The Weekend Writer: The Business Of Writing

I see The Weekend Writer as being for beginning writers, so last week's post about reading is probably more appropriate than today's about managing your writing business. But there's stuff in Money, Writing and Life With Jane Friedman at The Creative Penn that might be eye opening for people planning a writing career.

• Risk tolerance--You need it if you're going to quit the day job. Personally, I think you need it if you're not going to quit the day job. You're putting a lot of time and energy and emotional whatever into a very risky venture that you don't have a lot of chance of being successful with. Whoops. Should I have said that?
• A way to manage the reality of limited and irregular income--Joanna Penn says that when she gave up regular income from a day job in order to write full-time, she sold everything. The house. The car. No debt and a lot fewer expenses so she could manage on a writer's income.
• The traditional model for writer's income vs. reality--The model is income from book sales, but how many writers live on that without teaching/workshop/conference income, appearances, work for hire? By the way, there's a glut of MFA graduates right now, hurting writers' chances of getting college teaching jobs. I've heard that elsewhere.
• Few sales from many books vs. many sales from few books--Penn and Friedman discuss this. It's something you hear about a lot from entrepreneurial self-published writers, too. What are the chances of one or two books generating a lot of sales? What are the chances of many books generating small numbers of sales each? If you can write a lot, you don't have to sell a large number of each book in order to generate some money.

That's just a sampling of the material you can pick up from this Creative Penn blog post. Read it because forewarned is forearmed.