The Hard Truth About Making a Living as a Fiction Writer

I’ve been doing this a long time. Here are some things that will make it easier.

Is it possible to earn a living as a fiction writer?

I am asked this question so often, it would be funny if it didn’t cause so much anxiety. If you have this question, too, I hope it helps you to know that you are not alone.

Nearly everyone wants the answer.

I totally understand the anxiety, mostly because I’m right there in the . Thinking about your prospects of earning a living as a fiction writer can be daunting. Because the bald truth is, very few writers actually get there.

This isn’t the kind of profession where, if you get a degree or some experience, you’re pretty much guaranteed at least a middle-income job at the end.

You know, graduate from nursing school and you’re a nurse. Get an education degree, and you’re a teacher. Intern with a plumber, and you’re a plumber.

Get an MFA — and maybe you’ll get an advance from a publisher. Some day. Possibly?

Writing can feel more like a skill-based lottery.

If you work real hard and have some base talent, maybe you’ll catch lightning in a bottle and be one of the very few writers who earns eye-popping advances.

Worse, it can feel like a straight-up lottery, where luck plays a big role.

When we’re in the ‘aspiring’ phase, we tend to only see the people who are working for free and the millionaires. And the millionaires were lucky — like lottery millionaires.

But, of course, there are many fiction writers who earn some money, even if it isn’t an amount that threatens any eyeballs. Mid-list writers, indie writers who gain some traction, people who write one book and then don’t write any more — they all earn some money.

There’s also a sense that you’re in competition with all the people in the world who want to be paid to write fiction. There’s a lot of us out there. That adds to the impression that it’s impossible.

But the truth is, you put yourself at the top of the heap of folks who want to be paid a living wage for writing fiction someday just by writing a lot, working toward consistent improvement, and putting yourself out there as often as possible.

It isn’t luck that lets some people earn a living as fiction writers. It’s work.

That’s good news. This is something you can actually work for.

But — deep breath, now — there’s a hard truth you need to be aware of.

Here goes:

You may never be able to quit your day job and just write full time for the rest of your life. And if you are able to, it’s not something you can put a dated deadline on.

Making a goal like ‘I’m going to quit my day job in a year and only write fiction,’ is a recipe for feeling like a failure.

If that’s your goal, it’s just very unlikely that you’ll meet it. Unless you’ve got a partner willing and able to support you, some other sort of patron (maybe parents?), or you’re financially independent enough to buy your own time for this pursuit.

Notice I said feeling like a failure. Because not earning your entire living for the rest of your life from writing fiction doesn’t make you a failure. If that was true, there would be almost no successful novelists.

I won’t say it’s impossible, either. It might happen, I suppose. Maybe you’ve already written a book, and it’s completely ready to be published. That would give you a year to sign with an agent and for that agent to sell your book with a huge advance.

Like I said — not impossible. But improbable.

It’s much more likely that your path to being a full-time writer will look more like this:

You write. And write. And write. Then one day you finally sell a book. You get an advance big enough to be a full time writer for a while. A few months. A year. Maybe more. You do that and then you sell another book and that starts the cycle again. Or, maybe you have to go back to a day job for a while.

Or, you self-publish some novels and they take off enough for you to get some income flowing in. That lets you quit your day job and just write for a while. But then the money dries up, for any number of reasons. So, you end up back at a day job for a bit.

Either way, eventually you have enough books out there that are making a little money each and finally you can quit your day job for good.

Here’s how that cycle has gone for me.

I started writing fiction in 2004. I finished the first draft of my first novel during NaNoWriMo that year. And then I spend eight years writing every single day.

In that time learned to write better and I wrote three more novels. And I worked day jobs. Sometimes they were related to writing. Sometimes they weren’t.

In 2011, I signed with a literary agent who sold two of my books to a big traditional publisher in 2012. One was published in 2013 and one in 2014. I earned an advance of $7500 for each of those.

Obviously, $15,000 is not a full-time income for more than maybe six months. If you’re frugal and have a high tolerance for being poor. Don’t forget your agent gets 15 percent and you have to pay taxes. But I was married to a man who was willing to support me and our kids while I worked at this.

So, it was enough money to give me, in my situation at the time, about two years just writing. Remember, I sold those books in 2012. I had received all the income by 2014. When the last of it came in, I finally had to go back to a day job.

I sold two more books in 2017, to a different big publisher. Those were published in 2019 and 2020. My advance for those books was considerably larger. Enough to give me two modest years of full-time writing.

By that time I had Ninja Writers and I didn’t want to stop teaching. But I could have lived off that money alone for at least one full year. It would have given me several years of not needing a day job, with my husband’s income subsidizing me.

The hope, of course, was that I’d get another contract after that second book published. But that happened in March 2020.

Yes, that’s right. Just as the entire world shut down. So there were nearly no sales and there was no new contract. And the bulk of my advance for both books came in 2017, when I signed my contract. So, by March 2020, it was spent.

It took me until 2023 to sell another book. This time to a smaller (still prestigious, but smaller) publisher. My advance was very small advance. It wouldn’t have allowed me any time full-time writing.

