Ep: 217: Show Me the Money, 2020 Edition

Every year, Rachael Herron talks you through what she made over the previous year and how she made it because she firmly believes there’s not enough transparency in publishing. In 2020, she made $186,000, and here’s how she did it. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 217 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. Could not be more thrilled you are here today for our annual money, honey roundup. We’re going to be talking about how much I made in 2020, and I will spoil it a little bit right here and tell you that I made more than I made in 2019. So hazah! that’s the whole goal. Well, it’s not the whole goal. It’s actually not even a big part of the goal. So let me backtrack that a little bit, but it is a nice goal to have and I hit it. So I’m really pleased about that. First of all, though, a little bit of an update around here. Thank you all for your concern that you sent after the last podcast. I am still sick. I’m still battling some tough organs in my body that want to, like I said, leap out of them, leave out, leap out of it. So I have a CT scan scheduled for tomorrow. I did end up pushing my 90 day classes for two weeks which I just want to say was really huge for me. And I talk about it a little bit over at my Youre-Already-Ready podcast, which is not about writing. It’s more about life and I’m really loving that podcast. 

[00:01:31] I’m so glad that I started it. Would I have started a brand new project? Had I known I would get sick a week later? Absolutely not. My goal for You’re Already Ready was to post to it a couple times a week, two to three times a week. And I can’t do that right now. Maybe once a week is my max for that. So that’s kind of rough, but the fact that I am listening to my body and like I talked about last week, I have one job right now and my one job is to get and stay healthy. And I’m working on that. I have other little jobs and one of those little jobs I have decided today is being able to do this podcast for you to update you. I was not sure. I was going to be able to get this out this early in the year. Usually I try to make it my first episode of the year. I couldn’t do that this year, but it’s the second. That’s not too bad. And I don’t feel like I’m pushing myself too hard after this. I will go lie down for another great long while during my lying down, I am reading a ton and treating it like my job because my writing friends, reading is your job. You should be reading. I really recommend the Good Reads Reading Challenge. I hate Good Reads as a platform. I hate that Amazon owns it. I don’t use it for book recommendations. Although a lot of people do get a lot out of that. I do that. However, a couple of years ago, I discovered that they have that reading challenge per year. And when you finish a book, you just zap over to Good Reads. Put in that you finished it. You can give it a star rating if you want. You can do a long review if you want. I don’t. I only do star ratings and I put red because I wanted on my list. Sometimes I don’t even do the star rating if I don’t care that much. If I love a book, I give it five stars. If I don’t love a book as much, normally I don’t finish it. But if I do, I just leave those stars blank because as writers, we are polite to each other. If you give a writer a two or a three-star review, absolutely, you will hang out with them at a party, at a conference someday. And you will wonder if they remember that and they might, so I leave five stars or nothing, but I always mark them as read in Good Reads.

[00:03:41] Wow. I’m already going on lots of tangents. It’s going to be that kind of episode. Yay! So, in a little bit of an update of my health, I do have a little bit more energy and that’s great. The infection is gone and the fever’s down and I feel a lot better that way. So that’s good. I am taking my time as I move through things and that’s also awesome. So quick little chat about goals for 2021. I keep thinking that 2020 is so far in the future and it’s done, we spent it inside and it’s done. So now we’re in 2021. My goals for 2021 are to get well and to be strong and healthy, to remain strong and healthy. I tend to be a very strong and healthy person, which is why this is kind of get me down, but those are my, that’s, those are my top goals, honestly, along with spending time with friends and family, those are my goals in this year to come. Another big goal is to move to New Zealand. We don’t know when we’re going to do that, it depends on again on the dog who’s doing really well actually right now.

