Читать книгу Before and After the Book Deal - Courtney Maum - Страница 13
ОглавлениеI’ve heard stories of tough-love professors scaring the bejesus out of MFA students by insisting how few of them are going to “make it” on their first day of class, but few teachers move beyond this scare tactic to tell writers what it means if their art can’t fund their art. It means that you need to get a day job and financially plan. Good writing necessitates that you think like a child: dreaming, playing, and creating worlds inside your head. But in order to make money off that writing, you need to gain financial knowledge and make decisions like a grown-up, or pay someone to do the adulting for you.
“Although it has been many years since I’ve sat in a classroom, it seems to me that financial education is a hole in most curriculums,” says certified financial planner William Dobbins, who works with clients across the country. “Even the most basic of financial concepts—income, expenses, and budgeting—don’t seem to be addressed. Regardless of one’s degree of education, we are all cast out into a world that revolves—in very large part—around finances, and we’re expected to just figure it all out. Many—if not most—stumble.”
William (who, it’s worth mentioning, is married to a conceptual artist, so he’s seen the ups and downs of the professional creative life firsthand) has come up with a four-step financial planning cheat sheet for writers looking to pursue a career in the creative arts.
1. Build a budget
“Know your expenses intimately,” says William, “and work to get yourself to a place where your art income alone covers those expenses, and better yet, exceeds them.” (For most people, satisfying our expenses with “art income” will mean Getting a Day Job. More about those soon!)
Living expenses usually include rent or mortgage, utilities, a car payment or transportation costs, cell phone and Internet bills, student-loan payments, and groceries, but, of course, they can extend indefinitely depending on an individual’s situation: health insurance, gym memberships, therapist visits, medication, daycare . . . the list goes on. What one person considers a luxury might be a necessity to someone else.
2. Understand which of your expenses are deductible
“Learning which expenses are business-related and which are not is critical to your financial health,” William continues, “because Uncle Sam lets you take deductions on your tax return for business expenses. Whether you research these deductions on your own or engage a good CPA, you might be surprised at what qualifies: Part of your rent might be deductible. Part of your electric, Internet, and phone bills might be deductible, as well. Getting a handle on which expenses are deductible will save you money in the long run. Don’t give money unnecessarily to the IRS!”
3. Make saving an essential expense
Rule three is to invest early, even if you have next to nothing to invest. “If it’s one hundred dollars a year when you’re still living at home with your parents, early investment establishes a habit,” William says. “As your sources of income increase, the amount that you can save and invest only gets greater. So if the time comes that you’ve got a windfall—say a big check from your publisher—you’ve already established a habit of saving and investing.”
In terms of investments, William suggests both short- and long-term goals. “In the short term, ideally, one would have six months’ worth of expenses saved away somewhere,” he says. “That’s an ideal cushion in a savings account, something you think of as untouchable unless your source of income is disrupted.”
Over the long term, especially if you have taxable income, William advises establishing either a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA because they help build financial security for your future along with some tax benefits. Income restrictions, your age, marital status, and other considerations can impact whether a Roth IRA or traditional IRA makes better sense for you. The somewhat subjectively named RothIra.com has helpful information on the difference between these two financial plans.
4. Seek professional help
After a decade of my equally self-employed husband and I doing our own taxes to “save money,” I now understand that a real-life human tax accountant is an imperative—nay, priceless—part of a long-term financial planning strategy. In addition to adding years to our marriage, our accountant pointed out significant deductions we were entitled to as self-employed people who worked from home, and he helped us understand how we could afford health insurance, as well. When we had a child, our accountant was back to bodyguarding our modest savings account, indicating the percentage of our child’s daycare that we could write off as a business expense and other portal-to-another-world deductions that we otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
In short, the years I went without a tax accountant actually cost me money, and I would recommend that all writers hire one (I am going to do this) as soon as it makes cents.
But when is that? “If you’re no longer eligible to file a 1040-EZ tax form, that means you have income beyond a certain limit and that you’re entitled to more sophisticated deductions,” explains William. “At this point, it’s time to engage a tax professional. It’s also time for a discussion around what is the best entity form for you to take, a decision that will depend on your level of income.”
