Writer Finances and the Myth that all Authors are Millionaires

When you’re start out in this crazy business you decide which publishing track is for you. 

There is:

Traditional - publishing with an established publisher (think Orbit, Tor, or Angry Robot)

Self-Publishing - publishing on your own without an established publisher

Hybrid-author - publishing both with an established publisher and independently

Sounds great! Right? Except you may, or at the very least nearly everyone you tell about your decision to be an author will, assume that means $$$.

So, how do you budget when you don’t have a clue about what you're facing? 

Very…carefully? 

I wrote my first novel in 2013, the one that earned me my Golden Heart in 2018. See that 5 year spread? There was a lot of internet searching and learning happening in that time because I knew I needed to decide what to do with the thing. 

Self-publishing in 2013-2014 had a bit of a stigma for being sub-par, but I checked it out anyway. I’m a laboratorian at heart, I can’t make big decisions without a detailed pro/con list. For information, I attended a couple small writer conferences and attended sessions targeted at traditional and self publishing. There’s so much to that that I could fill your screens for days, or you could check the archives of my fellow SFF Seven’s posts, there be goldmines there. And recently the Fantasy Inn did a great survey on self and traditional publishing, check it out here.

Jim C. Hines did a nice survey in 2010 about first novel deals and earnings. But in all the Publisher Weekly announcements there was cryptic wording on the deal amounts. Thankfully, the Nelson Literary Agency puts out an excellent newsletter and blog, a great follow if you’re in the trenches. Kristin Nelson shared deal-reporting lingo translation. 

Finally! A way to decipher those press releases and find out how much traditional authors make! 

*cue laughing*

Back in 2014-2015 I was enjoying a very successful career in the medical field and determined that the time needed to be successful at self-publishing wasn’t something I had. That left the traditional path, hybrid author really wasn’t a thing back then, and I needed even more info to formulate my ten year plan. 

You read that right, TEN YEAR PLAN. If you don’t have one, you should make one. Being an author is a long road, no matter which path you take. And planning is part of figuring out that elusive author finances.

My ten year plan was to have one book published within five years and subsequently two books per year after that which would allow me to retire from the corporate world and become a full-time author by year ten with ten books on my backlist. 

Best laid plans and all…

I still have a ten year plan, though it looks very different from what I started out with. Due to my chronic disease, I chose my health over my job and walked away from my career in 2018. Unfortunately that means my family is now single-income, my husband is absolutely wonderful in case I haven’t mentioned it recently, and my healthcare takes up about 20% of it. 

Remember the planning carefully part I mentioned above? 

Even after all that, I still have a plan. Technically I have a one year, five year, and a ten year plan, and I’m still collecting information because the most important thing I’ve learned concerning author finances is the need to be flexible. 

Flexibility is key for which ever publishing path you choose. Make goals, set timelines for yourself, and be flexible. Yes, that means flexible with your income as well. 

In the past couple of years there’s been a movement to be more transparent about author income and a number of authors have voluntarily posted about it. There’s been some shared on Twitter, sorry I can’t find the tweets to link to. And Susan Dennard, author of the Witchlanders series, did a post on author income along with her agent (scroll down to the bottom section: For the Daydreamers).

None of this is to bum you out about your future prospects. But if you’re committed to being an author for the long haul, you’ll need a plan for your finances. Otherwise you’ll end up like poor Rob…

But he always looked on the bright side, which sounds like a good idea to me! 

Are you starting out and vacillating on which publishing path you want to take? 

Budgeting Self-Pub Production Costs

On the self-pub side of the publishing equation, you carry your production costs upfront. That's editing, cover art, formatting, ISBNs, copyright and in some cases, printing/distribution. Add audio production (charged per finished hour) if that's a format you offer. None of it is cheap. Yes, big backlists are critical to achieving a profit in this industry, but that's balanced by the upfront costs of production. Emotional costs are a different topic for a different post. Opportunity costs vary by individual but absolutely must be considered. If you're a speedy writer capable of producing 4+ books/year, the cost of production might be what limits how many books you publish in a year. Expect to lose money during your first few years while you build your backlist and your audience.

For my Urban Fantasy series, my cover art is my highest production cost because I didn't want to use stock photo models. I went all-in for the custom photoshoot. Yes, I could cut my art costs significantly by using premade covers or stock photo models. For me, ensuring my model didn't show up on sixteen other books that weren't mine was important enough to allocate a large portion of my budget for cover art.

