“Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get by on dwindling royalty payments, or working an unglamorous day job, or are married to someone with a much more reliable income.”— Malinda Lo, amazon.com
“I mean, sure, do what you love, but do it on the nights-and-weekends plan.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But look, a lot of the people who ask me for advice, they're not just asking about how to be a writer. Because everyone knows that: How to be a writer is: you write all the time, and you read all the time, and eventually maybe you'll write something worth reading. The question people are really aski…”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“When I do those books, I know it's a product. I know it's going to be shelved in a certain part of the bookstore. So what I try to do is inject it with as much artfulness and as much of myself and as much honesty as I can. But it never leaves me, the fact that I'm making something that's going to ha…”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But what I quickly realized is, I'm not quitting my day job. I'm swapping one day job for another.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“People hear 'NYT bestseller' and they think, 'Oh, he's a millionaire or something', which is just ridiculous as anyone who's been on that list can tell you.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But you get the sites you want to visit, and in the end, no matter how much venture capital they have, they'll continue to exist because of ads.”— Choire Sicha, amazon.com
“If you ever want to see something sad, ask a room full of freelance writers about their tax strategies. It's like asking a pack of baby kittens about space travel.”— Choire Sicha, amazon.com
“Forty percent of my income comes from teaching, thirty percent from speaking, and about thirty percent from writing.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“I love teaching and I love the security of a regular paycheck, and I especially love health insurance.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“The gift economy didn't give back. Every post I made was on a platform I did not own. My access was free, and my labor was free, but I was investing primarily in someone else's business.”— Susie Cagle, amazon.com
“Exactly how much do I make writing other people's stories? For most books, I receive a flat rate -- anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 in my case, plus or minus a percentage of the author's royalties.”— Sari Botton, amazon.com
“Being an extremely social, sociable, accessible person should not be the price of being a professional writer, but for women it almost inevitably is.”— Emily Gould, amazon.com
“Part of the fear of looking at the relationship between art and its financial context, perhaps, is the fear that something else is true as well: I am whatever these worlds paid me to be.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“What if we stopped thinking of money as the dirty secret of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads? Whether we like it or not, money's presence in art doesn't depend on whether we consider its presence. It's always already there anyway.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“Not thinking about money wastes my time, and I only have so much time to write. Thinking about money has saved me from writing another novel that probably won't sell.”— Kate McKean, amazon.com
“I know so many writers who say, 'just tell me what to write and i'll write it!' I do have that information, but it's not that easy. I can follow a sure-to-be-marketable idea and realize I have zero passion for it. If I have no passion for it, the writing will suck.”— Kate McKean, amazon.com