In layman’s terms, what this means is that if your income starts to roller-coaster (your book was turned into a TV show one year, or it sold like wildfire), you might want to protect yourself from the new tax codes put in place by the Trump administration by establishing one of three entities: an LLC (in which you and your business are united; the business’s profits are your profits and vice versa), an S Corporation, which is kind of like an LLC except that the income is taxed differently and in a way (if you’re up for the paperwork) that can bring you extra deductions, or a C Corporation, which is a separate living entity in and of itself that requires paychecks and a W2 and all kinds of other highfalutin stuff. Discerning which entity is right for you will depend on your level of income: LLCs are for the bronze-level earners, C Corps are for the golds. Unless you’re trained in tax or business law, you should pay a professional to help you understand which form is right for you. “Seek tax counsel,” William urges. “You don’t want to realize that you have been overpaying your taxes for years because there is no getting that money back.”
Whether you end up engaging a financial advisor or a certified financial planner, make sure that that person is a “fiduciary.” What that means is that they have signed a fiduciary oath that they won’t personally benefit from selling financial products to you. A fiduciary has your best interests at heart, rather than their own. They profit from your personal investments, so if they’re not helping you make money, they’re not going to get paid.
How will I get health insurance as a writer?
I have no idea, so let me know if you find out.
More seriously, the health insurance hurdle is one of the primary reasons that writers don’t get to write as much as they deserve to. Very few writers can afford private insurance, which puts people in a situation where they either have to take a job that they don’t want so that they can have health insurance, marry someone for health insurance, or risk illness and/or a serious accident by going without.
You might be able to find group health insurance (or information as to how to find it) through these organizations: the Authors Guild, Freelancers Union, the International Women’s Writers Guild, your local chamber of commerce, or the National Writers Union. PEN America has a resource page on its website with a lot of lesser-known organizations to help writers (and other entertainment workers) find health insurance they can afford. There are also ways to get health insurance by using loopholes in the American government. Under current tax law, self-employed people can deduct health-insurance premiums for themselves, for spouses, and for any dependents they might have. But how do you prove self-employment to the IRS? Constant documentation will be your friend in this noble quest. Some freelancers have the bad habit of mixing their personal and business expenses, so one thing you’ll need to do is to establish a separate business bank account (and debit or credit card) for business expenses alone. You’ll also need proof of wages paid for services falling in your line of work, and past tax returns proving that you’ve been producing income in this profession for some time.
That previously mentioned change in tax codes sees many self-employed people finding it financially advantageous to turn themselves into small-business entities in order to prosper from a 20 percent deduction of business income on personal tax returns for pass-through entities. The New York Times columnist Neil Irwin has an informative article on this subject called “Under the Trump Tax Plan, We Might All Want to Become Corporations” that explains how the savvy can game the system by taking advantage of “the huge gap between the tax rate paid on individual income . . . and the low rate on business income the president proposes, of 15 percent.”
Many of these same corporations can be used to acquire health insurance plans for their employees (and if you started your own corporation, you would be your own employee), but I wouldn’t advise starting a company to obtain health insurance without consulting a business-law expert versed in the current tax codes first. The Business Formation section of the DIY legal-guidance website, Nolo, can help you find a business law attorney in your area, and they have helpful articles on health insurance in an English even a writer can understand.
IMHO, the short answer is yes, until you don’t have to. I have a friend who has never published a story or essay she wasn’t paid for, and I have about a hundred friends who have only recently started to get paid for their published work.
I started out publishing anywhere that would have me, online mostly, for nothing, and I was only too happy to do so. (It’s worth mentioning that I had a corporate freelance gig at the time that made it easier for me to write for pleasure, regardless of what, or whether, I was being paid for a specific piece.)
Online writing was a positive experience when I was setting out: it helped me build relationships with editors and readers; it gave me clear feedback as to what was resonating; it established the kind of book-length projects that readers, agents, and editors might expect from me down the road. I found my current agent because of my online writing: she’d been following some of my humor columns and short stories, and wanted to know if I had something larger to share. It so happened that I did, and the rest is happy history. But do I write for free now?
The answer is rarely, and when I do it’s an occupational necessity. When you begin to publish books, you’re called upon to promote them, and this can take the form of blog posts, short essays, interviews, and other promotional items. There are exceptions, of course, but it’s ethically dicey for writers to be paid for work that promotes something they have published, so a lot of these promotional pieces will be completed for free. Regarding other requests for uncompensated writing, these are the questions I personally run through as I make my way to yes or no:
Will the assignment be emotionally draining?