[00:04:48] So we’re not moving imminently but that’s in the cards. The other business goals are to continue to make a little bit more in 2021, ever since I’ve gone full time, I’ve been making about 15 to 17% more every year. And I think that is incredible. That’s double digit growth. It’s fantastic. I am so lucky and grateful, so I’d like to continue that growth. I would like to write two novels, hopefully sell both novels or publish them on my own. And I would like to publish three books of non-fiction they’re all in various States of togetherness. They are all memoir-ish, they are creative non-fiction, none of them are about writing. I’ve kind of left that I loved doing Fast Draft Your Memoir and my assistant, hello, Ed! Would really like me to write more about writing because that is my best-selling book by far, in terms of the self-publishing. My romance does okay. But Fast Draft Your Memoir just keep selling, it sells in print, it sells an e-book, it sells an audio book and people really like it. So if you have read it and liked it, thank you, thank you so much. But I’m not doing any writing books right now. I’m doing just the creative non-fiction, which is what I love, the kind of thing I write for my Patreon essays. Those, these things that I’ve already mentioned are things that are mostly within my control. 

[00:06:20] The things that are out of my control, I don’t call goals. I call those wishes cause that’s all they are but I have a couple of wishes for 2021 and may my book, Hush Little Baby comes out from Penguin and I wish it does really well. I wish that all the big vendors take it and that people fall in love with it. And that it shoots to the top of the charts, which is, you know, a book of mine has never done in this country. So they, you know, my books generally sell okay. But they don’t sell great. And I’d love this one to sell outstandingly well, surprisingly shockingly well, wouldn’t that be fun? I have no control over that. So it’s a nice wish. Another wish that is completely out of my control, but I like to have it is to have more of my student’s books on my shelves. One of the things that I have in my office is just a little shelf and it has four or five books that people that I have worked with their books that they have written. Then I just want that book shelf to keep filling up no matter where I live, I want my students to send me their books when they’re done with them. So I can read the book and put it on my shelf. I want it signed to me. That is something that, again, out of my control, but I want more of that. And I have just had such an incredible year. 2020 was a really great year for working with students. I worked with students in many, many ways. 

[00:07:48] The 90 Days to Done online classes, the online pre-recorded classes. I taught at Stanford. I taught at Berkeley and I taught online at a bunch of different conferences and all of those things combined added up to money, which is great. That’s how I support myself and it added up well, but it makes me a better person. When I am the person who can talk about how I write and suggest ways to other people that might work with their particular writing process. Nobody’s ever going to have my writing process, but I know enough about enough people’s writing process’ processes now to really teach this well. And I love doing it, and I love getting those books when they’re done. And I also love that this podcast is built around that. How Do You Write has always been about the writing process. How do we get it done? And the whole idea, about 90 Days to Done and 90 Day Revision is getting it done, actually getting out of your own way for long enough to get a body of work in front of you. And in 90 days, and we’ll talk about seasons. When you’re in something like that, and when I’m talking about not just my classes, but I’m talking about NaNoWriMo or any other artificially constructed timeframe that you want to get something done in, that’s a season of your life that you are pouring into doing your work because you have set an intention. And I just feel so grateful and lucky that I have had the chance to teach these this year.

[00:09:25] And it’s been really, really wonderful. Okay. I can hear you Rachael. Move on to the money. Wow. I feel so underpowered. Usually I’m quite high powered not today, so I apologize. I’m very, very excited to share this with you. I hope that you can hear that in my voice at least. All right. So drum roll please. What did I make in 2020? I made, and this is pre-expenses, pre-taxes people but I made $187,272. So I don’t like the number 187. Cause I used to work in law enforcement and that means murder. So let’s call it. Let’s call it 186, rather than rounding up. We’ll round down. I made $186,000 last year. Holy shit. Right? That’s amazing. That is 15% more than 2019 where I made 159,000. This is my third or fourth year of a six-figure income. I can’t remember whether it’s three or four, but it has been mind-blowing. That five years ago, I stopped working and I knew that I needed to bring in $36,000 a year. And it has gone up ever since then. So I’ve gone up by a lot. What does $186,000 look like? It looks like 433 payments during the year. That’s how I was, what I added up to get to these numbers. 433 different kinds of payments from a coaching payment to a payment that a Penguin gives me when they release a book or when I deliver a book to them, all of those are included in there. That averages out to about 36 payments a month. And think about that. I’m getting paid for something. F more than every day. The average amount of each payment is about $433 which is very strange that it was 433 payments at the average of $433 each. But I will say that that average is a little bit skewed by big numbers that I get from things like New York Publishing and a lot of smaller numbers from, you know, like one-off coaching kind of things.

