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How To Lose a Third of a Million Dollars Without Really Trying

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
Something, something, Patreon. Why choose one patron if you can have many?

Making that work however...
This is a good point. I know a lot of artists who are turning to Patreon for supplemental income, but you need a pretty sizable fanbase and exclusive extras to offer to even make it work. That being said, when it works it works well.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
This is a good point. I know a lot of artists who are turning to Patreon for supplemental income, but you need a pretty sizable fanbase and exclusive extras to offer to even make it work. That being said, when it works it works well.

I've seen people make it work by being honest to their patrons. If you have that fanbase, and say in advance that it is meant as a tipping jar and not for exclusive content, I think some people might be surprised at how generous readers can be.... or not. I feel that something like this has a bit of a bandwagon effect. If a Patreon page receives a good amount of money, others are more inclined to add to that pile because there is confirmation from others that it is worth tipping to.
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
I've seen people make it work by being honest to their patrons. If you have that fanbase, and say in advance that it is meant as a tipping jar and not for exclusive content, I think some people might be surprised at how generous readers can be.... or not. I feel that something like this has a bit of a bandwagon effect. If a Patreon page receives a good amount of money, others are more inclined to add to that pile because there is confirmation from others that it is worth tipping to.
This is true. We don't do Patreon because we don't have the fanbase, yet, but we did once have a reader order a signed copy and paid us through PayPal, which is pretty standard for us. The pleasant surprise was the extra ten dollars they tossed in on top of the book's price and shipping costs. It was very considerate and unexpected.
 
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Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
A part of me feels pretty bad that she was disappointed but we can all ignore our debts, have a millionaires weekend and be broke by the second of the month. She just got to do it with more money than most of us will ever see.

Yeah, even trying very hard to be sympathetic, it's very much a facepalm story here. Sure, the publishing house could communicate better, I don't question that. But everything still comes down to, she blew through the money and just kind of assumed it would keep coming - I mean, seriously, at least pay off your debts, that's money management 101.
 

Slartibartfast

Minstrel
...it's very much a facepalm story here...
After I posted I worked out what was irking me. It's the type of facepalm we all did (or maybe just me) when we got our first paycheck. I came out of it realising that I had been a prat who needed to proactively hunt down and find information and advice, budget like crazy and fight to get the best out of everything. She's setting herself up as a mentor and, despite having several stabs at doing it wrong, came out of her experiences still saying that competent financial advisors, coaches, and mentors should have just materialised in a puff of smoke and fixed her life for her.

[edit - clarified first sentence]
 
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Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
After I posted I worked out what was irking me. It's the type of facepalm we all did (or maybe just me) when we got our first paycheck. I came out of it realising that I had been a prat who needed to proactively hunt down and find information and advice, budget like crazy and fight to get the best out of everything. She's setting herself up as a mentor and, despite having several stabs at doing it wrong, came out of her experiences still saying that competent financial advisors, coaches, and mentors should have just materialised in a puff of smoke and fixed her life for her.

[edit - clarified first sentence]

She also said, in a series of Twitter posts relating to this article, that authors were employees of publishers, and that the publishers should engage with them better. This is not the case. Authors typically are not employees of their publishers.
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
She also said, in a series of Twitter posts relating to this article, that authors were employees of publishers, and that the publishers should engage with them better. This is not the case. Authors typically are not employees of their publishers.
Agreed. I think that the crux of her issue is that she is very young, very inexperienced, and didn't have the first clue of where to turn for advice. Her first call should have been to her agent, and I think a ball was dropped, there. All the rest of the balls are hers.
 
Agreed. I think that the crux of her issue is that she is very young, very inexperienced, and didn't have the first clue of where to turn for advice. Her first call should have been to her agent, and I think a ball was dropped, there. All the rest of the balls are hers.

It seems to me that there's an inherent lack of money management skill in many young people. Lord knows I was guilty of it from the time I got my first job to maybe, say 25 or so. A large part of that seems to be the way the world tends towards inescapable debt being viewed as something perfectly normal and the ideas of saving money or simply living completely within one's means based on your current income level is a lost ideal. It sure as heck isn't social media sexy to do so.

My wife and I just celebrated our tenth year of making our living full time from our creative work. There are three things I can tell you:

One, we never could have done this successfully when we were 25. We weren't savvy enough, weren't focused enough or practical enough and weren't as aware of how rare it is to be in such a fortunate position.

Two, if we had not changed our entire lifestyle to fit that desire to work as full time artists, and to make that our number one priority above everything else, we never would have made it past year one.

Three, I am so glad I grew up with a spendthrift mother as a role model. :)

When we are asked how we managed to get to this point, our answers seem to send people running for the hills, as if our so-called sacrifices have been so great they can't comprehend them. They don't seem all that much to us though.

We left a city to move to a small, rural, dairy county and cut our monthly expenses by nearly $500 in doing so.
We never go out to eat and cook every meal at home. (Helps here that I was a bistro chef for ten years prior)
We never spend money on full priced clothes, shoes, home products etc. Rarely buy anything that isn't necessary though we DO support other artists on Kickstarter and Patreon when we can.
We never bother with the newest phones or devices nor do we desire them.
We carry zero debt (which was not true for either of us when we met. But yes, no mortgage, no car payments, no credit debts, no school loans)
We have/use only one credit card, and it gets paid in full when used.

There's a lot that someone on the outside might label as us "doing without" but we don't feel that way at all. We get to do what we love the most every single day. That entails working our behinds off seven days a week. It's the hardest, most demanding, most time consuming job I've ever had, but I wouldn't trade it for anything and I wouldn't change our lifestyle no matter the success level of any short period/given year. Month to month our income is never stable or guaranteed. Though over the years it actually has been far more consistent than we expected.

