While I have always considered myself a writer, I always had a suspicion it would always be a uphill battle for me to make my entire living from writing, even though I finally decided to get into the writing game seriously anyway. For every Stephen King, James Patterson, and Jackie Collins, there were always thousands and thousands of writers who never found that type of success.
Many years after I began considering becoming a writer, it has not become any easier to make a living as a writer, although perhaps it has become easier to get your stories published, whether through smaller indie houses or self-publishing. And while I certainly will make some money through my fiction, the idea I would be able to pay any major bills with said income would be foolish. It’s been a fantastic experience, but a career I would not call it – so far1.
I typically don’t base my posts on someone else’s posts, but every so often, I see something on Substack which is vibing with what I’m thinking2. And when I ran across this post by Tasmina Perry , a Sunday Times bestselling author and owner of her own digital media company, a couple of days ago in my feed, I had to give it a good long read.
The first couple of paragraphs got me:
Over the past few months, my author group chats have taken on a slightly funereal vibe. Friends are getting dropped by their agents. Novels go out on submission and then… nothing. Editors are being laid off. And people keep muttering the same dread-filled phrase:
Is this the end of the career author? The writer who lives entirely off book deals and royalties, the dream so many of us were raised to believe in.
Oh, jeez … other people have been facing this problem? Even all the ones making more money than I have? I had to continue.
Basically, it appears a combination of smaller advances on books from those publishers who still offer advances, a smaller middle of the road publishing list, and an overcrowded market is squeezing authors3.
So many times, I always felt no matter what word of promotion or work I’ve tried to do to get the word out about my books, it’s never been enough. But as it turns out, I’m not alone … and I’m going up against forces many other authors are facing.
Worse than the instability of all this is the shame.
So many writers assume it’s their fault. That their book wasn’t good enough. That they somehow failed.But it’s not their fault.
The truth is that the desire to make a full-time living solely from writing books has always been a gamble, far riskier than most of us are willing to admit.
The point that Perry, who has been heavily in the writing business for twenty years, is trying to make is trying to make a living as an author is hard. There are so many variables out there, from distribution and related logistics to promotions and acts of God that can screw things up for anyone, even someone with the level of success that she has. She shares several examples from her own experiences, including a funny story involving Waterloo Station in England and the Fifty Shades of Grey series.
However, as Perry points out, it’s never been easy to make a living solely from their book sales. Most historical authors like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and others made their living from a variety of other methods other than just book sales, whether that was from public lectures and readings, journalism, or a variety of day jobs. I paid my bills with money from a variety of newspapers and radio stations in eastern Iowa and western Illinois, and (at last count) a half-dozen or more public school districts and at least two junior colleges.
Looking back on the history of publishing, Perry asserts there was only a brief golden era of the 1960’s to the early 2000’s when mass-market paperbacks and other factors made publishing houses flush with success. I might say this golden era might have extended from roughly 1920 to 2020, but maybe I’m more of a fan of nice round numbers to be an unbiased analyst of this phenomenon. However, both eras happened to coincide with my childhood and my childhood obsession with fiction, and I don’t think that is a coincidence in my case.
However, now that we don’t have these unrealistic expectations, I have to agree with her that we have to consider writing to be just another aspect of our personal and professional lives. We as writers have to develop many different ways of supporting ourselves, back to the way things used to be. And maybe it’s for the best.
I often said if I had to pick the biggest misconception of my life, it was the idea I had to make my passion my career. Maybe it would have been simpler of me if I joined the post office like Charles Bukowski or the Veteran’s Administration like Harvey Pekar and left my intellectual exercises for my writing. However, I’ve enjoyed journalism and teaching and believe I contributed something to my community in both professions. I believe everyone has made weird turns in their lives, but have gotten something out of it, some hard-won knowledge, in the end. I’d like to think I am no different.
In Conclusion
I’m going to keep writing the way I’m writing. It’s not because I think it’s my path to unimaginable fame and fortune. It’s because I can’t picture doing anything else other than expressing myself through writing.
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- Remember, Sean Connery once said he’d never play James Bond again and then proceeded to star in a Bond film literally titled Never Say Never Again. Anything can happen, I guess. ↩︎
- And in all honesty, I’ve been on a dry run of writing for at least three days and I usually get a bit eager to break that spell by any means necessary not involving cutting and pasting or AI foolishness. ↩︎
- It’s also obvious that fewer kids are reading books, but I think I’m too much in love with the written word to worry about changing fashions now. ↩︎