John Scalzi posts awesome advice for writers on the topic of money. Why?
Because it very often appears to me that regardless of how smart and clever and interesting and fun my fellow writers are on every other imaginable subject, when it comes to money — and specifically their own money — writers have as much sense as chimps on crack. It’s not just writers — all creative people seem to have the “incredibly stupid with money” gene set for maximum expression — but since most of creative people I know are writers, they’re the nexus of money stupidity I have the most experience with. It makes me sad and also embarrasses the crap out of me; people as smart as writers are ought to know better.
Here are his top 10 – read the whole post for the details:
1. You’re a writer. Prepared to be broke.
2. Don’t quit your day job.
3. Marry (or otherwise shack up with) someone sensible with money, who has a real job.
4. Your income is half of what you think it is.
5. Pay off your credit cards NOW and then use them like cash later.
6. Don’t have the cash for it? You can’t have it.
7. When you do buy something, buy the best you can afford — and then run it into the ground.
8. Unless you have a truly compelling reason to be there, get the hell out of New York/LA/San Francisco.
9. Know the entire writing market and place value on your own work.
10. Writing is a business. Act like it.
I continue to be amazed at how many people romantize the writing trade. John does a good job cutting to the brutal realities.
(hat tip to the always-provocative libertarian Coyote Blog.)
Thanks, Ben, for confirming that I’ve long suspected.
I’ll confess to writing a word or two for money. And, like anything else I do for money, I treat it like a business.
But it seems like my approach is very uncommon in the writing world. In fact, my recent question to a fiction writer about the ROI from her blog was met with more than a little bit of, shall we say, surprise. (Sweetie, you’re writing your blog to show off your writing skills, and you can’t even quantify the work that has come from it?)