I have a friend in her fifties who has recently left a good career to write for a living. She is unmarried and on her own and I am concerned about her. She is convinced she will make more money as an author.
She has given up on a traditional publisher to go with a POD and plans to do all her own promotions. I admire her passion, but she has no real income except her savings which are dwindling and I'm not sure she is being realistic. From what I read on here and elsewhere, it sounds like promotion is pretty much a financial loss for a long time for sure and possibly forever. She says, "But it's deductible," and I think "from what?" I know you can write off those expenses for three years, but eventually you have to earn something from your writing from which to make the deductions.
And the profit to time and expense ratio seems to require a huge investment before any accruing any income.
I don't want to discourage her. I have actually made money from writing, but not from writing anything I really wanted to write. I wrote millions of dollars in government proposals to build a large military contracting firm, but creatively, I am still waiting for my first million.
I have made zilch from my poems, a couple hundred from my songs, a few hundred from magazine articles, I wrote a novel that I've never even submitted, and I make a few thousand from each of my plays (which I would do for the sheer joy of it). But the actual hourly income for my creative writing is somewhere around minimum wage and I have a graduate degree in creatie writing. Also, I don't do any promotion for my stuff except my puny little website.
I certainly see the value of affecting a taret population, but I'm afraid this woman who is depending on her writing as her only source of income is in trouble.
Am I missing something?
smile

[ February 11, 2005, 06:20 PM: Message edited by: smilinize ]