Luc Reid - Getting Published ≠ a Writing Career

I thought it might be useful to talk a little bit about professional writing, what it means, and what a writer of fiction can aim for. I don't know if this information will be old hat to you or a surprise, but the practical details of becoming a professional writer aren't universally known, and are important to understand at some point.

In case it's significant to you, I'll mention right now that I'm a professional writer (I periodically earn what are widely recognized as professional rates for some of my writing) but am not a full-time writer. Actually, let's start with those distinctions. Here are three key terms the way I use them. Other people sometimes use them in different ways, and this is not intended to be definitive, only vastly superior to any other interpretation one point of view.

• published writer: someone whose writing has been accepted by someone who publishes multiple writers' work. Publishing your own work does not meaningfully qualify you for this description, in my opinion.
• professional writer: someone who at least sometimes gets "pro rates" (5 cents a word is a good rough idea of a minimum) for their work.
• full-time writer: someone who supports her- or himself with writing income.

So as you may already have known, becoming a published author is not the same thing as having a full-time writing career, and in fact is surprisingly far from it. Most people who are getting published are not getting professionally published, which is to say that they're not getting paid much (or often, anything) for their work. Of those of us who do get paid pro rates for our writing sometimes, only a small minority make a full-time income from it, and of those, more appear to be nonfiction writers than novelists: it's in fact very unusual to make a living writing fiction full-time. Many professional writers--even fairly successful ones--hold down some kind of day job.

Hardly anyone makes a living writing poetry, short stories, or (to the best of my knowledge) plays. Successful screenwriters, on the other hand, make a fairly good amount of money by writer standards.

An an example, in science fiction and fantasy (the areas of fiction I know best), a typical advance for a first-time novelist is about $5,500. (This is my interpretation of some research novelist Tobias Buckell presented a couple of years back.) Many first-time novelists don't get any royalties past the advance. So a person might spend two years writing the book and net only $5,500, minus any research costs and their agent's 15%. The numbers are a little better in some other fields--romance, for instance, has some real opportunity for people who work really hard in that genre--but by and large the idea that a person can sell a novel and as a rule immediately become a full-time professional is mistaken. Not that there aren't exceptions now and then to that, of course: some people are very successful with their first novels.

And if a first novel is even modestly successful, then subsequent novels tend to bring in more money, and the whole proposition begins to get a little closer to being financially viable for the "full-time writer" arrangement.

Several writers in the writing group I run, Codex, have gone pro full-time since joining Codex (not necessarily because of Codex specifically, but because they're good, they write a lot, and they send their work out). Some have gotten good multi-book deals that offered them a fairly reliable income for a couple of years (but at the end of that had to find another deal or go back to a day job); others work some other job to support their writing; others incorporate editing or technical writing or things like that. So it definitely can be done, but unfortunately it's not just a matter of writing and selling one novel.

On the bright side, one of the most important things to know is that the people I know who have succeeded at this difficult task have been passionate about what they're writing, willing to keep trying despite a lot of rejections, hard-working, and persistent. Given those qualities and a willingness to learn, the possibilities become much rosier.