Tag Archives: freelancing

You CAN Make a Living as a Writer

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Well, at least I can.

I just got my quarterly royalty statement from one of my publishers.

The only known about a royalty statement is the approximate time it will arrive and the period it will cover. The amount is always a surprise.

Imagine having a job and getting paid once every three months and not knowing how much you’ll receive. That’s the boat I’m in.

Of course, when I write or revise a book, I get advances on royalties. The idea behind the advance is that it provides some income for the author while she is hard at work. This is a good thing because royalties are usually paid two to four months after the end of the period they’re due for. So, for example, the royalty statement and check I got today was for the quarter ending June 30, 2005.

Advances are deducted from future royalties. So a book has to “earn out” before I get another penny for it. That means that if I get a $5,000 advance and I earn about $1.00 per book, the publisher has to sell 5,000 copies of the book before I see more money. I’ll be the the first to admit that I’ve written more than a few books that haven’t earned out. That’s partially the fault of the publisher, for offering such a high advance. Fortunately, I never have to give it back. But if I revise that book the amount that was overpaid to me is cross-deducted from the earnings on the revision. Books that don’t earn out are seldom revised. Why through more good money away?

Another thing that can eat away at royalties are returns of previous editions. This really hits me because so many of my books are revisions. For example, my Tiger book is selling very well and, according to the royalty statement, my Panther book (which is the previous edition) is also still selling. But my Jaguar book (the one before Panther) is in its return phase. Since that book no longer has net earnings, the returns are deducted from my Panther book. When that goes into returns, the returns will be deducted from my Tiger book. Get the idea?

The first book I ever wrote was co-authored with Bernard J. David. Bernard once said to me that I should sign books in bookstores as often as possible. Why? Because then they can’t return them.

But I’ve never had to guts to go into a Borders or B&N, introduce myself, and ask if I could sign books. Heck, what if they were on to that trick and said no? How embarrassed would I be?

Anyway, I got a statement from Peachpit today and it came with a nice check. A very nice check. The best check I’ve ever gotten, in fact. Cliff (my editor) said my Tiger book was doing well, but he failed to communicate just how well that was. Now I know exactly how well. And those numbers are three months old.

A bunch of my other books paid out, too. Oddly enough, three editions of my Excel for Windows (2000, 2002, and 2003) are still selling briskly. (What’s very odd is that Excel 2000 is outselling Excel 2002.) And I got some royalties on translations of various titles to French and German. (My royalty statement from Peachpit is 53 pages long, with 29 ISBNs on it. Good thing I have an accounting degree.) So even if the Tiger book hadn’t done so well, the other titles would have pulled me through.

But my Tiger book is doing well. And I think it deserves it. This book, and the previous edition (Panther) are two of my best works. I worked very hard on both of them. They’re big, fat books with very reasonable price tags, giving readers a lot for their money. And I continue to support them by appearing at Apple Stores (I’m going to Tucson tomorrow), writing articles about related topics for Informit.com and the books’ companion Web site, and now publishing podcast entries with even more tips and tricks.

This is what I do for a living. I’m a writer. And I’m doing pretty well.

Fifteen Years as a Freelancer

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I realize (belatedly) that my fifteenth anniversary of being my own boss has just gone by.

May 29, 1990. That’s the day I left my last “real job” and began my life as a freelancer.

The job was at Automatic Data Processing (ADP) and I worked in the Corporate Headquarters in Roseland, NJ. I was a senior financial analyst, moved into that position after doing my required 2-year sentence as an internal auditor. I hated being an auditor, despite the fact that I was very good at it. No one likes a job where people are constantly trying to avoid you. Hell, men used to run into the men’s room when they saw me coming, just because they knew I couldn’t follow them there.

I’d been doing the 9 to 5 (well, actually 8 to 4 whenever possible) thing since graduating from college in May 1982. The ADP position was a good one, with benefits, a good paycheck, and a clear upward path in the corporate hierarchy. If I stayed and continued to play the corporate game — pretending, of course, that it wasn’t a game and that I liked it — I’d probably be some kind of vice president by now. I’ve seen the annual report — I still have 282 shares of ADP stock from the employee stock purchase program — and have recognized one or two co-workers in those coveted top-floor office positions.

