Why Writing Is A Money-Losing Proposition

Identifying the costs of trying to earn money through writing

I started this month with one goal: to make enough to buy a new laptop. So, $1000-$1200. My old MacBook Air is almost 8 years old and, while still okay for surfing the web, was on its last legs in terms of running any programs that require a significant amount of memory. Read: compiling an 80-page poetry book — out. Or: revising a 250-page novel — nope. I have been using my iPad, which is amazing to write on, but really hard to edit with and almost completely impossible to use for submissions. I’d been borrowing my wife’s laptop or, more recently, had borrowed one from work to “work from home”.

In any case, I thought that a $1000 goal would make me a real, money-earning writer. It would be validation that I could do this for a living. Never mind that we writers have to write anyway, but to know that we could sell what we write, well, that’s the bonus. So imagine my excitement when I made my first 4 cents on Medium. To date, I have been on Medium for about a month and I have made about $5. While I am super happy to be making any money at all, I realized that none of this is actually a profit. At least, not yet. If ever.

I looked back at my ‘writing spending’ over the past month — mostly in terms of subscriptions and submissions.

I am not including things like Apple News+, which I would’ve subscribed to anyway, though I do use it as daily prompts for my writing. I am not including things that I bought a long time ago, like Scrivener or my Children’s Literature fellowship certificate. As I said before, I’m trying to spend as little as possible, so I’ve been using a combination of my iPad and Google Docs. That’s it.

My spending last month was $216.95.

So I’m over $200 in the hole.

I’m including my $50 Medium subscription, even though that will last one year and even though they tell you that being a paid subscriber is not necessary to make money. I argue that you can’t read and respond to other writers enough with just three free articles a month. There’s no way. I subscribed to Poets & Writers and Publishers Weekly. The rest of it is poetry and chapbook submissions. For two of them, there was an option to buy their chapbooks and I did that, wanting to read the works but also to support the arts.

At this point, I will have to make over $1200 this month to justify buying myself a laptop.

The thing is, I also entered free open readings and sent a bunch of stuff to places that don’t require a fee, but the majority of those A) are a lot more selective because they have to be, and B) do not come with a monetary prize. I figure if I win one of the poetry prizes, which range between $500-$1000, that may just about cover my submission fees for one year! The additional sales of a few books will help with any unexpected costs — travel? Website creation? Marketing? I haven’t even tried paid advertising yet — once I paid $5 on Instagram to promote a post to 5000+ people, and got maybe 50 more followers. So I am not going to pay for marketing yet if I don’t have to.

I think I’ll get there. I was going to do this completely on the cheap or free, but it turns out the submission costs are adding up. I’ll have to re-evaluate for the second half of the year whether the submission and subscription fees are worth the return on investment.

Carmen Fong is a writer, artist, and colorectal surgeon who lives in New York City with her partner and two cats. She was a Stony Brook Children’s Literature Fellow and writes young adult novels. She also blogs about healthcare and surgery. Her poetry has been published in The Apothecary and on Medium.

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