those younger than we are helps to keep us involved in the world. But HOW to do that?

My advice for that is the same as with all social media: pick and choose.

When you hear someone talk about something cool they saw on some social medium, go check it out. Ruthlessly control what you see - pick and choose whose timelines or accounts you follow - and then play with it. Try to resurrect that feeling of youthful exploration.

Make it fun! After all, the second rule of social media is: If it's not fun for you, don't do it.

And it's okay if something that starts out fun stops being fun after a while. I'd really love for XKCD to do a graphic of the social media life cycle. First you find a new-to-you one, you play with it, gain a following, then creepy men send you anonymous messages. Brought to you by the person who thought Instagram was a safe space and is now receiving creepster messages. *sigh*

BUT... that's a minor part of things. Inevitable as death and taxes, it seems.

Another trick is to absolutely engage with younger people and manipulate them into helping your geezer self. It requires having no shame. I recently cornered a young writer in a bar and made him show me how to do Instagram stories. He was awesome about it.

Remember: learning something new is good for our brains! And having fun doing it makes all the difference.

Book Trailer Challenge

I know nothing about book trailers. Except that I've seen a few, and those few haven't left a good impression. There might be a way to create a killer book trailer, but I sure haven't seen it yet. Maybe if I did Claymation excerpts? But, you know, I already have a job or three. So that's not likely to happen in this lifetime.

I like video/film as a mode of expression. Not crazy about it as a means of selling. That's a me thing. I suspect I've got some prejudice about using the visual storytelling mode (video) to tell a story about a story told in a nonvisual mode. It shorts my simple brain. Right now, YouTube seems geared for the unbearably cute, the sadistically amusing, or the insanely clever.

I'm sure someone out there can create book trailers that fit all of those criteria. That someone is not currently me.

So while I think video has some serious strengths if you understand the pros and cons of the medium. It's an excellent teaching tool. Most people in our culture are visual learners. So there's that. Silly cat videos (KittenLady and TinyKittens, anyone?), DIY projects, instructional videos, experiences travel and adventure vids, and actual performance (assuming you can handle the trolls) - those are the things that really seem to pop on YouTube. If I still had an orange cat (sniff) I'd consider doing a trailer for Damned If He Does - it would be all from the cat's point of view. But. Ship sailed.

All of that said, I do have a YouTube channel. It's pretty invisible because my video quality is crap. It's all cat videos, boat videos, and this. The Night of The Frogs.

So. Book trailers? Nope. Not unless I can come up with a way to make marketing the written word via a visual medium I can't justify the cost or time. Now. Someone come tell me why I'm wrong. I'm always interested in learning that I'm thinking about something incorrectly.