Asking For Support Is Not "Begging For Money"

There is, apparently, a lot of confusion among folks on the Internet about how artists get paid. For some reason a lot of people out there seem to believe that once a creator makes something that it is submitted to the council of Art Warlocks who vote on whether the creator of this work will be given the standard Rich and Famous contract, or if they are to be turned away and told to try again.

Unfortunately, that isn't how it works. So I wanted to take a moment to explain to folks out there how it is artists actually make their money, and how important our audience is in making sure we actually have the ability to pay our bills.

For folks who wondered, we can't do this without Viewers Like You.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Where Does The Money Come From?

Allow me to pull back the curtain, and show you how it is authors get paid.

So, if you write books then you have to first write the manuscript. You then have to get it published either by a traditional publisher, or through a self-publishing platform. Traditional publishers do layout, art, etc., and give you a royalty for every sale, while self-published authors have to do all of that stuff themselves, but they get to keep a bigger percentage of every sale.

And if you're writing blogs or articles (or making videos), then you tend to have an option for traffic-based payments, as well as crowdfunding. For the former, consider the article If 90,000 People Read This Article I Can Pay My Bills This Month. It points out that 90,000 reads is what an article on Vocal.media needs to acquire in order to yield about $540 in payout to the author. And if someone wanted to support this blog, then you could go to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page in order to kick in a fee for every article I write in order to help me keep the train rolling.

It's all about numbers, baby.

However, the point of all of this is to say that authors do not get paid for making things... we get paid either by our audience buying things, or our audience giving us their time and attention on a platform which then gives us a fee for how much traffic we brought to their site. We could spend 20 hours a day putting words on the page, but if no one buys copies, or reads them on hosting platforms that actually pay the creator, then there's not going to be any money to be had.

This is why we ask our audience to support us. Because just like PBS says, "This program is made possible by viewers like you."

And there are a LOT of people our there who get vitriolically angry when you point this out to them.

We Literally Need Your Help To Do What We Do

I have lost count of the number of people who have left snide comments, telling me that if I need to "beg for money" then maybe I should give up and "get a real job" as they put it. However, the point that I feel needs to be driven home to so many people is that ALL creators are literally paid by the audience in one way, shape, form, or another. It doesn't matter if it's one of the biggest touring musicians in the mainstream, or somebody with a small YouTube audience talking about gardening. Whether it's you watching our videos so that we get a cut of the ad revenue from YouTube, you buying our merch so we get a piece of that sale, or you just directly handing us money as a tip for what we do, YOU are required for us to make money.

Period. End of story. And for folks who need the details spelled out, I made a video on it a while back.

Now, if you made it this far, I need you to read this next part very carefully.

You are not obligated to support artists whose work you don't like. Even if you do like a an artist, you aren't required to give them money. However, at the end of the day, you are what decides whether or not an artist gets paid. So if you want a particular creator to keep making things, it sort of behooves you to put in the effort to big up their signal, and make sure they're getting money in their hand one way or the other. Sort of like how if you want to see sequels to a movie, it's important for you to go see it in theaters, bring your friends, buy it when it's available to own, and so on, to send a message to the studio that there's an audience who wants more of this.

And it's something you need to work into your everyday. If you like a video, leave a comment of 7+ words, and give it an upvote. Get used to subscribing and following to people who you want to do well. Leave people tips, and buy some merch when you can. Being an active participant is worth so much to creators, and it is unfortunately so rare to find in an audience.

If you need a list, then just take the one at the end of this article, and apply it to all the creators our there that you want to see pay their bills, and keep making more art. Because it is a lot easier to keep doing this job if you have your utilities covered, and food in your cabinets. Just saying.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

How Creators Have To Cut Corners Behind The Scenes

History is full of proliferate writers. Whether we're talking about Stephen King's ability to churn out a handful of novels a year along with a slew of short stories, film scripts, and editorials, or going back to Victor Hugo's frankly absurd ability to pen one masterful tale after another while leading a sex life that also sounds like the stuff of fiction, there are some people who are all gas, no brake when it comes to their work.

For a lot of us, though? That's just not feasible.

The problem is that, in our modern world, audiences demand that kind of output in order to stay engaged with you. Whether you're putting out books, writing TTRPGs, creating videos, or making some other kind of content for your audience to devour, you need to have a lot of it, and you need to provide it constantly in order to maintain attention.

Which is why you often need to perform some serious sleight-of-hand in order to make it seem like you've always got something new, and to build up your archives of content so you can actually find yourself some breathing room.

It's exhausting, but needs be when the devil drives.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Before I get too far into this week's topic, I want to make one thing clear. Yes, it is possible to write one book, make one video, or write one article that just skyrockets you to success. Maybe it's because you're already a celebrity, and so you have a million followers who are ready and waiting to snatch up your latest creation, leading to you making a hefty chunk of money. Maybe you just happen to hit the market in just the right way, at just the right time, and the zeitgeist decides that you are now going to be the hip creator for this cycle.

