Time to read but no brain for it

I used to think, if only I had more time to read, I'd cut a canyon through my to-be-read pile. (The metaphor works because it is and has long been a vast mountain of a thing.) Every time a book that checks all my boxes comes out I'm all, YAY and one-click it and get really excited... and then it goes on top of the mountain, often never to be seen again.

Part of the problem, or so I thought, was lack of time. But right now, stuck in my house all day, every day, and no things to drive my kids to or appointments for dogs or husband or moms or self or grocery shopping or errands of any kind, I kind of do have time.

I just don't have the brain for it.

Like, I keep pulling books off the top of the mountain and cracking them open with glee, and they keep being well-written and engaging, but I just. Can't. Focus. I can't care. I surreptitiously side-peek at a news story or a think piece about the new normal or the endless Twitter feed of people freaking out.

I check my email.

I do the taxes.

But this week, I had a mini-breakthrough. My kids have a reading assignment for remote-learning school, and they have to sit down and read books for the project. Like, literally, butts in chairs, eyes on pages. So, in order to encourage this behavior, I told them I'd read with them. I started to reach for the peak of my mountain to pull down a much-longed-for piece of gooey fiction, but then I paused. Thought about it. And then grabbed a nonfiction book instead. To my surprise, it held my attention for hours. I zoomed through it, and for a little while, it was like old times, books and me, OTP.

So I'm thinking that's my strategy going forward. I'm on the lookout for nonfiction that can keep my attention off the news. Recs in comments, please!

Oh, and as a footnote, the topic of the book that brought me back to reading? The plague of 1347-1351. Because of course.

We get through this however we can, people.

The Reward Is Other People's Stories

Reading. As a writer, you should be doing a lot of that. Dirty secret? Once I started writing as a career, how much I read along with my storytelling expectations changed drastically. Once upon a time, my weekends were 3-book weekends, gleefully losing all concept of self and time in someone else's world. I didn't care about the style so much as I cared about the story.

These days, my reward for finishing a book I'm writing is a 3-book/300k binge of stuff not written by me and not in the genre of whatever I just finished writing. Like any bibliophile, I have stacks of TBRs. I employ a 3 chapter enjoyment test; if I'm not looking forward to chapter 4, I stop reading the book. It's taken me a long time to permit myself to DNF a book. I used to feel like I owed it to the characters to finish their story. Now I look at all the books I have yet to read, and figure I owe it to those characters to at least give them the chance to ensnare me.

Sometimes, when the words I need to write are being elusive, I turn to the graphic novels, comics, or illustrated stories to unstick my imagination and remind myself of the wonder waiting to be shared. Bite-sized tales give me a swift kick in the ass and scream "you can do it!" Novels pat the fluffy pillows and hand me a bourbon, whispering, "Congrats. You did it. Enjoy the escape. You've earned this."

Making Time to Read

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is reading! Do you set aside time for it each day? How do you decide what to read next?

Like most (all?) writers, I have always been a reader. My mom tells stories of me learning to read from Sesame Street when I was four, and how she stopped reading aloud to me before bed - a nightly ritual - because I started reading over her shoulder and correcting her mistakes.

So, yeah, I was one of THOSE kids. The ones whose parents yelled at them to get their nose out of the book and look around. The ones who carried their current book to class and snuck reading from it while the teacher was talking. The ones who read widely and deeply.

This continued into my adult life. My husband remarked once that he'd never known someone who read EVERY DAY. No matter how busy things got, I always got in some reading.

The only time this changed was when I began writing fiction.

For some reason, writing books took up the same space in my brain that reading books had occupied. At first I was kind of thrilled, because writing a book gave me the same joy and sense of enchantment that reading one had given me - and it lasted so much longer! And it was MINE! But then I began to see how dramatically my reading had dropped off - and I knew I had to fix that.

So, yes, I set aside time to read every day. At first it wasn't easy to rebuild the habit. I had to make myself observe that one hour of reading. It also took time to resume the habit of picking up my current read during spare moments. But now I read for usually a couple of hours every day.

As for how I decide what to read next? Any of you who've followed me for any length of time should know the answer to this! I have a spreadsheet, OF COURSE.

Author Finances - From Gold Rush to Tidal Wave to Steady State

DepositPhoto

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is writer finances and such issues as how do you budget for uneven income? What’s your biggest expense?

First, a little history. I sold my first book to Carina Press in late summer 2011 and Priestess of the Nile was published in January 2012. It obviously wasn’t the first book I ever wrote, but it sure was the first one I ever sold. I also self-published my first science fiction romance Wreck of the Nebula Dream in March 2012. At that stage of my career as an author, I was thrilled to have actually been published, to have readers and reviews, and to be able to say “I did it!” Lifelong dream of becoming published – realized.  I was immersed in my day job as NASA/JPL on the business side of the house and I knew next to nothing about the publishing or the self-publishing world. I was happy just being published.