[00:11:41] So where does that money come from? Okay. So I made the most from teaching and I know that that can be dispiriting for people to hear who don’t want to teach. You do not have to teach, to make money writing. However, a lot of writers make the bulk of their money from teaching. And I do too. So, from teaching, I made $113, $114,000, rounding up $114,000. That includes all of my 90 Days classes and I did those, I did three sections of those over three or four sections. No, it must have been three sections over the year all of my online classes, all of my in-person teaching, which was very, very limited, although there was some of it but it also includes everything at Berkeley, everything at Stanford and inside that teaching bucket, I include all of my coaching and inside the coaching, I include things like Rachael Says Write. Even though I’m not really coaching during Rachael Says Write, but I’m showing up as a coach, as a mentor. And that’s how all of this money gets put together. So, that is amazing. And wonderful. When I look at that number, I’m like really? Really, that’s so cool.

[00:13:00] So, but the thing that you’re probably most interested to know about is how much did I make from books. And I am glad and grateful to say that I made more in 2020 than I did in 2019. And that is not always true. I’ve been published. Since 2010 and that money has gone up and now, and it is not steady. It is not reliable in any way, shape or form. I made a total of $52,278. So 52,000 from books that breaks down to 23,000 from traditional publishing. So from contracts or royalties, and I don’t make many royalties because I don’t usually earn out my books. Hopefully that’ll change someday. So that was 23,000 from traditional publishing and 29,000 from cell publishing. Last year I made, I think about $40,000 from traditional and self-publishing combined. So this year I made 23,000 and 29,000. So that is up considerably. I didn’t do the percentages on that, but from 40,000 to 52,000, the self-publishing extra money I have to say is directly due to my assistant Ed’s help in getting BookBub’s. I have done nothing else to promote these books and I have not sell, published a new book. So this was all back stock. This was all stuff that was already out there. And he managed to make more money than I had before just by getting BookBub. So Ed’s one of, Ed can do anything. I think he can fly, but one of the things he’s really good at is like, he’s a, BookBub a whisperer.

[00:14:38] I swear I had one every, every month or two during the course of 2019. So, and that’s all him. And what he does is around each BookBub, he gets smaller buy-in ads like Freebooksy and ENT those kind of ads. And he puts those around the BookBub so that there’s a, there’s a slow rise and a gradual taper off. He does all of that. I do none of it. I’m hands-off and he’s brilliant at it. So thank you, Ed, for making me more money in 2020. Let’s see, from Patreon and which is another one of my big support basis. Another income stream that I rely on from Patreon MH, $17,117. That’s a nice, pretty number. And my patreon supporters think I have about 350 of them. So that’s not that many. I mean, that’s a lot, but it’s not. It’s not 14,000 or something like that. Most of them are at the dollar level, the dollar support level, which I have said before on the show. I absolutely love because it means that if you know, a $10 patron leaves, there’s a lot of other, $1 patrons that are still supporting that and keeping the income steady. So I know that I can rely on 1100, $1,200 a month from Patreon. So that is the Patreon income. I did cancel a Patreon stream of income when Jay and I stopped writing. I stopped writing, sorry, stopped recording our show, The Writer’s Well, we canceled our Patreon completely. It went away and that was one of those things where we made a choice. Shall we make less money in order to do this? Absolutely. We were not making a ton from that, a couple of hundred dollars a month from that, but hey, that’s an income stream and it’s remarkable. So we stepped back a little bit. I’ll probably make less money from Patreon next year.

