[SPEAKER_04]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: Season 20, Episode 47
[SPEAKER_04]: this is writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now go right, all the eggs and all the baskets.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Mary Robinette.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Don Lawn.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Dan.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Aaron.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Howard.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is my episode for our book Now Go Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: All the eggs and all the baskets is a presentation that I do and now it's a chapter in a book.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now it's an episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what this is basically about
[SPEAKER_03]: So, in 2014, I was on top of the world, I was very successful, I had two successful series, I had a New York Times bestseller, one of my books who's being made into a movie,
[SPEAKER_03]: I foolishly assumed that I had made it and that I would never have to struggle again.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it turns out that that's not how it works.
[SPEAKER_03]: So my next series was a flop, my next standalone was a flop.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of my publishers stopped promoting me entirely.
[SPEAKER_03]: The movie was made and it was very good, but nobody saw it, because it got released in like fourth theaters nationwide.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, and so the career that I thought was secure had kind of fallen apart overnight.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet my kids still wanted to eat three times a day.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I had still at a mortgage to pay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I realized that I had
[SPEAKER_03]: kind of foolishly assumed that the level of success I had attained was permanent and that everything would be easy from here on out and to go back to the episode title, I'd put all my eggs in that one basket of novel writing and then novel writing kind of dried up for me very quickly and I
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the episode where we tell you about all the other ways to get paid for writing words.
[SPEAKER_04]: So this is I'm glad that we're doing this and that it's in the book because that's one of the things that I found as a freelancer that I expect.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm always diversifying my income stream, but I see people who have a day job who think that they will be able to leave the day job and go
[SPEAKER_04]: They are unprepared, even the ones who are having success are unprepared for the dips and valleys of income stream.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, yeah, all the eggs and all the baskets.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so my first step in this was to try to figure out what else I could do in the novel writing space.
[SPEAKER_03]: And more or less what that came down to is I had a couple of manuscripts.
[SPEAKER_03]: My regular publishers didn't want them and I decided if I couldn't sell to the markets I was already in that I was going to branch out and try some new markets.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I took two genres that I'd always wanted to write in before, which were historical and middle grade.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I guess middle grade isn't a genre so much as a market, but I figured I would try those.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wrote one of each and I said whichever one takes off will take off.
[SPEAKER_03]: The middle grade was a huge, like top three bestseller on audible.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the historical has been read by maybe 15 people.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was a little bit of a 15 and I really love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love it, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it was clear that I was not finding much success there, so I started writing a lot more middle grade.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was the first step in kind of clawing my way back up the latter again, out of that valley of success.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then other than that,
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of it was just about figuring out, like you said, diversifying income streams.
[SPEAKER_03]: What are some other ways that I could get paid for words?
[SPEAKER_03]: I started writing for RPG companies, I started writing for video games, I started writing for a TV company, writing in writing for a TV show.
[SPEAKER_03]: all these different things started taking on tie-in work which I had never really done before.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's a lot of other options.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so rather than just me talk the whole time, what are some other places?
[SPEAKER_03]: What are some non-novel places that you all sell words to?
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, I, I sometimes sell, um, I have been fortunate enough, this is not an option that's available to everyone, but I have been, uh, sold like essays, uh, New York Times, Washington Post, I've been lucky in that regard.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's when I hadn't considered.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then the other thing that I do is my Patreon, which again, I met a point in my career where I can do that.
[SPEAKER_04]: But even when I was starting out and the Patreon was very small,
[SPEAKER_04]: When your income stream is like measured in a lot of money coming randomly from different places If you're getting 50 bucks to under dollars to 50, you know, that's that's that's money you can use If you can get pizza money 30 times a month You've now paid the grocery bill.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah
[SPEAKER_04]: But the trick that I have found is to, my thing has always been that I want to be able to turn down the gigs I don't want to do.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so when I'm setting myself up for something like a Patreon, making sure that it is geared so that it is stuff that I want to do that does not get in or does not get in the way of things I want to do.