When I’m assessing how much time a given assignment will take me, I’m not just thinking about the time that it will take me to research, write, and revise the piece. That’s physical time, real time, and finding it is a question of organizational management. But budgeting your emotional time is equally important. A negative collaboration can reverberate in your psyche long after the work is handed in. But how do you factor in emotional time when you might not know the editor you’re working with, or the author you’re interviewing? Pay attention to your initial correspondence. Does your interlocutor seem scatterbrained or passive-aggressive? The type to leave you for weeks without a returned email, or to request eleventh-hour edits? How many rounds of revisions will it take before you see eye-to-eye on the piece, and will you want to poke your eye out when that time comes?
If you’re not getting paid for something, it should either better you in some way (make you happy, bring you knowledge, forge important new relationships), or it should be fun. Keep in mind that it’s easier for people to share your writing online than it is in print, so you might take that into account if an online piece could bring you some positive exposure. (More about this mysterious “exposure” in a sec.)
What am I getting in return and how will I know when I have got it?
Sometimes publishing for free comes down to you owing someone a favor. Someone has written a blurb for you, and they ask you for a short guest post about writing habits on their craft blog; to me that’s a no-brainer: yes. Scratch my back, and most times, unless I’m under a particularly crazy deadline or you believe the earth is flat, I am going to scratch yours.
But if an editor promises me “exposure,” I need a way to know what “exposure” actually means. When you’re publishing online, it’s easy to track traffic and page views. Some platforms, like Medium, can even show you how far readers get into a particular piece. Publishing in print is trickier. If I’m asked to contribute to an anthology of essays for which my writing won’t be compensated, I get a little bristly. What’s the incentive? Will I get a cut of sales? Or is it payment enough to be published alongside a roster of other authors I admire? What’s the project’s audience? Is their audience mine? I’ll often write for free when it involves giving advice to other writers, for example, or if the publication is for some higher cause or charity. Generally, though, if I feel resentful of the ask before I’ve even started writing it, I know I should say no.
Once you start earning money for your work, I think you should keep earning it. On social media, the author Alexander Chee has been forthright about the reasons he no longer writes for free. “My experience thus far is that if I give writing away, people don’t respect it,” he wrote in his TinyLetter. “I have been a writer online since the beginning of it and my experience now, for the last fifteen years, is that people with a new website and a need for content have often treated my writing, and me, badly. If they can’t pay for my fee, they often can’t pay for other things, like copyediting and editing, fact-checking, and design. They take it down off the Internet without warning, or they change things, or they might even make it look shitty. Or they forget to invite me to the big fancy party they throw after inviting people who haven’t done anything for them once they’re doing better after first getting the work I gave them for cheap.”
Alex has come up with a fee that he will not write for less than, a sum he views as an “emotional boundary” that protects his ability to work well and to do so happily. “When I accept less than that,” he continued in his TinyLetter, “I get angry, and I self-sabotage. I’m fifty years old. I work another job, as a professor, and I’m a busy literary citizen, as the expression goes, judging contests and showing up for my causes. I also have bills to pay. That all takes time I don’t get back. And if I’m writing an essay based on my experiences, well, I don’t get those experiences back either. I have started counting the working years I have left against the projects I want to write, and yes, that may not include your ask that you are hoping I won’t ask for money for.”
Alex sees asking for pay as part of literary activism. Even if the answer is no, writers should ask for pay so that the asker starts expecting to be asked.
Can I call myself a writer if I’m not making money from my writing yet?
Deciding when you “earn” the right to call yourself a writer is intrinsically linked, for many people, with their definition of success. If it’s getting a book traditionally published, maybe you say you’re a writer when your book has an ISBN. If you think successful writers get paid for their work, perhaps you call yourself a writer the first time you get a check for something you have written. If you equate success with establishing a readership, you’re a writer when you publish something that is widely shared. The steely-nerved among us will consider themselves writers when they start taking risks. “I began calling myself a writer as soon as I had a book-length work in progress,” says author Lara Lillibridge. “I didn’t get paid for being a mother, so claiming an identity apart from money didn’t seem weird. It was about the time spent and passion for it.”
