by Flack » Sun Nov 07, 2021 4:50 pm
loafergirl wrote: Sun Nov 07, 2021 1:51 pm
Seems Flack would rather be writing. I was a Creative Writing Major in HS before dropping out, always loved it, love reading now, but don't have any confidence that I could make a career of it. [...] Which leads to the question... are you all doing what you want? What do you want to do?
After one year of community college, I was 100% convinced I was going to become a professional writer. Writing fiction wasn't on my radar, but I thought for sure I'd become a reporter -- maybe write a little non-fiction, churning out a few school textbooks on the side if I got bored. This was in the early 90s, so online publishing wasn't really a thing yet.
My second year of school, I interned at two different newspapers. The first was the town's free newspaper that got delivered to everybody's mailbox once a week whether they wanted it or not. The closest I came to getting paid was receiving 1,000 business cards (I still have at least half of them). It was a fun gig and I got college credit for driving around town and asking random people hard hitting questions about the weather and what they thought about local issues.
I spent the second semester interning for the town's real newspaper, who picked me up as a stringer. A stringer is someone who covers events on spec and only gets paid if the paper uses them. The going rate in the mid-90s was 50 cents per column inch. The first story I had published was about the county fair. I spent my entire Saturday hanging out at the fair, interviewing people and coming up with different articles. I think the one they published was about the 4H contests. The final story was 10" long in the paper, so I got paid $5 for one whole day of hanging out at the fair and another whole day writing articles. When I wasn't stringing I sat around the office turning AP articles off the teletype machine into filler for the paper. Most people don't know this but newspapers only exist to sell advertising. Copy is just what they use to fill in the space around the ads.
Around the time I was making astronomically less than minimum wage, a couple of my friends were making $10/hour at a local computer store. The two of them assembled, upgraded and repaired PCs for customers. I loved computers, and a light bulb went off in my brain. Yes, I loved writing, but I loved computers too. One of those careers was paying me $5-$10 a week and the other was offering $10/hour. That was really the moment I walked away from writing and gravitated toward computers as more than just a hobby.
A few years later, right around Y2K, I heard that websites were beginning to pay for content. I wrote a few DVD reviews for IGN (which are still online, and pretty bad) and got paid $50 per review. Online journalism wasn't very organized back then. I would write articles for IGN and two months later they would mail me a check. It wasn't quite the immediate payment system we know and expect today. That gig with IGN showed me that there was still a way to get paid for writing -- maybe not by being a boots-on-the-ground reporter per se, but something similar, from the comfort of my own home.
In 2005 when I began working on what would become my book Commodork, I reached out to a few agents to see if anyone would be interested in publishing a memoir about computer BBSes. Unsurprisingly, no one was. The best offer I got for an advance was for a small computer/gaming publishing company who offered me a $1,000 advance (which would be paid back at $1/copy) and then $1/copy profit for me after 1,000 sales. I decided to self-publish the book instead. It was the right place at the right time, and over a few years I ended up selling 1,000 copies and making $10/copy profit.
In 2008 I tried to duplicate my success, but quickly discovered that part of my first book's success could be attributed to being in the right place at the right time. In 2006, self-publishing was still in its infancy. In 2008, the flood gates were beginning to open. I'll bet I've only sold 200-250 copies of Invading Spaces, a book about arcade games that should have had a much larger appeal than my first book about BBSes.
Over the years I've learned that I'm a good enough writer that most places will accept my work... for free. I wrote articles and reviews for a ton of websites and online ezines for free. When I tried getting paid for my work, I found fewer people were interested. Still, I've been published in (and been paid by) probably a dozen magazines over the years, but the reality is people will fight you for the opportunity to write for free. Why should IGN pay people to review DVDs when there are a thousand kids in college willing to write for free just for the honor of being published? Trust me, I have tuned down hundreds of offers from people asking me to write a magazine or book article for free -- of course they'll be selling the product and making money off of my content, but they never word it like that. "You'll be getting paid in exposure" is the biggest racket of all time.