[SPEAKER_04]: So like my you know I have I enjoy teaching so teaching one class a month that's you know a lot of it is stuff we've talked about on writing excuses but it's it's something I enjoy doing it's not a big time commitment and it's very scalable and one of the things I made a mistake early on was doing things that just weren't scalable or that got in the way of the creative work I wanted to be doing
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, non-fiction can be a great place to start with that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, whether that's a Patreon, whether that's a newsletter, and then trying to get things placed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, one thing that's generally true, although this has changed a little bit as the internet continues to evolve, unfortunately.
[SPEAKER_02]: But outside of genre spaces, the pay per word is usually much higher than what we're used to seeing in terms of what people pay for short fiction in the science fiction fantasy space.
[SPEAKER_02]: So short-fiction writing, essays, long-form non-fiction, all those can be really useful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Podcasts is a great option depending on the kind of thing that you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: My friend Richard had a gosh, $300,000 a year job with a fortune, whatever, 100 company.
[SPEAKER_01]: and lost it through mergers and acquisitions and whatever else and found himself at loose ends and but he knew somebody at Forbes and he started writing
[SPEAKER_01]: basically blog posts for Forbes and the amount of money they were willing to pay for someone who knows how to write and knows a couple of things about these businesses and and it happens to have you know friends all over that he can call.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was suddenly making living writing
[SPEAKER_01]: five or six hundred words a day.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I forgot about that that I was there was a point when we were living in New York.
[SPEAKER_04]: We had moved there thinking that Rob Wood, my husband was an audio engineer and windmaker because those two jobs make sense together.
[SPEAKER_04]: But we thought he would go into doing film and television when we got to New York.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that was when there was a writer's strike, so there was no production work happening at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I was supporting us on my puppetry and writing income in Manhattan, which was a thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I forgot that I, one of my income streams was essentially blog posts I was writing
[SPEAKER_04]: And they were paying me money to do like top, you know, top five fantasy films with dragons like the most granular list you could possibly develop.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, one thing I do want to flag is we're having this conversation is, you know, we are also in a moment, you know, pulling back the curtain a little bit in a necessary way that we are recording this in summer 2025 right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: the internet over the last year in media business in general have been in a period of enormous flux and change.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Over the past few years, we've really seen the collapse of the online ad model, which has impacted almost every content website across the internet.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're seeing major websites going down, being acquired, losing audience and having trouble making ends meet.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're seeing opportunities to publish these kind of blog posts, these kind of news articles going away.
[SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, what we've seen is an incredible,
[SPEAKER_02]: growth in sort of indie options in terms of, you know, journalist-led newsletters, you know, subscriber-led podcast, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We're moving away from this big, like, here's I-O-9, where you get all your science fiction fantasy news to follow this creator or this small collective of creators, whether that's, you know, a defector or a four-four media or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: People, people that you subscribe to and support directly, and that's where you're getting
[SPEAKER_02]: you can use these big media platforms to build your audience and get paid for that do starting to need to build your own brands online and getting direct access that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're seeing this shift in that marketplace happening right now.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I have a question.
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to ask you, Dan, but I'm going to ask it after our break.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: So before the break, Dung One was talking about how the market has shifted a lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: I am curious, do you think, if you had to make those decisions now about trying ghost ghost station?
[SPEAKER_04]: Ghost station or zero-j.
[SPEAKER_04]: When you were trying to do that, do you think that you would do the same strategy or do
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, where I to do it today, um, honestly, I would probably not do either one, because the next thing I was going to talk about, uh, that we, is, uh, I became a professional game master, which is not writing, but is still storytelling, uh, and I supported my family pretty much solely on that for two years.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I gave that up basically when I started working with Brandon's company, but where I back in the situation where I was looking for work again, I would absolutely go back to doing that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love to doing that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have become more
[SPEAKER_03]: amenable to publishing my own stuff over the years.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I self-pubbed, ghostation in print, and zero G in print.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't think I'm very good at marketing myself as an indie author is what I have discovered.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you are indie, that's like 60% of your job is self-promotion.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's not a skill I have developed yet.
[SPEAKER_03]: Though clearly one, I would work on developing if I didn't have a real job.