But that’s not what I wanted. Heck, I didn’t want the corporate thing at all. I never did. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. My family pushed me into a career I showed some interest in, just because it would come with a big paycheck. Accounting was (and still is) something I enjoyed, but I wound up as an auditor and got burned out before I could escape. By the time I’d finally achieved the financial analyst position and spent my days crunching numbers with Lotus 1-2-3, I was sick of the whole 9 to 5 joke and tired of playing the games I was expected to play to move up. I wanted out.

My ticket to leave came in the form of a contract to write a 4-1/2 day course for the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA). Ironic, isn’t it, that auditing got me into the corporate world and auditing got me out. There was a $10,000 paycheck attached to the contract, enough to keep me for a few months. I asked for a leave of absence, was told I couldn’t have it, and resigned. No hard feelings, just get me out of this place.

My mother freaked. How could I give up my career to be a writer? Watch me.

To help make ends meet, I got a job as a per diem computer applications instructor with a New Jersey-based computer company. The rate was $250 per day — not too shabby — and, at times, I would work as many as four days in a week. I averaged about 10 days a month and that really helped to pay the bills. They called me when they needed me, preferring their full-time employees because they were cheaper. They tried about four times to make me an employee and I kept turning them down.

I finished the course, wrote another one based on it, and got another job as an assistant trainer for a Macintosh troubleshooting course. That one had a nicer paycheck — $700 a day for two-day courses — and I got to travel all over the country. One year, in June, I did six courses in six different cities. I remember riding in the Club car of an Amtrack train on my birthday, admiring a rainbow as we approached the Delaware River from Washington, DC to Newark, NJ. Although I was allowed to fly to Washington, I preferred the train and took it whenever I could. It’s far more relaxing and comfortable.

Somewhere along the line, I started to write. First some articles for little or no money. Then a few chapters of a book as a ghostwriter. Then half a book as a coauthor. Then a whole book at an author. That first book with just my name on the cover came out in 1992 and I haven’t looked back since.

I did some FileMaker Pro consulting work for a while, too. I built a custom solution for Union Carbide. Not a big deal, but they needed me to update it each year and didn’t balk at $85/hour, so who am I to complain? I also did consulting work for Letraset at the same nice hourly rate. That was good because they were only 15 minutes from my house.

The trick to freelancing successfully is to not put all your eggs in one basket. I never — not once in 15 years — had only one source of income. I’d be training for two companies and writing articles. Or training for one company and writing books and articles. Or consulting and training. You get the idea. There was always more than one client, more than one editor, and more than one project in the works. Before I finished one book, I was negotiating a contract for the next. I remember one day not long after coming to Wickenburg when I signed four book contracts. Four, in one day. That was guaranteed income of $32K within the next six to eight months. And that didn’t count the other income producing tasks I was doing.

For some people, it’s difficult to stop getting a regular paycheck. I don’t recall it ever being difficult for me. I do remember the second year after leaving ADP having a dismal year and only making $19,500. That was a far cry from the $45K/year I pulled in that last year at ADP. But things improved quickly, I got out of that slump, and have since brought in considerably more every year. I’ve been pulling in six digits for the past seven years, a fact I’m rather proud of. I’m certain that I’m earning more now as a freelancer than I would have earned if I’d stayed at ADP to climb that corporate ladder. And I don’t have to wear a business suit or pantyhose to do it.

But no matter how you slice it, it’s not as smooth and easy as a weekly or biweekly paycheck. Advances come four to eight weeks after they’re due, royalties normally come quarterly, consulting clients pay a month after you bill them, magazines pay when they get around to it. You learn to earn first and collect later. You learn to avoid clients who don’t pay promptly, no matter how hard you need the work. If you’re good, you’ll find someone else who will pay on time.

