The money pit …
Jim C. Hines (whose Jig the Goblin books I like) has an interesting post up about money and writing. Go check it out.
Why am I mentioning this? Mainly, because of my cousins. They were recently in town, and whenever I see them, I always get questions about how much money I’m making on my books and when I’m going to quit my day job. Everybody seems to think that I’m getting rich or something. Trust me when I tell you that I’m not — not even close.
The book business is really not as glamorous as people think. And no, I’m not making wads of money. To illustrate this, I thought I’d do a post about where an author’s money goes. The numbers below are completely hypothetical and for illustrative purposes only. With that caveat, here goes:
$10,000: Say you sell a book, and you get an advance of $10,000. Given the economy and the way publishing is floundering right now, this is a pretty good advance — especially if you’re a debut (new) author. Your agent automatically gets 15 percent — or $1,500 — of this money. So you have $8,500 left.
$8,500: Uncle Sam is going to take about another 15 percent of what’s left after you pay your agent — $1,275. It’s a little thing called self-employment tax, and it sucks. So now, you have $7,225 left.
$7,225: Say you like to save money and you put this in the bank. You’re going to have to pay taxes on the interest that it earns. Just to make the numbers easier, let’s say that’s $25. So now, you have $7,200 left.
$7,200: Now, it’s time to do promotion. Getting bookmarks/business cards/letterhead made can easily run $1,000. Let’s say you spend that much on paper products/office supplies/etc. and another $1,000 on creating a Web site. That’s $2,000, so now you have $5,200 left.
$5,200: Now it’s time to buy ads. Depending on the size you want, a single ad can easily cost $500 — more if you want color. Let’s say you drop another $1,000 on advertising. Now, you have $4,200 left.
$4,200: You’ll probably want to travel to a conference or two when your book is out to promote it and maybe meet your editor/agent. Conferences can be expensive. Let’s budget another $2,000 for travel/hotels/food/conference fees. Now, you have $2,200 left. Do you see where this is going?
$2,200: Postage is also a major expense. You’ve got to mail out books to contest winners, bookmarks for promotion, etc. Let’s say you spend another $200 on postage — and I am being very, very conservative here just to keep the numbers even.
$2,000: Let’s say this is what you’re left with after all the taxes, expenses, etc. That $10,000 advance isn’t looking like so much now, is it?
$1,000 per month: Now, let’s consider your time. Say you write fast, and it took you about two months to write your book. So you’ve made $1,000 per month of work. Not great, but not bad, right? Wrong. Because we haven’t talked about the revisions, copy edits, and page proofs you’ve had to do for your editor.
$500 per month: Let’s say the revisions, etc. take another two months to do. So now, you’re down to making $500 for four months of work on your book — and this doesn’t even factor in all the hours you spent on promotion or gas to drive to post office or a hundred other things that crop up in an author’s life. Which brings us to this …
$0: Sadly, this is probably what you’re going to end up with out of that $10,000 advance when you consider taxes, promotion, your time, etc.
So really, being a writer is like being in a money pit. Every little thing sucks those precious dollars out of your hands. Authors write books because they love writing, not because they’re making fortunes. Almost every author I know has some sort of day job to help support themselves, including yours truly.
Anybody who thinks that writing is a quick ticket to getting rich is crazy. And us authors? We’re probably the craziest ones of all for doing it. But hey, love does strange things to people …
Got questions? I’ll answer what I can in the comments.