“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” – Albert Einstein
So that’s my goal, plain and simple, live life as a writer that earns a nice twenty thousand dollar signs monthly. You could argue that money is a thing and therefore can’t be a tie happiness according to an inspirational quote by a back-in-the-day scientist, but the goal is measurable and it’ll take me a while. Nothing keeps life interesting as much as an impossible challenge.
In Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, I read that being a creator doesn’t always mean you have to be at the height of your recognition to start posting your work, and if not just your work, your process, so now I’ve got this website and I’ve got a goal. Time to get the great wheel turning. I plan to make one of these progress posts every once in a while. The hope is I can help others who might be sailing the same wind.
Are you at a similar point in your writing career? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear insights from others, especially those working to grow their own revenue.
Never too Late to Dream Big
At twenty-seven I hung up my military uniform, finishing my Army National Guard contract and not finding the intestinal fortitude to start another. I wasn’t against putting in more years of service, I just wanted to see what I could do with my own time, other adventures I could get into with a little effort and determination. It’s taken a lot of focus to get myself to exactly this spot. I want to make twenty thousand, and I want that income to rain in monthly.
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” —Andre Gide
Where I’m starting
As of this moment, outside of my day job, I’m averaged out at about a hundred American dollars a month. That’s a hot minute short of my goal, but I do have a lot of material cooking. Here it is:
- 1 completed 118,000 word science fiction novel in the agent submission process. This is a project I believe in so it’s on the board for the long game, the far-out paychecks from a publisher.
- 2 self published nonfiction works on Amazon. These books are money grabbers. They don’t sell apart from the occasional pop around fourth quarter (December-ish) when everyone in the world is spending like crazy.
- 1 sci-fi book about a quarter way through it’s first draft. This is a gamelit novel aiming for an audience that’s used to self published products.
- 1 website dedicated to showcasing my creativity
- 1 Canon R100 and 1 GoPro Hero 8 ready to capture the process. What? Do I sound rich to you?
I anticipate that novels and a good working blog/channel will be the main revenue streams, passively bringing in the cash. Here, I’ll outline why I believe in the long term game with a hybrid of traditional and self publishing.
Short vs. Long Game
Life is a balance of long and short term payouts. In this instance, I’m thinking about selling stories vs. books. This week, I wrote a three thousand six hundred and ninety-nine word story and submitted it to a well known science fiction magazine. If this magazine accepts the work at ten cents a word, I’ll get a nice three hundred and seventy dollars or so into my account. Doing the math, that’s about two percent of where I want to grow my income, not just per year, but per month.
Realistically, I don’t think I can squeeze out fifty of these every four weeks, let alone get them all published. I don’t imagine anyone has that many stories in their head. Short stories might be fun, they might build author credentials, but they aren’t a living.
So, next let’s think about traditional publishing.
I won’t lie to you, it’s been a rough ride trying to get an agent. Have you ever heard of querytracker.net? It’s this super convenient website where you can upload queries to agents and keep track of your replies. I’ve been using it at full blast. Once I get an agent, I’ll have to wait until a publisher says yet to the agents proposal, and after that I’ll need to wait for whatever publishing slot my book falls into before I can see it on any bookshelves. Long story short, if that was hard to follow, is it feels like I won’t see that book published for years, and I can’t count on it (for now) as part of my twenty thousand plan.
So…what to do? Quitting my day job sooner rather than later would be preferred.
I’ve landed on self-publishing as my next plan of attack, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not that I don’t believe in traditional publishing. I absolutely do, and I want it as bad as I want cream cheese on my bagels. However, as we’ve discussed in this wish list of an article. I want money, and money falls under the umbrella of a simple logic. Money is numbers. X number of novels equals Y number of dollars. Therefore, I don’t see my publishing career as an either/or scenario. I can have self published books, and traditionally published books. There are markets where self published books produced quickly and in large numbers can perform quite well.
That, in a nutshell, is why I’m writing a gamelit book. I’ll let you know how it performs on Amazon once I’m done with it. I expect that most books, even if well written, don’t necessarily do well, so I’ll need to write a lot of books. X will average out at a high Y eventually. It’s math, right?
My thoughts about advertising and growing an audience will have to wait for another article.
Therefore and in a Nutshell
I have a painful amount of work ahead. It’s no illusion that the more you break down the writing game, the more difficult and small the success window starts to look. But no worries. Lucky for me, and hopefully all writers, I enjoy writing. I really think it’s something I would do even if I didn’t think I was going to succeed. I will succeed though, or I’ll starve. Being a millennial in the current economy is crud. I don’t want to give away all the details about my day job, but let’s just say a respectable position that I had to get an education for earns me barely enough for a nice one bedroom apartment. I didn’t say luxurious, just nice.
Thus, the old ways are upside down. To succeed, to own a home, to have a family, I have to do more than just work a job and forgo creative pursuits. I honestly see my creative future as the only future. There’s no lid on a creative income. Working for the man, however, has its limits, and it ain’t gonna keep up with inflation.
The future is ours, baby.
But what exactly is the work ahead, you might ask?
Bare Minimum:
2,000 words a day. Yeah, it’s a lot, but here’s the logic. At that pace, in one year, I can have written 730,000 words, which, broken down to an average length of 100,000 words per sci-fi novel, I’ll get about 7 first drafts done in a year. That’s 7 chances to gain a following, and a back log for whatever book might take off in the market. Impossible? Maybe, but let’s say I cut short and only make it to 5. That’s still 4 more than I’m currently producing. I’ll take that success and run with it.
Let me know. Are you writing? What’s your daily word output? Do you have any suggestions for readers? Comment below and if you’d like to see where this journey goes from here, sign up for my emails.
