Writing is a profession with a very long lead time. For the majority of writers, writing a novel takes somewhere between six months and two years (there are, of course, folks who can do it faster or who require even more time, but they’re outliers). Then you have a wait for editorial revisions, and then it’s usually one to two years before the book is published. And, as I mentioned last post, the advance money is spread out in irregular chunks over all that time.
Essentially, it’s like a long, long pipeline, with the writer standing at one end pouring manuscripts in. No matter how fast you pour, it takes quite a while for the money to start coming out the other end. This can be intensely frustrating, especially at the start of one’s career. One works for years for a payoff that never seems to arrive, or that looks inadequate when it does finally start trickling out.
A lot of people get discouraged during that initial start-up period. It’s hard not to. It takes a long time to fill up the pipe. Eventually, though, money does start arriving.
And that’s where things get even trickier. Because that pipeline is long enough that a lot of the time, there isn’t a lot of correlation between how productive a writer is being and how much money is coming in. As your career builds up, there are occasional bursts of subrights money – which covers everything from foreign editions to audiobooks to movie options and merchandising – as well as money for reselling books that have gone out of print and had their rights reverted (though as ebooks become a larger part of the market, I expect “out of print” will become a quaint notion and rights reversion will get a lot more complex). About half my income in any given year derives from books I wrote more than ten years ago.
So money does not end up being good positive reinforcement for continuing to work hard at producing stories. Which is the next place where a lot of writers get into trouble. Since that pipeline is really long, it is quite easy to let up and coast for a while, because once you have filled up that long pipeline with work, the money will keep coming out for a good long while, even if you stop putting things in at the other end.
The trouble, of course, is that if you stop putting things in, eventually the flow at the other end dries up, too…and then it’s another long, long haul to try to fill the pipeline up again. If I finish the current WIP within the next month, I could sit back and not write another word for two solid years, and I’d still have a new book coming out each year. Three years, if you count the paperback versions. Of course, at the end of that time, I would have at least a three-year drought before any more books came out, because that’s how long it would take to refill the publishing pipeline…and if it takes me a year or two to write and sell a book, that gets added on top, so call it four or five years.
This is why I keep saying that discipline and persistence are the two most important characteristics a writer can have – because it takes discipline and persistence to keep writing when it gets hard, when it doesn’t seem as if you need to (because the far end of the pipeline is spitting out enough money to meet your bills now, and three years from now is a long way off). Also because discipline and persistence are much rarer qualities than the talent that so many want to depend on instead.
Talent doesn’t pay the bills.
There’s also the opposite danger as exemplified by Charlie Stross, where, in a desperate attempt to squeeze money out the pipeline by writing harder, you end up contracting for two different series for two different publishers simultaneously, while also trying to deliver short stories to magazines and a standalone novel with a third publisher. (Actually I’m not sure if he really did all of that, but for a long time, whenever we heard from him, he seemed to be having to write so much to fulfill various contracts that I used to imagine him writing different novels with his left and right hands at the same time, and possibly writing a couple of short stories with his toes as well.)
Lol! Writing different novels with his left and right hand! I don’t have much to say, except this post makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you for writing it.
It can be disconcerting if you shift from stories to novels because they are so much bigger a commitment — what’s happening to the pipeline?
This is why I’m taking the long view. When I was running my own business I was always looking for passive income that I’d work at once and would bring me income for years. And now with the e-market and books likely never going out of print, I have that opportunity with my fiction.
I’m therefore willing to have the patience to build up a catalogue over the next 10, 15 or 20 years.
Let’s be the tortoise, not the hare…