Making a living from writing?

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To your question: I personally don't know anyone who makes a living writing books/novels. I know a few people in the writing biz (as in advertising and such).

I've heard if you wish to make a living, you'd either have to sell your soul, or win the lottery. Selling your soul as in, write, write, write, write, write. And winning the lottery as hitting best seller, many times over.

You don't have to sell your soul.

To make a living from writing you have to consistently write material that sells but until it sells enough to enable you to make a living from it you may have to supplement your writing income through another job and many writers do just that.

Many do make a living from it but to succeed requires hard work and dedication just like any other profession.

Plenty of writers do. OK, not everyone is King or Rowling, but so what? It's more than possible to make a living from writing.

Look at Amanda Hocking and JA Konrath (just the first two who come to mind). They have been making pretty tidy livings as indie authors for at least a couple years now.

Oh! And AW's own Sara King seems to be doing well too. I don't know any of her figures though.

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can much more easily make a living as a self-published author than going the brick and mortar route. This is, of course, assuming you write good books, take extreme care with editing, and market yourself and your novels well.

I haven't done any of this yet. However, I have started in on the marketing and developing a fan base portion of things. My left brain demanded that I should start developing a web presence while I write my first couple novels. Paige Nolley is my pseudonym.

Indie =/= self-published.

I know several people who make a living from writing, but they vary - some are freelancers, one writes screenplays, a couple are academics and I know a couple of copywriters and a speachwriter. I also know a couple of novelists who write full time. But I have to say that the novelists who write full time and the freelancers and academics work very hard, to get more work/contracts you need a good body of work, and to get a good body of work you need to get contracts.

What I'm saying is this - it's possible, sure. But most writers aren't Stephen King or JK Rowling - they aren't getting million dollar advances. If you are getting a typical advance of £5-10k and you aren't earning anything else on top of that (ie. not earning out your advance and so not earning any further royalties) then you would need to sell two-3 books a year to make minimum wage, about 5 books to make the UK National Average wage.

Paige Nolley said:

Look at Amanda Hocking and JA Konrath (just the first two who come to mind). They have been making pretty tidy livings as indie authors for at least a couple years now.

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No, they have been making a living as self-published writers.

Indie doesn't mean self published, it means published by an independent press (ie. not one of the Big 6). I'm sure there's a sticky about that......

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can much more easily make a living as a self-published author than going the brick and mortar route.

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And your understanding would be wrong.

It's much easier to get published as a self published author, but much, much, harder to make a living as one - this is because most self published books only sell a couple of hundred copies, and there are a lot fo readers who won't even look at a self published book. It's harder to get your book any kind of exposure.

Also, the onus is on the writer to edit, format, produce, market etc etc etc - most individuals lack one or many of those skills. Just because you can write a book doesn't mean you know jack about how to market it.

Unfortunately the media hype surrounding writers like Hocking has given a lot of folk the false impression that it's easy to make a living as a writer - if only you self publish the world will come to you.

What they don't like to tell you is how damn hard people like Hocking worked for her success - she writes about it on her own blog, you should check it out.

Self publishing is HARD. Making a living self publishing is HARD. Hell, getting published at all is HARD.

Paige Nolley said:

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can much more easily make a living as a self-published author than going the brick and mortar route.

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Afraid not.

Paige Nolley said:

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can much more easily make a living as a self-published author than going the brick and mortar route. This is, of course, assuming you write good books, take extreme care with editing, and market yourself and your novels well.

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Not so at all, I'm afraid, and it worries me when I come across this view among inexperienced writers. You can always look at outliers like Amanda Hocking (who recently signed with one of the big 6, btw) and say it's possible to make a good living from self-publishing, but that ignores the reality of the market. According to a recent survey, conducted by Dave Cornford and Steven Lewis for Taleist and published under the title NO GOLD RUSH, 75% of all royalties generated by self-published books went to just the the top 10% of writers; and half of all self-published writers earned less than $500 a year...many considerably less.

