Writing Novels For A Living

May 21, 2008

I recently interviewed a couple physicians who also write novels. It was a pleasant enough interview and their recent novel sounds interesting. What threw me a tiny bit--but probably shouldn't have--about the interview was their acknowledgement that writing novels for them was essentially a hobby with relatively small financial gain.

That's partly because they're docs, of course, who typically have better incomes than the rest of us. And I've run into other physicians who are novelists along the line, as well as successful lawyers and business people and even TV personalities, who have written novels. In most cases, their novels net them nowhere near what their "day jobs" do. So why do it?

Well, maybe it is just a hobby. That's okay, actually. In fact, I'm increasingly starting to believe that since most novelists are lucky to make more than $5000-$10,000 per book (if that), then most would probably be a lot happier if they went in accepting that fact instead of expecting to make a fortune. What is often dismaying--and certainly it applies to myself--is how we continue on thinking the BIG HIT is just around the corner... all evidence to the contrary.

Some writers, at least publicly, are pretty cool about this. They're happy to be published, they're happy to have readers and they're happy to call themselves novelists. I struggle with this, frankly; partly because I make a living as a writer and would like fiction to play a larger part in that. I want it to pull its own weight, because I can generally spend the same time on something else that would be significantly more profitable, and nobody expects me to go out and market the final product on my own dime. (Of course, knowing this logically and accepting it emotionally are two wildly separate things).

It seems to me that there are essentially two camps out there in terms of writers and non-writers. They think either authors are all rich or they think authors are all poor, living in garrets and wearing berets.

Sometimes people think this simultaneously. When I first started out I was in the first camp. Now, all these years later, I see it not as a bell-shaped curve with the ends representing the poor, garret-living writers and the bestsellers with a large bulk of novelists making a decent living, but as a wildly steep incline-curve that almost resembles a ski jump. The vast majority of novelists make almost no money, there's a little plateau of writers who make a living, and there's a tiny proportion that make it big (and cling fiercely to the slope in constant danger of getting knocked off).

Which camp are you?

Cheers,

Mark Terry