So how much money do you make?

It can be really hard to know what to expect as an income in writing, and so I thought I’d make a blog about it. Before I started my writing career I literally had no clue. I knew one figure: the Text Prize offered $10,000 to the winning manuscript. But as for anything else, no idea!!!

So I’m making this blog about money! For context for all of this, I have three YA novels out, one of them has won a fancy award, my last book came out in 2020, I’m white, I’m trans, I’m disabled, I live in melbourne and I work part-time in a day job.

For the financial year of 2021–2022, I made a total of $13790.65. So what was that made up of?

This is a usual kind of year for me nowadays. I’ve been earning money from writing since 2013-ish, but until 2016 didn’t earn more than $60-ish a year. Events have always been my biggest income. (I did an overview of my incomes over the years over here if you’re interested.)

Events — $6475.83

The events I do are usually workshops and panels, and they’re the only kinds of events I did this financial year. The workshops I do are most often at libraries, but can be for schools too. Events are usually part of a writers festival, but some are for things like book week, IDAHOBIT, etc.

Within the events total, I earnt $4745.83 doing workshops and $1730 doing panels. Usually I do more panels than workshops, but I think this shift is due to a couple of things:

• Covid
• I haven’t had a new book out in a while so I’m less likely to be invited to speak at festivals
• I run a regular workshop most fortnights, which counts for $2695.83 of the total in this category

Royalties — $4295.58

“Royalties” is a loose term here, basically I mean it to be payments for things I have already created. This is much more than it ever has been. This is because of two things:

• Euphoria Kids’ lending rights have kicked in
• I have earnt out all three of my book advances

Lending rights (ELR/PLR) is a great scheme that the ASA has fought hard for. Basically, authors get money for whenever their books are borrowed from public libraries (PLR) and educational libraries (ELR). It’s calculated in a way I don’t quite understand, but it depends on how many copies of your books are in libraries. Each book then gets a “score” and then that determines how much you’re paid. My PLR earnings ($1366.56) are higher than my ELR earnings ($880.19). It takes roughly two years from a book’s publication to earn any money, which is why Euphoria Kids started earning money this year.

Next is the Copyright Agency payment — mine this round was $921.40. That’s $300 less than last year, but it’s a nice sum! Again I’m not sure how this is calculated, but comes from articles I have written as well as my books. (If you have any published writing or images I’d recommend signing up!)

Book royalties — this is the highest it’s ever been because sometime during the last year I’ve earnt out the advances from all of my books (My advances have been $2000 for Ida, $3000 for Highway Bodies and $3000 for Euphoria Kids). So I earnt a total of $721.68 from book sales this financial year, which is nice! I got these in two half-yearly payments, the first in September 2021 for $195.53, and the second in March for $526.15. These payments sort of go up and down and I can’t predict them.

The last section is for a downloadable workshop I made for Kill Your Darlings about writing YA, for which I earnt $257.78 this year.

Consultancy — $1875.96

This is a pretty new category for me, and I don’t know if I’ve earnt money doing this kind of thing before. What I mean by ‘consultancy’ here is sensitivity reads and being contacted for my opinions by organisations. I pretty much just do sensitivity reads for nonbinary side characters written by cis people, and it’s a lot of fun. This is work that I really enjoy! I get paid between $350 and $400 for sensitivity reads, and I wouldn’t do them for less (unless it was for a friend or some kind of exception I wanted to do). They take up a lot of time and the thing to remember is that when you’re asked to do a sensitivity read, you’re being asked to read potentially damaging content. Luckily I’ve had a really nice run with them, but here is always that potential.

Writing — $800

This I count as new writing work, so royalties etc I think of as belonging in a different category. This financial year I have sold two short stories — one for $300 and one for $500. The fees for short stories vary widely and so it’s hard to know what to expect. For me historically, $500 is a good payment, but $300 is a more usual payment. I have published short stories for more and for less.

Editing — $300

This is a first for me, and one that came around very unexpectedly. There was a callout for trans editors on twitter and I put my hand up. I was asked to do a copy edit of a picture book and I really enjoyed it. I don’t know if I’ll be seeking out editing work in the future, but I loved having a go and I’d do it again if asked.

And so that’s how much I earnt.

I hope this has been helpful. If there’s anything you want me to talk about, comment or email me. If you’re an author and want to be featured, maybe we can make this a series (you can be anonymous if you prefer). Feel free to do your own version of this post though!

Thanks for reading :-)