[SPEAKER_01]: Clear back in 2006, I was at Emerald City Comic Con and there was a panel of web cartoonists including the Penny Arcade guys and Robert Koo, who two years previously.
[SPEAKER_01]: had basically come up to them and said, you're not monetizing yourselves well, I can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm worth $90,000 a year, but I'll work for you for free, for a year, and at the end of that year, if you can't pay my salary, it's because I failed and you won't need to, and I'll quit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Penny Arcade went on to launch the Penny Arcade Expo, which is one of the biggest entertainment expos in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's two or three of the biggest entertainment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, yeah, it's huge.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was all Robert Coo.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even just two years into his run with them, we were hanging on his every word.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that panel, and one of the things that he said was, never let any single revenue channel account for more than 40% of what you make.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hate advice that begins with never, and so turning it on its head, what I would offer is strive to ensure that you have enough revenue streams,
[SPEAKER_01]: you're not losing half your money and and I thought, you know, in the early days, early days, through 2012, 2014, with Schlok Mercenary, I thought I had accomplished that because we had ad revenue and we had another kind of ad revenue and another kind of ad revenue and we had books
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and all of it was pinned to Schlokmersknery.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, well, Schluck mercenary has now finished its 20 year run and we're still making money on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, making most of our money on it, but I'm in a situation very similar to yours in which gee, I thought I had my eggs in a bunch of different baskets, but all of the baskets were in the back of the same truck.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So what are the other things that the other lessons that
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the the first main lesson is what how we're just articulated make sure that you have lots of different revenue streams that you don't have a majority of it all tied up in one thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other one is I think more psychological you have to change the way you think about yourself and the way you think about your career.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, and this was difficult for me because I had always, you know, since second grade when I told my parents I was going to write books, I had always thought of myself as an author, I'd always thought of myself as a novelist.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it felt like selling out in a way to start doing other things that were not that.
[SPEAKER_03]: and I really had to redefine myself, not as an author exclusively, but as a writer in general.
[SPEAKER_03]: Someone who can write, you know, these essays or these nonfiction things or go to RPG companies and video game companies and write for them.
[SPEAKER_03]: writing tie-in-fiction was a very selfish hurdle to get over because I wanted to write my ideas, I don't want to write your ideas, but if you are going to make a living in this industry, that's a lot of what most professional authors I think need to do is branch out and write words for other people in addition to writing for themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think this is something that I struggle with a lot as somebody who also writes a lot for a lot of different types of people is that there's sometimes I think of perspective in the industry that like certain types of writing don't count as writing like somehow that's not really writing I remember being on a panel with some folks talking about like making money as a writer and they were all novelists.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so it was basically like making money as a novelist was the it true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was like, I'm, you know, all I do is write or tea trading like that is my entire career is writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I felt like people were like, well, yeah, but like none of that's from novel writing and I'm like, that is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't write any novels.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in some ways I'm like, that's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means like I've managed you while avoiding, if I wrote a novel too, I'd just be rich, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like I think it is there's so much like what is the self like what is the image of what it means to be a writer and I think like divorcing yourself from that is is always helpful because there are a lot of things that we think of that are Being a writer that are not great that are that can be harmful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember a friend one saying this is a very
[SPEAKER_00]: weird pivot that she drank more because she thought that like writers would like end every day with like, I don't know, like a couple whiskey and writing and then was like, why am I drinking so much?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because I came up with this idea when I was 10 and now I have to like bury that idea because like my liver would appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that kind of thing like stepping away from that because at the end of the day, like, you
[SPEAKER_00]: you're the only one you have to live with.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you have to pay your bills and the people who may or may not think X about your career are not gonna be there with your landlord or your mortgage company.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the big kind of clickover for me was when I stopped thinking of all of these other writing projects and all of this freelance work as
[SPEAKER_03]: slumming and something I was forced to do and started thinking of it as something that was great, something that was expanding my horizons and my abilities.
[SPEAKER_03]: Today I work as the Vice President of Dragons Tale with Brandon Sanderson, who's one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: people all the time ask how you can get that job.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's because of this, it's because he came to me not because I've known him for a long time, but because I had a ton of experience in a ton of different areas that he doesn't have.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, well, we eventually want to do TV shows of, you know, the Cosmere stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I've worked in TV.
