What Writers Make
By E.A. Aymar (also E.A. Barres)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author's Note
New Releases (That I'm Excited About!)
Two Writers You Should Read
Events
It's Contest Time!
Other Writing (by Neely Tucker)
What Writers Make
This past Friday was my last day at my day job, and it was a job I’ve had for 23 years.
And it’s fine! Really! I knew this day was coming and had months to prepare. I genuinely loved the people I worked with, and the company’s mission was one I deeply valued. The work and life balance they struck was wonderful – it’s rare, when you work in D.C., and especially for a media company, to be able to stop work promptly at 5 PM. But I did, without recrimination or even passive guilt from my employer, and this provided me the opportunity to spend time with my family, and the time to write novels.
People have asked, now that I no longer have a day job, if I plan on writing full-time.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: lolno.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to write full-time. More specifically, to write the books and essays I want to write, rather than chasing various freelance work, as many hard-working, full-time authors do. That life is a grind, a respectable one, but a grind. And, honestly, I didn’t get into this biz to write stuff I don’t believe in or care about. I simply don't have much time, in the grand scheme of the universe, to put meaningful words on paper. And I also have (or will have) a day job and a family and wonderful books to read and, let’s be honest, video games and television shows…I don’t have the time to waste words. I want to write a lot, but I also want to love what I’ve written. That’s important to me.
That said, the very fair questions about whether or not I’ll write full time deserves a thorough explanation about what writers earn. It’s, um, not much! I was on a panel once with my friend Neely Tucker – former Washington Post reporter and terrific novelist – and he told a stunned audience the truths about what a writer makes. I've always remembered his words, and asked him if he could write them down for this newsletter. He did, and it's fantastic, and must-read for any writer or anyone interested in publishing. His essay is at the bottom of this newsletter, in the Other Writing section. If you only read one thing in this month's newsletter, then make it that. It's one of the most important essays about publishing I've ever read.
For me, there’s also the emotional element. I want to write full-time someday but, outside of the commercial appeal for my own novels, I never want to write to chase money - by which I mean, the freelance side-gig work that's often necessary. I genuinely respect those that do. It’s a hard gig, one that requires a certain mastery of tone and messaging many writers simply don’t possess. I think I could do it, but I’d rather find another day job outside of writing similar to my last. One that pays the bills, is maybe related to writing but not necessarily, and gives me the time for family and craft.
My next novel will be on submission later this year. My last was a single-book contract with Crooked Lane, so I’m a free agent (although, as is common with this industry, they have the right of first refusal with my next book). I’ve expressed my excitement about this next book before (working title: No Home for Killers), but I truly don’t know what path it will take me down in my writing career. Plotting a career in writing is like guiding a raft through rapids, but in the middle of a hurricane.
That said, I do know exactly where I want to go. And I’ve written something I love. There’s so much I want to do – this career, no matter the necessary humility, is fueled by relentless, limitless ambition – but, right now, I am both glad and grateful for it. There’s a wonderful moment and knowledge, when your manuscript is finished but unedited, before the stress of submission and pressures of publishing and worries of sales and reviews. A moment where you hope this one could make enough to pay the bills but, even if it doesn't, that lovely, imperfect book you’ve made feels like enough.
Did I mention that I don't have a day job anymore? It would be wonderful if you could buy a copy of my latest book to keep me in the lavish lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I just checked, and Amazon has apparently discounted the hardcover from $27 to $14? Which works for me (and, hopefully, you)!
Thank you, I love you very much.
Runner
Tracy Clark
Chicago in the dead of winter can be brutal, especially when you’re scouring the frigid streets for a missing girl. Fifteen-year-old Ramona Titus has run away from her foster home. Her biological mother, Leesa Evans, is a recovering addict who admits she failed Ramona often in the past. But now she’s clean. And she’s determined to make up for her mistakes—if Cass can only help her find her daughter.
Cass visits Ramona’s foster mother, Deloris Poole, who is also desperate to bring the girl home. Ramona came to Deloris six months ago, angry and distrustful, but was slowly opening up. The police are on the search, but Cass has sources closer to the streets, and a network of savvy allies. Yet it seems Ramona doesn’t want to be found. And Cass soon begins to understand why.
Ramona is holding secrets dark enough to kill for, and anyone who helps her may be fair game. And if Ramona can’t run fast enough and hide well enough to keep the truth safe, she and Cass may both be out of time.
K-9 Hideout
Elizabeth Heiter
Police handler Tate Emory is thankful that Sabrina Jones saved his trusty K-9 companion, Sitka, but he didn’t sign up for national media exposure. That publicity unveils his true identity to the dirty Boston cops he took down…and brings Sabrina’s murderous stalker even closer to his target. With their covers blown, Tate will risk his life—and his guarded heart—to save Sabrina from a fatal end.
