So, last year I had two goals. A financial one, and a writing one. And a hoped for relationship between the two–that meeting the writing goal would lead to meeting the financial goal.
Nope. Wrote more words, and made less money, than any year of my life since high school.
So. What metrics do I use this year?
Money and words worked for some friends of mine. Maybe I need to just keep going and they work someday in the future. Maybe I come back to that way of doing this.
But another friend of mine, a writing teacher, says, for God’s Sake Don’t Quit Your Day Job, because the saddest writing story ever told is of a writer doing meaningful work, who had enough success to quit and go full time…
Who then struggled to make a living, at the mercy of the inscrutable and merciless marketplace. Their work becoming lifeless garbage before their eyes as their fingertips arc mechanically through motions once joyful, and now simply necessary. And purely mercenary.
But.
We are creatures of the marketplace, if you grew up when and where I did. Anywhere on Earth in this century. And hooking the marketplace to this effort, even if it is only to dream of lottery ticket glory (JK Rowling! Fifty Shades of ME!) is inevitably a part of this. Unless you’re filthy rich and I suspect even then.
That thing, from the musical A Chorus Line… that song Dance 10, Looks 3.
Dance for my enjoyment? That ain’t it kid. That ain’t it kid.
The dancer in that song gets plastic surgery, to get paying work. Alters herself with a knife. That was what it took. So she did it.
There’s a Clifford D. Simak story, about a future in which fiction is written by AIs, and a writer doing very well, and his friend, who is struggling, who covets his AI fiction engine.
Writers feed in parameters and tweak the output and so the struggling writer sneaks into his friend’s studio at night and discovers that his machine is hollow, just a shell, and the writer his been coming up with it all himself.
So Bright the Vision, is the name of that one. So Bright the Vision. That’s what you want. Not the knife. The Vision.
Look. The zero level barrier to entry. (time; the ability to twitch a single body part.) means that as a writer you are in direct competition with every being on the planet who wants to give this a go. Oh, and everyone who has tried from the 18th century on, too, because writing isn’t like bread. It keeps. Pretty damn soon we’re going to be competing with AIs. Rationally? You’re doomed.
So Bright the Vision. The Titanic sinks. Are you Leo De Caprio or Kate Winslet or the band that plays on? Doesn’t matter.
Do it anyway. Ever wonder if you could be a hero? Then keep going. I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. This shit is excruciating. Do it anyway. Keep going.
It’s only life after all.
Have you considered eyeballs as a metric rather than word count or dollars? Perhaps eyeballs that can be converted, two at a time, into fans and then friends?
I’m sure you know you can meet some interesting people through writing. Why not count them as part of your success?
eyeballs become valuable to the north of 10,000, (20,000 I guess, two eyes for most people) and I have produced viral content at that level… twice I think in 20 years?
Our mutual friend has had several million hits on his toy videos and reviews; a million hits is about 1000 bucks at youtube, from what I understand. Our mutual friend has made more doing his hobby than I have writing full time, publishing and or submitting 250,000 words.
Those eyeballs become valuable as a loss leader to sell some other good or service. Consulting, design, speaking engagements, and that’s a huge reason for indypub for professionals; non-fiction indy; motivational stuff, etc.
It’s a very good point, though.
One of the things that viral content in the 1k to 10k viewing rage is worthless at is monetizing something in which there is no money. this includes:
Liberal polemic with profanities and lots of typos. (One of my things)
Content aimed at creative people, who as a whole, have almost no money. Writers. Photographers. Designers. Etc.
I’m left with GLBTQ activism, where my only viral content was created which is sort of a kind of appropriation now that my kids are fending for themselves. And tackling some random subject where people actually need a book or a blog or whatever.
I have to leave my comfort zone to find anything that could make money most likely. My design work / illustration isn’t good enough to justify a big following, though doing it full time for a year might nudge me in that direction. My political commentary is much less likely to ever get popular enough to be more than a bar band kind of thing. Writers to writers about writing is pretty much the same thing.
Whats left? Academic discussions of SF? No. I have no degrees and that’s almost worthless too.
My spec fic, the short work, has zero discoverability thus far in online markets. Four works, with 3 loss leaders in KU, have sold to date, exactly zero books. Discussions with a fan where she admitted that she didn’t even remember I had written a story, that she remembered, that she liked, indicated that Asimov’s is the brand, and that with 10 stories in it to date, my brand recognition hovers near zero. I am happy to be in the magazine and be paid and find readers. I hope to sell novels someday and bring more readers to the magazine. But to date, the URL in bios have driven no detectable traffic.
Each story is read by at least a few thousand people, and about one person in a 1000 interacts with the content they consume, so I get a few notes for each story, which is great.
Some indy gurus like to say that with 2000 real fans, you have a career; they generate the push that creates this penumbra of other sales that will keep you afloat. I have 50 non-friend mailing list sign ups from the ten stories to date. I need to publish 200 more stories to get to the magic number.
All dissections of data, of trend lines, show failure. I have to pray for non-linear events for which there can be no predictors. I have to work I mean, for those events.
The sea of data I swim through all says, given what I know, financial success is impossible. This is a labor of love.
But I keep at it.
Writing as an avocation is wonderful. If I were rich, what I am doing now would make perfect sense. What I have to do now is monetize relationships. Which takes all joy from them, in my experience. Even friendly win win stuff. Add money, suck out the soul.
It all points back to the ‘don’t quit your dayjob’ idea. Only my dayjob quit me.
“What metrics do I use this year? … What I have to do now is monetize relationships.”
Meet the new metrics, same as the old metrics.