If You're An Author, You Can't Afford To Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Over the past several weeks of staying home and trying to flatten the curve, I've been talking with a lot of my fellow authors. Just like any other group of people they've had to leave day jobs if they weren't considered essential, they've had events they were counting on to sell books at cancelled, and they've been scrambling to find solutions for their bills, food, and daily survival.

So in other words, writers are getting hit just as hard as everyone else by what's going on outside.

Which is why this week I'd like to talk about eggs, and baskets.

I currently find myself in a bizarrely unique situation. Because though I am still a mostly-broke, middle-of-the-road author who's had a modicum of success so far, basically all of my work was already done online. I only attend two conventions a year on the regular (neither of them as a merchant, as I don't have the cash for the books and the table fee), I don't have any local signings or events, and my fans (the few that I have) all know me from the Internet.

In other words, my career path hasn't led to a huge amount of financial success, but what I do have is uniquely insulated from this current situation as long as the Internet remains functional.

Now, to be clear, this is not a brag. I'm not suggesting that anyone follow the path I've taken, nor did I specifically lay my career out like this because I'm a Hunter S. Thompson-like recluse who doesn't trust the glue that holds society together. It's mostly a happy accident, but it's one that happened because I've had the rug yanked out from me several times before. The lessons I've learned from that are what I wanted to talk about this week.

Happy Accidents and Lessons Learned

As I've mentioned before on this blog, the first time I ever got steady pay for writing was when I was in college as a reporter for the newspaper. I really liked that gig, but it was very limited work, and it had an undeniable shelf life (paper didn't run during the summer, and I was eventually going to graduate). Rather than let the grass grow under my feet, I started looking for similar gigs in my town, and managed to land a semi-regular position with a smaller paper. It still wasn't rent money, but at the same time it wasn't nothing.

Pretty sure this is how addicts are made, now that I'm thinking about it.

While I was finishing up my schooling, I started getting tips from friends of mine that I should look online for work since that's where a lot of clients were reaching out. I eventually became a regular lurker at Online Writing Jobs (I swear that is not a made-up website, go check them out if you need work) where I found everything from catalog entries, to dating site profiles, to current news articles. From there I stretched out to other websites, until I finally found one (which I shall not name for professional reasons) that paid well, offered revenue shares on some articles, and generally let me step up into that adult income bracket.

For those of you who know the story, about ten years ago that employer didn't exactly fire me, but they made it clear that despite having written several thousand articles for them, I was no longer going to be allowed to work for them unless I earned a master's degree. This basically kicked my earnings square in the crotch, and left me scrambling. I moved to a smaller apartment, returned to several websites I hadn't worked for in a long time, and reached out to clients I hadn't had time for to see if they had anything new they needed help with.

This one incident taught me a very valuable lesson; never put all your eggs in one basket.

Over the past ten years, I've lost a lot of clients. I've had businesses shutter their doors, anthologies my stories had been accepted to close without giving me a check I was promised, and entire websites shut down with barely a few weeks notice that my work would no longer be earning me royalties. And while these things have never been good news, and I have had to recover from them, I've never received the twin of that knockout punch that sent me reeling before.

My Tips For My Fellow Writers

I will fully admit, a big part of it is luck. Another part of it is risk management, making sure that if one plate falls that my other plates wouldn't be affected by that. And a third part is just paranoia.

Burn me once, shame on me, and all that shit.

 As of time of writing, I definitely have one income stream that pays me more than others. However, rather than going all-in on that one stream, I'm trying to build up all the others to absorb a hit if a hit needs to be taken. It's why I sell books and RPG supplements, why I have affiliate accounts with Amazon and Drive Thru RPG both, why I have a Patreon, why I'm constantly increasing my Vocal archive, and why I still maintain a list of work-for-hire clients.

For folks who got rocked harder than I did by being kept at home, I highly recommend checking out the following options if you haven't already:

- Free Resources For Artists Affected by Covid-19: This should provide immediate relief and help.
- Online-Writing-Jobs: For those who need work with a fast turnaround, this site has listings.
- Patreon: If you have a blog, or you're willing to release regular fiction, you can mobilize your fans.
- Ko-Fi: Ko-Fi allows you to take one-time donations, and pairs beautifully with Patreon.

If you're looking for something to work on in a more long-term way (aside from just writing and selling books), then I would recommend checking out some of the following:

- Vocal+: If you have a lot of content looking for a home, and you want to make it pay, go here.
- If You're An Author, You Really Need an Affiliate Marketing Account: Affiliate earnings take time to grow, but they are more than worth the effort to build up your monthly streams.

Hopefully the resources and explanations are useful for folks out there! And if you or someone you know is an author who's looking to make ends meet, feel free to reach out via the Contact Me gadget on the page. One of the best things we can do right now is big-up each other's signals to make sure all our potential readers can get hold of our books while we're hunkering down and trying to flatten the curve.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!