I chose my cover artist because he's good, he's timely, and he also offers book production services. My "cover art" costs include images and lettering, plus banner/social media images, formatting for ebook and print, and covers for both formats. Essentially, I send my cover artist my completed manuscript and a summary description for what I want the cover to look like and, after a bit of back and forth, he (and his team) send me finished book files that are ready for uploading to distributors. For me, the savings in opportunity costs offset a significant portion of the cash cost. YMMV.

For my High Fantasy series, editing costs me more than art because the books are twice as long as the UF books, and I opted for an illustrator instead of a photographer for the art. Now, let me disabuse you of any notion that illustrators are by default cheaper than photographers. That's not remotely a true or fixed thing. Art is art, thus subject to a very wide price range. There are artists you may love but can't afford (or your schedules may never align). That's a reality that comes with the business. While it's important to have a book with a good looking cover--yes, people absolutely judge your book by its cover, hence the saying--don't blow your budget on art alone. You can always recover your books if/when your budget allows.

If you're writing a series, the production costs are a fairly fixed per-book charge, which makes them easy to budget. Ideally with a series, if you know how long that series is going to be, you can negotiate bundled pricing with your artist and/or book production team. Some will, some won't, some you'll discover you don't want to work with for the whole series (thus, ensure there's an "out" clause in any contract).

Recurring costs like website (hosting, design/build, custom email, SSL, etc.), newsletters, ads-creative, ads-runs, promotions, promotions art/copy, and subscriptions to design/creative creation sites, stock photo sites, cloud storage, distribution sites, and post boxes can be broken into annual charges, monthly, and per-use. These charges may spike when you drop a new release, but they're charges you incur even if you don't publish a new book. They're charges of running the business.

The hardest recurring cost to budget is advertising using CPC, because sometimes the company will use all your daily maximum allotment and sometimes they use a fraction of it. For the purposes of budgeting, assume they'll max you out every day. You don't want to end up in debt due to the whims of algorithms. How much of your total budget should you allocate to advertising? It varies. Less when you're starting off, more at midlist, less once you have a large and dedicated fan base. Not a particularly helpful answer, I know. The most helpful generalization I can offer is that don't spend too much when you don't have a backlist. You need inventory (aka multiple books) for ads to turn a profit because your ROI (return on investment) comes from subsequent full-price sales of your other (non-advertised) books. There are many online classes in advertising. Look for the ones that deal specifically with books and fiction in particular. Book advertising is a different beast from other products. Non-fic relies heavily on author platforms/reputations, which doesn't commonly apply to fiction (you don't need to be an Influencer to write a killer thriller). The book community is hypersensitive to social-space spamming and unsolicited inbox invasions that many product-sales classes encourage, so don't waste your money on broad-topic sessions.

Now, I could go on and on, but this rough overview probably has caused your eyes to glaze over, so I'll stop. The most important thing about writerly finances whether you're trad-pubbed, hybrid, or self-pubbed is that you have a budget and stick to it. Like any creative industry, feast and famine are real. Don't blow your money during seasons of feast; you're going to need it during seasons of famine.

Real Information on Author Finances

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is again eerily timely. We're talking writer finances. How do you budget for uneven income? What’s your biggest expense?

With so many people struggling financially due to the #COVID19 shutdowns, managing money is heavy on many people's minds. It's odd to find myself well-equipped to deal with this because - as a full-time writer with no other income and with a non-salaried spouse who does not provide me with health insurance - I am always juggling the financial balls.

Though many people regard writers as wealthy, most are not. There's a huge spectrum of author incomes, from approaching zero to multi-millions. Various groups use surveys and data-mining to estimate median author incomes - eliciting huge arguments, too - but the short answer is that how much an author makes varies. And it doesn't just vary from author to author, but it varies over an author's career. There are good years and bad, feast and famine, upward trends and downward ones. Even within the course of a year, that income varies.

The bottom line is, if you're relying on writing income to pay the bills, then budgeting is a major challenge. There is no salary, so the standard method of budgeting - knowing your monthly income and keeping expenses below that number - doesn't work. So, what does work?