Getting a book published today is nothing like what it used to be. Today, the first thing book publishers want to know is what your social media presence looks like. Writers are expected to come to the table with a large social media following (or mailing list). Many smaller authors do mini book tours on their own dime. Copyeditors have largely been squeezed out of the equation; copyediting falls back on authors and (to a lesser extent) agents. Advances are either super low or super high, and if your book doesn't make a profit, you'll get dropped. For a lot of genre fiction, authors are expected to come to the table with one book fleshed out and two more to round out a trilogy, in case the book sells.
Here's the reality. 70% of traditionally published books don't make a profit. And the average self-published book sells around 250 copies. That's way up from a few years ago, when the average was just 20 copies. People still occasionally pay for my books, but the reality is if you took the profits from all three of my books, plus all the books, magazines, and websites I got paid to contribute to and added them all up, the total would be roughly one month's salary. Eh, maybe slightly over one, but definitely below two.
Of course there's always the hope you'll tap into something. Virginia Wade's book "Cum for Bigfoot" caught on and soon she was cranking out novels about barely legal girls being raped and seduced by Bigfoot. Before Amazon locked down the bounds of self-published erotic fiction, Wolf was making $20k-$30k a month on writing Bigfoot porn. I worked on a memoir about old computers and sold 1,000 copies. Virginia Wade wrote a dozen books about boning Bigfoot and became a millionaire. Go figure.
Stringers still exist today. Most major news outlets go through stringer services that take 30% off the top. Stringer packages (stories and photos) sell for $100-$300. If you sold a $100 package every day of the week, every week of the year, that's an annual salary of $26k. That would be considered a success. A friend of mine wrote an article for the Huffington Post and got paid $0. He got some web traffic and business from the article, so maybe it was worth it. If writing is your full time gig, that's not a great payment plan.
Would I be a be a writer if it paid my current salary? You betcha. Unfortunately I can't afford to do it, and so I'll have to continue to feed that hunger by writing things on the side... like movie reviews on forums.
Sorry for the lengthy response. Feel free to split it off into its own "wistful writers" thread if necessary.
[quote=loafergirl post_id=124984 time=1636318264 user_id=14]
Seems Flack would rather be writing. I was a Creative Writing Major in HS before dropping out, always loved it, love reading now, but don't have any confidence that I could make a career of it. [...] Which leads to the question... are you all doing what you want? What do you want to do?[/quote]
After one year of community college, I was 100% convinced I was going to become a professional writer. Writing fiction wasn't on my radar, but I thought for sure I'd become a reporter -- maybe write a little non-fiction, churning out a few school textbooks on the side if I got bored. This was in the early 90s, so online publishing wasn't really a thing yet.
My second year of school, I interned at two different newspapers. The first was the town's free newspaper that got delivered to everybody's mailbox once a week whether they wanted it or not. The closest I came to getting paid was receiving 1,000 business cards (I still have at least half of them). It was a fun gig and I got college credit for driving around town and asking random people hard hitting questions about the weather and what they thought about local issues.
I spent the second semester interning for the town's real newspaper, who picked me up as a stringer. A stringer is someone who covers events on spec and only gets paid if the paper uses them. The going rate in the mid-90s was 50 cents per column inch. The first story I had published was about the county fair. I spent my entire Saturday hanging out at the fair, interviewing people and coming up with different articles. I think the one they published was about the 4H contests. The final story was 10" long in the paper, so I got paid $5 for one whole day of hanging out at the fair and another whole day writing articles. When I wasn't stringing I sat around the office turning AP articles off the teletype machine into filler for the paper. Most people don't know this but newspapers only exist to sell advertising. Copy is just what they use to fill in the space around the ads.
Around the time I was making astronomically less than minimum wage, a couple of my friends were making $10/hour at a local computer store. The two of them assembled, upgraded and repaired PCs for customers. I loved computers, and a light bulb went off in my brain. Yes, I loved writing, but I loved computers too. One of those careers was paying me $5-$10 a week and the other was offering $10/hour. That was really the moment I walked away from writing and gravitated toward computers as more than just a hobby.
