The business of writing

One of the dark secrets about the writing profession is this: there is almost no middle class. Most professional writers (note the exception below) do not make a living wage by writing. An example. When I was teaching at Clark College, a colleague had a very successful series of detective novels, each set in London during Elizabethan times. Very well reviewed. "Decent" sales. However, her royalties income from the series amounted to less than $10,000 a year. At a time when I was making almost this much optioning screenplays that never made it to screen, we used to rant about the injustice of it all.

Figure it out. Say a hard cover sells for $20. A writer gets two bucks for every copy sold. A book sells 5000 copies. You get ten grand. Is 5000 a fair number? Most published books sell far fewer copies than this. It used to be, in the 60s, you could make the top ten sellers list with sales of 20,000 (a middle class income for the writer) but I suspect it's far higher today.

Because a few writers sell so many copies and make so much money, we forget that they represent a very small percentage of the writers who are publishing. A sad reminder of this. Lately a notice has been circulating for a safe storage space for hundreds of boxes of books written by Clyde Rice, the wonderful NW writer who first published in his 80s. I suspect these are unsold copies of his three books. My own publisher of the recent anthology I edited,
Oregon Fever, has a garage filled with boxes of unsold books. This is typical.

Indies have the toughest time of all. Say you're a writer who got published by an indie or even published yourself. You have to do the marketing. So you buy an ad in a group ad for indie presses in the NY Review of Books, for $750. You'd have to sell hundreds of books from that little ad to break even! When I advertised my electronic screenwriting tutorial, Screenwright, in commercial venues, I never broke even. I always lost money. The product was selling very well at the time, so I guess I got greedy. It still sells. But testimonials, reviews and word of mouth are what sell it. Ads never did a thing for me.

The same for book festivals. I've taken my books to book festivals. I've sold a few copies. But I figure out the time involved, the gas, and compute an hourly wage from the experience, I'd do better flipping burgers at a fast food joint. Marketing is a full time job, and only writers who spend the time and effort have a shot at good sales. Sometimes even this isn't enough. The anthology publisher is the most energetic, go-getting, creative and aggressive marketer I know -- and he still can't sell all those books in his garage. You go to a book fair, you sell 50 books, which is great!, which means you made $100 minus your expenses. Was it actually worth the time? And selling fifty books at a fair is a very, very big deal. Normally most writers at book fairs are selling in single digits per day. Well, it's for exposure. It's for networking. A full time job of marketing, as I say.

Many writers want to write. Not market.

So the big secret is that most writers -- published, professional, even well reviewed -- don't make much money. That's why they teach or sell screenplays or have a day job.

In this sense, I've always envied poets. There is no temptation about "making it." Poets know going in that they won't make a living. So they deal with it. For other writers, there are always a few who strike it big. Temptation. Possibility. Delusion.

The only existing middle class of writers can be found among staff writers. When I was managing editor of Oregon Business Magazine, my last "full time" "regular" job, I was in the middle class. Before that, I was struggling as a playwright who was supporting myself with journalism, grants, and screenplay options. I was "successful" as a playwright, in the sense that my plays were being produced, but you make little money at that. I could make more with a single screenplay option than I could in a couple years of play royalties. Indeed, my two biggest paychecks as a playwright were for film rights and TV rights, not royalties.

You make it big or you struggle to get by ... that's the truth of the business side of writing (staff work excepted).