Writers who have the option of working with trade publishers are almost invariably better off. I go into this in detail in this article, but in brief: What do you think it would cost to hire not one but three editors (trade pubs put fiction through 3 different edits), a top designer and cover artist, professional book-marketing experts, a sales force that covers the whole country, subsidiary rights expert to offer serial, translation, and film rights; PR that includes expensive bound galleys sent to every major reviewer in the country, etc.? How much is it worth to get your book in most every library in the country, where people will read them for years to come?

There's just no comparison, IMO; the main problem is that it's so damn hard to get published that most writers will never have that option. But it seems to me a shame if, having gone to the trouble of writing a book, the writer doesn't even try.

shaldna said:

... you would need to sell two-3 books a year to make minimum wage, about 5 books to make the UK National Average wage.

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This is why I obsess over speed. And get really discouraged because I'm slow.

dogpie said:

I'm wondering how many of you out there are making a decent living (by this I mean you're not worrying about next week's grocery money) just from the books you've written?

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OP, maybe you'll consider this answer off topic, but there are many ways to make a living as a writer, and doing it off the royalties of books you've written is only one of them.

I haven't yet succeeded as a fiction writer, but I support myself entirely as a freelance educational writer. I write chapters of textbooks, teacher's materials, tech activities, worksheets, and standardized assessment.

I've also known people who have supported themselves by specializing in medical writing or advertising copy.

So yes, it is completely possible to support yourself as a writer. As everyone else has said, supporting yourself as a novelist is much more difficult.

Layla Nahar said:

This is why I obsess over speed. And get really discouraged because I'm slow.

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Me too

I get so hung up on "do it NOW!" that my brain gets all freezey. A big part of my slowness comes from anxiety over each step in the process. I end up overcoming my fears, but it takes me a while.

I'm holding myself back.

Ugh.

dogpie said:

... I'm wondering how many of you out there are making a decent living (by this I mean you're not worrying about next week's grocery money) just from the books you've written?

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I have a good friend who's been doing this for decades. Although not just books, she earns a decent living writing. But for her, decent is less than I make from my day job. Her cost of living is about a quarter of mine. So "decent living" is relative.

Jeff

I make a living as a writer. I even have reasonably good pay for doing so. But it is hard to make a living as a fiction writer like the others have said. I think that the key to making a living as a writer is to diversify.

I write novels and copy. Ie I write advertisement texts. Ad texts are my bread and butter. If I wanted to make extra cash, I would sell articles to magazines as well.

But making a living exclusively as a novelist is a very capricious thing, and I think it's safe to say that a large majority of novelists don't.

I don't yet but I'm working toward it. Right now I have one bill that is consistently met by writing. Sometimes I can do two or three smaller bills, but those are bonuses right now. I think that's respectable for two years at this. my goal: write consistently, live frugally.

I've got 5 ebooks out that sell around 25 copies a month each. If I had 10 ebooks out that sold 100 copies a month each then I could live from that. So what I say is set yourself a target, like a five year plan, and then write, write, write, edit, edit, edit, submit, submit, submit - and reach that target.

Paige Nolley said:

My understanding, from what I've read, is that you can much more easily make a living as a self-published author than going the brick and mortar route.

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I find this very hard to believe.

BTW, I've been making a full-time living from writing for the past twenty-plus years. Part of the trick, for me, was to move to an area with a low cost of living.

I think Maxinquaye is right on with saying that deversifying is a good idea. I don't make a living as a writer, but I do make a living using my writing skills. As a paralegal, my work involves about 95% writing.

WeaselFire said:

I have a good friend who's been doing this for decades. Although not just books, she earns a decent living writing. But for her, decent is less than I make from my day job. Her cost of living is about a quarter of mine. So "decent living" is relative.

