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