Weekly Update #50

Every day I’m coming closer to the magic post number 52 signifying one year as an author. Wow! Who would’ve thought I would have ever found myself here? Despite it all, somehow I’m managing to survive, but let me tell you it ain’t easy!

This week the Author’s Guild released a survey of their members about the state of being an author. It’s not pretty! The median income for full-time authors was only $2000 last year. Yikes! Authors actually made more (around $3000) from “writing-related activities”, which I guess is selling merch and tutoring or whatever. The good news is that this is rising faster than inflation. It still remains an area where you just make it or you don’t, though. The top 10% of authors made a median wage of $275k, but the bottom 50% only made $1300. Not sure about the other 40%. It would have been nice to see if you can actually just survive if you manage to break out of the bottom. The top selling genres remain romance and mystery, of course, but something I wasn’t expecting is that romance authors had the highest gross median income over mystery by a factor of three. Shit, man. Maybe I gotta get some of that! Another interesting tidbit is that most books don’t have an audio version, which makes sense, but anything you can sell is an opportunity.

Here is the link to the article.

Anyway. This week I went up to 32k words. It’s going pretty well, I think. I don’t know if it’s any good but I’m happy with it, so that’s all that really counts. I’m thinking about splitting up my day so that I have one session in the morning where I write and another at night where I edit. Writing can be pretty draining so usually when I’m finished I’m finished, though. You’re always competing against the pressure to complete anything ASAP!

Ok! It’s pouring rain now! Hoping for snow sometime this winter instead!

SB