Monday Madness: Make Sure You Love It

The inspiration for this post came to me at 2:35 a.m. Sunday morning as my brother and I were trying to get back to Arkansas. At this point we'd been on the road for 22 hours straight (driving to Minnesota and back) to return my nephew home. What a way to end a honeymoon, eh?

But as I was nodding away over a cup of convenience store (and mildly disgusting) coffee, an interesting point crossed my mind:

There's a reason writers are not paid hourly. I just received the check for my short story ($25) and it boiled down to me earning about one dollar for every hour I worked on that story. At minimum wage I would have gotten $181.25. (I like the latter amount better.) However, if you think about how much time you spend working on a NOVEL...OMG.

If you're lucky or extremely talented/famous or all of the above, you might get a good hourly wage once that advance rolls in. However, I'm sure that most of us writers are always going to be underpaid in the scheme of things. (That's why you REALLY have to love what you're doing.)

So, let's say that you're one of those blissfully organized writers and write for at least two hours a day every day. That's 730 hours a year. That does not include the time you spend brainstorming or editing. So, for the sake of fairness, let's add another 730 hours to that total. (And, really, we all know that's being frugal.) That's a total of 1,460 hours. (Yep, that's totally being conservative. Most people I know work on their stories WAY MORE than that.) If you work on your novel for one year, just for the writing/editing/revising stage, you would need an advance of at least $10,585 to earn minimum wage for your efforts. (Note that the total STILL does not include querying/researching agents and editors, etc.)

The question is, can you live off of $10,585? (Sure, if you live in a cave, snub modern conveniences and shoot your dinner.)

Now, if you're a full-time writer, working 40 hours a week (including all your revising, editing, querying, etc.) then you would work 2,080 hours a year. Which means you would need a $15,080 advance to make minimum wage. In the light of some authors receiving six figure advances, you might scoff at my paltry number. But in most cases, a fledgling author is more likely to see one of my calculations on their advance than six figures. So, repeating some words to the wise: Don't quit your day job AND make sure you love writing...because all those sleepless nights and aching fingers might not pay off in the way you expected.