My career path lay at NASA/JPL and I had no expectations as far as the books.

In 2013 Carina Press published the second and final book of mine that I would be doing for them and we amicably parted ways. I self-published a second scifi romance and started to believe hey, maybe I could chuck the day job (no offense to NASA/JPL) and be a fulltime writer. Day dreaming commenced...

2014 – self-published two more scifi romances, was much more involved in the online author world, had been to conferences (what a rush on so many levels), won several awards for my books, was contributing to the USA Today Happy Ever After blog and a few other places…the world was my oyster, I was sure. The day job, in an office dealing with contracts, audits and process improvement and the like was less and less what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. I decided to go for the new dream. Serious planning ensued...

2015 – I left the day job to become a fulltime author. I had a best-selling scifi romance that went to number one in its category on Amazon.  I chaired a panel at a big conference…I thought I had it made and wow I was sure my decision was the right one.

Umm, guess what I was totally and blissfully unaware of? The whole ebook self-publishing situation was a gold rush and not only had I come into it at the tail end, the entire industry was about to be rocked by the tidal wave that was Amazon Kindle Unlimited (KU).

DepositPhoto

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written several excellent blog posts about the gold rush situation and the effects of KU, if you’d like to read them. Here’s the 2015 post and then a follow up in 2017 after a major outlet for indie ebooks (All Romance eBooks) had just gone out of business. According to KKR, the gold rush actually began tapering off in 2012 and pretty much crashed in 2015, when available content caught up to the demand and then KU hit. Note the amazing alignment to the fledgling career of yours truly.

One of her key points is that an indie author must stay flexible because the situation is always going to change. You have to adapt. You also have to write good books that the readers want to read.

So, to back up a bit and track to the original SFF7 topic for the week, in the beginning my day job salary supported the books. Even when I went fulltime as an author, I was still using my savings to support the writing. A big no-no by the way but I was naïve. I thought that was temporary and I could absorb the costs for a while and surely my royalties would skyrocket and cover everything. I might not ever become a J. K. Rowling with theme parks and movies but I’d be doing okay. Right?

I also blithely expected the arc of my writer career to be like the arc of a more classic career (the one I had at NASA/JPL), where each thing leads to a bigger thing, more responsibility, a better office and title and oh, more money. Well, the author world really doesn’t work that way for most of us, as it turns out.

I see you shaking your head and telling me I ought to have done a whole lot of intense and focused research before I jumped. Well okay, but it was a gold rush even if I didn’t know it and the mentality of the moment grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I have a tendency to succumb to magical thinking at the drop of a hat. It was the chance to live that glorious fulltime author dream life, people!  No more commuting on the freeways, no more staff meetings, no more scrutinizing of fine print in the tech specs for spacecraft… And I did do a certain amount of financial planning but I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I probably didn’t want to hear it anyway by then.

I had a LOT of fun though. I truly have no regrets about the choice I made to go fulltime as an author.

Things began to look brighter for my author career right on schedule in 2015 with that big hit, Star Cruise: Marooned, which is the book I mentioned above. My sales continued to be strong while a lot of other people’s sank. I think I got about three extra months of great royalties before the inevitable happened and the tidal wave hit me too. (Yes, we used to get 90 days of sales ‘lift’ from a new release – wow, those were the days. Now it’s a week, maybe.)

DepositPhoto

Soooo….I began cutting back. And back. I stopped doing audio books. Too expensive and they didn’t earn out the costs for me. I quit going to conferences. I stopped doing the big pretty promo in magazines and on prestige romance sites. I cut back on some of the things I’d been spending time on that were so much fun but took away from the writing time (like being a TV blogger for USAT/HEA, recapping episodes for several scifi shows, interviewing the actors, etc.). “Does this pay the rent?” became my mantra. I made other adjustments in my personal life, including downsizing my living space. Out of necessity I also got more efficient at writing the books and had seven new releases in 2017, one of which was Aydarr, the first book in my very successful Badari Warriors scifi romance series. (Thank you, readers!).

The end of the gold rush really forced me to become much more serious that the writing was the thing. Plant myself in my chair and get the words onto the paper.

I have about forty books published at the moment, released 11 in 2019 alone. I was on track to do about the same this year until we all got hit with the pandemic. It’s proving to be hard for me to focus on writing in this stressful time, although I am managing about 1K a day on the new book. Thank goodness for the extensive backlist.

