Write to Life
Writing as Your Day Job
Before I begin I would be utterly remiss if I did not tell you that Wutaryoo is now available from Versify/HMH wherever you buy books. It was written and illustrated by my friend Nilah Magruder and I have it and it is stunning. I’m really excited to tell you about this beautiful book if you don’t already know about it. I hope you will check it out.
Today’s topic is near and dear to many writers’ hearts. I know this because it has come up in most of the writing groups I’ve participated in, writing Twitter is discusses it regularly, and people ask me this question probably second-most of all the writing- and publishing-related questions I get asked (the first being “can you help me publish my story?”):
I want to write as my day job. How can I write for a living?
You know people do it. You know there are people who generate all the income they need to live—and sometimes get rich!—just from writing. The people most probably think of when I say “writing for a living; writing as your sole source of income” are the superstars (people like JK Rowling and Stephen King who are famous household names for their novels), the quiet powerhouses (like Danielle Steel, who you never see in the news but who has outsold JKR in lifetime units), and the successful workhorse authors (writers like Seanan McGuire who put out two or three financially successful titles each year).
But what if I told you—in my best Laurence Fishburne voice—that’s not what the landscape of writing-for-a-living looks like? At all?
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 143,000 people in the United States as of 2020 whose job is “writer or author.” That doesn’t mean they work full time—some are part-time workers—but that’s their job. That’s about 0.04 percent of the US population (again, circa 2020). To put this in perspective, this means there are around the same number of “writers or authors” in the US as there are dentists, butchers, or massage therapists. I don’t know if that information helps anybody else but it helps me create a mental picture of “about how many in a given town or city.”
The good news is, this field is expected to grow at an average pace (compared with other job fields) over the next ten years. More writer jobs coming! The bad news is, these jobs are not the jobs you might imagine.
First, I’ll mention that the category “writers and authors” excludes technical writers or journalists under the BLS organization schema. Technical writers are another 50,000 working writers and journalists are about another 50,000 on top of that. If we lumped all these writers together, journalists and technical writers would make up 40 percent of working writers in America right off the bat. Even counting out these two large groups, this category does not include only people who do narrative writing. In addition to novelists, “writers and authors” means:
Biographers and other longform nonfiction writers
Bloggers, yes that’s a legitimate writing job
Content writers, who supply content like articles to magazines and websites
Copywriters, who prepare advertising content
Ghostwriters, who write novels and nonfiction books for others
Grant writers, who write proposals for funding sources
Playwrights and screenwriters, who write scripts
Science writers, who write articles about scientific and medical information
Speechwriters
And, of course, fiction novelists, which is probably what you’re here about.
Of those 143,000 writers and authors working in the United States, a whopping 68 percent (about 97,000) of them are self-employed. This means they don’t get a regular paycheck every week or couple of weeks or month, they don’t get a W2 at the end of January (I received mine today). Self-employed writers is everybody who writes freelance, everybody who writes as an independent contractor, and all the novelists.
If you want to specifically be a novelist as your day job, to earn your living, as your sole source of income, you will be self-employed. I think most people understand this at some level so I’m probably repeating at least some things you already know, but bear with me because there are additional considerations that you may not have accounted for when you sat down to figure out how to make it work as a professional, full-time novel author.
First, you don’t receive a paycheck. Novel authors make money in the form of advances (payment up front for a manuscript) and royalties (a small amount of money for each unit sold). Starting out, until you have a backlist of titles bringing in regular royalties, this is very irregular income. Advances are paid in a lump sum or a few incremental payments and you only get an advance when you sell a manuscript.
“No problem,” you might be thinking. “I’m always hearing about these 6- and 7-figure advances authors get and I write three manuscripts a year so I’ll be rolling in it!” There is a very wide range of customary advances depending on genre, demographic, and the author’s particulars. Are you a sci fi writer? The median advance in sci fi and fantasy is $5,000. NK Jemisin, probably sci fi’s hottest and most awarded novel author right now, got a $25,000 advance for each volume in the NYT best-selling, three-time-Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy. Not every advance is equivalent to a generous annual salary in one lump payment. The vast majority are not nearly that large.
Next, consider: Once you’ve been paid an advance on a manuscript, you do not begin to earn royalties for that title until the book “earns out,” or until you’ve “earned back” the advance in book sales. That’s why it’s called an advance. The publisher is advancing you money against the royalties they expect you will earn. If you get $10,000 as an advance for your manuscript, and you earn 5 percent royalties on sales, you will not begin to receive royalty payments until after the book has made $200,000. I simplified that math because I’m bad at math but you get the point.
In order to become a full-time, professional author of novels as your sole source of income, you have to find a way to sell enough manuscripts, and enough units of your published books, to replace your current income in order to maintain your standard of living—right?
No again! You need to make more money—considerably more—to maintain your standard of living if you are currently a W2-style employee at a company.
First, self-employment taxes. When you work for a company that withholds taxes for you, they withhold Social Security and Medicare taxes on your behalf and they also pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for you. In 2021, employers and employees each paid 6.2 percent Social Security tax per employee, and employers and employees each paid 1.45 percent Medicare tax per employee. If you are a W2 employee, this means you paid 7.65 percent Social Security and Medicare tax and your employer paid the other 7.65 percent for you. If you’re self-employed, for instance if you sell novel manuscripts for a living, then you’re on the hook for the whole 15 percent yourself. Your tax obligation just went up.