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I've gotta agree with this. I know various people who live entirely off writing, but some of them are making less per year than I was in my just-above-minimum-wage job out of college. And that's with a huge amount of effort and output; it's not like they're slacking off.

This depends on many factors, most of which I think were explained above.

What do you consider a living? Do you want a huge mansion on the water with maids and butlers or do you just want enough to pay your mortgage on a two-bedroom house and your cable bill? Are you the sole income in your household? Or do you have an 'other half' who also works? Do you have children? Your cost of living is, most likely, not equal to anyone else.

For me, I have no children and am married and my husband brings home most of the money. I've set my goals on what I want my future to be like and from there decide how much I need to make (whether it be as a novelist or working in general) to support that goal.

If you want all the money in the world so that you can buy whatever you want whenever you want regardless of price, you better make sure you're writing a novel a day (not really. That's an exaggeration. But you get my drift.)

If you're like me where there is a second income in the household and don't have children and just want a nice small house I can call my own (with mortgage payments, obviously) and enough to cover bills and not worry about how much I spend on groceries, I can probably make enough to do that if I work like crazy, and may still need to continue my transcription work.

It also depends on where you want to live. New York? New Jersey? I don't know cost of living in many other places than where I live (Jersey) but I know it can be ridiculously expensive in NY and not so much other places. That all has to be taken into consideration as well.

Not sure if that helps or makes it worse, but just my two cents on how you can figure out what you need to make your living.

James D. Macdonald said:

I find this very hard to believe.

BTW, I've been making a full-time living from writing for the past twenty-plus years. Part of the trick, for me, was to move to an area with a low cost of living.

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I'm glad you brought that up, because people forget that outgo is just as important as income.

If you want to live off your writing, start now by paying off debts. Get used to driving paid-for cars. If it is possible, move to someplace that is cheap to live. Reduce every expense that can be reduced. That will stretch your earnings.

Thousands of writers make a good living just from writing books. I'm almost one of them, except I also earn a good bit of income from writing nonfiction this and that, and some from short stories.

Selling your soul is nonsense, and the bestseller list is not a lottery. Nor do you even need to hit the bestseller list in order to make a pretty decent living. And write, write, write, is what writers do, primarily because it's whet we most want to be doing. It's one hell of a lot better than nearly any nine to five job out there, and it's pretty silly to say a writer who writes a lot is selling his soul. Earning a decent living is just not that difficult, if you write well enough to sell.

Now, I can think of several writers who earn more than twenty million per year, and a couple who earn several times this amount, and that is tough to accomplish.

How difficult it is to get to this point is purely an individual things. Most can never get to this point because they lack the talent, the dedication, or the business sense. Others get to this point with a first sale. How long it takes you will depend on what you write, and how well you write it.

Jamesaritchie said:

Thousands of writers make a good living just from writing books. I'm almost one of them, except I also earn a good bit of income from writing nonfiction this and that, and some from short stories.

Selling your soul is nonsense, and the bestseller list is not a lottery. Nor do you even need to hit the bestseller list in order to make a pretty decent living. And write, write, write, is what writers do, primarily because it's whet we most want to be doing. It's one hell of a lot better than nearly any nine to five job out there, and it's pretty silly to say a writer who writes a lot is selling his soul. Earning a decent living is just not that difficult, if you write well enough to sell.

Now, I can think of several writers who earn more than twenty million per year, and a couple who earn several times this amount, and that is tough to accomplish.

How difficult it is to get to this point is purely an individual things. Most can never get to this point because they lack the talent, the dedication, or the business sense. Others get to this point with a first sale. How long it takes you will depend on what you write, and how well you write it.

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Bingo.

Bufty said:

You don't have to sell your soul.

To make a living from writing you have to consistently write material that sells but until it sells enough to enable you to make a living from it you may have to supplement your writing income through another job and many writers do just that.

Many do make a living from it but to succeed requires hard work and dedication just like any other profession.

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But I thought people wanted to write books because it's easy. You know that's what they think.