Tag: writing is a job

Complaining Pays 0¢ per Word

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

A pair of friends are putting together an anthology of short horror stories written by Connecticut writers. To that end, one of them posted a submissions call for the anthology in the r/Connecticut subreddit. She provided the guidelines as well as the compensation: $20, a contributor’s copy, and a free PDF of any future books the editors produced under their imprint. Sounds harmless, right?

But this is Reddit we’re talking about. Immediately my friend was swarmed by keyboard Bolsheviks indignant at such exploitation. Only $20 for a short story? Outrageous! Nevermind the fact that token-paying markets (defined as paying $0.01 or less per word) are common in the genre world and nothing about my friend’s offer was unusual. One little Lenin claimed she had friends — close friends — who were HWA members and they would laugh at such an amount. “Your ancestors were probably slave owners as well,” snarled another self-styled Che Guevara. And thus a blow was struck against my friend, the capitalist pig-dog. Writers of the world unite!

You can certainly make money as a writer but writing fiction is probably the worst way to do it. A 2022 survey of nearly 5,700 members of the Author’s Guild revealed that the median pre-tax income for authors — both full-time and part-time — from their books was $2,000 a year. Yet their earnings jumped to $5,000 when all writing-related income was considered; according to the survey, “56% of respondents reported that such activities as journalism, conducting events, editing, ghostwriting, and teaching more than doubled their income.”

Not all of these authors are fiction writers, of course, but the survey does jibe with my own experience: the most lucrative writing is the unglamorous stuff. Copywriting. Technical writing. Journalism. Over the years, the best-paying gigs I’ve had involved ghostwriting, editorial work, or writing short nonfiction articles.

So if there are better ways to make a buck by writing, why write fiction? There are a few reasons. One, I enjoy it and take great satisfaction when a story or book comes together. Two, some readers seem to like what I write. And three, I own it.

It’s almost unheard of for a writer to sell their copyright to a piece of fiction, whereas journalism, ghostwriting, and the rest is often work-for-hire. That means you sell the copyright in exchange for a one-time payment. Meanwhile I can theoretically publish and republish a short story an infinite amount of times because I always retain the copyright. Same with novels and novellas. Should A Season of Whispers go out of print, I can republish it with another publisher or self-publish it myself — hardly worst-case scenarios. It will be mine until long after I’m dead and it joins Jay Gatsby and Mickey Mouse in the public domain. I should add that this goes for book-length nonfiction too, like Smedley.

A writer may not make a lot of money from an individual sale of a piece of fiction but those sales can accumulate over a lifetime; and obviously the more works one has to offer, the more sales he or she can potentially make.

While I would never write in exchange for that dubious social credit known as “exposure,” I’ve mentioned before that I believe there are circumstances in which it’s OK for a writer to sell their work for less than what they might otherwise expect. For example, I have no problem contributing a free blog post or article that advertises a bigger project of mine, like a newly released book. Or, for reasons of ownership mentioned above, selling first-time rights at a bargain rate may be in your interest if your goal is to create a body of work that you can hustle forever.

Likewise, should you feel called to write lesbian steampunk poems, then you probably shouldn’t expect whopping sums in return. But if your goal is to become the preeminent name in lesbian steampunk poetry with all the fame that it brings, then token markets may be solid stepping stones toward achieving your vision.

The key is to examine a given situation and ask, Who’s making money here, if anyone? If the publishers are earning substantial profits from the project, then you should absolutely receive a piece of that, either upfront or as a royalty. But many projects operate on much leaner budgets, like, say, anthologies of horror fiction meant to showcase the talents of Connecticut writers. I assure you my friends did not embark upon their collection as a money-making scheme.

In that case, it’s up to you to determine if receiving $20 in exchange for a short story is worth your time and energy. Ask yourself if it aligns with your goals and the ultimate vision you have for yourself. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. There are nine and sixty ways of constructing a writing career — and all of them are right.

The Unstrung Harp

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment
Mr. Earbrass has been rashly skimming through the early chapters

This week I completed the eighth draft of my fourth and latest book. It’s not the final version by any means, but it’s the version I’m comfortable showing to people while I consider improvements. There’s never a final version to any book, even once it’s sent to the printer; I keep a running list of corrections if a revised edition of Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer should ever be requested.

