Uncertainty is The Worst (and The Best) Thing About Being an Author

The most common piece of advice I've heard since the point I decided to become an author (around age 13 or 14, I think it was), is that I need to have a reliable, steady source of income while I do that on the side. It's not that they didn't think I had the chops or determination to crank out books till the day I died, but rather that there's no telling what the market is going to do when it comes to a writer's trade. You might write one book, hit the lottery, and explode! You might spend a decade or two writing shelves worth of novels, only to become an "overnight success" when someone with a big following tells their fans your work is amazing.

And while most advice you get from people with no experience being a writer is basically garbage, there is a lot of truth to this one. Because writers are self-employed now more than ever before in the age of the gig economy, and your income is going to depend almost entirely on the fickle finger of fate. And I'll be the first to tell you that can be both infuriating, and exhilarating.

Pay your fee, take your shot, and hope for the best!

Before we go too much further, if you want to help me negate some of the uncertainty I'm dealing with (and make sure this blog keeps on trucking), consider becoming a Literary Mercenary Patreon patron! Or, if you don't have the spare dosh for that right now, signing up for my weekly newsletter to ensure you don't miss any of my new releases!

Reliability is an Illusion (Unfortunately)

One of the hardest truths there is about being an author is that your entire profession is largely a matter of luck. Talent helps, developing your skill and craft is necessary, networking is good, and gumption goes a long way, but everything you achieve (or don't) basically turns on the fulcrum of luck.

And this is a door that swings both ways.

Sometimes opportunity doesn't bother knocking.

As an example, take the current pandemic. I had spent several years building up a rather large pile of completed work as a ghost blogger, and it was slowly getting approved, ensuring I had a "regular" check to help bolster all the work I do writing novels, RPG supplements, blogs, and all that other nonsense. Then when the plague crashed across the economy, many of my clients put a freeze on approving any more work. Others cancelled projects (some of which I'd turned in weeks or months before), and still others just ghosted entirely, cancelling their orders and vanishing.

So practically overnight I went from a ghost writer who is hoping to one day quit that job to write novels and RPGs full time, to suddenly relying very much on my body of creative work to make up the difference from the "safe" clients who'd left me hanging.

You know, just like any other job where you're considered an expendable worker, or where the company suddenly takes a nose dive into concrete.

That same zeitgeist can go the other way, as well, putting a surprising amount of good fortune in my pocket when I didn't expect it to be there. For example, a few months back my article Partners and Polycules: Polyamorous Designations Based Off Dungeons and Dragons Dice was randomly shared on a pretty wide scale thanks to a single mention on a subreddit. It picked up several thousand reads, and quickly rocketed up to the front page of my most-read pieces ever on Vocal, suddenly easing my difficulties covering bills that month. In the early summer of 2020 Drive Thru RPG had a big sale on a huge number of World of Darkness game supplements, and overnight my entire 100 Kinfolk project that I'd written for Werewolf: The Apocalypse jumped in sales, pushing my earnings in royalties over $200 for the first (and so far only) time since I started getting a cut of my RPG earnings. I haven't gotten my first check for my noir mystery novel Marked Territory yet, but it's entirely possible that a mystery with a Maine Coon alley cat trying to figure out why a pack of stray dogs is putting the squeeze on a church mouse and her community sold far better than I expected it to.

And one of the hard truths of this job is that while you can tell the story, talk about the story, and try to spread the word, so much of whether or not you succeed is actually out of your hands.

You Can Only Do What You Can Do

Hitting the jackpot as a writer is basically being a professional gambler. You need to read the trends in fiction, understand your audience, learn to recognize interest, figure out what the social media algorithm wants to see from you, and do what you can to gather support from the community. But even if you crunch all the numbers, put your links in the right place, show up to interviews, do readings for your audience, at the end of the day you're basically just gambling. Every book, every blog, every supplement, every article is just one more roll of the dice.

As Captain Picard says, it's possible to do everything right and still fail, when all is said and done.

Even if the odds are on your side, there's no guaranteeing you're going to win. And even if the odds are against you, there's no guaranteeing you're going to lose. The best you can do is put the words on the page in the most compelling way you can, do everything to get it in front of the audience's eyes you can think of, and hope for the best.

Never depend on luck to see you through. At the same time, understand that it is often pure, unadulterated chance that happens to be what makes a book, blog, video, etc. popular. And getting struck by lightning ain't an easy thing to do.

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 noir thriller Marked Territory, 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!