A year in the life of a semi-professional writer

plus some $$$ talk

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Starting in January of 2023, I started to do something a little strange: whenever I do something relate to the business of writing, I log what it is and how much time I spent doing it. This includes writing (and what project), editing, networking, social media, screenwriting, substack, and dealing with my finances. I did this because I wanted to see: if I was going to decrease my hours of my day job, how much time am I spending on my writing career, and how much money am I getting from it, was it worth it. I’m not really a “God will sort out the finances” kind of person.

First off, when I say “semi-professional” I mean “people are willing to pay me for my work but I don’t do this full time.” When I got my first book deal, I didn’t take the idea of quitting my job into serious consideration. I think circa 2020 and afterwards, after my soul had been ground down to dirty bits, perhaps if I was married to a wealthy golden retriever husband who could get me health insurance, I would have considered it, but alas. Even then though, I don’t think writing is quite enough for me to to do.

Here is what the data looks like for the year and some of my thoughts about it.

The little dark blue bars= small amounts of PR things I had to do for A Step Past Darkness. It was not as much as I had to do for Never Saw Me Coming.

Red bars= mostly the writing of Substack posts, but also the editing of those posts. It can take me 1-2 hours to write a standard post. When I do posts that involve research or data analysis, these take up more time. I really really like doing those posts, but I limit how often I do them because more research does equal more value but does not equal more clicks or more money.

Occasional purple bars: me coming up with the characters and plot of proposed book 4. Note this is not me writing, but me planning out book 4.

The main meat here are the teal green bars. This is me writing Book 3. (let’s just call this book Poison as I’m 1000% sure the title will change.) At the end of 2023, publishers failed to acquire Poison based on proposal. So I wrote the draft on spec—you can literally see this happening January- June of 2024. There’s something a little awkward here that I’ll point out. The book is about 100k and it took me 6 months to write. But I already knew that generally speaking, it takes me about 6 months to write a 100k novel. That’s how long it took me to write my first, second, and third books (all unpublished.) I wrote NSMC way faster, but I think I was possessed by the devil or something. ASPD took me twice as long because it was literally 200k in draft form, so the rule still stands: 6 months for 100k. But…… I wrote those first three unpublished books when I was working 40 or more hours a week. In other words, I had more time to write in 2024, but worked more slowly.

I wouldn’t label this a problem, especially since I’m told that I am very very hard on myself and that my work ethic could do with some chilling out. 2024 was a bad year for me psychologically. Not getting acquired on proposal really hurt my self esteem and I had some seriously derailing personal problems. I heard back from my agent in July with edits to Poison but I spent all of August traveling and dealing with aforementioned nightmare personal problems. The teal band you see Sept- Dec is me revising Poison. (That is actually only a week of December being counted, because I finished it a few days ago.) I knew I wanted to finish before Christmas, so once I came back from traveling, I really kicked it into gear. I think I initially thought I could write the book in three months, but I’m pretty sure I gave the caveat of “unless something disastrous happens,” accurately predicting what happened.

Where is the money coming from?

2024 felt like a financially quiet year, at least psychologically, because I didn’t sign a new book deal and I wasn’t signing foreign rights deals for ASPD. For whatever reason, there was a ton of foreign rights deals for NSMC, but not my second book (which is annoying because the second book is better but whatever). I did the math, and it turns out I did make enough money to make up the hours I gave up at day job plus a little more.

About 50% of the money I made this year from writing came from the penultimate payment for ASPD (the 3rd of 4 payments comes on publication day, with the final payment a year later with the paperback publication). I got a higher US advance for that book than my first one, but the first one made more money overall because of foreign rights plus film deals. I made about a third of my money in 2024 for the German rights for NSMC. Mind you- I originally signed my Germany contract in 2020! It was a solid deal because it sold at auction, but there was a significant delay in payment because of German tax law. (Won’t get into details as its boring, but point being: you really can’t predict when you will get paid for foreign rights.) 10% of 2024’s money came from selling the film option to NSMC for a second time. When it comes to Hollywood, never make a major financial decision based on the hopes of a film or TV deal. Just take it as free money that will never amount to anything (as much as you want it to amount it something). 10% of 2024’s money I made came from royalties for NSMC. It continues to have stable sales, and I’ve mentioned earlier that the majority of my sales are electronic (ebooks plus audiobooks). If you are interested in what authors may be making from their audiobooks being on Spotify—and both of mine are—I would love to tell you but I have no idea. I don’t believe that the audiobook sales that are reported on my royalty statements reflect Spotify. I think Spotify gets its money from licensing for some bulk number of books with publishers. Lastly, 1% of my money comes from Substack. Thanks to paid subscribers! On the one hand, I am getting paid for blogging, which I used to do for free, but on the other hand, the amount I am getting paid if you do the math is lower than my hourly rate if I was working a normal job. So there is some calculus I’m doing. When I went paid on Substack I consulted with a Substack expert and she suggested the best model for me was “content free, people pay if they want to support you.” Though I offer some special items to paid subscribers (query review, signed books, etc.) most of my paid subscribers haven’t contacted me to request those things, so I think they are just supporting me so I keep writing, which of course I appreciate. I got a substantial bump in subscribers in early September because Jane Friedman restacked my post about the Black List—those are random events that you can’t really control and that was a one off response about a particular current event rather than say, a deep dive about how to write character or something.

So you can see a few things with this: all of the money I got for NSMC was signed a long time ago, but trickles in bit by bit, accompanied by royalties. It would be nice if I could predict that I would always get roughly that amount of royalties every year, but that isn’t certain. What could hypothetically happen is that if I publish a book once every few years, slowly they can earn out, then start earning royalties, and then once there is more than one book earning royalties, that can start to add up. But you can also see that most of the work that I did this year I did on spec (unpaid—working on Poison) or I was paid but it made up very little of what I earned (Substack). This is probably why it felt financially unsettling this years because theoretically, Poison might go out for submission and not get acquired.

What I’m hoping for next year:

Hopefully I find a publisher who’s not just interested in Poison, but me in general as a writer. I’d like to double my number of Substack subscribers. I’m taking my first official research trip (to Croatia) for book 4. I won’t be going to Thrillerfest in 2025, but you can catch me at Bouchercon. And assuming that my life is less derailed than it was this year, I’m hoping to get some short stories published, to pick up the sci fi I was working on, and see what I can do about some horror screenplays.

Photo by Rohan on Unsplash