The freelance life is not the easy life. Not only are you constantly on the prowl for paying assignments, but when you get them, you’re working your butt off to get them done on time in a way that’s satisfactory to the client. Anyone who thinks they can succeed as a technical writer — which is what I guess I am — without meeting deadlines and keeping editors happy is sadly mistaken. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there who want the same job and all it takes is one who can do it a little better to get his foot in your editor’s door. I succeeded as a technical writer because I gave my editors what they wanted quicker than anyone else could, with a format and writing style that required very little editing or modification. My editors love me and, when they treat me with the respect I think I’ve earned, I love them right back.

By comparison, the cushy corporate job is the lazy way to earn a living. Show up, do what they tell you, collect a paycheck. No looking for work, selling yourself, and collecting.

Don’t get me wrong — being a freelancer gives me benefits that far outweigh those I’d have in a corporate job. No one is counting my days off. They’re not watching a clock, noting when I arrive late or leave early. I typically take one to two weeks off between books — if not more — just to clear my head. During that time, I goof off, fly, write blog entries, or go on road trips. Or all of the above.

But when I’m working on a project, I’m working long days, working hard in my solitary office. There’s no chat at the water cooler, no long lunches with friends, no personal telephone calls. Just work. I start at 6:30 AM and quit after 4:00 PM. Every weekday and more than a few weekends.

It’s a trade-off, but I don’t mind. I love it and couldn’t think of any other way to earn a living.

Last summer, I had the first real job I’d had since 1990. I was a pilot on a 7 on/7 off schedule at the Grand Canyon. I had to be at work at 6:55 AM and I worked until about 6:30 PM. Seven days in a row, with seven days off after that. It didn’t matter how busy we were or how much I was needed. I had to come to work and be there, all day long, even if there wasn’t a damn thing for me to do. Sometimes it drove me batty. I’d much rather sit in a cockpit and fly all day long than sit in a chair in front of a television. Some people liked being paid to sit around and wait. I didn’t. I hated it. But what bothered me the most was having to come to work on a schedule, even if I wasn’t needed. Such a waste of time. I don’t do that as a freelancer. I go to work when there’s work to do. When there isn’t, I don’t.

I suspect that I’ll never be able to work at a “real job” again.

But hell, I’m a freelancer. Who needs a real job?

Freebies

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On why a professional writer should consider writing for free.

It was a hotly debated topic back when I started writing professionally and frequented BBS message bases (the precursors to Internet mailing lists). Some people argued that a professional writer should never write for free. In fact, one person even bragged about how much free work he turned down regularly. (Of course, he never bragged about the paid work he got, either.) Other people — including me — argued that to break into a writing career, you have to write for free, at least in the beginning. How else would you get the clips you need to establish yourself as a writer?

Clips are the beginning writer’s Holy Grail. A clip is an article or a story you have written for a magazine or other published document that has been “clipped” out to show other publishers or editors you want to write for. It’s proof that you have been published. The more clips you have, the more experience you can prove. You can then use those clips to impress the people who can get you better assignments.

Of course, the quality of a clip is just as important as the overall quantity of clips. A clip from, for example, Vogue, is worth about 50 clips from small press beauty newsletters that no one has ever heard of. So the argument that you should be paid for all of your writing does have some merit, since Vogue is far more likely to pay for your work than the sporadically published Betty’s Beauty News (if such a thing exists).

Back when I started, I was breaking into a new career that I had absolutely no formal training for. Heck, I was a financial analyst and former auditor with a degree in accounting! What did I know about journalism? I knew enough, it seems.

I knew back then that I needed clips to get started. I knew that no one would pay an unknown to write for them. So I knew I had to write a few freebies. And I did.

My first published article was for The Audit Advisor, a 12-page monthly newsletter for auditors, back in 1987. It was an article about auditing construction project budgets. I received two copies for my efforts. No money. But I had my first clip.

I wrote a few other articles for publications I can’t remember. Junky little publications. One was a writers’ newsletter. When I received my sample copy, I was appalled that my work had appeared in such a rag. It had obviously been “printed” on a photocopier. One that needed maintenance.

I got my next big break in 1989, when the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) offered me $10K to write a 4-1/2 day course about using computers for auditing. I had taught a few times for them — also for free, with permission and salary from the company I worked for at the time — and knew what they were looking for. I was also quite informed about personal computers, which were very new at the time, and how they could be used to simplify work while performing a financial audit. I asked for leave of absence from work, but they wouldn’t give it to me. So I resigned my $45K/year job (a huge amount of money in those days) and took the biggest gamble in my life: to start a new career as a writer.