Keep your head on straight. This is a long haul.

Fiction writing is not a salaried position. It’s definitely not an hourly job. It’s work that often pays in fits and starts — a bunch of money now, no money at all for a long time. And no guarantee or even indication of when that next paycheck will come.

If it comes at all. Even after being published by two major publishers, I have to start at nearly square one when I have a new book to sell. I still have to write it without knowing it will sell and then my agent has to try to sell it.

I already have an agent, so that’s good. But I don’t have any guarantee that my next book will sell. And sometimes it doesn’t.

Fiction publishing is also fickle and it depends on a market and on the subjective tastes of other people.

So, can I tell you how to quit your day job and earn a living writing fiction? Not really. I can’t even tell myself how to do that.

But I can tell you this: Most people don’t stick with it long enough. If the slog isn’t worth it for you, you’re likely to be pretty unhappy.

You’re still here, though, reading this. So the slog is worth it for you. Excellent. Here are my best tips for navigating the whole ‘working fiction writer’ thing.

Embrace your day job.

Don’t worry about quitting. If you hate your day job, work on getting into a situation that’s more tolerable. But putting a deadline on yourself for being a full-time fiction writer who doesn’t have to do any other work?

Oof. No. Don’t do that to yourself.

Fiction writing is a job that benefits from lived experience. Get out there and find unique and interesting work.

I’ve worked as a drug court counselor, a paralegal, a bankruptcy and divorce preparer, a vintage clothing seller, a teacher’s assistant, a substitute teacher, a small-town newspaper reporter.

All of that work has given me experience that feeds my writing.

Train your brain to think about whatever your day job is as being in service to your writing career.

Waiting tables or teaching or working in an office — whatever it is you do to fill your bank account puts a roof over your head, under which you get to write.

You own a small business. Your day job has contracted with your business for your time. But you’re in charge. You’re making the decision to keep them on as a client.

If you don’t like working with them, you can find another client to replace them. And continue to work toward building up your writing revenue to allow you not to need that contract at all.

AKA: to allow you to quit your day job.

In the meantime, every person you meet, every skill you learn, every experience you have — it all filters back into your writing machine.

Learn to love the income stream

This Humans of New York post came across my Facebook feed a while back and it struck a chord.

Writers are self-employed. When you’re self-employed, income streams are key. The woman above sells things, teaches things, cooks things, babysits — and all of it supports her creative work.

Figure out a few ways you can bring in some money, if you’re determined not to have a standard 9 to 5. And guess what? Not all of them have to be writing-related.

Some might. Maybe do some freelancing or technical writing. Or offer your services as an editor. Write and self-publish nonfiction books. Blog.

The list of possible income streams is nearly endless. Drive for Lyft, deliver for Door Dash, rent a room in your house, use your day-job skills on a contract or freelance basis, offer your services to your neighbors (babysitting, handiwork, etc.)

Let yourself get excited about income streams, even if they aren’t writing fiction. They bring you a little closer to freeing up more of your time for the work of writing.

Be productive.

Sometimes, I feel like a broken record, but I’m going to say it again. The thing that sets any fiction writer who is earning an income apart from all the other writers is work.

I cannot tell you how many people I meet who want to be fiction writers. Really want it. But. They. Don’t. Write. Fiction.

They write morning pages. Or in their journals. Or blog posts.

And if they are writing fiction? They don’t finish what they start. They flit from one project to the next without ever actually getting to the point of being able to earn money from any of it.

Trust me, if there was a way to earn a living writing the first fifty pages of a novel, I’d be on it. But there isn’t.

The one thing I think every working writer who earns any kind of living has in common is work ethic.

If you want to be traditionally published, you’ll have to wrap your head around the idea that you may need to write several books before you write something that someone else wants to put money into publishing.

And Indie writers who earn enough money to live on often publish a book every month or two. Seriously.

It’s pretty common for writers to be fickle about their work. It’s easy to decide that we need certain conditions in order to write at all. Enough time. The right atmosphere. Even our mythical muses.

There’s even a term for when a writer just can’t work at all: Writer’s Block.

I’m here to tell you, though, that Writer’s Block isn’t real. It’s your brain, whose job is to protect you, giving you an out from excruciatingly difficult work that you have no real way of knowing will ever pay off the way you want it to.

The best things that I learned as a newspaper reporter was to write anyway, blocked or otherwise. I was on a constant deadline and there was no time for that nonsense.

If you’re serious about being a working fiction writer, then you have to be willing to work (a lot) before the money happens.

I advocate for a daily writing habit that starts with a teeny tiny goal — just ten minutes a day. My experience is that ten minutes usually turns into twice that amount of time or more. But, more importantly, it’s such a small goal that it’s easier to just go ahead and do it than it is to skip it.

If you’re develop a daily writing habit and stick to it, you’re so far ahead of the game. If you’re concerned about making a living as writer, then you have to think of writing as your job.

Show up to work everyday and see what happens.

One of the best books I’ve read on the subject of writing and earning an income is Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin.

I also highly reccomend The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, Louie Baloo the dog, and Ollie Wilbur the cat. She’s on Instagram @ninjawritershop and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.

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