Autumn Is Coming


Just got word from Mike Davis that my story "Cul Du-Sac Virus" is going to be included in his Autumn Cthulhu anthology. As an avowed lover of Autumn (there really is no better season) I'm both honored and excited to have one of my stories among the leaves.

 

 

 

 

Entries in Writing Income (1)

Monday
Mar192018

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.