The simplest and lowest-risk method: many authors who write full time have a stable source of income that does not come from writing - a retirement annuity or a spouse's salary. In this scenario, budgeting can be done according to the reliable income, with income from writing counting as "gravy." Now, the reliable income budget can be pretty bare bones, meaning the gravy is pretty important, but this also allows for a percentage of writing income to go back into the business.

I'd love to be doing it this way! However, I'm not. My husband retired early from his state job, so while he does have a monthly stipend, there's not much left after his health insurance premium. (I self-insure through the ACA.) He's also non-salaried, so his income fluctuates wildly.

So, how do I handle budgeting when in some months I receive 15% of my annual income and in others 2%? (Those are my 2019 numbers.)

Very carefully?

What I'd love to be able to do is budget annually. I'd love to set aside a year's worth of fixed expenses - mortgage, utilities, groceries, etc. (which are, by the way, my biggest expenses) - and pay those ahead or out of an account set aside for that purpose. I've come pretty close to being able to do that, but not as consistently as I'd like. If I ever received good-sized advance - like more than $100K - I'd set it aside for that.

What I usually can do is budget quarterly. At any given time, I like to have enough money to cover projected expenses for the ensuing three months. That way, if what we have in hand looks like it'll dip, I have a few months to try to supplement the income.

One thing that helps hugely with stabilizing income is self-publishing. While an author still can't control sales, the retail platforms pay monthly, which really helps to even out the income. Diversifying income streams as much as possible helps, too.

Of course, keeping expenses low is ideal, but that's true of any budget. So is earning a Whole Bunch of Money!

In the meantime, we do our best to make the ever-shifting ends meet.

Tropes Are Like A Box of Chocolates

DepositPhoto

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "What trope/theme did you think (or wished) had "died" only to recently reappear?"

From Wikipedia: The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works.

So here’s the thing – I don’t think in tropes. I don’t pay attention to them, I don’t read for them or despite them. When I saw this topic of the week, I thought of a See’s Candy Shop, with all the flavors and varieties. (Alas for the good old pre-pandemic days when their stores were open.) I know which ones I like, I usually order the same ones (dark chocolate vanilla buttercream is my favorite, followed closely by dark chocolate butters and many more…) but occasionally I’ll try a new one, which is how I discovered my love for raspberry truffles. I don’t even glance at the flavors I don’t like and I politely refuse a free sample if those are the ones on offer. I’m perfectly happy for the other flavors to exist, for whoever enjoys them, but they’re not on my list.

True story: when I was in college, I worked for the May Company as a housewares department manager, I used to stroll down the mall on my dinner break and have See’s candy. Now I’m not saying I did this every day, but I did it often. This became a problem when my husband came to keep me company for dinner one evening and suggested as a treat we get some See’s. Uh oh. The clerk greeted me enthusiastically and put my usual order into a bag without my ever opening my mouth! Busted! My spouse was concerned for my health more than anything else and we laughed about it later but I guess I might have overdone my “dinner at See’s” routine a bit.

Yes, I know I digressed but See’s candy….yum.

So tropes can be overused to the point they become clichés – the black hatted villains in cowboy movies come to mind – but even then, if a reader enjoys reading cowboy novels with black hatted villains, is it really a problem?

One of my favorite web sites is TV Tropes, “The All Devouring Pop-Culture Wiki”, which despite the name does cover other areas than just television. You can browse, search, look at the indices and otherwise roam this site for far too long, finding fun examples of every trope under the sun. I picked a few at random from the “Overused Sci-Fi Plot Devices” list, which is extensive:

Time travellers go back in time to prevent some Bad Thing from happening and in the process actually cause the Bad Thing to happen.

Time travellers go back in time to prevent some Bad Thing from happening; they succeed, but cause something worse to happen.

When a player gets "killed" in a virtual reality simulation, they also die in real life.

A war gets started over a stupid misunderstanding between two sides that otherwise have no reason to fight, and no effort is made to resolve the crisis diplomatically.

The two opponents in a war have been fighting for so long that they've forgotten how the war got started in the first place, but no effort is made to resolve the crisis diplomatically.

The two opponents in a war have been fighting for decades/centuries/millenia; the main characters end the war peacefully in a matter of days or hours.

Humans have a special quality that makes us unique, so that even superbeings can learn something from us.

A pet survives the disaster, and is discovered at the end of the story.

(I think I’ve seen every one of those on a Star Trek episode!)

