How, Exactly, Do You THINK Authors Make Money?

There is a strange event that keeps recurring like I'm stuck in some digital version of Groundhog Day. In short, I'll be online giving an update on my current releases, or sharing around something I've made, and there will without fail be someone leaping into the comments who will say something along the lines of, "I'm not here to support your lifestyle! If you aren't making enough money, then go get a real job!"

And I'm not even mad... I'm just honestly confused. So while the title is a bit of a rhetorical question, I do genuinely find myself wondering how it is the general public thinks creators make money if this is the way they act toward us?

Seriously... I am befuddled by this behavior.

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!

All Right, Let Me Break It Down One More Time

I cannot stress this enough, and even though I feel like I've gotten up on this stump before, apparently the people who need to hear this message haven't come across it yet. But the public, the audience, are what make creators money! You can write 100 novels, or make 1,000 YouTube videos, or put together 10 whole seasons of a podcast, but if you don't have an audience propping you up and helping you actually get consumed, seen, listened to, or read, then you may as well have been blowing raspberries and picking your nose for all that's going to actually get you paid.

I made a whole video about this a while back, in fact, over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel.

All right, let me back up a second to explain something that a lot of folks don't seem to understand. People who write books or blogs? People who create roleplaying games? People who make YouTube videos, or any other kind of art? We don't get paid for that! Unless the artist in-question is a staff member for a company who is paying them to create things (a rather rare position overall), or the person is working on a commission or as a ghostwriter, we do not get paid for making the things we make. We are making things, and then trying to sell them so we can turn a profit off the finished story, game, video, etc. we have made for people to enjoy.

When I wrote my novel Marked Territory about my hardboiled Maine Coon solving mysteries in New York City, I didn't get paid for writing that book. I did not receive an advance from my publisher (that's not really a thing anyone does except at the highest levels). If I expect that book to make me money, I need people to buy copies of it. When I wrote the 13 supplements in my 100 Kinfolk Bundle for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, I wasn't paid for that. I do, however, get 30% of the earnings on every sale those supplements make. I don't get paid for writing articles on Vocal, like my RPG character concept The Cult Born. I do, however, earn a certain amount of money based on how many reads all of those articles get from the audience.

And I feel like a lot of people out there just don't get this on a fundamental level.

When you see an author, or an illustrator, or a YouTuber talking about the stuff they've done, or asking folks who like their work to buy copies, or support them on a crowdfunding site, it's not that we aren't making enough money from our publishers and we need the audience to supplement our incomes. It's that our audience IS the source of our incomes! Whether you're buying copies of our books, or watching videos that have ads on them, or pledging to give us $5 a month so we can keep our bills paid, you out there, the people consuming our content, are where the money comes from.

You Aren't Supplementing Creators... You Are The Main Source

This is a point I feel people really need to internalize, because it's important for this to be understood. Creators can't just go to companies and apply for jobs, because we don't get hired to work for direct pay like that. And the few positions like that which do exist are highly competitive. A lot of us may pick up some freelance work, or we may get signed to short-term projects, but at the end of the day our success is directly laid at your feet... the audience.

You decide if we live or die in a very literal sense.

Which is why your cheers matter so damn much.

Again, you are not required to spend your time or money supporting creators whose work you aren't interested in, or which you don't like. But if you see creators out there posting links to their work, telling people about their Patreon, asking for folks to like, follow, subscribe, etc., understand that this is the way creators get paid. We don't get paid when we finish a piece unless we've got a contract with someone for it, and for a lot of us we depend on our crowdfunding audience, and our royalties (whether that's from book sales, merch sales, or from people's eyes on our articles and videos).

If you don't want to support, you don't have to. The ball is in your court. But if you do like that artist, and you want to see more of their work, and you want them to succeed, then you need to understand there isn't some phantom boss our there signing our paychecks. There's just you, and what you choose to do to help support the creators you care about.

And if you want to know exactly how you can make everyone's lives easier, I have the full breakdown for you in Care And Feeding Of Your Creators (5 Steps All Fans Should Take) that provides a bulleted list for you!

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.

Writing Books Is Not A Way To Get Rich Quick

So, it's that time of year again. Yes, the time when people drive themselves mad working out scheduling, figuring out what their budgets for gifts are, attempting to resist the urge to eat entire plates of cookies, and to not start a fist fight over the repetitive music... however, there is something else that happens around the holidays/the end of the year.

For some reason people start hyping themselves up to finally take the plunge to become an author.

Now, I want to be as encouraging as I can be. If someone genuinely wants to try their hand at writing a book, I wish them all the luck in the world, because the task is far from easy! However, it isn't just that people start talking about finally writing a book with the new year looming in front of them... it's that they start talking about writing a book that is going to allow them to quit their job, pay off their debts, and live a life of ease.

Because, for some goddamn reason, people in general population seem to think that anyone can write a book and make a killing off of it.

Yeah, I don't know where they got that idea, either.

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!

