What Is It Like? The Writer’s Life
Janet Dawson, Mystery Writer
I went to a presentation yesterday at the Mastick Senior Center in Alameda, California. It was a free event and was going to feature two hometown authors. One was sick that day, so Janet Dawson spoke to us.
I was thrilled to see a writer in the flesh. I’d already started reading one of her books a couple of days before and quickly became enamored of the heroine and of the other characters in the book. A lovely 14-book series that follows Jeri Howard around Oakland, Alameda, and the Bay Area as she works as a private investigator. I kept saying, “I know that place! I’ve been there. Yup, that’s what it’s like in the winter.”
The presentation was well attended. They had to haul chairs out as people kept joining the audience.
Everybody had lots of questions. I asked a few too. I wanted to know if there was a special time of day that she wrote when she found her energy to be best. She said that 30 years ago, before she retired, she used to get up at 4 am to write before work. I heard a number of gasps from the audience, but I had done the same thing. Those precious two or three hours at the beginning of the day were when I wrote. I did that for years too.
Janet said that now that she is retired, she wakes up around 10 am and writes until the early or mid-afternoon. Same with me. Usually, I get up around 7ish and am writing by 8. I crap out around 2 pm or so. It’s not the same every day. It’s not like a job where you start and stop. I might take a few hours off to watch something on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or YouTube and then go back to writing for a couple of hours or more in the evening. It just depends.
I would like to begin scheduling my time. I would like to regularly submit articles to the different publications I write for here at Medium and at Pencil Stubs Online. I need to find time to write and finish up my three-book series on Getting a Job. I have several other books going on and in different stages. I’ve got research I need to do for Daniel’s Story, set in the 1880s in South Dakota.
I am, I suppose, like any other writer, and I read a lot. I am happy if I can spend a few hours, or more, reading during the course of any day. Part of the reading I do is with Medium. Other things I read are as they come to me. I’ve got enough books saved on my Kindle and occupying every nook and cranny in our house, so if I were on a deserted island, I could spend three years there reading.
The books I have to read by Janet Dawson are on my Kindle. I borrowed them under the Kindle Unlimited program ($9.99 a month at Amazon). The first 5 books in the Jeri Howard Private Detective series count as a set and one borrow. Janet has been writing a long time. I think many of her books were published in the 1990s, which explains why there are pay phones complete with phone books in the story I just finished.
I mentioned that I had borrowed the books, and I had heard somewhere (I believe it was in an article here at Medium, though I can’t remember which one) that said a writer earns something like .0043¢ for every page read on a Kindle. Google answers that question between .004¢ and .005¢ per page read. Ballpark it and just say ½¢ per page read. I had wondered how a writer got paid for those borrowed books and what happened if I didn’t finish reading one of them. Of course, it hasn’t happened to me yet, so I can’t say for a certainty. I do believe though, that the formula is probably as difficult to understand and as hard to pin down as the formulas used to calculate how much Medium authors are paid.
Janet mentioned the changes that had happened through the years as her publishers, editors, and other supporting folk connected to her books have come and gone. She did say, though, that she makes most of her money from Amazon. She didn’t say how much, but it was encouraging to hear. The self-publishing course I am taking recommends that you publish the paperback, the Kindle, and the Audible book for each of the books you write. They also said that the market for Audible books is going through the roof. I think it might be a good time to be an indie writer.
Somebody else asked Janet if she always knew who had done it in her books. She said it was funny because sometimes she would have the story planned out, but then one character raises his or her hand from the back of the crowd shouting out, “I did it! I did it!” We laughed at that one, but I’ve had that happen too.
It’s nice to know that you aren’t the weird one. It’s nice to know that these writer folk are my folk too.
Thanks for reading.
