John R. Platt - Writing Advice

Writing Advice

Payday Squared

By John R. Platt

Even a fiction author lucky enough to sell only to “pro” markets (at a whopping three-to-five cents a word) or to sell a novel at current going rates ($5000 for your average genre novel) is hardly going to get rich at the writing game.

Writing just doesn’t pay enough, and it takes too much effort to write a piece of fiction for it to really be cost effective.

But there are ways that writers can earn extra money with their fiction. Here are a few of them:

1. Sell to the top markets first, and then make sure to pay attention to your contracts. Don’t sign away any rights that you don’t have to. Control the future of your work, so you can sell reprint rights time and time again. There’s no reason why a story you wrote in 2001 shouldn’t still be earning you income in 2041.

2. At the same time, don’t be afraid of the smaller markets. Sometimes, the reprint fees after being noticed in a small market more than make up for the lesser initial payment.

3. Work hard to get your stories into books. In addition to your initial payment, you’ll earn a royalty on copies sold.

4. Once you have a book in print, set up a web page with an associate seller’s link to Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or any one of a number of other bookselling sites. Depending on the retailer, you’ll earn at least five percent of any sales generated through your site -- and not just on the sales of your own book. If someone surfs through your site, buys your book, and also buys $100 of other products, you get a piece of the whole thing.

5. Self-publish your reprints. I published a nicely designed chapbook of recent reprints, paying $120 to have 100 copies printed. I sold them for five bucks each at readings and signings. In addition, each book contained a list of my other works that were available or coming soon. I didn’t compete with any other products in print, and I earned a few hundred dollars in extra profit, doubling what I’d been originally paid for the stories.

6. Sell your backstock of contributor’s copies. Do you really need two copies of those magazines or a crate of books? Why not earn some extra money from them?

7. Look for foreign markets. They’re not easy to find, but if there are a million magazines in the US, there are easily as many elsewhere. (Sometimes, publishers outside the US read American magazines to find stories they want to reprint. Several stories from Over My Dead Body Mystery Magazine were resold this way.)

8. Can you adapt your already-written work to new mediums? Comics, theatre, radio plays, screenplays, whatever? You already took the effort to plot it once, each subsequent adaptation could be easy. Again, make sure to protect your rights in your original contracts.

9. What research did you do for your book or story? Can you take that expertise and earn more money from it? Can you write articles on the subject, or be quoted as an expert by other reporters? Non-fiction pays very well, and if you are credited properly, it can lead to more sales for your book. (You won’t be paid actual money if you’re interviewed or someone else writes about you, but good publicity is payment enough.)

10. Finally, have any readers contacted you about your work? Keep their names and contact info to generate a mailing list. Two or three times a year, send a short little “what’s up,” so your fans know when and where they can buy your writing. If you’re lucky, they will.

There, that’s a start! Keep chasing that paycheck, but keep writing, too. In the long run, it’s not what you earn, but what you have to say, that keeps editors and readers buying your writing.

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