Can that happen? Sure. You could also buy a scratch off ticket and win a million dollars a year for life. For most creators out there, you're going to have to write, record, etc., a phenomenal amount of content, getting little spikes in activity here and there as a few new people subscribe, or become fans of your work, and word of what you're doing spreads a little bit at a time.

It's a marathon, and like marathons you have to keep going at a steady pace. And to maintain that pace, we often have to cut some corners to ensure that we can keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Take the above audio drama. The story Russian Roulette came out of my Geist: The Sin Eaters supplement 50 Geists, and it was used as a scene setter for that RPG supplement. I'd already written the story (and been paid for it), which meant that the script for this little audio drama was complete, and just waiting for me to turn it into its final form. This saved me a whole step in the process, and at least a day of work, which allowed me to make the audio drama much more quickly than if I'd had to write the whole thing from scratch, and then create the video for the Azukail Games YouTube channel (which you should check out and subscribe to if you want to see more stuff like this). This is, incidentally, why my audio dramas come from either my TTRPG content, or from my previously published short stories, like 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, which is something I wrote years ago.

This is far from an uncommon way of saving time and energy when it comes to making audio dramas in general, and a lot of video-based content specifically. Many voice actors out there will find stories that are freely available (whether it's fan fiction where the creator gives their consent, or works in the public domain that they can use for free), and they'll dramatize them to quickly add videos to their channel. Again, this saves them the effort of having to write scripts themselves so they can focus on making good dramatizations of these stories. And, to be clear, I'm not pointing this out as a mark of shame. A lot of creators are perfectly capable of writing really banging stories (A Vox in The Void and Niva The Puppet Queen are two that come to my mind), but doing the writing yourself adds to the overall amount of time it takes to produce a video, and it takes a far greater amount of effort, because you've added a whole separate task to the production.

And this doesn't just apply to videos; that's the easy example.

Another good example is one of the earliest TTRPG supplements I wrote for Azukail Games. 100 Random Encounters For On The Road, Or In The Wilderness is just a list of things you could have your characters run into when you're moving from one town to another. From huge ads for nearby inns painted on the side of big, flat rocks, to bounty hunters looking for bandits, to roving bears who seem to be searching for something, there's all kinds of odd little encounters on this list. And while the version linked above is meant to be system neutral, simply providing ideas that can be used in any fantasy RPG, we also released a version for Pathfinder, and another for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition that offered mechanics for certain encounters. These edition-specific versions were quite popular, as well, and over time the publisher also converted the supplement to a version for Zweihander, and another version for Castles and Crusades. Again, these versions have sold all right... but more importantly, it took far less effort to put out these conversions than it would have taken to write an entirely new supplement from scratch.

For me, the ultimate example of this kind of cost-cutting measure will be my book The Rejects.

Get a copy, if you haven't!

I released this book back in 2020. I'd published my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife a year and change before, and I wanted to come out with something for the convention season so my readers would have something new of mine to check out (the book dropped in January, I had no idea the pandemic was coming). Since the other novels I had were in submission, I put together a bunch of my short stories that hadn't found a home in any anthologies, put them together into a collection, and put this out there for folks to check out.

It wasn't no work getting the formatting right, editing all the stories, deciding which order they were going to go in, and so on... but it was something I could do in a month, as opposed to the 10-12 months it would have taken for me to write a whole new novel.

It's All About Time, Energy, and Money

I'm going to be the first to admit that I really wish I didn't have to try to figure out ways to constantly produce fresh, new stuff at a break neck pace for people to check out. I would love to be able to just sit back and put out a novel or two a year, maybe write a long-running audio drama podcast (I mentioned this a while back in "Windy City Shadows," A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal for those who didn't see it), but the reality is that I don't have the resources to make that happen. I don't have a big inheritance I'm sitting on, I don't have a rabid fan base of thousands of people giving me money every month, and adding up all the royalties for all my work is basically enough for me to pay some of my bills at the end of the month.

As far as writers go, though, I'm still more successful than a lot of folks out there.

And I still qualify for every government aid program out there.

Now, if one of my books spontaneously rose to the bestseller list? Or if I received a film rights contract to turn one of my short stories into a movie? Then absolutely, I could take a deep breath, and focus on those bigger projects. I could dedicate myself to making something a little more in-depth that didn't have to turn an immediate profit because all of my bills would be paid, and I wouldn't need to have the regular monthly spikes to keep my head above water.

But as long as a creator is scrabbling to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors, they need to make things with quick turnaround... and that usually means cutting corners until the thing we're producing is a pretty passable frisbee.