You Are Very Unlikely To Be The Lottery Winner

Some people might compare writers to Olympians, in that this is a skill you have to have a natural aptitude for, it's something you have to work at, and you have to pour years of your life into honing your craft before you're ready for the big leagues. And while that might be true if the quality of one's writing directly correlated to their book sales (spoiler warning; it doesn't), I find the lottery is a much more fitting example. Anyone, in theory, could win the lottery regardless of who they are or where they are as long as they took the risk and bought a ticket.

However, if you play the lottery, you just have to hand over some cash for your chance to win big. For a book you've got to spend several months to several years actually making it into something that's ready for the market. And while it's true that a book could see steady growth over time, or get a big boost in sales years later, too many people seem to think that as soon as they finish writing the book they're going to get a big, fat check from the royalty fairy.

Let me be blunt. It isn't going to happen. The idea that someone can just sit down at their computer, bang out their first-ever book, and catapult themselves to stardom and money overnight is a fantasy. It's no different than any of the thousands of hopeful screen writers and actors who flock to California, dreaming that they'll meet a producer at the perfect time who will be wowed by the dreamer's talent, and make them a superstar. It's pure, Grade-A, Rags-To-Riches American bullshit.

And if you really are serious about writing a book, you need to understand this, and to look at the actual challenges you're facing.

This is a video that I referenced all the way back in my first post How Much Money Do Writers Really Make?, but there is something that I feel needs to be really brought home to folks who are looking at writing books as a way to make money. Because something people don't seem to grasp, especially when they're just looking to jump into writing books, is how much time everything takes!

So, a brief timeline of stuff for folks who don't know anyone that's an author:

- Writing The Book: This could take you 2 months if you're Robert Louis Stevenson, but it's far more likely that you're looking at between 1 year to 2 years to actually get your manuscript up-to-snuff.

- Publishing The Book: If you go with a traditional publisher, this could take several months, to a year. If you do it yourself this will depend entirely on your personal skill, familiarity, or whether you can pay someone else to do it.

So, if we're extremely generous, we're looking at a 6-month turnaround if you are someone who can blaze through writing your book. For the rest of us, though, let's say you're going to take 2 years or so to get your book market ready and available for purchase.

In that 2 years you have between 1 and 4 lottery tickets. Now ask yourself, what are the chances of you winning the lottery with 1 ticket? 2 tickets? Even as many as 4 tickets? They aren't good, right?

It's the same thing for writing books.

But I was supposed to be a bestseller...?

It's one thing to fantasize about becoming a blockbuster bestseller. We can all indulge in a little escapism from time to time. But the reality is that those are a tiny percentage of books, and when you only count the books written by first timers, the numbers drop even further. A lot of people act like writing a book is a guarantee of income, status, and an easy life, when in reality you can spend 2 years or more on a title and sell a handful of copies to your friends and family. Or to no one.

We like to believe that writing a good book that entertains readers is enough. Unfortunately, it isn't. You need to have a good marketing plan, you need to figure out some way to get the word out about your book, you have to go to shows, do interviews, write blogs, make videos, show up on podcasts... or just be famous. After all, it's why every D-list celebrity is a bestselling author; if at least 10,000 people are curious enough what you have to say, then you can become a New York Times bestseller without breaking too much of a sweat.

Even if you skimmed everything I said above, I'm asking you to please lock in for this closing part.

Writing a book is hard work. It takes skill, dedication, and a lot of time to actually finish this project. But writing the book isn't where the work stops; it's just the beginning. You actually have to sell the book once it's written, and unless you are already famous or have a huge platform (we're talking 100,000+ followers for scale), then you haven't just found a shortcut to Easy Street... you've given yourself a second job as a salesman.

It's all well and good to sit back and imagine... but this is sort of like that whole getting-somebody-a-pet-for-the-holidays thing. That puppy is not a Christmas present, but a 10-year commitment. If you want to be an author, that's all well and good... but you're looking at several years before any wheels start turning.

So keep that in mind before you start drafting your resignation letter, expecting your novel's royalties to pay your bills come February, because it ain't happening, friend.

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.

As An Author, You Need To Learn To Double Dip Your Career

One of the questions authors always get (myself included) is where do we find the time to work on things? Not just the writing (though that's obviously part of it), but also the time to do the research we need for our projects, the time to market things, or the time for... well, anything else, really. How are our lives not just sleep and work, with minimal time given to sleep?

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.

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.

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.

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 Many Books Do You Have To Write Before You Can Survive? (The Answer Might Depress You!)

I have lost count of the number of friends, family, activity partners, and even casual acquaintances who have remarked on exactly how much time I spend working. Whether they're impressed with the grind, or they're frustrated it stops me from making plans, or they express that I should really take more time for myself (trust me, I would love to do that), there's always a throughline in these conversations. Sometimes it's said directly, and sometimes it's implied, but it always boils down to roughly the same sentiment.

"Sooner or later you'll have written so much stuff that you'll be able to take your foot off the gas, and relax a bit."

I laugh, they laugh, and the conversation moves on. However, there is a bitterness to my chuckle, because I know something that they don't. Something I'd like to share with all of you today.

Trust me, it isn't funny.

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!

