How to Make Money as a Writer (and feed your kids).

I'm reluctant to post this, because it is about making money. It is not about art. It will not feed your soul. (It might feed your family, however.) But here goes:

As the parent of two kids, I'm always worried about college and other extremely high-cost future ticket items (not to mention the expensive current charges like summer camp, piano lessons, soccer cleats, etc...) -- so while I write for myself, and I write literary fiction (i.e. The Stuff that Can Not Be Marketed) I am hyper-aware that at some point I would actually like to earn some money doing this writing stuff that I do.

I do not suck as a writer. At the moment, I have a musical going up this weekend in New York (I co-wrote it with a friend who is a composer and professor at Tisch School of the Arts) and I also was just informed that the St. Petersburg Review is going to be publishing a short story of mine in its next issue. But placing one story per year and having a musical off-Broadway results in an annual income of about $800. That's not enough to send a kid to plumbing school, much less to anyplace that might connect him to an air-conditioned office. And that's a darn good year. So okay, what to do?

Many writers I know who self-publish tout the benefits of self-publishing. The New Wave! The Way of the Future! Money for Authors! This may be true, but I suspect that, just as in traditional publishing, you still have to write a book that sells.

Self publishing has this going for it: the author makes much more per book than in traditional publishing. That is a fact.

So the only variable is -- how many books can you sell?

Here is a jaw-dropping article about self-publishing that my husband found. It is all about producing a book that can turn into a best seller. And what is amazing is that IT DOESN'T MATTER what the book is about, so long as it is tolerably well written (in the comments, someone wrote, "I bought your book and was going to demand a refund, but found it was reasonably worth the $5 that you charge for it." -- and that is the truth of the matter.)  Money is made from people *buying* your book - not people reading your book and loving it.

Reader expectations are low. Fifty Shades of Gray was badly written--there is a global consensus that this is a fact. But who cares? People bought it out of curiosity. And bought it. And bought it. And anything like it. And anything with a similar title. Etc. Etc. Etc.

We know this and yet we do not take advantage of it.

But this article speaks to non-fiction writers. What do they have that fiction writers don't? A built-in market. Business people go to conferences. They go to networking breakfasts. They blog. They usually have an entire floor worth of co-workers who will happily buy their book (and probably never read it). They have networks.

What fiction writers have that?

Lots of us.

Anyone who has already written a book that sold over 4,000 copies. (That's why traditional publishers beg you to have a blog, a Twitter following, and a Facebook feed--they want every single person who liked your first book to also buy your second; and then some.)

All the genre writers (lucky stiffs) have a built-in network. There are dozens of conferences to attend to mingle with others of your genre. Write mysteries? Every secretary in Manhattan would happily give your first book a try, all you have to do is get it in front of her when she has just finished the last book of the last series she was reading. Write sci-fi? There are more pro-paying markets for science-fiction short stories than almost any other genre--and they treat writers professionally. A two-week response time is considered painfully long and unconscionably rude.

But brand-new novelists interested in literary writing? Nearly all of the short-story markets are unpaid, with 6-8 week turnaround (if they are good). Advances are now usually under 10,000 and more often than not, under 5,000. And you are expected to repay the portion you fail to earn.

Are they kidding?

Nearly all of the novels published sell under 2,000 copies. And why?

Because there's this "thing" that literary writers believe. That we have to be isolated. That we should be like Thomas Pynchon, hidden away from the horrors of publicity. I know that I'm preaching to the choir - all of you at the very least had a kid, so you can't be utterly isolated 100% of the time. And our Salons obviously offer an opportunity to network with writers and readers. All great stuff.

So why not take advantage of this? Start to build a network. Get that Twitter feed going, guest-blog on other people's sites. Goodreads seems to do good networking. And there are other places to build your network of colleagues, too. Attend readings and meet people there. Go to workshops (or teach them!) strive to exchange information with everyone you meet.

It's a business. As soon as you have a following of more than 5,000--you have "a following"...and while they are not guaranteed to read your next book, there's a pretty good chance they might buy it if it has a catchy title and a nice cover.

