Don't Qut Your Day Job

A recent article published on Medium has been causing a bit of a stir in the small section of the Twitterverse that I follow. It's written by Heather Demetrios, a successful novelist. Her first books netted her $375,000 in advances, and she thought that she'd hit the big time and started living the life. But sales weren't that great and her next advances got smaller and smaller. Reality bit, big time.

The article offers some solid advice for writers, some of which is applicable to the more mundane writer types who are sitting in cube farms working from contract to contract.

I'm going to add a link to the response by Elizabeth Bear, who is a successful (and very good) author of science fiction and fantasy. Her latest novel, Ancestral Nights, was published earlier this year to generally favourable reviews. Again, while the article is aimed at novelists, some of her points will be applicable to freelance contractors.

• Pay off your debts when you can, buy durable goods that last when you need them (rather than the cheapest available) and stick to a budget.

• Don’t spend ludicrous amounts of money on self-promotion and travel. Build your brand and your network by treating people well, making friends, and providing interesting internet content. By all means go to literary festivals, cons, and so forth if you’re invited or if you want to go for the social opportunities, but if going to cons made you a best seller I would not be sweating how to pay the mortgage now.

• Be aware that the money is going to come at weird times and it will get held up when totally inconvenient, and sometimes you’re going to have to chase people down who have been sitting on an invoice for months. Sometimes years.

All of this makes me wonder how many writing programs, be they creative writing or technical writing, offer a course on the business aspects of the career?