Why Bother?

I recently did my taxes and as usual it was a depressing and painful reminder that writing is hard. Not only is it hard to get words onto paper (or the word processor) when you’ve got all the distractions of everyday life, but then there’s all the stuff that leads to submitting, selling, editing and finally releasing a book.

And at the end of the year, you look at your combined income and thing, why the heck did I bother with all that work? Bad enough that the husband teases you about the little royalty checks (you gonna buy yourself a bag of chips with all the money you earned?) but when tax time comes, he’s suddenly indignant that you earned anything at all, because filing as a couple means my income reduces his tax return.

Now, logically, I made more than he would have gotten back if I hadn’t earned anything at all, but since it come in through the year in dribbles and drabbles, it doesn’t really feel like much of a contribution. Still, it left me wondering if maybe I should work really hard to make a lot of money, or if I should stop completely.

As a stay at home mother, my goal was to make enough to make it more viable for me to remain at home as a full time writer once both kids were in school...I have about 3 months before the youngest is out of SK and then the summer before he starts grade 1. I can tell you right now, I won’t be making enough by then, but because of the economy at the moment, chances are I wouldn’t be able to get a job in the fall anyway. Nobody seems to be having much luck, so that buys me a bit of time.

Let’s say I need to earn the equivalent of minimum wage, part time hours, or about 18-24K a year. Let’s break that down and see how the numbers look.

18-24K a year works out to $1500 - 2000 a month
average royalties for a book that is of medium length is about $1.70 per copy
that’s 882-1176 individual sales a month (looking at current royalty statements and crying)

That’s of all books available for sale. Lets say you have 5 books out, that’s 300-500 copies sold of each per month. Not very realistic no matter how much you promote.

For ten books available you’d have to sell 150-200 copies of each per month, which is less daunting, but not very realistic either.

20 releases equates to 75-100 of each a month.

The thing is, it’s all well and good to look at the numbers and say, “Okay if I have thirty books out, I could make it work.” but the publishing business doesn’t work like that. Usually on the release month you sell tons, because your book is visible to customers right away when they go to the publishers website. Once your release month is over, it might go to the “recently released” section lower on that page for a month, but then people will have to browse and chose your book from hundreds of other titles. Sales plummet. It’s up to you to keep your book in the publics eye, and that is not an easy task. Very little promotion works well enough to justify the time involved. You can do chats and throw excerpts all over the place, but it very rarely does much in regards to sales.

The best thing to do is keep releasing new books, keep yourself visible in groups and blog (I know, I’m so bad at this...it’s like a killer telling someone to be good)

Point is, writing is hard, and making it a career is even harder. It may be easier to get published in the epub world, but you don’t get the same kind of sales you might get in print, and you have to do the promo yourself for the most part. Is it worth it? Well, I still say I’d rather be home writing than working a minimum wage job wearing a tacky uniform all day.