Read that article... Here, I'll repost the link:

How To Self-Publish A Bestseller: Publishing 3.0
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/19a8_62fTE4/


Next week, we have a new guest-blogger -- Peter von Ziegesar just came back from a book tour with his 15-yr old daughter in tow....eager to hear another voice on the subject of book tours with kids!

Ghost writing, blogging, and writing a novel in a year

As writers who have to support little hungry mouths, we are (well, like everyone else) always searching for a way to make money.

So what about ghost-writing?

Articles like this one from the BBC, make it sound so easy - write two or three books a year, put your kids through private schools. Live in a fancy house. Meet celebrities who love you. Done.

Of course, no one knows who you are.

But why do we write, exactly? I mean, none of us can stop, right? Whenever we think to throw the pen out the window we are haunted by ideas, gripped by the fear that we have tossed away our talent. When our PTA asks us to write for the newsletter we squirm, as angry as the doctor who is asked to "just take a quick look" at this weird blister-thing on Sybill's back during a Fourth of July barbecue.

We want to be read, and really, we want to be paid for our work.

So how important is it that people know we are actually the author of that work?

Interesting question, isn't it? How would you feel if you wrote a whole book and it became a best seller -- but then some dipstick actor who could barely focus thoughts into a verbal sentence, much less in an email, gets credit for writing that fascinating book and gets to talk to Oprah, Ellen, and Jon Stewart about how gripping their story was to read. Would the money be enough to keep you satisfied?

If it's just about the money, why aren't we all writing creative ad copy? I can find a million job offers for blogging about random things. Here's my position on this:  do whatever day job you have to do to keep your kids fed and your rent paid, but leave time for your own creative work.

Ghostwriting can leave you drained. Yes, you are using your craft (writing) to earn a living. But you are also asking your inner artist to draw a picture that did not rise from your own soul.

Writing is of two parts: the story is the art, the writing is the craft. A great novel has both, and both belong to the author.  Ghost-writing is a good way to pay the bills, but don't let it be the only writing you do. Make time for your own story, even if it's not as marketable as Angelina's.

Better still: make something up. Write a story that has not yet been lived.

If you can't find time to work on your own creative stuff, then you have to give something up.  You can't (and shouldn't) give up your kids. You probably should exercise a little and leave at least a few hours for your spouse and for eating and sleeping and, let's be real, a few hours for detox with your favorite addictive TV show. But what you can give up is a day job that makes you feel like you are writing without actually letting you write. You can stop pretending your low-paying blogging job is really what you want to be writing, and instead you can take a stupid-mind-numbing job where you are being paid GOBS of money and then you can take that extra money to hire a sitter so that you can actually work on something creative.

And if you just yelled at this post, then maybe you are secretly happy at what you do and you need to JUST ACTUALLY WORK ON YOUR NOVEL. Here is a kick-in-the-pants blog (warning: really colorful language) I found to help you write a novel in one year.

Good luck & get to it.

How to balance a creative career and an active family life

I was asked to guest-blog on Kidville's blog on the topic of balancing a creative career and parenting responsibilites, and I share with you the post. One day, perhaps we will also be fancy here with images and so forth. But for now: stay creative. Balance your life. Please comment on their blog in response to the tips - let them know this is a topic of interest in the virtual world!

And - we at Pen Parentis extend heartfelt strength to the families suffering in Boston. As New Yorkers with offices a block from Ground Zero, we get it. Gather strength from your loved ones, and remember that writing can also be therapeutic.

What AWP taught me

This is going to be an unusually personal post - I went to AWP (the massive, twelve-thousand writers in a single event space dance-with-your-editor party that the Association of Writers and Writing Professionals puts on annually in various cities). First let me say that it was....amazing.  There were thirty panels for every time slot - each one hour and fifteen minutes long. There were six official time slots in a conference day, for three days. Do the math. You could spend a whole session just debating what panel to attend--!  Simultaneously, there was a two-floor book fair at which indie presses and literary magazines, MFA programs and writing retreats all had their tables. Down there, you were likely to run into people who did readings with you, who attended your grad school, or who had been standing in line for the bathroom with you for fifteen minutes the day before. In other words, those two floors were all about socializing and making connections. As if that's not enough, there were evening receptions (up to ten on-site per night) plus a score of offsite readings and social hours, dance parties and dinners.  It was...amazing.

