My Semi-Charmed Life: 2017 Writing Income Report

Well, my taxes are filed and another year of writing receipts have been tallied. As I did last year, I figured it might be worthwhile to throw the totals up here to give something of a “view from the middle” of the authorial life.

Quite a few professional authors post their income on their various blogs (Kameron Hurley, Bradley Beaulieu, and Jim Hines to name a few), but what about the rest of us ? For reference, I consider myself solidly semi-pro in that I do make money writing--although certaininly not enought to call it a career.

So, without any further prevarication…

I was lucky enough to place four stories with pro markets (>6 cents a word), three in semi-pro publications, and sell the reprint/audio/visual/translation rights to 9 stories from my back catalog. However, this doesn’t mean I’ve received payments for all of them. I don’t want to get too granular with regards to actual publications, but here is a general breakdown of my writing income for 2017:

Quite a banner year--my best ever, in fact.

As far as expenses go, this year was relatively modest. Having a young child at home, I was only able to attend two conventions (one in my hometown and one in Los Angeles). There’s also my website, which I paid to have upgraded and redesigned. I think it was worth the investment--hopefully you agree. There are also professional dues, publication tracking, a small cut taken by publishers, and a reasonable allowance for purchase of genre books and publications.

As with last year, there are quite a few ways I could have cut down on expenses--switching from Duotrope to a free service like Submissions Grinder, trying to hit more local conventions instead of flying across the entire country, moving my website from Squarespace to a free site like Wordpress. Having said that, these are the things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

So, in summation:

2017 Income:     $4,744.03

2017 Expenses: -$2,098.69

2017 Total:         $2,645.34

Believe me, I’m as surprised as you.