Some of the entries on the list have links to other essays and there are folders of examples in every field from anime to music to toys live action films.

In my own writing I have certain tropes I go to just about every time and here are some examples – the weary but deadly Special Forces soldier, the high powered business woman, the Ancient Aliens, the extremely dangerous or catastrophic situation (Wreck of the Nebula Dream, my first published science fiction romance contains a number of these tropes of mine), a dream space or alternate form of reality where the characters can connect, maybe a pet, sometimes a child, an interstellar crime syndicate,  the evil implacable alien forces, a benevolent galactic civilization with bureaucracy, Artificial Intelligences, true love, a Happy ending (whether For Now or Ever After)…

But the thing is, this is the type of book I enjoy reading myself and therefore the kind of book I want to WRITE. And I’m blessed to have readers who enjoy the same ingredients.

The key is to tell a good story each time out, to mix and match elements – maybe this time the weary soldier is a kickass woman or the ancient alien is a tree, who absorbs the characters to talk to them – and be sure to tell an exciting tale.

I also keep my eye out for new concepts to work into the stories. Some of my most novel plot elements have come from reading articles in business magazines. Refresh a trope with a new take!

My Badari Warriors series is at thirteen books and going strong. The basic trope is the same in every one, since the novels are about genetically engineered soldiers of the far future, fighting alien scientists for the right to live and to love. They each find their fated mate in the course of the book’s events and together the couple battles the enemy. The key, however, is that each time I consciously challenge myself to find new elements and new ideas to differentiate the plots, and of course the characters in each book are different people, each with their own characteristics, background and likes/dislikes. So far the readers seem to find the books satisfactory.

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Going back to my See’s Candy analogy, their recipes use the same ingredients – chocolate, sugar, cream, butter, flavorings, nuts – to create that entire store full of delightful delectable different offerings. Tropes are the same – ingredients that can add up to an infinite number of stories and there will never be enough time in the world to read them all.

Stay safe, sending best wishes to you and your loved ones for good health in these stressful times! Happy reading…

Spare Me the Antihero

Houston, we have a release date. On June 10, the third book in my SFR series Chronicles of the Empire comes out. The first NEW novel in this series in nine long years. Seriously overdue.

It's never a good day when a radioactive hunk of starship nearly drops on your head.

The Claugh Empire attacked Edie's planet fifteen years ago, murdered her parents, and left the teen for dead. So when a wrecked Claugh starship interrupts a salvage mission, she's torn between revenge and rescuing survivors—especially the stirring captain with an uncanny ability to rekindle her dead emotions. Something about him inflames the urge to come to terms with her past. But the mercenary in Edie doubts trusting a former enemy will bring her redemption or put old prejudices to bed. When a new common enemy, hell-bent on wiping out humanoids, threatens to bury them all, the captain tries to convince her a mutual coalition might breach their political impasse—all for the greater good.

I think I have the tropes SO covered with this book. Enemies to lovers. A heroine who flirts momentarily with being an antihero which is funny, because when we talk about tropes I don't want to see, the antihero is right at the top. I wish I could breakdown why I hate antiheroes so much. Maybe it having to read A Clockwork Orange in high school. I wanted every single character in that book dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. And not by their own hands. I wanted them robbed of the agency they robbed others of. Apparently I am karma, and I have zero patience. Either way. It feels to me like antiheroes are either unwilling to learn and grow or are too stupid to do so. Therefore, in a just universe (and hey, in fiction, you GET to have a just universe dammit! That's why it's fiction!) they'd all die because death is the result of failing to adapt, right? I suppose this all makes sense since we currently have a cadre of antiheroes running our government like it's a clown car and I have certain intense feelings about that. (Please let me live long enough to vote in November!)

So yeah. Antiheroes. Won't read 'em. If I want to keep company with willfully ignorant jerks I'll turn on the news, thanks.

Trope? What's a trope?

(the genius of Wreck It Ralph 2, see it if you haven't!)

It’s blursday!! Is anyone else having trouble keeping track of what day it is? 

One thing I don’t keep track of much are what the it trope of the year is. Oh, I’m absolutely aware of what they are because a trope doesn’t become it until it reaches the mainstream and is everywhere. But some of you may be scratching your head, what exactly is a trope and am I reading one?