So let me get personal. I am, first and foremost a mom. A writer. I just spent two whole minutes deleting one and replacing it with the other. I honestly don't know which I am first. If the kids need me, I'm definitely a mom first. But if they are at school, there's not a chance in hell I will choose voluntarily to create a felt-board so they can learn their spelling words if I'm in the middle of a writing session. So what comes first? Whatever needs me most, I guess. And yes, there's guilt in that.  But that's not what this blog post is about.

I also balance running Pen Parentis with the writing and the momming. And at AWP I realized that a lot of the time, I place the Directing higher on the scale than either of those things because it feels like a job. It can get tedious. It can be frustrating in an administrative "we just ran out of ink in our printer and need to put up flyers for tomorrow's event" sort of way. And it gives us the kind of pride that only a job can give you: a sort of legitimacy in the universe.

And what's hideous is that it means that even I, who run this organization, tend to subconsciously negate parenting and writing as legitimate. And I'm crushed about that, because it's preposterous.

If you could have seen the work that was being done at the conference to learn and innovate, to get inspiration for the next page, the next sentence - the people sitting on each other's feet (quite literally) to be able to fit into a very-full panel discussion on Traditional & Nontraditional Structures in the Novel, or Surviving and Thriving without an MFA or Borrowing from Literature to Create for the Screen...you too would have said, these people are not being self-indugent (a criticism I often hear about writing as a profession--yeah, it irks me too). I doubt any gastroentereologists at conferences at the Hynes Convention Center would stand through a whole session with one elbow in someone else's face and another on the water cooler, just to see a panel speak about a new surgery technique. Maybe they do, I've never been to a medical conference. But I have seen the suits that doctors wear to their conferences, and that sort of high-end costume doesn't encourage crowding.

But not even every large-scale literary event is this exciting. The difference between this conference and the BEA (Book Expo America that happens in June in NYC annually, and is the publishing industry conference) - is where the passion lies. At BEA, it is passion for the book: as a product, as a collaboration of author, agent, editor, publisher and distributor, and as a valuable, thrilling piece of art (or at the very least a valuable, thrilling commodity that sells like hotcakes). There are a lot more suits and a lot fewer panels, and nearly all those panels feature powerpoint. At AWP, the conference celebrates WRITING. The creation. The editing. The decision to sell or sell out or change or not. The teaching of writing. The collection of writing into anthologies. The transformations of writing both style and content. The impetus to write and the things that block it or fund it. This conference is all about the craft.

What did I learn? I learned that I actually wear three hats; which isn't all that surprising, given that my nickname in grad school was "Chapeau"... Here are my three hats: when I'm a parent, I feel guilty I'm not writing, but also I feel like I'm doing the exact correct thing by giving my all to my kids. When I'm a writer, I feel guilty I'm not doing more for my kids, though I feel personally most fulfilled. (I was surprised to discover that when I accomplish something great in writing it gives me a huge amount of personal, if fleeting, pleasure and makes me feel like yes, I've made the right choices.) And when I'm the executive director, all the doubts and fears and guilt fall away, to be replaced by hope and encouragement and I find myself acting like that tree in The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. You know the one? "And the tree was happy..." When wearing the hat of founding director, I will scrape bottom to ensure that every writer/parent who is pushing to keep a writer hat on -- even part-time -- while wearing their parenting hat the rest of the time, gets rewarded and encouraged. You guys -- and you know who you were -- who attended that conference bringing along your kids? You were my heroes. I could see the suffering you felt as others looked askance "really? you couldn't get a sitter?" -- and wanted to shout on your behalf: it's frickin' impossible to get a sitter for four days!! And then I want to give a public shout-out to the many, many writers who are devoted to their craft, are working full time day-jobs and/or just don't have the funds to go anywhere for four days with or without their kids. They deserve celebration as well.

