Last month author Laura Purdie Salas did a blog post called [my writing life] How Much Money Does a Writer Make? (2012 edition) in which she described her income breakdown. In the writer circles I've bumped around in, she's not doing badly. In fact, I know plenty of people who would think she did pretty well last year. What's interesting is how many different types of writing-related work she had to do in order to generate that income. Money from trade book sales, which is the way most people think writers make a living, was quite a small portion of her overall income. She has links to her income from several years back, and even in years
when she's done better over all, it wasn't because of a lot of money
coming in from trade. Even if you add what she made from work-for-hire books to the what she made for trade, so that we're counting all of what approaches "traditional" writer income, we're not even getting to half of her take for 2012.
She has done what seems to me to be a good job of going out and finding writing-related work. The time involved in managing all those different work tasks makes me want to curl up in a little ball.
Writers interested in the work-for-hire writing can find information on the subject at Rachelle Burke's Resources for Children's Writers (Scroll down to Item 14) and Evelyn B. Christensen's Educational Markets for Children's Writers. Both those sites were brought to my attention by Kathryn Lay in her article Writing for the Educational Market in the March/April 2011 SCBWI Bulletin.
"The time involved in managing all those different work tasks makes me want to curl up in a little ball."
ReplyDeleteMe, too! The various other tasks I do that are writing-related are mostly things I find rewarding in some way. But the logistics of juggling a million different income streams (as my very business-savvy brainstorming partner has taught me they're called) is overwhelming at times. Earning a living as a writer (including all those non-writing tasks) is stressful and mind-boggling at times. I only spend 10% of my time actually writing things I want to write. Sometimes I curse online time sheets--I wish I could kid myself that it was more. So far, though, that 10% still makes it all worth it:>) There are days, though...
I know other writers who are frustrated because, while they really are making a living writing, like you, they don't get much time to do the kind of writing they're primarily interested in. On the other hand, a lot of writers who are writing what they want to write aren't generating enough income to call it a living. I wonder, myself, if a lot of us couldn't get some satisfaction out of writing other sorts of things, the way you do.
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