It Does Not Matter How Much Stuff You Make

All right, let me back up a step.

First things first, yes, the more stuff you create, the better the chance you have of succeeding. It's like rolling a 20-sided die. Yeah, you want that 20 to come up, but if your first roll didn't do it, being able to roll again, and again, does help. And, at least in theory, having an archive of stuff you've written means that anyone who discovers you for one thing at least has the potential to dig into your backlog to check out your other work as well.

Let's talk about that word. Potential. Because that is what a lot of us bank on, but it's also what a lot of average folks out there don't really grasp when it comes to this profession. They might understand it academically, but down in their bones they don't really get it.

Size is no guarantee of success.

I've seen dozens of different takes on this over the years. There used to be programs claiming you needed an archive of at least 400 blog entries/articles to really suck your audience in, get people reading through everything you had, and earning regular revenue from their traffic. There are programs out there right now promising that if you can write 20 novels (not an easy feat in and of itself) that you'll have reached the mystic number where your work becomes self-sustaining, and you can relax a bit.

The problem with all of these so-called solutions and promises is that they're bunk. Complete and absolute fables. And I say that so confidently because they put the emphasis on what you are doing as the author, and promising that if you work a certain amount that it's some kind of guarantee that eventually your career will be successful.

I am here to tell you that, unfortunately, that is not true. And it is not true for the simple reason that all you can do is create the thing, and do your best to promote it. The people who decide whether your work is successful is your audience... or lack thereof, in many cases.

No One Knows What Will Or Won't Succeed

I've mentioned this before, but if you look at every major publisher's book list, they have a handful of really big sellers, a few middle earners, and a lot of books that never really go anywhere. And if you ask an editor why publishers don't just publish the books that are going to be top sellers, the answer is always the same.

"We'd love to, but no one knows which goddamn books they will be!"

This illustrates the central point of this week's post. Because even major publishers with all the resources to promote the books they publish, and all the industry insight of experienced editors, cannot predict with any real accuracy which titles and which authors are going to be financially successful. They, like those of us who write said books, are literally rolling the dice and hoping for the best. Books that have everything going for them that should become beloved bestsellers go mostly unread and forgotten, while books by no-name authors no one has ever heard of become roaring, viral successes.

Why? If I knew the answer to that, I'd be sitting on a throne of royalties instead of writing this blog.

Seriously, writing books is WAY more fun.

So the answer to how many books you have to write, how many articles you have to craft, how many videos you have to make, is... it's a crap shoot.

Let me throw some numbers at you. Because as of right now I have:

- 4 novels

- 2 short story collections

- 326 articles on Vocal

- 150+ videos on YouTube

- 191 tabletop RPG supplement titles

I am not the most proliferate creator (and I left out the 1,500+ blog entries on this blog and my gaming blog Improved Initiative, as they don't pay me anything), but I have a rather sizable amount of stuff out on the market for folks to consume. And if I had a big enough audience, or something I made went viral for some reason, yeah, I could take a day off, kick up my feet, and relax. If for some impossible reason a thing I made drew thousands upon thousands of readers every month (or every year in the case of a book), I could theoretically stop making any new stuff and just coast on that popularity.

I wouldn't, because I like writing, but I could.

Because at the end of the day, it does not matter how much stuff you produce as a writer. It matters how many people consume what you're writing. If you write a single novel, and half a million people a year buy it for the next decade, you don't really need to write another one unless you want to. By the same token, you could write 20, 30, or 40 novels, but if no one buys them, it's the monetary equivalent of never having written anything.

Your Audience Decides Your Success (Not You)

You, as the author, should do everything in your power to create the best quality work you're capable of. You should write a good story, fix all your spelling errors, make sure there's no dangling plot threads, and so on, and so forth. You should do your best to pick enticing cover art, to find folks to review your book, and to promote it as best you can.

None of that is going to earn you a dime unless people buy your book.

It does not matter how much you write. It does not matter the quality of your work. It does not matter if you have a massive social media presence, if you go to conventions, or if you make an entire vlog channel documenting the book's journey. If people do not buy your books, or consume your content (in the case of articles, videos, etc.) then you do not get paid. Period.

For instance, folks who want more of this serious should buy copies!

The point, to hammer it one more time, is that you cannot write yourself to success in the way so many people think. If a creator needs more money, they can't just write more articles, make more videos, or put out another book... it's sales, not word count, that matters.

If you've got a successful series with a lot of readers eager for a new installment, yes, a new book will probably get your audience to pick up copies... buf if you don't have the audience who is supporting you, it doesn't matter how much stuff you make, because no one is buying it. You're the proverbial tree falling in the forest, and no one is around to see you or hear you.

An author's success (and how hard they have to work) is determined by their audience. So if you have an author who you want to pay their bills, and work a reasonable day instead of pulling 12 hour shifts at their desk, do what you can to support them. Buy their books, leave reviews, follow them on social media, boost their signals, leave comments... do what you can to help them build up the audience. Because without an audience, it doesn't matter what we do... all of our earnings comes from you. Full stop.

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)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up 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!

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.