So keep that in mind whenever you ask yourself why a creator whose work you like is making a lot of stuff that feels like it's dipping back into the same well time and time again. And if you can, please support folks that you want to keep making art. Because it's that support that allows us to reach higher, and to make the bigger, more involved stuff like novels, podcasts, and even films that would otherwise be impossible.

Support The Literary Mercenary

For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an ongoing audio drama series on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

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!

Know Who You're Selling Your Book To (Before You Start Writing It)

Most people think they have a pretty good grasp of the writing process. You come up with an idea for a book, and you go through whatever pre-planning you need for your plot. Once you're ready, you pump out a first draft. You let it cool, then go back over it for a second, third, and maybe even a fourth draft depending on your preferences and style. Then you hand it over to your beta readers, and you have them read it over for mistakes you missed, plot holes, spelling a character's name differently halfway through chapter six, what have you.

Then, when you finally have a complete manuscript, you engage phase two... finding somewhere to sell the damn thing!

Got a minute to listen to my pitch?

If you're one of those writers who puts off the marketing aspect entirely so you can focus on your writing, then you might want to pick your head out of the sand for a moment. Because you should already know where you're selling your book before you so much as put the first word on the first page of your first draft.

But You Can't Sell A Book Until It's Written!

Right you are bold, italicized text! However, I am not saying that authors should be pitching their books to publishers when they don't have the manuscript ready to go. That sort of behavior is utter folly. However, it's a mistake to think of the writing process as two separate halves; creating the book and selling the book are just two sides of the same coin.

Which is why you can, and indeed should, be working on both of them simultaneously.

Sacagawea would approve.

As an example, while I was putting together the stories for New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam, I was also in talks with the few publishers I knew at the time to gauge who might be interested in the project once it was complete. And, in the event no one on my list was interested, I was combing through that year's copy of Writer's Market and compiling a list of alternative publishers to query. I already knew I was putting together an inter-connected collection of noir steampunk short stories, and I knew that I didn't want to publish it myself, so I made sure I had a list of potential homes that I could query as soon as it was ready.

That preparation paid off, though there was a hiccough or two in the road. One of the publishers I'd worked with before expressed interest almost as soon as I reached out to them, and even gave me a contract, but the project eventually fell through. Fortunately, because I'd already done the legwork, I had a list of other publishers to query with the project once that ship sank. It eventually wound up with JWK Publishing, who polished it up, and took care of the rest of the publishing process for me.

Could I have written the book, and then done all that work to get it placed with a publisher? Absolutely. However, much like writing, doing market research and submissions prep isn't something you should try to hammer out all in one go. Instead, it's more like going to the gym; if you do a little bit every day, and ease into it, then pretty soon you find you're really proficient. You know all the different options you've got, and all the different angles to work in order to get the results you want, and it's not likely to strain you.

This Goes Double For Self-Publishers!

I see you in the back of the room trying to sneak out. You're thinking that, because you're self-publishing, then you can work on your own schedule without bothering with the rest of this. After all, there's no reason to send emails, make calls, etc., until your book is done because you can't actually start the rest of the publishing process until your manuscript is ready.

Ah, but that's where you're wrong!

When you're your own publisher, it only makes sense to start the plates spinning as soon as possible so you have as little work left to do once the manuscript has reached completion. For instance, before you start writing you should make sure all your formatting is going to work for your platform of choice (because there's nothing worse than fixing 300 pages of using a Tab for an indent when you should have just set your preference in your Paragraph menu and let the technology handle the rest), and if possible you should have cover art picked out and ready to rock long before you reach the final chapter.

If you haven't checked out Looking For Cover Art For Your Book? Try Drive-Thru RPG!, then you will certainly thank me once you have.

Additionally, if you're confident in your ability to deliver your book on time, you can start the marketing machine early. If you run a blog, a YouTube channel, or a similar platform, give your audience updates on how the new book is coming to get them excited for the release. Reach out to reviewers, and get them lined up so they're ready to look over your advanced reviewer copies once they're ready to rock. Schedule interviews, guest blogs, etc. and stay on top of that schedule so that you can seamlessly transition from, "writing the new book," to, "selling the new book."

You Don't HAVE To Start Both At Once

Everyone's different, don't get me wrong. Some authors know by the end of chapter one how many words this book is going to be, and how long it's going to take them to hit that number. Other authors may meander a bit, needing some spare months to do re-writes and to backtrack from false starts and unnecessary plot points.

Writing books is tough, and it's not always a straight line to get from A to B.

We're working with a lot of variables, after all.

However, once you're sure that your project is going to be carried to term, it's a good idea to start preparing for its completion. Because just like having a baby, you want to have a sitter, a crib, some formula, etc. already waiting in the wings for the day it's finally here. Because arranging all of that while your newest creation squalls in your ear is a lot harder (not to mention more time consuming) to do from square one.

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!

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!