In an interview with The Guardian, author Maggie Nelson discusses the alternative MFA she earned by moving to New York to participate in a punk-poetry scene catalyzed by the poet and activist Eileen Myles. “I wasn’t the kind of writer who was saying, ‘Oh if only The New Yorker would publish me,’ ” Maggie remembers in that article. “Self-publishing wasn’t what you did because you were rejected by HarperCollins; it was what you did because it was fun to make zines and run around with them.”
Speed and affordability are benefits of on-demand publishing, but looking back, a lot of self-published authors fear they clicked PUBLISH far too fast. “One thing I regret is not using an outside editor for content and grammar,” says the writer Tony Thompson, who self-published his first memoir Love, Fate and Afghanistan with the now-defunct publishing platform CreateSpace. “Some things in the book could have been expanded on, some things could have been shorter, and I see now how an editor could have helped me with these things.”
Another frustration Tony had was the amount of energy he put into promoting his books versus the return on his investments. On the advice of a CreateSpace employee, Tony advertised on Facebook, Amazon, and on the listserve of his college graduating class. He created an author website, and he occasionally attended book fairs where he would sell two or three books per fair. “Honestly, I’ve had more sales come about from taking my own email list and writing people about my book than I have through advertising,” Tony says. Disenchanted with the lack of success from the promotional tools he was spending money on, Tony left Facebook and let his author website lapse. With the disappearance of the publishing platform he was used to, Tony doesn’t think that he’ll self-publish a book again.
There are success stories in self-publishing, and Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet is one of them. Jarett suspected that his brutish diatribe about the Silicon Valley start-up scene was going to be a tough sell for commercial publishers, and after a bunch of failed submissions, he decided he was right. But he also knew the book had a potential that the editors weren’t seeing. Along with two friends, Jarett founded the indie press We Heard You Like Books in part to publish his own debut, and also—as he describes in a profile at Publishers Weekly—“to make the world safer for its freaks.”
An Instagram-friendly book title, a shiny blurb from Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that Jarett had the resources to work with an outside publicist helped get his novel into some important hands. Within three weeks of its publication, the book had taken off: Dwight Garner reviewed it in The New York Times, Bret Easton Ellis shared a photograph of him reading the book in bed, foreign rights started to sell, and Jarett was being interviewed by international publications like The Guardian and The Irish Times.
The way that you feel about your self-publishing experience will largely have to do with the reasons you self-published in the first place. If you are hoping to make money, you are going to be disappointed regardless of how you get your book out. (To put things in perspective, in December of 2018, BookScan showed that I Hate the Internet had sold 5,839 copies in its American print edition since its publication in 2016. I imagine that a great deal of this book’s sales were made up of ebooks, a format that BookScan doesn’t include, but still, this isn’t a lot of copies for a book considered as a sleeper hit.) If your decision to self-publish is motivated by your desire to share your work with others, you might end up having a positive experience. Sure, there are people who are going to look down at you for self-publishing, but most readers—and especially people who aren’t writers—don’t care how you publish something; they’re amazed you managed to sit down and write a book at all.
If you do think that your project has commercial value, however, you’re better off revising it than publishing it yourself. Most publishers won’t offer on manuscripts that have already been published in other forms.
I’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