[SPEAKER_03]: We want to make role-playing games.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've worked in role-playing games.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every aspect of writing and the writing industry, I have dipped my toe into, which made me a really appealing candidate for this huge entertainment company.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've written ad copy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: When I did the collaboration with him, he came to me because I had audiobook experience and he did not.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a thing that Jim Henson says, or said, which is the secret to his success was to hire people who were better than him and let them do their job.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think one thing that's, I think as we're talking through all of this, when I think about a writer's career, I think one thing that's
[SPEAKER_02]: The writers who make it long-term have a certain client of flexibility and a certain willingness to roll with the heads.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't care who you are, your career is not going to go as smoothly as you thought it was going to be, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't care how much success you've achieved, you're still going to be hitting roadblocks, you're still going to be running into things that are
[SPEAKER_02]: Challenges are frustrating on one book's not going to work as well, or TV deals going to fall through whatever that's right nice problems to have but those are still problems right so whatever it is I think the writers ability to succeed as a published author in the publishing industry as a professional writer in the world often comes from your ability to roll with the heads right and then to keep going the good news is no one gets to take writing away from you as a job that is the thing that you can always be doing what
[SPEAKER_02]: What that comes down to, though, is how flexible can you be about how you see that job and what opportunities are you willing to pursue to keep furthering that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so all of that said, though, I do want to put one note in here about
[SPEAKER_02]: don't forget also why you want it to be a writer in the first place, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And even as you're pursuing these other projects, defend the time that you need to work on the projects that are near and dear to your heart that are important to how you see yourself as a writer, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yes, don't be drinking whiskey every night.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like go with like shed the parts of like this dream of being a writer that don't serve you, but also don't forget the core of it of like why you're pursuing this art in the first place.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then figure out, okay,
[SPEAKER_02]: I need this amount of time to do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can spend this other time writing, pursuing these other things, doing comics, doing games, writing for TV, whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to say one quick thing, which is that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think part of what that does is open you up to Kismit, because I think that...
[SPEAKER_00]: You're sometimes you forget some of the things that you used to write or some of the things you used to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like I have taken work doing script writing and when I was in college, I wanted to write for soap operas like because I love them as an art form.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so like I wanted to be a script writer, but I forgot, like you know, sometimes you get really focused on one particular type of writing because it's the type you're doing and you forget that like,
[SPEAKER_00]: each project to me is like what can I learn from this if I don't think I can take something interesting away from it and sometimes it's like I'm interested in still feeding myself but a lot of times it's what can I take that's like that's interesting that I can learn and I will sometimes be surprised like you were saying Dan that like
[SPEAKER_00]: later somebody will look at you having done something being like this is really valuable experience in a way that you could never have anticipated when you did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing that you learned still stays with you and then you can end up using it in the world once you're out there doing other projects.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know we're going kind of long.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to make one final point before the homework as Howard mentioned I've written a lot of ad copy before I broke in as an author.
[SPEAKER_03]: I spent eight years in advertising and marketing and so you know I I freelance as a website writer.
[SPEAKER_03]: It can still take a long time to break in, like some of what we're talking about sounds very pie in the sky.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I didn't have a career, so I started writing for TV.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that's it's not that easy.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to put in the work and a lot of your early writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: might be really boring stuff that you don't love.
[SPEAKER_03]: But stick with it.
[SPEAKER_03]: If this is what you really want to do, doing those kinds of ad jobs and marketing jobs and website jobs can be a good way to get your foot in the door.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, here's our homework.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want you to try writing in a genre or a format that you've never tried before.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you have always been writing novels or short stories kind of classic prose fiction, branch out and try something else, write something in a script format, write an episode of a TV show that you love, write
[SPEAKER_03]: a role playing game adventure.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pick a, try doing tie-in work.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pick a book series or a video game series that you love and write a short story using those characters and set in that universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do something that you've never done before and see how it feels.
[SPEAKER_04]: This has been writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_04]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_04]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
[SPEAKER_04]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.