I finished the course in the alloted amount of time and even taught it a few times for the IIA. They paid me to write spinoff products for it. I can’t remember what they were, but I have copies in my office somewhere. But I was not really a writer yet. I hadn’t paid enough dues, I didn’t have enough clips for what I wanted to write about: computers.

So I got to work and found some more small publications to start writing for. For free. One of them was one I cooked up: Macintosh Tips & Tricks. It was a monthly newsletter that lasted a few years in a number of formats. People paid to get it mailed to them, so I guess you can say I was being paid for my writing. But not enough.

So I supplemented my income with a job as a per diem computer trainer. I worked for two different companies. One paid pretty well; the other paid very well. It kept the mortgage paid and food on the table.

Oddly enough, my next big break was as a ghostwriter for a John Dvorak book. Dvorak was very big in the computer world back in the early nineties and his name sold books. So the publisher, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, had hired him and Bernard J. David to write a book called Dvorak’s Inside Track to the Mac. Of course, they didn’t actually write the books. They hired ghostwriters to do it. They split the chapters and farmed them out to a handful of people who were probably a lot like me: struggling to get started as writers. I got the Fonts chapter and finished it quickly. Bernard liked it so much, he gave me three more chapters. I made a whopping $500 per chapter. My name doesn’t appear on the cover, but it is in the second paragraph of the acknowledgments. A very big deal in those days.

I neglected to mention how I managed to make this connection. This is an odd story, too. I’d written a book proposal about using Macs for Telecommunications. I was rejected by the four or five publishers I sent it to. (Ted Nace at Peachpit Press wrote a kind letter saying that there wasn’t a big enough market for the book. The truth is, I was ahead of the time back in those days. A year later, telecommunications really took off.) But one of those publishers sent my proposal to an agent. The agent wanted to represent me, but I was unproven. (Not enough clips.) So he referred me to Bernard who wasn’t terribly pleased (at first) about having to give me a chapter of the book. The really odd part about it is that the agent never contacted me again. To this day, I’ve never been represented by an agent.

After that book, Bernard wanted to work with me again. We wrote The Mac Shareware Emporium for Brady Books. It didn’t do very well, primarily because another book on the same topic was published two months sooner (for reasons I won’t get into here) and it was heavily promoted on AOL. (AOL was just starting to gain momentum at the time and shareware was hot.) But I did have the ultimate clip: my name on the cover of a book.

Fast forward to today. Since leaving my full-time job, I’ve written or co-authored about 60 books. (Many of those are revisions to existing, long-lived titles.) I’ve also written hundreds of articles for magazines, newsletters, and Web sites. My published books collection (including translations) fills three shelves on a bookshelf and my clips, which I don’t even bother collecting anymore, fill a file storage box. You can see a list of everything I’ve bothered to list on my Web site’s Books and Articles pages.

So you might assume that I no longer write for free. Not so. I’m obviously writing this for free. (No one is going to pay to read the things that go on in my head and in my life.) And until recently, I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web.

Why? Well, the way I see it, there are two goals to writing. One goal is to make money. That’s why I expect to be paid for writing books and most articles. I have to earn a living. But the other goal is to establish yourself as an authority and spread your name around so people will look for the other things you’ve written.

For example, suppose I write an article about Faxing with Mac OS X Panther. The article gets read by a bunch of people. Some of them may have read other articles I’ve written. They like my writing style, they feel I know what I’m talking about, they think they could benefit from reading some of my other work. Like my books. So they go to the bookstore or log into Amazon.com and buy a book. And I just earned a little bit more money on book royalties. While it doesn’t really pay to have one person do this, it would be nice to have a thousand people do this. And with Web publishing, this is possible.

If you were reading carefully, you may have noticed that I used the phrase “until recently” when mentioning that I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web. I still do write these how-to pieces, but I’ve found Web sites that are willing to pay for them. So instead of writing them for free, hoping that readers will buy books to compensate me for this work, I can now be paid for the article. And one of these Web publishers is kind enough to put links for buying my books where the article appears. So a reader can succumb to impulse buying and order the book right then and there.