A few years later, right around Y2K, I heard that websites were beginning to pay for content. I wrote a few DVD reviews for IGN (which are still online, and pretty bad) and got paid $50 per review. Online journalism wasn't very organized back then. I would write articles for IGN and two months later they would mail me a check. It wasn't quite the immediate payment system we know and expect today. That gig with IGN showed me that there was still a way to get paid for writing -- maybe not by being a boots-on-the-ground reporter per se, but something similar, from the comfort of my own home.
In 2005 when I began working on what would become my book Commodork, I reached out to a few agents to see if anyone would be interested in publishing a memoir about computer BBSes. Unsurprisingly, no one was. The best offer I got for an advance was for a small computer/gaming publishing company who offered me a $1,000 advance (which would be paid back at $1/copy) and then $1/copy profit for me after 1,000 sales. I decided to self-publish the book instead. It was the right place at the right time, and over a few years I ended up selling 1,000 copies and making $10/copy profit.
In 2008 I tried to duplicate my success, but quickly discovered that part of my first book's success could be attributed to being in the right place at the right time. In 2006, self-publishing was still in its infancy. In 2008, the flood gates were beginning to open. I'll bet I've only sold 200-250 copies of Invading Spaces, a book about arcade games that should have had a much larger appeal than my first book about BBSes.
Over the years I've learned that I'm a good enough writer that most places will accept my work... for free. I wrote articles and reviews for a ton of websites and online ezines for free. When I tried getting paid for my work, I found fewer people were interested. Still, I've been published in (and been paid by) probably a dozen magazines over the years, but the reality is people will fight you for the opportunity to write for free. Why should IGN pay people to review DVDs when there are a thousand kids in college willing to write for free just for the honor of being published? Trust me, I have tuned down hundreds of offers from people asking me to write a magazine or book article for free -- of course they'll be selling the product and making money off of my content, but they never word it like that. "You'll be getting paid in exposure" is the biggest racket of all time.
Getting a book published today is nothing like what it used to be. Today, the first thing book publishers want to know is what your social media presence looks like. Writers are expected to come to the table with a large social media following (or mailing list). Many smaller authors do mini book tours on their own dime. Copyeditors have largely been squeezed out of the equation; copyediting falls back on authors and (to a lesser extent) agents. Advances are either super low or super high, and if your book doesn't make a profit, you'll get dropped. For a lot of genre fiction, authors are expected to come to the table with one book fleshed out and two more to round out a trilogy, in case the book sells.
Here's the reality. 70% of traditionally published books don't make a profit. And the average self-published book sells around 250 copies. That's way up from a few years ago, when the average was just 20 copies. People still occasionally pay for my books, but the reality is if you took the profits from all three of my books, plus all the books, magazines, and websites I got paid to contribute to and added them all up, the total would be roughly one month's salary. Eh, maybe slightly over one, but definitely below two.
Of course there's always the hope you'll tap into something. Virginia Wade's book "Cum for Bigfoot" caught on and soon she was cranking out novels about barely legal girls being raped and seduced by Bigfoot. Before Amazon locked down the bounds of self-published erotic fiction, Wolf was making $20k-$30k a month on writing Bigfoot porn. I worked on a memoir about old computers and sold 1,000 copies. Virginia Wade wrote a dozen books about boning Bigfoot and became a millionaire. Go figure.
Stringers still exist today. Most major news outlets go through stringer services that take 30% off the top. Stringer packages (stories and photos) sell for $100-$300. If you sold a $100 package every day of the week, every week of the year, that's an annual salary of $26k. That would be considered a success. A friend of mine wrote an article for the Huffington Post and got paid $0. He got some web traffic and business from the article, so maybe it was worth it. If writing is your full time gig, that's not a great payment plan.
Would I be a be a writer if it paid my current salary? You betcha. Unfortunately I can't afford to do it, and so I'll have to continue to feed that hunger by writing things on the side... like movie reviews on forums.
Sorry for the lengthy response. Feel free to split it off into its own "wistful writers" thread if necessary.