No Money?…. Are You Really a Writer? Part 7 of 12

Writing is a challenge, but welcome to those who enjoy such challenges. Feel free to leave a comment. I’m busy proofreading one non0fiction at the same time, getting a fiction piece back on track. It’s amazing how much editing is needed to get a piece to the point of great condition. However, for me, writing both gives me a chance to use both sides of my brain.

One thing that does resonate a lot with me is that fact that money is a thing that I do need in my life. Not in a bad way, but more on the basic needs of life. It’s important to bear in mind the averages of writers. By averages I mean advances. The thing we all know and love and are advances. Let’s put it in perspective though. I’ll make it really simple, so that everyone can get an idea.

Let’s say joy of joys your publisher loves you book and gives you an advance ( for the purposes of my math challenged brain I’ll make it easy) and they give you $100 to publish the book. Each book makes for you, about 5 cents as royalty, since they are about 75 cents each. Follow? How much will it take to make back that advance to get royalties?

Well, okay please stop laughing, I know that that is an extreme, but it does give one good point, you’ve got $100 “proving” dollars in your pocket. You need to prove you can work for this, after all, we don;t get anything for free there is always a price. You need to sell 2,000 books to make your advance and to make some money beyond that.

What about the advance? well if you expenses are such that $100 will cover things for two months, great. But it also means you need to be writing some more, a lot more as there are 10 more months in a year! Not to mention the new expenses of trying to get the word out on your book. You need connections, a lot of them, because family and close friends will not be able to buy 2,000 books.

This means that while an advance is nice, and it is, the work done before your book is out, with honest connections and working to get that one more person will make all the difference. We don’t live our writing lives alone, we are all connected. These connection should be honest and trustworthy. You build them, and then you need them, and they will help you.

Everyone works together. So does an advance seem so wonderful still? Yes, if you have your connections and hard work beforehand done.

My Question for Today is this: How much to do try to put things such as connections with people and money into perspective?