As with many young people over the years, I remember thinking I would someday like to write the great American novel.
I was enamoured 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 remarkably durable. I have met people in their sixties who still hold a version of it, unchanged, having never written anything, and the holding of it has become a substitute for the doing.
What is wrong with the fantasy?
Not the writing part. The part where there is no mechanism.
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 does not.
That is 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 do not, 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 is not choosing purity, they are choosing a hobby with extra steps, and they usually know it.
This is the part the fantasy actively resists, because business is not romantic and typewriters are.
Why write it as a handbook?
Because the shelf is already full of books about the writing life, and they are 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 is 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, which is a choice and not an accident. 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 the money arrive?
In pieces, from several directions, which is the thing the fantasy gets most wrong.
Royalties from one title is the model everybody imagines and it is 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 is less satisfying to describe than a bestseller and it is what the arithmetic looks like for nearly everybody doing this successfully.
Is it easier now?
Authors have never had it better, and that is 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, not the difficulty. When permission was the constraint, getting permission was the whole problem. Now that anybody can publish, being findable is the whole problem, and that one is considerably harder to solve by persistence alone.
What would I tell the version of me in that imagined flat?
The typewriter is not the constraint. It never was, and neither is the flat.
Learn the business half or accept it is a hobby. Both are legitimate. Confusing them 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 could not have imagined at seventeen is that the business half turned out to be interesting too.
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