(as a side note, our Writing Fellowship for New Parents was created specifically so that you people whose only impediment to attending conferences or residencies like AWP is a financial one could finally do so. It's open for application until April 17--do spread the word, please.)

I kept thinking, between panels and meetups and waiting in coffee lines, that there were 12,000 "literary"-genre writers that attended this event, but that meant that there were probably a million writers who were actually WRITING while the rest of us were taking in panels, not to mention the writers in other genres who have other conferences to inspire them! That's a pretty miraculous and astonishing number of people who are faithful to the word as an art form, and I hope that all you guys, the guys who stayed home as well as those who made it out to AWP, I hope that you all find inspiration in the livetweet feeds, that blog posts, and all the Facebook posts and articles that resulted from this massive conference. Also I hope that you all keep writing and fighting the good fight. Give your all; change hats as often as you possibly can. Hats are awesome.

I'll likely write some specific things that I picked up at AWP on my next post. I attended a huge number of panels, and why not spread the wisdom? We can all be better at what we do - but for now, what's important is to remember to also enjoy it. A bestselling author on a panel about getting your book into the world says that she still to this day has to remind herself every day that it is amazing that we are able to do what we do - the work is hard, but oh, is it ever rewarding.

Guest Blogger: Birgitte Rasine, Preparing for Colombia

Hope everyone has their tickets or reservations to Tuesday's Andaz Pen Parentis Authorfest!  It's going to be a great time! If you haven't yet reserved: click here and please note, it's standing room only at this point!  In the meantime, please read on for the first guest blog from Pen Parentis member Birgitte Rasine who is leaving today for a writing trip to South America with her toddler in tow:

___

First things first: a big warm thanks to Milda De Voe for enthusiastically embracing the idea of blogging from the field as my family and I embark on a 2-month-long trip in Colombia.

Yes, we’re about to ship off to one of the world’s most beautiful, exotic, and in some minds, dangerous countries.

It’s not the first trip—I’ve been to Colombia a number of times, and loved it more each time.  But it was never a writing-retreat-slash-black-piranha-wrestling-in-ancient-rivers-slash-Caribbean-island-vacation-turned-potential-international-conflict.  With a toddler.

It’s the end of the year, and three years since my husband and I were able to have a real vacation (get-togethers for weddings and Christmas in Florida don’t count!).  So we decided to take two months in South America.  For him, it’s a chance to soak up several weeks of extreme fishing in the Orinoco river, for me it’s a long-deserved break from clients to do nothing but write, and for our daughter, it’s everything she has only seen in books—and the iPad.

(I’ll reveal what the Caribbean island is and why it’s involved in an international conflict in a future post.)

As any parent knows, the B.C. (“Before Children”) era simply does not compare with the A.B. (“After Birth”) period.  One is freedom, tranquility, restaurants and romantic evenings out.  The other is sleepless nights, food-strewn carpets, and classes in advanced psychology and negotiation skills.  And yet, somehow, nothing but nothing compares with being able to give your child the experience of a lifetime, many times over.  This trip is one of many that I want my daughter to experience, to open up her already inquisitive, nimble mind.  Discovery of the world simply cannot wait.

A little about me before we head off.  I’m a Czech-American author descended from a loooong family line that apparently goes back to the eleventh century.  I write shorter fiction (short stories and novellas) inspired by the painful romance of real life.  And the occasional non fiction work, like “The Serpent and the Jaguar”, a book about the Mayan Calendar and sacred time. 

As I sit here writing, my 2-year-old tucked in next to me on my usually ample executive chair, wriggling all over my lap while I endeavor to hit the right keys, I reflect on how stable and safe everything here in Northern California is (generally).  In Colombia, life is intense.  A kiss from a beetle can give you Chagas disease. Untold parasites in standing water everywhere.  Paramilitary trucks just around the bend of a rural road.  But the light is brighter, the air cleaner, the food richer and tastier, and the people are some of the most social, warm, hospitable on the planet.  Your senses sharpen, your memory is young again, and you forget where you came from.

