The Literary Mercenary Needs Your Help!

I regret to interrupt your regularly-scheduled serving of snark and biting wit, but unfortunately there's a rather serious issue I need to let you know about.

The Literary Mercenary is in Some Serious Shit!

I do hope that got your attention.

What's Going On?

I'm glad you asked. Let me break it down for you.

Chapter One: How I Got Fucked

Many of you have heard of Yahoo! Voices, but if you haven't it's a user-content creation website where people write articles and Yahoo! pays them a fee based on how popular those articles are. Yahoo! paid authors between $1.50 and $2 for every 1k page views their content received, and for those of you who don't work on the Internet let me testify that getting 1k page views isn't easy. That said, after half a dozen years of working on this platform off and on I had finally managed to earn a triple-digit royalty check. I was ecstatic, because my views seemed to have nowhere to go but up.

Until a week after this event, where I got an email from Yahoo! informing me that they are shutting the Yahoo! Voices network down completely at the end of July.

What This Means For Me

This puts me in a bit of a tight spot. I've gotten used to having a $40 or $50 royalty check from Yahoo! over the past year and change, and as I mentioned it seemed that I'd finally managed to get into the $100 range. In addition to royalties though, the website also offered up front payments to authors whose work was likely to earn lots of page views. So all told I'm not only out an employer, but the roughly $200 a month that employer represented.

Not enough to kill me, but much like my left leg I'm going to notice when it's cut off.

The rights to my content revert to me, and I'll be finding new homes for a lot of it. However there are no websites that pay for just getting traffic with the closing of Yahoo! Voices; they only pay on ad clicks. That means that no matter how useful, intriguing, entertaining, or helpful my articles are I don't get paid if viewers don't click ads.

How many ads have you clicked during your web browsing today? That's about what I thought.

How You Can Help

No, I am not asking you for money. That said if you have it and are offering it I'll gladly carry that burden for you.

Seriously, I am that kind of friend.

For those of you who do want to help me, and of course my blog, there are a couple of different ways you can do so.

#1: Tell Your Family, Tell Your Friends

This sounds obvious, but I'm going to say it again; if you want to help out then please tell everyone you know about the blog entries you like best. Like and share them on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, and whatever other social media you've got. Bring up my blog in conversation, tell that cousin of yours who wants to be a novelist to check me out. If you have a blog, a website, a Live Journal (people still have those, right?), use it as a platform and give me a second or two in the spotlight. Put your email address in the box on the upper right, and make sure that you get my updates as soon as they happen.

The more people who come and read what I've written, the more popular my blog will get. That will make it a popular destination, increase my ad revenue, and generally keep my bills paid while I keep providing all of my readers with more content.

#2: Make a One-Time Donation

If you were walking down the street and saw a street performer you liked you'd toss a buck in his cap. If you want to do the same for me click the "Shakespeare Gotta Get Paid, Son" button on the right hand side of the screen just below the email-followers box. This will let you toss some cash right into my PayPal account as a one-time "hope this gets you through the change over" sort of donation.

It's not tax deductible, sadly. I work cheap, but I'm not a charity.

#3: Become a Patron

Patronage has been around since the first artists wanted to quit hunting in order to put murals on the cave walls. For those of you who don't know, I have a Patreon page you can visit by clicking right here. If you choose to become a patron what that means is that for every blog entry I put up you are willing to give me a certain amount of money. This is a reward for me doing good work, and an incentive for me to keep it up. Generally all I ask is $1 per entry, but if a single Washington is all you're comfortable parting with then that's fine too. Just put your monthly cap at $1, and no matter how many times I post you're only spending a buck to keep me going.

Patronage is a big step, and I know that. All my patrons have my most sincere thanks, but since those aren't worth the dregs in a pot of government-employee coffee, I'm giving all my patrons their choice of ebook for free once they sign up.

The cost of the ebook is worth at least three months of support. I'm just saying.

Thanks for stopping by! I should return you to your regularly scheduled blog post as of this coming week.

How Much Money do Writers Really Make?

One of the primary questions people often ask when I tell them I'm an author is, "How much money do you make?" Before you ever choose to ask a writer this question again, I would like you to please watch this video.

For those of you still with me who haven't lost your faith in humanity, or an eye to a nearby pen, this video sums up a great deal of the preconceived notions and the focus of the public at large in my experience. For some the very idea of writing a book is so alien (particularly to those who don't understand reading for pleasure in a world where DVDs exist) the only yardstick they have to measure the quality of a book by is what financial return it gave the author. These are the same people who, by and large, assume that only writers who are rolling in piles of money reeking in fan sweat are "real" writers. Unfortunately there is a lot that goes into how much money a given writer makes. Things like...

Connections

Becoming a successful writer is kind of like storming the beaches at Normandy. You're hungry, tired, damp, you've pissed yourself, and you're running straight into the teeth of oncoming criticism. With hundreds of explosive obstacles in your way and machine gun nests full of battle-hardened editors, it's a race to see who gets up the swell and comes through that mess without getting shredded to pieces and sent back to the sea.

Unless, of course, you're dropped behind enemy lines because you know a guy, who knows a guy.

Some of the biggest names in the game, from Christopher Paolini to Joe Hill are where they are at least partially because they had a head start. If someone has the ability to walk into a pitch meeting, or to put a manuscript right into an editor's hands after stepping over the slush pile, that is a powerful thing. Problem is that most writers don't have the ability to punch a number and talk to a family friend/uncle/mother/father and just set a time. We get to run up the beach.