Second, health insurance. As a self-employed author you will have to pay for this yourself unless you can get it through your spouse’s employer. On average, employers cover about 73 percent of insurance premiums for their employees with family policies ($16,253 for a family). Employers also get favorable group rates for health insurance compared to what an individual can get privately or on the exchange, at least that was my experience when I had to shop for my own health insurance a few years back. If you currently provide health insurance for your family through your employer’s policy, remember before you quit your day job that your writing income will have to cover the entire premium for the policy you choose.
It goes without saying (but here I am saying it anyway) that other perks we receive as part of our compensation when we work for a company are also not provided to self-employed folks—things like matching 401k contributions, life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, dental plans, employee assistance programs, and so on.
In order to make writing for a living your reality without tanking your standard of living, you’ll have to replace your current income and then some with income generated by your writing. The median income for writers and authors in 2021 was $67,120. The top 10 percent of writers and authors in terms of income earned more than $133,460.
The flip side is, you’ll have way more time to devote to writing, right? A full-time worker in the United States typically works approximately 2000 hours per year (40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year). If you move to writing full time, you’ll have 2000 hours to spend on nothing but writing new manuscripts, so you’ll be able to write even more. With more product (manuscripts) going out into the marketplace, you’re envisioning more money coming in.
Whether you publish traditionally or self-publish, you will not spend all of your working hours writing if you are a full-time novelist. That is not a realistic expectation.
If you publish traditionally, you will have to devote working hours to:
Implementing manuscript revisions as requested by your agent and editor;
Reviewing and responding to copyedits and queries;
Reviewing and correcting proofs;
Assisting the marketing team with developing promotional materials;
Participate in promotional events for your book, like signings and talks;
And this is all in addition to writing the next manuscript.
Maybe that all sounds tedious so you will self-publish instead to avoid all those requested reviews and rewrites. In that case, if you go the self-publishing route, you will have to devote working hours to:
Managing freelancers who help with your books, like cover designers and proofreaders;
Advertising, marketing, and promoting your books;
Handling the technical aspects of book production, like checking behind automated typesetting programs and troubleshooting book metadata;
You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t—even a full-time novelist doesn’t spend all their working hours writing novels. There is a lot of ancillary work surrounding publishing successful books and as an author, you will have to do some of that work. Even JK Rowling is out there promoting her stuff. Do you think it’s a coincidence that she publicly makes a controversial transphobic statement every time she launches a new book or Harry Potter property? If you Google search “Stephen King interviews 2021” you’ll note that he is on TV or in a magazine promoting himself and his books multiple times a month. He’s not sitting in front of his typewriter with a glass of whisky at his elbow and a dog snoozing at his feet and that’s it, that’s the whole job.
In practical terms, if you have experience with writing manuscripts but not selling or publishing them, you may imagine that you can channel your pace of writing to a full-time career and write that many manuscripts each year—but what you came up with may not be a realistic number given the other demands on an author’s professional time. Keep in mind that some of the most prolific authors of modern times (looking at Danielle Steel with 141 novels under her belt) put out about three titles annually, consistently. There are some outliers who put out more quality titles than that per year (Nora Roberts) but these are, as I said, outliers.
How, then, are so many people out there in the world and on social media living this comfortable, glamorous life as full-time authors if there are so few jobs and the jobs there are pay such a moderate salary in the median? I do have information on this. It is anecdotal and based on the people I know who do this for a living and the people they know and have told me about.
Lots of people do this as their sole and full-time venture but are not supporting themselves that way, or do not require as much income to survive as the average American does. I’m talking about inheriting a house for you and your family to live in rent- and mortgage-free. Drawing your living expenses from a trust fund. A spouse or family member who pays all the bills and provides health insurance. Just generally being independently wealthy. Some authors are open about this but most are not.
There are also full-time W2 writers out there; this just isn’t the job most people envision when they say “I want to be a professional writer.” I had a job once where one of my duties was writing articles for magazines. This was vaguely associated with a government contract my company had, I’m not exactly sure how the two things were related. But I’d get assignments from time to time like this:
Military Base Furniture Monthly needs to fill two pages in the next issue, so we need 1250 words on twin XL mattresses for barracks sleeping quarters. The audience is the military and nonmilitary federal workers who hire contractors to furnish military bases, and the agencies that are bidding for these contracts. Research the topic, draft the article, and email it to the client in two days.
I just made up this magazine and assignment as an example but it was all stuff like that. Like Cat Fancy–style magazines but for the DOD instead of cat owners. I think about this whenever I see a publication offering information to consumers. The person who wrote the article probably became an expert on their lunch break yesterday using Google; take these magazines with a grain of salt.
I hope today’s article has helped shed some light on this frequently asked question. I feel like a lot of what’s in here is just common sense information about working in the United States like “if you’re self-employed you have additional taxes and pay for your own health insurance” compared with statistics I pulled from BLS and the cold hard fact that whatever someone’s job looks like from the outside, the reality is often very different. I’m not here to crush dreams but to bring transparency to an industry that is unnecessarily opaque. I hope I’m doing a good job sometimes.
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