Walking Through Needles
Heather Levy
From an early age, Sam Mayfair knew she was different. Like any young girl, she developed infatuations and lust—but her desires were always tinged with darkness. Then, when Sam was sixteen, her life was shattered by an abuser close to her. And she made one shocking decision whose ramifications would reverberate throughout her life.
Now, fifteen years later, Sam learns that her abuser has been murdered. The death of the man who plagued her dreams for years should have put an end to the torture she's endured. But when her stepbrother, Eric, becomes the prime suspect, Sam is flung back into the hell of her rural Oklahoma childhood. As Sam tries to help exonerate Eric, she must hide terrifying truths of their past from investigators. Yet as details of the murder unravel, Sam quickly learns that some people, including herself, will do anything to keep their secrets buried deep.
What's Done in Darkness
Laura McHugh
Seventeen-year-old Sarabeth has become increasingly rebellious since her parents found God and moved their family to a remote Arkansas farmstead where she’s forced to wear long dresses, follow strict rules, and grow her hair down to her waist. She’s all but given up on escaping the farm when a masked man appears one stifling summer morning and snatches her out of the cornfield.
A week after her abduction, she’s found alongside a highway in a bloodstained dress—alive—but her family treats her like she’s tainted, and there’s little hope of finding her captor, who kept Sarabeth blindfolded in the dark the entire time, never uttering a word. One good thing arises from the horrific ordeal: a chance to leave the Ozarks and start a new life.
Five years later, Sarabeth is struggling to keep her past buried when investigator Nick Farrow calls. Convinced that her case is connected to the strikingly similar disappearance of another young girl, Farrow wants Sarabeth’s help, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get it, even if that means dragging her back to the last place she wants to go—the hills and hollers of home, to face her estranged family and all her deepest fears.
Bath Haus
P.J. Vernon
Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.
He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.
Sirens of Memory
Puja Guha
When your past comes back to haunt you, you are forced to see who you really are.
Mariam is pregnant and fleeing an abusive marriage as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait begins. Leaving her husband Tareq for dead, she crosses the border and is evacuated with the help of Raj, who she meets at a refugee camp and suggests she assume the identity of his dead wife so she can be issued Indian papers.
Twenty-five years later, Mariam is still living under the identity of Raj’s Indian wife in the US. In an attempt to put her past to rest, she attends an event commemorating the anniversary of the invasion at the Kuwaiti embassy. Also in attendance is Tareq, miraculously still alive, who had assumed his wife was killed in the invasion decades before. Angry and obsessed, he begins planning his revenge. The confrontation that follows forces Mariam to confront her past as a victim and decide who she really is, once and for all.
Red Riviera
David Downie
Its jaws open wide, a firefighting seaplane skims the glittering Gulf of Portofino on Italy’s jagged Ligurian coast, scooping up a lone swimmer named Joe Gary. The super-rich, retired Italian-American has mob connections and a dirty political past. Has he been snatched by accident or murdered? Red Riviera, Commissioner Daria Vinci’s first investigation, is a wild ride from the tangled trails of the Cinque Terre to glamorous Portofino to roistering Genoa. It’s a Riviera made red by riotous bougainvillea and spilled blood. Half-American, Daria Vinci is an outsider, the unlikely rising star of Genoa’s secretive Special Operations Directorate DIGOS. In Red Riviera, she must face down a Fascist police chief, the CIA’s local mastermind, a former World War Two Spitfire fighter pilot, and a plucky hundred-year-old marquise whose memory is as long as it is vengeful, in order to solve her case.
The Bombay Prince
Sujata Massey
November 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a fourmonth tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.
Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. Feeling guilty for failing to have helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist Freny’s family in the fraught dealings of the coroner’s inquest. When Freny’s death appears suspicious, Perveen knows she can’t rest until she sees justice done. But Bombay is erupting: as armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger?
Regular readers know that this space is typically reserved for a writer I like, and a writer they recommend for you. But I'm doing something different this month! WHAT.
I was so appreciative of Neely Tucker writing something for this newsletter that I'm going to recommend the three books in his excellent Sully Carter series. Plus, writers ought to be compensated for their work and, what am I going to do, pay him? Nope.
That aside, Neely Tucker's Carter series is about a D.C. reporter who gets tangled up in cases that wonderfully explore Washington from its Capitol to its lost streets. A former reporter himself, Neely knows the city back and forth, and brings the kind of insider knowledge - both about the city and those who work in it - that you'd find in a novel by Christina Kovac, George Pelecanos or Ward Just. His work is outstanding, and I can't recommend him enough.
To learn more about Neely Tucker and his work, click on the photos above. And read the essay below.