Will I still write how-to pieces for free? Yes. But only when I can’t write the same pieces for paying markets. After all, I do have to make a living. And the clips box is full.

On Being a Professional Writer

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Some thoughts on writing for a living.

I make my living as a writer. And I make a very good living.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. The next question is usually, “Oh, have you had anything published?”

Hello? How can you make a living as a writer if you haven’t had anything published? After all, the money comes from the publishers. It doesn’t come out of thin air just because you spent time putting words on paper or in a word processor. Or in a blog, for that matter.

I’ve written 58 books since 1990. True, most of those books were revisions. Like my Mac OS books, which have been bestsellers since the very first edition. That was about Mac OS 8 back in 1998. I revised it for 8.5, 8.6, 9.0, 9.1, X, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3. I’m going to start work on the 10.4 edition soon.

I learned very early on in this field that if I wanted to make a living as a writer, I had to write a lot and get it all published. So I learned to write my computer books extremely quickly, giving my publishers just what they wanted pretty darn close to the day they wanted it by. Publishers like that. They don’t want to work with prima donas who won’t do things their way. They don’t want to work with writers who can’t deliver on time. Because I met the needs of my publishers, they gave me a lot of assignments. I always had work to do. And since these books only last 12 to 18 months (on average), I needed to keep working. Even a bestseller doesn’t pay a dime when it’s out of date.

I had two bestsellers: the aforementioned Mac OS books and my Quicken books. The Mac OS books continue to do well. I’m extremely proud of the latest edition, which is over 600 pages long and full of great information. The next edition will be even better. The Quicken books aren’t doing as well these days. I think the market is saturated. I have other thoughts on this, but I’ve been advised to keep them to myself and I agree it’s probably a good idea.

Bestsellers are nice. They generate big checks. I wish I could have 10 bestsellers, all at the same time. Then maybe I’d have a little house on top of Howard Mesa instead of a camper with a pair of bad batteries.

If you’ve been reading these blogs, you know that I have a summer job as a pilot. It isn’t quite over yet, but it will be soon enough. Some people think I got the job because I needed the extra money. In all honesty, the job is a money sucker. The pay is terrible and I probably spend as much money commuting to work by helicopter as I earn each day. (But heck, it sure beats the 40-minute drive in the Jeep.) And every day I’m away from my office is a day I can’t work on a book. So I’m losing money when I’m flying. Good thing I enjoy doing it.

This summer, I worked a 7 days on/7 days off schedule. But I fiddled with that a bit and got it set up as 5 days on/9 days off for much of the summer. As a result, I was able to go home and work on books. I revised my Quicken book in June. I worked on my new Word Visual QuickProject Guide in July and August. And this month, I started my new Excel Visual QuickProject Guide. I have another Word book (a revision) and my Mac OS X book (a revision) lined up after these. So there’s plenty of work to do.

I also got some work writing articles for a Web site. I can write those when I’m away at my summer job. I use my laptop. They don’t pay as well as a book, but I can knock one off in a few hours. And it’s kind of nice to write about a bunch of different things rather than just one main thing.

There are lots of people out there who want to be writers. I’ve met many of them. I was even pretty good friends with one or two. But they just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that if you want to write for a living, you must write what the publishers want so they’ll buy it. If the publishers don’t buy it, you won’t make any money on it.

And don’t talk to me about self publishing. I have a friend who went that route and still has a garage full of books. Five different titles! Self publishing is risky. There’s a huge cash outlay involved and if you don’t know how to market (or sell) your book, you’ll never make any of that money back.

Yes, the key word here is sell. Sell your writing, sell yourself.

If you do it well enough, you can have a very nice lifestyle. After all, it’s nice to be able to make your own hours, work in your pajamas, take vacation anytime you want. Those are the perks of being self-employed. But you have to work to earn those perks. Pay dues, so to speak.

What a disjointed blog entry this is! But sometimes it’s nice to write something that you don’t have to sell. I guess that’s what these blogs are all about.