Author income streams

Lots of talk about multiple author income streams.

Which reminded me of a blog post I wanted to put up, but was always a few words short of finishing. So here it is. Here’s how I made a living in 2010:

For me speaking is a small portion of the gig. The bulk of my fiction income was advances, royalties, and foreign rights sales, broken down thusly:

I haven’t talked much about finances over the last couple years, not because I’m suddenly bashful, but because I wasn’t interested in people misinterpreting the discussion. After nearly dying twice right before 2008 closed out, and dealing with the after affects (decreased ability to work, mental headspace, medical bills) I wasn’t interested in sharing that journey as it happened (particularly as my ability to get fiction projects done suffered as I focused on staying afloat). But I’m grateful I work in multiple income streams, and you can see why here:

In 2009 I worked harder at freelancing, which pays better per hour than fiction writing, to keep my overall earnings up. I could work 2-3 hours a day and make the same as if I worked 10 doing mostly fiction. And since I could only gather the energy to work a couple hours a day throughout a big chunk of 2009, this was the responsible course. I was also lucky to get a very cool marketing copy writing gig referral from a friend, which allowed me to hang on through 2009.

In 2010 I turned back to trying to resurrect the mess that all that had left my career. I cut way back on freelancing, and focused on fiction more. I took an overall cut in pay, but it was with an eye on getting back to making more off fiction eventually and would, hopefully, pay off sometime in 2011 and 2012.

Had I been just a fiction writer, I have to imagine the health crisis would have destroyed things for me even more, so I’m rather fond of having these different legs. In fact, had I been at a normal dayjob in 2009, I would have been laid off or something due to inability to work, because who has 3 months of sick leave? Because that’s roughly what ended up happening to me.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of multiple streams of income.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on April 13th 2011 at 4:56 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.