Market Appeal

Sometimes there are no explaining the trends in entertainment. No one really knows why "Twilight" became a smash success, or why "50 Shades of Grey" is a monstrous blockbuster. At the same point, most people would never have predicted that a book as unpopular as the "Lord of the Rings" series would bounce back from obscurity and become a standard-setter of an entire genre. If a book was guaranteed to make these kinds of sales, then publishers would perform sexual acts for which there are no names to get the author's name on a contract.

There is no such thing as a guaranteed bestseller, unfortunately. What publishers have are past sales reports and estimates from market research. If they see a book that looks like it could be a celebrity look-alike for a big hit, then they'll often be willing to gamble on it and back it up. If a book is projected to do poorly, or if there are no readers for it (an unfortunate truth for the many talented writers who want to explore the romance between single-celled organisms fighting to create a new species in the bowels of an elder beast between the stars), then getting the word out will be nearly impossible.

Fan Base

Speaking of getting the word out, perhaps the most important a writer needs to make money is a fan base. Ever wonder why it is celebrities, even boring, stupid, D-list celebrities that only a few people have ever heard of, seem to be able to get book deals with a snap of their fingers? It's because people know who they are, and there's a slice of the population that will pay good money to see what's between those pages. The bigger the name, the more grease is on the skids from keyboard to release date. Kanye West, we're looking at you. Disapprovingly.

Speaking of names, a writer's past performance also weighs into this category. Publishers are not in the business because they want to sponsor new and experimental artists, and they aren't in it to give the struggling guy a hand up. Publishers exist to make money; they are a business. If a writer is an unproven talent then that makes him or her a risk. If they have a strong fan base and they've made money in the past, then regardless of how poorly-written or juvenile the books those writers put out are a publisher would be stupid not to keep raking in profits.

Talent

It is not an accident that this category is last on the list. I'm not cynical enough to make the case that the whole publishing industry has gone to shit and that the inmates are running the asylum. Not yet, anyway. But unproven talent it a lot like an unproven soldier. All the training, polish, test scores, and simulations in the world cannot predict exactly how someone will do once they get out in the field and the safety comes off. Even if a writer can create a great narrative that sucks in the reader and dodges every single pitfall of bad storytelling there is, it's still no guarantee that book will make any money.

So How Much Money Do Writers Make?

For the last time, it depends. If a writer goes to a major publisher then he or she might get a $5,000 advance, or a $70,000 advance on a book. Depending on how that book sells that writer might be set for life. Or if the book doesn't sell then that writer will never see another penny after the advance check. If a writer goes to a small press then there might not even be an advance; just a promise of 10% of the physical sales (if they have them) and 40-60% of the electronic sales.

A writer could become a self-publishing sensation (they do happen from time to time) and sell 100,000 copies in a year, netting $80,000 or more in sales. Or a writer could invest a huge amount of time in getting a book to that tipping point, just to watch it sink like a stone and return no more than a few bucks because friends and family gave it a pity purchase.

If a writer works for a newspaper or a magazine then there might be an annual salary, or a flat fee per piece that gets published. Short story writers might get between nothing and $30 for a story (though bigger publishers will often pay $200 or more for a single story), or if the story is featured in an anthology then they'll get a cut of the royalties.

Just like the books they put out, every writer is different. Generally speaking though the bigger a writer's company, the more famous that writer is, and the more coverage the book(s) in question get, the bigger the numbers on the tax forms will be.


If you made it this far, thank you very much for reading. Check out what's new with my work by following me on Facebook, or if you're a fan of harder drugs, find me at The Literary Mercenary on Tumblr. If you're wondering about all the stories I've published, then type my name into your friendly neighborhood bookstore's website and see what comes up (psst!, check out the anthologies Sidekicks, Noir Carnival, and Big Damn Heroines).

My Name is Neal F. Litherland, and I'm Here to Help

I've been called many things during my professional career. Since I got started in 2008 I've been a writer, an author, a journalist and a freelancer. As of this post I'm officially adding blogger to that list as well. My name is Neal F. Litherland, and I am the Literary Mercenary.

What does that mean? Well, in a nutshell it means that I'm the guy in the editorial trenches. I'm the ghostwriter who gets it done. I'm the pinch-hitter when an anthology needs a closer, or when the regular guy had to duck out because of a family emergency. I put pen to paper for anyone that's willing to pay my price, and like most starving artists I'm willing to work dirt cheap.

This blog serves a two-fold purpose, which I'm hoping my readers will appreciate. On the one hand, I want to provide what insight and advice I can offer so that other writers out there can follow the trail I've blazed and avoid many of the pitfalls I've had to fall into and then climb back out of a time or three before I learned my lesson. I want to provide tips on which publishers are accepting manuscripts, and to review those I've personally worked with so that no author sells his or her baby to a vanity press in a three piece suit. On the other hand I want to add my voice to the ongoing debates that affect us as readers and as writers. I want to weigh in with my own experience, and to share it with those who haven't had the advantage of being on both sides of the editorial desk. Lastly, I want to bitch about some of the things out there that flat out piss me off. And since it's my blog, I think I'll do just that.

The goal at the moment is to manage one entry per week, and to make sure that each entry provides actionable information on something. My latest work will be featured of course (how else am I going to let people know when something is out?), but I'll also be talking up other writers whose work I admire, and if this experiment lasts I may even have a guest post from time to time. So with that my dearest readers have a seat, and take a load off. I have got some serious shit to lay on you.

Also, for those who want the latest updates on my work and on other things I find interesting, Like my Facebook author page at www.Facebook.com/NealFLitherland.