1455 Summer Literary Festival: Crime Fiction, in Short
I'm taking part in this year's 1455 Summer Literary Festival (virtual), and the panel is going to be SO COOL. I'll be moderating a discussion about short stories in crime fiction with Sarah M. Chen (my co-editor for the two anthologies The Night of the Flood and The Swamp Killers, who also happens to be an award-winning short story writer), Nikki Dolson (also an award-winning short story writer), and Stepha Cha (the new editor of the esteemed Best American Mystery Short Stories series). Yes, that's incredibly cool, but so is the entire festival. Check it out for panels and interviews featuring some of the most celebrated voices in writing, including Caroline Bock, Tara Campbell, S.A. Cosby, Jane Friedman, Hannah Grieco, Bethanne Patrick, Rose Solari, Jake Tapper, Lisa Ling, Alma Katsu, Louis Bayard, Angie Kim, Holly Smith, Amber Sparks, and many more. You can register for it HERE.
It's contest time! The monthly contest winner wins copies of the books listed in my "Two Writers You Should Read" segment, which means all three books in the Sully Carter series by Neely Tucker. And the winner is...
Raven_0@y_o.com
I also ran a contest for a $50 Amazon gift card for new subscribers, and the winner of that contest is:
library__g@y___o.com
Congrats to both of you, and keep your eye out for a separate e-mail from me!
You Sold Your Novel for $100K!!!
By Neely Tucker
Holy cow, that’s great! It’s so great you might want to not actually mention it to your novelist friends, because you’re really in top-shelf territory.
But before you quit the day job, please allow me to be That Guy. Ready?
You’re going to take home about $15K to $20K for three consecutive years.
That’s is. That’s the end. There’s no health insurance, no retirement fund, not a single benefit. Your agent and taxes take the rest.
Welcome to the big time!
But wait, you say. You’re a real badass. You can get a $100K contract every year, and that’s a good living, right? In terms of royalties, depending on which format most of your books are selling, you’ll be moving about 25,000 units of each new book. That means you’ll be on most bestseller lists, at least for a few weeks. You won’t be a household name, like Patterson or King or Roberts or Grisham, but you’ll get SRO crowds at book-store readings. People who follow your genre will certainly recognize your name.
And, in your third year, you’ll raking in … about $60-80K, still with no health insurance, retirement fund or benefits. Maybe a little more if back sales are good. If you live in the D.C. area, that’s about what your kid’s high-school math teacher makes – but they get summers and holidays off, plus benefits and job security longer than their next book.
I’m sorry to do this, I truly am. I’m a fellow novelist and hopeless romantic at heart, a fiction geek who wrote his first “book” when he was six years old. Writing books and telling stories is the most meaningful thing I do.
But I’ve also made most of my living over the past 30 years as a journalist, in which romance is dead. You follow the money. Numbers are numbers. I also manage the family finances, deal with the accountant at tax time and have been lucky enough to sell a couple of books for about $100K.
Here’s the reality: Fiction, like playing jazz, is based on a very small economy. If you write or play jazz for art and an avocation, to make a few extra bucks or to kick in to the kid’s college education, that is wonderful.
But if you want to actually live on it, don’t let a few big names distract you. You can name 15 writers who make big money? Fabulous. I can name more who won the lottery, start as an NFL quarterback or an NBA point guard. Of course those people exist. It’s just very unlikely that you or I will be one of them.
Please don’t take that as a slight. Heaven knows, financial success in fiction isn’t based on merit. Sales aren’t personal. They’re based on tons of things – actually, a sequence of tons of things – that have nothing to do with you. Nobody can control them. Not you, your agent or your publisher.
The crime novelist Elmore Leonard was a good friend from the early 1990s until his death in 2013. Early on, I told him I wanted to write novels for a living. Dutch was a nice man and a practical sort. He nodded and then drew two segmented lines on a piece of paper. He pushed it across to me. One line went up at an angle and had an arrow at the top, pointing up. The other line went down, as did the arrow at the bottom.
“Write three books,” he said, “then look at your sales. If they’re like the first line, with each book selling more than the last, then you might have a career. If they’re the second, then maybe you don’t.”
As obvious as this is, I had never thought of it before. I had pictured writing books but had always been a little hazy on cash flow. When you’re 20-something, this is pardonable. When you’re 40-something, it’s criminal.
Now, maybe you have a spouse who makes a good enough income to support the household, or you have a trust fund, or you live in cabin in the woods and eat fruits and nuts. Most people who write fiction also teach, have a day job, or do something else for money.
But if we’re talking about a career like Dutch’s – in which your income is based on book sales – then you better pay attention to the financial books, not just the ones you write.
As a young man in Detroit in the ’50s and ’60s, with a budding family of five kids, Dutch worked at a prestigious ad agency. On the side, he was writing Westerns. Buoyed by some initial success (he had written “3:10 to Yuma,” made into a 1957 film with Glenn Ford), he quit his day job and made a run at making it as a novelist.