Creativity, I've come to think, should be a combination of full throttle passion AND good business sense. But I think that means following one (broad is ok) passion. Instead of people walking through life thinking "Yes, I'll pursue this AND that AND that. . ." , and claiming they're all equally important, maybe they'd be better served to settle for, "I want this one thing. Period." and then do everything in their power to make that one thing a reality and only fill their lives with what supports that.

The idea of having it all seems an enduring farce. Not sure how it ever got started or why people fall for it time and again, but all I've seen it bring people is unhappiness and discontent, myself included until I stopped buying into it.

All that is to say, I can't feel bad for the author at all. She's young. She obviously has some writing skill so the future may find her with another deal offered. If not, well, there is no one to blame but herself in my opinion. Learn the lessons and move forward.
 
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pmmg

Myth Weaver
I am willing to have a sugar-mama.

Meh, I have a good amount of money cause I have a day job and I've been at it a long time. Would be nice to make a bank with writing, but I don't really have it as a priority. Just want to tell stories, if I ever have the time. If I could have a wish, it would be for time, not money ;) Anyway, never surprised, fortunes are won and lost all the time. Its one thing to have a Ferrari, its another to drive it.
 

gia

Scribe
They were given 6 figures twice and managed to squander it? Got to be honest, that's on them, and I'd be real happy if I had the opportunity to risk becoming a cautionary tale like this!
Yeah kind of feeling the same way. It was like she was saying....I take responsibility but no one told me (in other words she didn't take responsibility)
 

Danskin

Scribe
As she says, it sounds a lot, but after tax and agents, it's about what a teacher would make in 4 years.

You're not going to get big book deals often enough to live off that, and all of your royalties get removed until the advance is paid off, so you have no further income. It's not hard to see why that's hard to live off. And it's very rare for such big sums to keep coming.
 
From the article:

But when I sold a trilogy to another publisher the following year for over $250,000 dollars (even now I cannot believe I wrote that sentence and, furthermore, that it’s true), I really thought I had made it — forever, not just for a moment. Not for this one book deal. Forever. Otherwise, I reasoned, they would never have paid me such enormous sums. These publishers must be investing in me for the long run. I was one of their own.

"I was one of their own."

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of being a spendthrift vs being a penny-pincher, Heather Demetrios' mistake as a newly published author seems to have been two-fold.

First, a traditional view of workplaces led to the assumption that being accepted for a job—the books were the job—meant that continued work and payment for that work were guaranteed as long as she continued to...labor, heh. Whether as a teacher, a convenience store cashier, a factory employee, a used car salesperson...once you are hired, accepted for a role within a business or enterprise, you can depend on continued employment as long as you work and your work meets the criteria required by your employer. [Maybe not actually. Layoffs happen. Other things happen. But this is the general view, minus those possibilities.]

This view doesn't take into account the fact that the so-called "employer" in her case has millions of potential "employees" to choose from, month to month, to complete "tasks"—the production of new novels—that are limited in number. In other words, it's not exactly a zero sum game; having one's work accepted and receiving payment for it does not mean that a "position" has now been filled and competition for that position has been eliminated. A publisher can only publish so many new novels; so yes, those novels chosen by the publisher sort of win the zero sum lottery, heh. But their source, the authors, do not.

Second, Heather Demetrios fell into a common trap. An identity trap. I'm trying to remember the name of the European visitor to America who commented that an American's first question when meeting a stranger was, "What do you do?" whereas a European or perhaps a Brit would first ask, "Where are you from?" Circa sometime in the 19th C.; probably, this has changed. But in either case, there's an issue of identity, and more specifically, unchanging identity. If I am this, then I am always this. I may change a job, so I no longer answer, "Salesman," heh; but whatever I become afterward is now my identification and will remain my identification for as long as I do it. As a newly published author, Heather Demetrios fell into the trap of "Published Author." Once that, forever that? And what attaches to that title, heh, to that identity? Perhaps the more apt title would be, "Once-published Author."

This second point intertwines with the first. A sustained role in an enterprise, as an employee of some sort, pairs well with the belief in the sustained identity. Except when the first never existed in the first place.

Incidentally, my knowledge of traditional publishing is rather limited. Are books really zero sum? One might think that a publishing house need not have an upper limit on the number of published books it produces per month, especially if we are including e-books and any novel could be published only as an e-book. Why not play the numbers and publish more and more and more that way? I would suggest two reasons. The traditional publishing house does, in fact, have "zero sum employees," i.e. a limited number of spots in its work force: editors, marketing professionals, etc. Not only can each handle a limited workload, but a publishing house's expenses paying them and the other costs associated with their work must be limited. So, they are a bottleneck of sorts. For the second reason, I'd point at the potential for diminishing returns if a publishing house were to flood the market by releasing a bazillion e-novels every month: Potential readers, also, are limited in number and they, too, represent a sort of bottleneck for the publishing house.

But what do I know of traditional publishing houses? Not a lot, really.

However, Danskin's link above suggests, to me, why independent publishing might prove much more profitable for the average individual author. The same bottlenecks exist for the independently publishing author, but at least the author can tailor the production and release of her own novels in such a way they'll make it through those bottlenecks, heh, especially long-term.
 
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This could have been avoided if she had done two things: read her contract(s) and spoke with her agent about the contracts. The terms of the contract, I imagine, were rather clear. This advance is for this book. I bet there were clauses that did not guarantee anything in the future and so forth.

And let this be general life advice, read your contracts.
 
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