I can’t wait to share it all with you.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine

The post-hurricane blog

Remember that old thing you learned in English class about the "types of literary conflict" where one was Man vs. Nature?

Yeah. We're losing that one.

I suppose you've heard by now that the November 13th Pen Parentis Literary Salon was canceled. Our lovely host, the Andaz Wall Street, is not yet open for business after Sandy. (I keep thinking of Sandy as a Tarantino character who initially looks all wild and cool but then kills without remorse for so many scenes that you ultimately can't like her anymore.)

She killed our November salon. It feels like a personal defeat - In four years, I haven't ever canceled. Not when the restaurant "forgot" to tell the new manager that we existed. Not when Arlaina or I had personal emergencies that took us out of town. Not when there was a January blizzard. Not ever.  But this time, the whole neighborhood is suffering and we are just another bit of collateral damage. So okay. We step back and we rebuild. Again.

I know there are those of you out there who have lost more than just an event (my home lost heat but we are bundled up and will be fine) and for you who need them, I have these resources from the Fractured Atlas Blog including very good advice from ArtsReady, a nonprofit that takes care of artists affected by natural disasters.

In the meantime I'm going to work on our December 11th event - you'll recall that our December events are huge and fun and fundraiser-ish...we hope this one with Amy Sohn, Josh Henkin, Robin Black and the author of Triburbia, Karl Taro Greenfeld will blow you out of the water.

So to speak.

While I am off working on this in our unheated offices, I have a huge treat for you. Guest blogging for the next two or three blogs is a really cool member of Pen Parentis - Geoff Kirsch, who is a writer and part-time stay-at-home dad in Juneau, Alaska. He has published one book-length piece of humor, Run For Your Life Doomsday 2012! His work has also appeared in/on Comedy Central, Huffington Post and Adventure Cyclist and other national magazines. I'm really excited that he offered to guest-blog, not only because he's a wonderful writer but also because, well, he's from Alaska and he's a member. That's just...awesome.  

I totally can't wait.

Want help? Give it. Part 2.

Face it, there’s a reason you’re not getting an agent: it’s not because your writing sucks. If your writing sucked, you wouldn’t be getting encouraging emails from agents saying they are sure it will find a market at some point. You would be getting only standard boring-as-hell, form-rejection letters that probably don’t have your name on them (if you are getting only this sort of rejection, quickly go take a writing workshop or writing class and find out why—the problem is likely technical and easily fixed)—but no, YOU are getting rejection letters that feel like apologies for not wanting a second date after a great first one… Short little half-apologies with lame excuses. Often it’s that your subject matter isn’t easily marketable, that your novel isn’t easy to categorize, that it doesn’t fall within typical guidelines, or just that the agent ‘didn’t connect’ with the material. I mean, if you were writing a zombie detective novel, or a torso-baring typical romance novel with a main character named Delphinia who at 27 is still a virgin, it would already be in print. But then you, dear author, wouldn’t be you.

Now the advice I’m about to give is time consuming, so listen up. I’m talking about FRIENDS here. I’m talking about people that you went to grad school with and held their hair as they puked and didn’t post the photos to FB (okay there wasn’t FB back then, but whatever) – I’m talking people who went to your kid’s first birthday party and who you swore to be friends with forever. Don’t let one-sided success screw up a good friendship. Just don’t!

I am NOT talking about the crazy guy from the MFA program who keeps friending you from other accounts because you sat next to him one day and were nice. I’m not talking about the crazy bitch from day care who keeps haranguing you to have a playdate because she has just written her fifth novel manuscript and wants you to blurb it (oh wait, crap, that’s me, nevermind) – and I’m certainly not talking about anyone that you don’t actually LIKE.

But that does leave a handful of friends. Even writers, you know who you are, have friends.