Often when I reach this milestone, I pull out my copy of Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey, a collection of his first 15 books, and reread the The Unstrung Harp. The story details the process of CF Earbrass, renowned English novelist, as he writes and publishes his latest work. The Unstrung Harp spans the period just before he begins writing and concludes with his escape from the reactions and reviews by suddenly going on holiday.

Never before or since The Unstrung Harp has a better rendering of the authorial journey been set to paper. Having read it first as a teen, it’s become a nostradamic document for me, a compilation of quatrains describing events and experiences that have come to pass.

In one panel Earbrass writes so long and hard that he skips lunch, whereupon he retreats to the kitchen to eat a jelly sandwich. That’s practically my daily routine.

Upon finishing a chapter, Earbrass sits and ponders “where the plot is to go and what will happen to it on arrival.” How else do you write a book?

Earbrass finds a presentation copy of an old novel in a second-hand bin but can’t remember who Angus is. A friend of mine once found a presentation copy of Smedley at a used-book sale and apologized to me, as if he was the one who gave it away.

Earbrass is cornered by an irate reader, who believes a character in the novel is modeled on him. Not only has this happened with my fiction, I also have a Smedley stalker who shows up at places to argue with me.

What’s amazing is that The Unstrung Harp was Gorey’s first book, originally published in 1953, and yet reading it, you’d think it was written by an established author reflecting on his career by way of self-mockery. Nope. Instead Gorey wrote a prophetic parody of the writing life, a blueprint of absurdity. For me, the humor only grows with each re-read.

Story Terrace

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Late last year, I scored a gig writing for Story Terrace, a UK-based company that’s expanded into the US.

Story Terrace publishes memoirs and autobiographies ghostwritten by a stable of authors, who interview the subject at her home and then compose a finished book complete with photos and a professional layout. The company has gone through several rounds of investment, including a crowdfunding effort this past summer that raised more than £617,000.

So far I’ve written three books of varying lengths for Story Terrace: the first was a memoir of a successful lawyer about his years growing up in Queens in the 1930s and 40s, while the other two were biographies of an Italian-American couple and an Irish-American woman, all of them immigrants who left the poverty of their homelands and achieved the American dream. It’s fun and rewarding work — much more rewarding, in fact, than I had anticipated.

Initially I was reluctant to write about the gig publicly because the position was originally advertised as “ghostwriter.” Years ago, in addition to the bylined articles I wrote for them, I did some ghostwriting for Dig and Calliope, the children’s magazines about archaeology and history, which I was actively discouraged from talking about.

That, I now realize, was ghostwriting of a very different stripe. The editor loathed having to deal with PhDs with their jargonized writing styles, outsized egos, and complete lack of respect for any form of deadline, so in a few cases she found it easier to assign the writing to me and then, after a cursory review by the academic in question, slap Professor Snootynose’s name on it. I didn’t particularly care about the byline — as long as the check clears, I’m good — but I was also sworn to super-duper secrecy with cherries on top, lest the professor be unmasked as a fraud by his peers, ridiculed, and driven like a mangy dog from the ivy-covered halls. The editor took pains to stress how seriously I needed to keep my lips shut — because we all know how tolerant our colleges and universities are.

The work I do for Story Terrace is ghostwriting of a less stringent sort. It’s work-for-hire, meaning the copyright goes to the customer, but I get a small credit inside the front of the book so there’s no top-secret surreptitiousness involved.

Further, Your Most Obedient Servant actually receives a commission for referrals that lead to projects, so if anything, the company wants me blabbing about it nonstop (not to mention that they have my headshot on their front page). I’m happy to recommend them.

So — if you or someone you know has always said, “I should write a book,” but never has, Story Terrace may be able to help make it a reality. The company has three different standard packages you can buy or you can tailor a project specific to your needs. All of the projects I’ve worked on were commissioned by adult children for their parents to capture their memories and experiences before they were lost forever. If you’re interested, just drop Story Terrace a line and mention my name. If you’re local, we can even arrange for me to write the project.

Makes a great stocking stuffer!

