So You Wanna Get Paid?

If you want to make a lot of money writing, I have some bad news for you. It’s not that it’s impossible for you to succeed, but your odds are so low that you might as well do something more worthwhile. For instance, I have calculated that I’ve spent well over 15,000 hours in my life writing. I’ve published a poem and a short story, written eight novel-length works, and even published more than a million words in a personal blog. Counting the money I’ve been paid at my job for various writing projects, I can realistically say that I’ve made around a thousand dollars writing in my lifetime

Because writers tend not to be good at math, that means I’ve earned approximately $1,000 for 15,000 hours of work, which calculates out to seven cents per hour. If I round up.

Consider how much time and effort is put into a novel.

But don’t just consider me as an example. Consider how much time and effort is put into a novel. Suppose you can write at 2,000 words per hour (a very fast pace, but doable). Suppose that you write a novel that ends up being 80,000 words long. That means you’ve put in 40 hours. Now you have to edit it, rewrite, edit, rewrite, and hammer it out.

Supposing you are incredibly gifted and manage to get a publishable novel in a mere three drafts, by the third draft you’ll have spent at least 200 hours writing and editing your novel. It’s not going to happen that fast, but we’re talking fiction here so let’s pretend. At this point, you mail it off and because we’re still making up everything, suppose that an agent immediately snaps it up and you get the contract done in a month, they ship it to a publisher and within that following month they offer you a $5,000 advance. You think, “Wow, I’ve gotten $5,000 for only 200 hours of work!”

But notice that even in this extremely truncated timeframe, you’ve gone more than two months without money to get that $5,000. Let’s call it an even 2 months. You’re only getting $2,500 per month. If you earn $16/hour, you make more than that for the same 2 months.

Even so, you only worked 200 hours in this fictional example. But earning $5,000 in 200 hours is still only $25 per hour. While that’s better than waiting tables, at that rate you’ll still only earn $52,000 per year…and you have to write a new novel with the same advance every 200 hours to maintain that income. Considering that a 40 hour workweek gives you approximately 2,080 hours per year, this means you’ll need to write, publish, and sell 10.4 books per year.

If money is the reason you want to write, become an accountant instead.

Realistically, you’ll spend over a thousand hours to get your book ready, it’ll be rejected numerous times, finally accepted years after you first sent it out to an agent, then offered a crappy contract because no one knows who you are. If money is the reason you want to write, become an accountant instead.

Writing needs to be done for its own sake, because it will cost you. It will cost you time, sweat, and cash. But if writing is what you are, this is not a sacrifice; this is your passion. And if you happen to get compensated for it, all the better. But write for yourself, not a paycheck. Writing for money without the joy of the art itself is one of the stupidest ways to spend your time.