Crime Doesn’t Pay – Does Writing?
It is, unfortunately for many of us in the UK, tax time. Self-employed tax time, anyway: unlike our cousins across the pond, the government normally just taxes us as we go rather than making us… guess, as far as I can tell. But alas, for we freelancers and writers and all such others, we do have to do paperwork. (But at least it’s better than in America. Sorry, guys.)
Now the details of my tax return would a) make for an extremely boring blog post and b) probably reveal quite a lot of personal information that I really shouldn’t stick on the internet, so I’m not going to do that. But as I add up things and look at spreadsheets, I am confronted by a harsh reality of being an author – something which many others have also eloquently stated, if you follow writing types on the social medias.
Basically, this job don’t pay well at all. Or at least not easily.
From selling books last tax year, I made about £60. There are many advantages to using KDP to publish books on Amazon, as I do – they take care of printing, distribution, all those other things that would doubtless be more expensive if I did them myself – but the royalties aren’t much. Selling a single short story – which thankfully I have done this week, and with a bit of luck might do again – brings me more income than a year’s worth of selling books.
The main issue, of course, is that I’ve not sold that many books. I’m definitely selling more and more as time goes on (and as I have more books in my catalogue to sell). This month, in fact, I sold over 300 copies of The Blackbird and the Ghost! I was in the top 10 for one specific category of free ebooks on Amazon for a hot minute!
Well, I say ‘sold’. They were mostly free, because I put it on sale. I’m hoping that a fraction of those readers will enjoy Blackbird enough to pick up some of my other books. But I have no way of knowing if they will. It is, at least, good exposure. The more people pick up one of my books, the more likely one might leave a review; the more reviews or other little bits of publicity I get, the higher the chance I might sell another book.
I’m well aware that I’m not great at self-promotion, and I’m always trying to find new ways to push my books. But frustratingly one of the best metrics is reviews and ratings, on Goodreads and Amazon and all those things, and most readers just don’t leave those. (Hell, I don’t leave enough of those on the books I read, even though I’m trying to do so as much as possible nowadays.) Having such an important thing be essentially out of my control is frustrating, to say the least.
It’s important to state that I do have a full-time job, and another freelance job. This is not my primary income. But I’d sure as hell like it to be, some day. I want people to just read my writing and enjoy it, most of all, but it’d be wonderful to be able to do this full-time, or even just more part-time than it currently is.
I’m aware this post has been a bit of a downer. Don’t worry. If anything I’m just even more motivated to try harder and keep clawing my way up the mountain that is being an author. The size of that mountain has just been brought into perspective, that’s all.
But if you’ve read one of my books, drop a review. There are, gratifyingly, hundreds of you at this point. Let me know what you think, and let other people know too. I don’t care if you loved it or hated it – either way, I want you to tell me.
Everything helps.
