As with many young people over the years, I remember thinking I’d someday like to write the great American novel. I was enamored with writing. A good friend and I imagined ourselves as famous writers, living in a little flat somewhere with a typewriter and stacks of blank paper, tapping away at something important.
That image is unusually durable. I’ve met people in their sixties who still hold a version of it, unchanged, having never written anything, and holding it has become a substitute for doing it. That one makes me sad, because the dream stayed perfect by never being tried.
What’s wrong with the fantasy of the full-time writing life?
The writing part is fine. What’s wrong is that the fantasy has no mechanism, and I think that missing piece has cost more would-be writers their careers than any rejection letter ever did. In the flat with the typewriter, the pages accumulate and then, at some unspecified point, recognition arrives. Nobody in the fantasy ever queries an agent, prices a book, learns a platform, sends an invoice or chases a payment. The middle is missing entirely, and the middle is where the career either exists or doesn’t.
That’s a comfortable arrangement, because the fantasy version can be held indefinitely without ever being tested. The moment you write and publish something, you find out. The moment you don’t, you get to keep the flat and the typewriter and the possibility.
What does the real version look like?
Considerably more like running a small business than like being an artist, and I say that as somebody who loves the writing part.
The writing is the product. Everything else is the business: what you sell, to whom, at what price, through what channel, and how you get paid. A writer who declines to learn that half has chosen a hobby with extra steps, whatever they call it, and they usually know it.
The typewriter fantasy resists the business half, because business isn’t romantic and typewriters are.
Why write a book about ghostwriting as a handbook?
Because the shelf is already full of books about the writing life, and they’re mostly for reading instead of for using.
I wanted to give a no-nonsense, soup-to-nuts handbook on how to make a living writing. This is a book for doers.
That’s a positioning decision and it excludes people deliberately. Somebody who enjoys reading about writing will find it dry. Somebody who has a manuscript and no idea what happens next will find that it answers the questions in the order they arrive.
The tone is businesslike, by choice. The subject is a business.
The book on this: Make a Living as a Self-Published Author is the soup-to-nuts handbook on making a living writing, for doers instead of for people who enjoy reading about writing.
How does money arrive for a working writer?
In pieces, from several directions. The fantasy gets that most wrong.
Royalties from one title is the model everybody imagines and it’s the least likely to work. The realistic version involves several books, work for other people, and income streams that individually look too small to matter and collectively add up to a living. That’s less satisfying to describe than a bestseller and it’s what the arithmetic looks like for nearly everybody doing this successfully. I get impatient with advice that sells new writers the single-bestseller dream, because it sets them up to quit the first time one book earns less than they hoped.
Is it easier to make a living writing now?
Authors have never had it better, and that’s true and incomplete. Never in history has it been so easy to get a book in front of readers without permission from anybody. No gatekeeper can stop you. The tools are cheap and the distribution is global.
What that removed was the barrier, and the difficulty stayed. When permission was the constraint, getting permission was the problem. Now that anybody can publish, being findable is the problem, and that one is considerably harder to solve by persistence alone.
What do aspiring writers get wrong about the writing life?
The typewriter isn’t the constraint. It never was, and neither is the flat.
Learn the business half or accept that it’s a hobby. I respect both choices. What I can’t respect is advice that lets people confuse the two, because that confusion is what wastes the decade.
Expect the money in pieces. One book, one stream, one big break is the fantasy again wearing different clothes.
Publish something badly instead of plan something perfectly. The information you need only exists on the other side of having done it.
The great American novel can wait. Nobody who has made a living at this started with it, and most of us never came back to it.
My friend and I never got the flat. I did end up with the stacks of paper, in a form neither of us would have recognized, and the part I couldn’t have imagined at seventeen is that the business half turned out to be interesting too.
I think the romantic version of the writing life has done real damage, and the people who keep selling it to young writers ought to be ashamed of themselves. It promises that good work gets recognized on its own and leaves out the business half, where a writer learns to sell the work and get paid for it.