Amazon accounts for about 85% of my sales, although I remained ‘wide’, keeping my books at all the major ebook sellers, versus going into KU. I personally don’t like having all my eggs in one basket. Your mileage may vary. Amazon pays royalties every month, which does amazing things for me paying my bills, and the amount is from the sales 60 days ago. I check my dashboard every single day and monitor my royalties closely, so I can budget ahead and know pretty much what I’ll have to work with in two months’ time. It's a rolling balancing act.

Household expenses and bills come first, then the cost of the books. I set aside a fixed amount every month in the budget to cover certain book-related expenses. When I was writing on the 9 to 11 new books a year schedule, I knew what the monthly book-related income and expenses were going to be pretty reliably. Right now sales are down and since I’m not turning out books as rapidly (which could be a self-perpetuating loop because readers want new books but pandemic happening and my Muse is struggling…) it’s balanced out, although I am continuing to commission book covers. I know what my next few books will be and it helps incentivize me to write if I already have a gorgeous cover from Fiona Jayde to stare at.

My biggest expense is editing, followed by covers, with the formatting third. I’m not techy and can’t do my own formatting. I use the wonderful Formatting Fairies who work for Marie Force and they’re very calming to my anxiety and so helpful in general! Worth every penny.

(My high powered CPA is a once a year expense and I’m thrilled to pay that fee because I can sleep at night thanks to her, with no nightmares about the IRS.)

DepositPhoto

I’m doing very little paid promo right now. I did just put my Badari box set on sale and paid for some promo this month in connection with that, plus generous author friends helped spread the word. The SFR community is a really good place to be, pretty supportive of each other.

I have a newsletter and a blog. I’m active on social media and in various author and reader groups for my genre. I write about scifi romance for several national outlets (USAT/HEA sadly is no more.) I don’t get paid for those posts, which I know many people say is a no-go but I feel the exposure to potential readers in the SFR genre is definitely worth the time I put in. You never know what other opportunity may arise because of a post going viral. And a big part of my efforts is always spreading the word about the entire SFR genre. I believe the more readers we have for our SFR novels, the better it will be for all of us who write them. Romance readers are wonderfully voracious!

I have a strategic plan, which I’ve been working to since 2015. I update it once a year and then review it every quarter and make changes as needed. It’s an important tool for me to stay flexible and to watch out for changes that I need to make in my thinking and my author activities to respond to the industry itself. It's the opposite of magical thinking but reassuring in its own way and  makes me feel more in control. I feel like I'm in a steady state right now as far as income and outgo but I need to get back to regular new releases pretty quickly and I'm counting on the readers to want more books in my various series.

The writing is the writing, thank goodness. Once I sit down and focus, the words flow and the stories tell themselves to me. If I can just keep myself from spending too much time staring in bug eyed disbelief at the news or going down social media rabbit holes – or binge watching TV shows and movies – I’ll be okay.

Always assuming the readers continue to enjoy the stories I offer!

Amazon     Apple Books     Kobo     Nook

Harsh Financial Realities

Author finances are, for me, a long series of wrenching trade offs. My balance sheet bleeds. I've been operating at a loss for enough years that I can no longer file with the IRS as an author. I've been relegated to hobbyist. Also, I've picked up a day job to help get the family through some of the current nonsense because there can never be enough employed people in a household during an economic downturn. At least I'm technical writing, I guess.

This all amounts to me having to make decisions about how and where I publish material based on cost. For the moment, that means that self publishing is out of my reach for the foreseeable future. Professional editors are worth their weight in gold. I prefer not to publish without an editor looking over my stories and calling me out on my bad habits. It's just I don't currently have the gold for that or for good cover art. That can all change at a moment's notice. But the more likely scenario is that I can change that with hard work and book releases. So I'll favor small presses (thank the heavens for The Wild Rose Press) and querying agents about getting back into traditional markets, maybe. Whether I like it or not, this is the way it is for now.

So what convinces me to part with my pinched pennies? Marketing. Low investment ads that allow me to play a long game to build an audience slowly as I finish up the SFR series this year. I committed the cash to join an authors' coop so I could learn from people who are out there in the trenches really doing a good job with marketing. They're being super generous with their knowledge. Learning new skills is always worth the money. Up to the point that you can't pay the mortgage, obviously, but so far that's not at risk. Knock wood.

I don't mean for any of this to come off as a complaint or a plea for any kind of sympathy. I want to be transparent. There are reasons people stop publishing. I won't because I can't. And I have just enough ego mingled with spite to keep throwing my pages out into the aether.

At least with most of the world on lock down, it's not like I'm missing conferences this year?

Y'all stay safe out there.

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.