Well, first of all, they're not. Most of us just work all the time, every day, trying to keep our heads above water. However, one of the most important skills that I've found as an author is that I have to be able to double dip everything I do. Or, put another way, I need to make sure that whatever I do as an author has multiple applications to either justify my expenses in time, money, and energy, or to make sure that I'm getting double the results whenever possible.
If that sounds confusing, stick with me, I'll give you some examples.
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| It's simpler than it sounds, I promise! |
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!
Double Dipping Your Work (For Fun and Profit!)
Perhaps the clearest, recent example I have of what I'm talking about can be seen in some of my work writing tabletop RPG supplements. Now, for quite some time, I've been wanting to run a game of Hunter: The Vigil (a roleplaying game where players take on the roles of normal people hunting monsters in the dark shadows of the modern day), but I wanted to set it during Prohibition. Now, I knew relatively little about that particular era except what you see in movies. However, I wanted to run a game that felt authentic to the time period, rather than a parody of it, so I knew I was going to have to do a lot of reading and research.
But I couldn't justify just spending hours upon hours at my desk reading and learning history just for this thing I'm doing in my free time. I'm already spending 9-12 hours a day working on things, and I have no blocks of personal time or energy that I could dedicate to reading about organized crime in Chicago, and the social changes sweeping America in the 1920s. So if I was going to dedicate time to this, I needed to find some way to put this knowledge to use in a professional capacity in order to justify the energy I was going to expend.
As such I took the notes I'd made on the time period, and I wrote several unrelated RPG supplements meant to be used with the game Call of Cthulhu (a roleplaying game set in the Cthulhu mythos created by horror author H.P. Lovecraft). These include 100 Gangsters, Gun Molls, and Goons, as well as 100 Books To Find In The Miskatonic Library (That AREN'T In The Restricted Section) and 100 Whispers and Rumors To Hear Around Arkham. Not only that, but because these supplements have short vignettes in them of an ongoing investigation, I also made an audio drama or two to try to get readers hooked into what's going on.
This series appears on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, in case you want to check it out. If so, give us a like and a subscribe while you're there!
So, this is a series of double dips. First, I want to do something in my free time that would take a lot of research for me to do well. So I did that research but I found projects that I could then use that research on other than my own, private game. Not only that, but once those initial projects were done, I used them as a springboard to make an audio drama, which takes a lot less time and energy due to the fact that the "script" is already written, and I just have to read and record. This allows the videos to draw in people who enjoy audio dramas, both making money in ad revenue, but also funneling people to the supplements, which they might buy.
And at the end of the day I still have all this period research I've done for the game I want to run for my friends, and I still used that knowledge to make something to pay my bills.
Is this exhausting? It absolutely is. However, double dipping as an author is a habit that you need to build over time. Like exercising, or portion control. It's a way of looking at things, and finding those helpful little loopholes that make prices lower, or which justify time spent doing one thing instead of something else.
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| The system runs smoothly, once you understand how it works. |
As another example, do I want people to buy copies of my private detective cat novels Marked Territory and Painted Cats? I absolutely do! However, I also leave Amazon affiliate links to those books when I mention them on my blog because that chance to earn some extra money (getting paid my royalties by my publisher, and my affiliate commission from Amazon for selling something through their platform) might be the difference between paying my bills, and needing to dip into savings when the end of the month comes. I love going to conventions, but if I just go as an attendee then I'm out time and money for the experience that goes into a black hole. If I volunteer for panels at the convention, or if I run my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic in the gaming room, then suddenly the gas mileage, food expenses, hotel bill, badge, and any other things I paid for are all tax deductible for me when it's time to settle up with the IRS. I may even get my badge for free, or extra swag from the convention, depending on the event in question.
Hell, even just going out to dinner with someone I'm trying to have on as a guest on my show, or who is working with me on a podcast, counts as a business expense. Which again means that Uncle Sam lets me count those costs against my earnings for the year.
Again, authors are working with paper-thin margins of error, and a lot of the time we cannot justify the expense of something in terms of time, energy, or money if we hold up that thing in a vacuum. So learn to double dip what you do, because it will make a lot of things you thought were impossible quite doable... or at least less painful in the long run.
Just remember to keep your receipts, and don't bite off more than you can chew.
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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!
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