Financial Literacy post #01: How I make money as an author

In which I illustrate how many side hustles it takes to stay financially afloat in publishing

Hello and happy Wedneday.

I’m numbering this post #1 of I don’t know how many because I want to dedicate a good portion of this spring to discussing financial literacy for writers, a subject—as proven by the AWP panel I was involved with on this topic—that is being under-taught and under-shared in writing programs and most workshops. Happily, financial literacy for creatives is at the core of everything I do both in my publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and the Substack I named it after.

Honestly, if I had to give a reason for any success I’ve had in this industry, the first answer would be my work ethic. I have extremely solid time management skills and I work like a Russian ballerina on my craft. But the second reason for my success is that I never expected my writing to support my life financially.

I want to repeat that, because there is a huge difference between these statements:

I never expected my writing to support my life financially.

vs.

I hoped my writing would support my life financially.

Since my elementary school years when I was making books using cardboard and wallpaper with “About the Author” sections on the back, I hoped I would one day “make it” as a writer, meaning that writing books and articles would one day be my full-time job.

That is a very different mindset from expecting my writing to pay the bills for me. I’m afraid that this expectation mindset is one of the major obstacles for writers, especially students going through the MFA system where teaching financial survival skills to creative people is still woefully taboo.

While I never came into publishing expecting my book deals alone to support me (I still don’t for reasons I’ll explain in a separate post), I did come into this expecting my skillsets around reading and writing to support me. Why? How? What did that look like? Let’s get into it.