And … it didn’t go so well. His agent sent him notes, asking where the novels were that he had promised he’d write once freed from the demands of a day job. The truth? He was financially stretched. His books, while popular, had never been bestsellers. He had to turn to writing scripts for instructional videos for manufacturing firms to pay the bills. Things like how to operate heavy machinery. It wasn’t glamorous.
And that’s why Elmore Leonard – now collected in the Library of America, literary master of American fiction – started writing crime novels. When asked why he switched from Westerns to crime, people often expected an answer about artistic vision. He always said, “I needed the money.”
That’s as good an example as I know why, if you want to write fiction for a living, you have to pay attention to the business side, because it isn’t easy, not even for someone as hardworking and talented as Dutch Leonard.
So here’s the boring financial breakdown on that theoretical $100K contract I mentioned at the start. It’s based on boilerplate contracts, the kind you’re going to get unless and until you starting selling books that make a lot more money than a paltry $100K. Another caveat: This is broad-brush stroke, the industry is changing and no, I don’t know your particulars. Your mileage will vary.
Still, you might find this useful.
Your agent, as you probably already know, gets 15 percent off the top. That leaves you with $85K.
Publishers traditionally break that into three payments – on signing the contract, on acceptance of the final manuscript, and then on publication. In the traditional model, this period is likely going to spread over three years – and you actually want a long lead-in to publication, to allow you and your publisher to do as much advance marketing as possible. You might get two payments bunched into a calendar year, particularly if there’s little editing on the manuscript. It’s also possible these days that, if your book is going to be digital only, the whole process is collapsed into a much shorter time span.
This is 1099 income, not W-2. You’re going to have a higher tax burden because, in part, employers usually pay some part of your tax obligations. It’s almost certainly going to add up to somewhere between 35 to 50 percent of your gross.
But deductions, you say! I’ve got all these deductions! You can indeed deduct certain writing, travel and promotional expenses. But, remember, that’s still money that you spent to earn your $100K. You’ll get about a 30% deduction on your taxes, but by no means do you get back all the money you spent.
Let’s say you’re good with money, have some deductions and manage to keep your tax exposure low. Let’s say you only owe $35K on $85K of untaxed income. That’s good. That leaves you with $50K. Divided into three payments, likely one per year, that’s $16K. Maybe two of those payments will fall into a calendar year. Fine. You get $33K one year and $17K the next.
$33K/year is $17/hour working full-time.
$17/hour is what my 22-year-old eldest child earned as an entry-level employee at the Apple store.
In raw sales numbers, you only get about five percent of the sales price of the first 5,000 copies you sell, and most novels do not sell that. But, at the top end, you gross about $4 for audio and e-books, $3 for hardcovers and $1 for paperbacks. You net about half that. You will have to sell about 25,000 copies, mostly in hardcover or electronic formats, to earn out that $100K advance. There are lots of really good writers whose works we all admire who do not sell this many books. (Cough.)
When you go to sell your next book, publishers are mostly likely going to base their offer on your previous sales.
Maybe somebody will buy the film rights? Ah, the pot of gold for the fiction writer. It certainly could be big money. Once, when I was at Dutch’s house and we were about to go to dinner, he pointed to a neat stack of papers on his desk. It was his next novel, not yet published, and he had, just a few minutes before I arrived, sold the film rights for a few million. He’d pick up the dinner tab, he laughed. I certainly got excited when my agent called in the early 2000s to say Nicolas Cage and Halle Berry were looking for a project to do together and they were interested in the rights to my memoir. Would I grant them a seven-day exclusive to look it over? Why, yes I would. Seven days have long since come and gone and I have yet to have a nice chat with Halle. It was equally exciting when a big-time producer who had Oscars to his name called to say he wanted to produce a film about the same book. I’ve been sitting in the theater and seen his name pop up on big hits since, but our deal never materialized. Another time, I went to Hollywood to talk with a different set of producers, and yet again to the New York Film Festival to meet with a great guy and actor who wanted to produce and star in a film about a different work. And so on. In the end, here’s my Hollywood money: I sold the initial rights and my consultation services to HBO for one book for $20K. The film got as far as the script and then HBO had a change of leadership and the project died. I netted about $10K and paid for my kid’s braces and the end of a car note. Not bad for signing and initialing a few pages, but not quite that Malibu mansion, either. And even if they’d made the movie, my total payout would have been about $250K before taxes…and we’ve talked about that.
Does any of that help? I hope so. Look, every now and then these things work out. I hope they do for you. But it helps to remember that William Goldman’s analysis of the film business also applies to fiction: Nobody knows anything.
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(See? I told you it was good. You can check out Neely Tucker's work HERE.
Until next time, stay safe. Much love to all of you, and Happy Reading! - EA)