Short answer: yes. A literary trope is a theme, type of character, language etc. that is used over and over so much that it becomes a red flag, a bullseye, a characteristic that tells you immediately what type of book you are reading. 

The chosen one. A marriage of convenience. The Butler did it. Killer aliens. The secret heir. An object of immeasurable power. Vampires.

All of those are tropes that give you clues to what you’ve just picked up. And all of them have been bemoaned at some point.

But when the masses are calling for a trope to die, it doesn’t mean it really truly dies. It only means the market is oversaturated with that specific trope and, like the bunny being fed pancakes at the end of Wreck it Ralph 2…people explode from too much of a good thing. 

So the bunny explodes. There’s pandemonium and screaming as the other books scramble to be the entrée. And the pancakes hang out in the background until people start looking around, craving those fluffy flapjacks covered in syrup again. 

Since I don’t tend to binge on books of the same trope I don’t get sick of any. That’s not to say there aren’t tropes I give a hard no to, there absolutely are. There’s no such thing as everyone will love it. Even if the social’s blowing up with pancakes, not everyone’s going to be eating them and subsequently calling for their annihilation.

But to answer the topic of the week: for me, the pancakes have always been vampire stories. I loved Dracula back in the day, fell hard for the Dark Prince of the Carpathian series, couldn’t get enough of Cat and Bones, and have been searching high and low for my next fanged fix ever since. 

I’ve known vampire books would return someday. And no, I know some of you are saying write what you want to read if you can’t find it, but my brain doesn’t write vampire fic. And I'm very good at waiting. 

How about you? What tropes have you gotten sick of recently?

And the trope came back, the very next day

You know that maybe-a-bit-too-dark kids' cartoon song "The Cat Came Back" about Mr. Johnson who tries to get rid of his overly destructive cat but the cat keeps, um, coming back? (For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW9f04Dctz4)

That's sort of the opposite of me and story tropes. Nothing pleases me more than a beloved story trope all dressed up in some shiny modernity and busting back out into the market.

Story: Back in middle school, I read all of Anne Rice -- even her erotica, shh, don't tell -- and loved, loved, loved vampires. All things vampire. I played Vampire: The Masquerade in college. At a roleplaying con. For which I won an award. I watched all the vamp movies (aside: Tom Cruise will never be Lestat to me, but Antonio Banderas pinching a flame out sure was fun) and read pretty much every vampire book in the library. So, seriously, drowned myself in the vamp goodness. It was glorious.

And then the Twilight thing happened, and the world went, oops, maybe too much vamp, and then sadly all my angsty undeads went away.

I missed them and kept my spirits up by re-reading my faves and a few determined series that kept on going (bless you, Christa Paige and Juliet Lyons), but then guess what came out yesterday?

No really, guess.

*jumping up and down*

THIS!

AND THEY'RE MAKING A MOVIE OUT OF IT!

May this officially usher in a new round of vampire fiction.

And may it never, ever, ever, ever again sparkle.

p.s. -- When I saw the SFF Seven topic for this week, I had a twinge of panic. I wasn't sure what was hot in the market these days, so I asked my Facebook buds, and apparently alien mchotties with prehensile everythings are a big deal at the moment, which you know what that means? Tentacle porn is back, too! If you need to dig out some very old and dodgy anime purely for the nostalgia, I won't tell anyone.

Die, Trope, Die, Damnit!

Tropes that just won't die, eh? Tropes that need to be shoved through the airlock during an interstellar mission? Tropes that ought to be dunked in lighter fluid then fed to a dragon?

The whole Incest is Best thing. Like, really? REALLY? Even the allusion to it needs to be dropped into an active volcano. Sexual abuse is horrible on any scale, regardless of gender. Rape as character motivation or punishment is so ingrained in spec-fic that it's more shocking to not encounter it. Stories that add Keeping It In The Family as an extra layer of brokenness? Ugh. DNF. Instant wall-banger.

Yeah, yeah, "but it happens" and "history is full of examples." So? Fantasy in the 80s was rife with sibling sex. Hell, there was required reading in school involving that shit. Fast-forward 40 years and low and behold, that damn trope is back. Worming its way into popular SFF, again. More than just that one super famous series that made it to TV or even that other semi-popular book-to-show series. More than that next one you're thinking of too.

~head explodes~

If you want your character(s) to be really fucked up, you don't have to have them fuck their family. FFS.

~wanders off to find brain bleach~