And there it is, the evil word that makes identifying as a writer even more fraught: money. When people ask you what you do for a living, they’re also asking you how you earn a living, and most writers don’t have any idea what they’ll make from one month to the next. “Eight books in and I struggle to say it out loud 80 percent of the time,” admits YA author Beth Ain. “I call myself a writer in the immediate wake of a deal and then not again until the next one.” With two novels behind her, author Polly Dugan also struggles with fluctuating confidence. “I’m still trying to get comfortable calling myself a writer,” Polly says. “Mostly because I’ve been stalled for so long on book three that the first two seem like they were written by a different person.”
First things first: you have the right to remain silent in any conversation—real or digital—pertaining to your work. You don’t need to make it easier for anyone to understand you, and you certainly don’t need to play existential how-I-make-a-living Twister for a stranger. You don’t even need to tell people what you’re working on, if they ask. If you choose to engage, come up with a line to protect yourself from priers. Something along the lines of: “I’m working really hard on something, but it’s too much in my head right now. I’ll be excited to tell you more about it when it’s done,” might work.
The longer you go working on something that you’re not being paid for, the more that people (even friends and family) will start to doubt this mysterious, time-consuming book. So if you’re in the long-distance club, arm yourself with peers. There’s no shortage of writers who took their sweet time getting their books right: Tayari Jones spent six years on her novel An American Marriage, an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Donna Tartt works at the breakneck speed of one book a decade, and you don’t hear her readers complaining (or the Pulitzer Prize committee, either). The childhood fans of J. R. R. Tolkien had to wait through an entire world war for him to perfect The Lord of the Rings, his follow-up to The Hobbit, and it took Gary Snyder forty years before his epic poem cycle, Mountains and Rivers Without End, was published in book form.
If you are going to be deep-diving for many years into a project, don’t forget to tend to the seeds of your career. Although it’s romantic to consider going off the grid for ten years only to reemerge with a game-changing tome, the writers who applied for fellowships and residencies, published essays, fostered writerly friendships, and/or deepened their presence on social media in a meaningful way during the decade(s) spent writing their debuts are competitively equipped to find a publisher when they finally type, “THE END.”
Speaking of The End: you should try to reach it if you have it in you. “Not finishing the novel would have dealt my psyche a blow whose imagined pain was worse than the considerable frustrations of facing my limitations every day,” wrote Matthew Thomas of the decade-long fight to finish his debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves. This quote (which appears in the book’s author questionnaire) actually inspired Lisa Ko to finish the novel she’d clocked seven years on, the bestselling, prize-winning, took-her-around-the-world-on-book-tour book, The Leavers.
Whether your book takes you two years or twenty, whether you get a million bucks for it or it never finds an editor, you are the only person who gets to decide when—and why—you call yourself a writer. Once you do, don’t stop.
Supplementing your income, a.k.a. the side hustle
Unlike full-time teaching or editorial positions, there is no annual salary for “writing.” Most of the creative writers I know seesaw between perilous financial comfort and living hand-to-mouth, and this includes writers that the outside world judges as successful. With many independent presses offering advances in (and under) the $5,000 range, it’s virtually impossible to live on such an advance unless you (or someone else) is supplementing your income. Given that they are divided up over a number of years, and that significant percentages have to go to a writer’s agent, the IRS, and regular bill payments, even giant advances net a writer a yearly salary on par with that of an associate professor, but this “salary” comes without health insurance and it has a stop date: you can’t continue to earn such a wage unless you are writing, selling, and promoting new books every year. This is a grueling pace.
Accordingly, many writers (most writers) take on side hustles: short- or long-term gigs that supplement their incomes while keeping their minds engaged. For creative writers, the industries within which they can apply their skills are manifold indeed. Author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich found themself writing copy for a marinara-sauce jar label when the owners of an Italian restaurant reached out to them after reading a Modern Love column about snake ownership and sexual identity that they wrote in 2011. (Admittedly, it takes a few leaps to get from snakes to marinara, but the restaurant made those leaps.) Author Annie DeWitt wrote entries for The Princeton Review’s Best Law Schools while she was at Columbia (“It became the underground side hustle for a lot of MFAers,” she admits). Rolf Yngve helps former inmates write their résumés through a veterans’ program called Leave No One Behind, and author Nelly Reifler was a monthly columnist for Electrical World Magazine—a column, by the way, that she was in no way educated to write. (“The editor said it was easier to teach good writers how electricity works than to teach electrical engineers to write well,” Nelly says.)