So what can we do to help each other? Well, you’ve done the first step: you’re seeking community. We really CAN help each other. It’s just that the one-on-one “here’s my agent’s cellphone number” help isn’t going to happen. Here’s a list of what we can do for each other:

• 1)   Read your friend’s books. (yes, some of them will suck. But just the fact that you bothered to put them into your long reading queue will mean SO MUCH to your friend that the next time his agent asks if he knows someone who writes X and you do, your name might come up.) – this goes for published and NOT published books. If you have three novels under your hat and your best friend from grad school is still struggling, well, do the shlub a favor and read his MS. And be honest: tell him, you need to take a writing class (he will hate you, but he won’t hate you more than if you keep NOT reading his MS). And vice versa: “I’m working on my own novel” is no reason not to read that friend’s book. Skim it. Read pieces. It’s not nice not to. If it’s awful, be gleeful in private and plan how yours will be better.
• 2)   Review that book wherever you’re a member, but keep the review really short (it was a great read! Or I loved this book!) – long reviews for friend’s books seem nepotistic. But do give your friend five stars if they deserve five stars: that’s just being nice. Plus (added nepotistic bonus) they might thank you in their blog which has 20,000 followers. And if the book really sucked, just skip the stars and say what you liked “great character of Pauline on page 245!” And published author-dude and dudettes: if you do read an MS that was great, guess what? Your 20K followers might want to know that too. You don’t have to be embarrassed to say “I just read a friend’s unpublished novel and really enjoyed it; I hope they find an agent soon!”
• 3)   GO TO YOUR FRIEND’S EVENTS! It’s so important to stay in touch, and if you are the only one who showed up at Barnes & Noble on that rainy Saturday, it will mean so much.  I learned this from my days as an actor: I can’t tell you how many auditions I got (mind you, it wasn’t jobs, no one hires you without trying you out: not in theater and not in books) – just because I showed up at a friend’s show. And it’s really good for YOU to go to these events: you’ll meet other authors. You’ll meet your friend’s agent. You’ll be able to network. Maybe you’ll meet your next editor, or at least know one editor’s name when you send your book out. Hell, just leaving the house for something other than a milk-run is a bonus these days.

These are super-easy things to do. Well, okay, the events thing might require a babysitter, but in general, what I’m saying is that we are a COMMUNITY. It is important to stand up for your friends. And yeah, Stephen King might not really notice when you show up, but he’s a freak of nature anyway. You went to high school with him and were best mates and now you saw him at a live event? Blog about it, cc-his alumni email address or tag him on the Facebook note, and maybe, just maybe, he will reply. Which will earn you a “like” on your site, which will lead to another blog entry, which will gain you a few Twitter followers, &etc…

Writing as a Parent

So I'm often asked whether Pen Parentis is for people who write about parenting.  Our mission is quite the opposite: we want to encourage writers to continue on the creative track they were on before they had kids.   That said, parents need to build college funds - or just pay rent! - and in a world where it is increasingly difficult to get paid for your typed strings of excellent thoughts, writing about parenting is definitely still a lucrative market.

So here are a few articles I've collected to guide you if you do decide to (or can't possibly help) writing about the experience of having kids:

Pros & Cons (from WoW)

List of Markets (from FreelanceWriting)

How to Begin (from AbsoluteWrite)

More Markets (from WritersWeekly)

You don't have to play the guilt game (from Babble)

It's overwhelming to be a parent and the idea of monetizing what you are stuck thinking about all the time anyway is a compelling idea. But when have you ever been thrilled to turn a joyous hobby into a paid endeavor? It can strip all the fun out of the fun.

Remember - writing "for money" about your experiences as a parent is going to be just as much work as writing your novel--so you're still not paying attention to your kids while you're doing it -- and what's worse, it's no escape from the 24/7 of parenting, like writing fiction can be.

But if you must, you must. Let me leave you with a word of advice.

If you choose this route, ensure you leave room to nurture your creative non-parent self. Cash the paycheck and spend it on a babysitter so you can go to your local library and write a few pages of your very own. Or if you haven't got any juice left, then by all means: read a book.