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

At Electric Lit’s Blunt Instrument advice column, an author asked how to absolve herself from the shame of publishing a book she now feels is “juvenile:”

I saw a tweet a little while ago from someone who said, “I would never forgive myself if I wrote a bad book.” I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself, either, and I can’t figure out how to move on. For a time I thought that I would just work hard and write something else that would be so much better and erase the collective memory of my first book (I think I flatter myself to even think there is a collective memory), but I remain filled with doubt. And self-loathing. This might be a better question for a therapist, but here’s the short version: how do you recover from publishing shame?

Elisa Gabbert, the Blunt Instrument’s fount of wisdom, replied in part:

It makes sense that young people, because they lack experience, would tend to undervalue experience and overvalue talent, which may be all they have. It also makes sense that older people would place a higher value on experience, now that they have it. I am not especially young, so you can take my bias into account, but I believe that experience is important, and that more life experience, reading experience, and writing experience are going to make you a better writer.

I don’t disagree with anything Gabbert said and her entire response is worth reading, particularly for her discussion of how the vagaries of publishing often result in a disparity between the fondness an author feels for a work versus its popularity among readers.

Yet what’s significant to me is that Gabbert explicitly underscores such shame being an issue of experience. Writers who are early in their careers — regardless of their age — have smaller portfolios and therefore are more conscious of it. If you only have ten published pieces to your credit and one is awful, that’s ten percent of your bylines; but if you’ve written 100 pieces and one is bad, the stink is confined to a negligible percentage.

All writers produce bad copy — God knows I have. Thankfully most of it is lost to the mists of time, but before you tell me that Google forgets nothing, keep in mind it works both ways: yes, some of my bad stuff has fallen down the memory hole but so have some pieces I’m particularly proud of, even though they were authored in the age of search engines. Publications come and go, and often they take their servers with them. The Internet is no elephant.

If you dug up one of those old pieces of mine, the kind I’d prefer were forgotten, and waved it my face, I wouldn’t be happy. But neither would I lose sleep over it. I have a number of aphorisms I’ve developed over the years. For example: The best response to a piece of bad writing is to create another piece of writing. When I start something and realize it’s not proceeding well, I set it aside and write something else. Sometimes I will cannibalize it for words or ideas but at the very least the act was a warmup, a prelude to a new thing. To the inexperienced, a setback or criticism can seem monstrous but to the jaded rodeo clown it’s like, Meh whatevs.

This subject resonates with me, I think, because this week I’m putting the finishing edits on my current WIP, a 37,000-word novella. Today I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but while I can’t imagine ever hating it, five or ten years from now I may view it more critically. That’s OK because I’d like to think that in five to ten years I’ll be writing even better stuff.

And that, ultimately, is what you have to ask yourself: Does what I’m writing today reflect the best I can do in this moment? Is it a product of my current talent and ability? If not, throw it in a drawer. But if it is, then hustle it, and if your future self doesn’t like it, then tell him to STFU and get cracking on something better. Move forward. Forget the past. Let the dead bury the dead.

Short News, Struggling Scribblers Edition

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Office in Small City by Edward Hopper, 1953
Office in Small City by Edward Hopper, 1953

Do your job. Electric Literature says writing is a job “even if it doesn’t pay you as much as you wish it would.”

[S]ometimes the money just isn’t there. If you are writing weird poems on a friend’s Tumblr page that only a handful of people will read, you can’t expect to be paid because there is no money being made. But if you are writing for, say, a big website that gets massive traffic, you should absolutely demand to be paid

I previously inked some thoughts on writers and rip-off publishers here.

“Should we always play it safe?” Barrelhouse has a great graphic essay on writers and writing.

File under Asylum, lunatics taken over the. Trumpkins swarmed the Goodreads page for author Laura Silverman’s latest book, inundating it with one-star reviews because she dislikes their clown prince of politics. Punchline: the book hasn’t been released yet — it’s still in copyedits. Allies responded with five stars to counteract the attacks; meanwhile, Goodreads lethargically removed the troll reviews. Silverman said the incident “scared me a lot, because they were taking it to the next level.” If it’s any consolation to Silverman, I wouldn’t worry about it affecting her career — that’s just another Tuesday for Goodreads.