The host of the Rally Reading Series, Ryan D. Matthews, once wrote birthday party guides for Party City that focused on the plight of stressed moms with little time (Ryan remembers “Yoda Soda” as a particularly inspired article of his), and author H. W. Peterson taught writing to engineering students (they’re coming for your job, Nelly!) until she found a gig writing dialogue for Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, through a contract company she still works for today.
Sex sells, but it sells better with good copy, and so it is that many of our writer friends have side hustles in erotica. The writer Kara Leighann wrote DVD cover copy for gay soft-core films like Hunkboat 1 (and 2 and 3), Joyland publisher Emily Schultz wrote copy for a cable news show where the anchors stripped while reporting, and—while not exactly erotic, unless used in a certain manner—author Amy Bloom wrote descriptions for a line of body products scented like baked goods. (Shout out to edible products, y’all—I wrote about them for a year at Victoria’s Secret, myself.)
As suggested by these examples, copywriting can be an energetic side gig for writers who know how to meet deadlines. Editing, proofreading, translating (if you speak more than one language fluently), ghostwriting, sensitivity reading, tutoring, and public relations work are equally great options, but how do you get these gigs?
First of all, you’ll need a track record of your writing and/or other creative work. An author website is a good place to include links and excerpts, and it will spare you the hassle of sending potential clients your ten-gigabyte portfolio. The social-networking platform LinkedIn has a reputation as the weird uncle of social media, but employers do look for full- and part-time candidates on this site, so it behooves you to keep an up-to-date professional profile there. At the time of writing, Sophia Amoruso, the brain behind the Girlboss empire, announced that she was starting a LinkedIn-like platform exclusively for women, so keep your eyes out for that. Most of the writers cited above found their gigs through personal connections, friends, colleagues, or people they were already working with, but I’ve personally had success with job-recruitment agencies like 24 Seven Talent or Artisan Creative, myself. (Make sure to specify whether you are looking for full-time or part-time work and whether you’re willing to commute or relocate when you sign up with one of these sites.)
Of course, many writers supplement any income they are earning from their writing with teaching positions, but it’s important to note that you will need either an MFA or a published book (or both) to apply for most creative-writing positions in the academic market—a beast that we will tussle with in book two. If we can’t actually help you find a side hustle, at least you know you’re gonna need one. Blogger Elna Cain’s informative article on finding freelance writing gigs on ElnaCain.com, as well as the online resource center for writers, The Write Life, are both great places to start.
In After the Book Deal, we’ll explore the finer points of going on the academic market, but at this juncture (especially if you’re in an MFA program or contemplating attending one), it’s worth asking yourself if teaching is the right career move for your future. Teaching is a popular—one might even say default—option for writers and graduates with humanities degrees, but with more articles and statistics coming out about the restricted job market for MFA and PhD grads, a young writer could be forgiven for asking why.
“I’m currently grading final papers and so I’m not sure that I should commit any of my feelings about teaching to print,” wrote one college teacher who preferred to remain anonymous, “other than to suggest that writers explore ALL POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES before deciding that teaching is the best career choice for a writer.”
A few benefits up-front: teaching allows writers to stay engaged with the subject and discipline they’re passionate about; it grants access to other great minds and minds that might be even greater with a little bit of encouragement; it provides exceptional networking opportunities along with a supportive community of like-minded people who understand the ups and downs of the writing life. And, of course, there is the lure of having your summers off to write. Except, hold on. Without even addressing a reality in which responsibilities/life/offspring exist, the truth is that most writers (especially adjuncts) have to use their summers to supplement their income, prepare the fall semester’s courses if they have a teaching job, or try to find one if they don’t.
For most writers who enter academia, landing a tenure-track teaching position is the Holy Grail. Job security! A craftsman bungalow! Sabbaticals! Tweed coats! It’s worth slaving away as an adjunct for a couple years in order to make it to nirvana, right?
Unfortunately, young writers and students aren’t indoctrinated to the reality of just how hard these tenured (and tenure-track) positions are to get. In an article for Vox, a former tenure-tracker named Oliver Lee put things into perspective. “I can’t overstate how rare this opportunity is: Tenure-track jobs at large state universities are few and far between. Landing one without serving a postdoctoral appointment or working as a visiting assistant professor is about as likely as landing a spot on an NBA team with a walk-on tryout—minus the seven-figure salary, naturally.”