[00:16:35] All right. And then there’s this miscellaneous category, and I really want to mention it because in this miscellaneous category, I have collected three things that also made me money. I made $2,000 from audio. I made $1,275 from query letter help. I, if you go to RachaelHerron.com/Query for a hundred dollars, I will assist you with your query. I don’t really ever advertise that much and they kind of come in dribs and drabs, but I really liked doing them. So I haven’t canceled doing that. And I made $600 from one magazine article that I submitted. I just did not focus on magazine articles. Like I normally don’t. So that totals up to almost $4,000 from those three miscellaneous categories: audio, query and magazine. The audio I want to bring up, I want to make more on audio in 2021. Ed could tell me exactly and he has, and I’ve forgotten, but I have earned out already one of my big expenses, for one of my books that I paid out of pocket. I think I might be close to earning out for the series that I paid out of pocket. So that means everything that’s coming in now is just going to be straight up cash.

[00:17:47] People are still listening to audio books and this number kind of surprises me. I thought I had sold more audio. But it’s still two grand, right? That’s amazing. And this, but this small miscellaneous category tells me that what I’m doing around the queries is right. If I I’m accepting them, when they come in, they don’t take me long to do when I really enjoy doing them, I’ll keep doing them. I call this sushi money. On a random Tuesday afternoon somebody will ask for a query and now I’ve got a hundred extra dollars. And if we get a ton of sushi and it’s really delicious and it’s delivered and we tip 20% for the driver, it’s going to come to about $75. So, hey, that’s just a free sushi delivery. And, but what it also tells me is that this magazine category, this writing for other articles, I have it in the right place in my life. I don’t miss not doing it more. It is, for me, it is not worth the hustle to get those kinds of gigs that pay $600 for a, you know, a thousand-word article. However, it does make me think about other income streams. And I just wanted to mention this. So I have a new income stream, yesterday I got paid from something new. I got paid 78 cents. Yes. 78 whole cents from medium. So medium.com, I’m sure you’ve seen articles on there. It is a really good place to go to read good stuff. The nice thing about medium is that you can cross post. So in firing up, You’re Already Ready as a podcast, I’m also putting the transcriptions of those podcasts onto my blog. And it’s actually a little bit backwards. I do the blog and then I read it. So it starts as a piece of writing that then I present on You’re Already Ready.

[00:19:34] So it’s already on my blog. Over on medium.com I can push a button that says import this and it imports. And it’s just on Medium. All by itself. I have joined as an author on Medium and therefore I get to choose whether I put my articles behind the paywall. And the reason I do this is to put those articles behind the paywall. So these millions of medium readers who have never heard of me may, just may, stumble past me and read an article or two, and like my voice and at the bottom of every post, there is a way to subscribe to me and you get tiny fractions of cents for people who read your work on medium behind the paywall. And I just started doing this a couple of weeks ago and I made 78 cents. And that is 78 cents that I would not have made had I not decided to try this new income stream and, you know, I would love it if it got up to a hundred dollars a month or so, $200 a month, like one of my friends has that would be just more money coming in and why not?

[00:20:38] So the reason I mentioned this is try all the little income streams and then decide what works for you. For me, hustling for magazine articles is exhausting and dispiriting. And I don’t love doing it. What I love is when magazines come to me and actually that’s what that $600 was, somebody came to me and said, would you write this article for $600? And I said, hell yes, I will. But I don’t, I don’t want to spend my time seeking those out. However, something like Medium, where I can actually just put up what I’m already writing and attract a new audience. Why wouldn’t we try that? Even if I ever got one extra reader, which I obviously have, that’s just a little bit, that’s not sushi money, but that’s maybe, it’s going to add up to sushi money someday. So I am excited about that while we are talking about income streams, I would really love to thank some new patrons Maria Frazelle. Thank you very much. Adrena Mussai. Wow. Why do you all have such beautiful names? Thank you, Adrena. Sandy, welcome. Nicole Morgan and Sarah Bailey, thank you.

[00:21:51] Isabelle Kanyas. And Roxanne Abali. I am not making these people, these names of people, these are gorgeous. Fe White, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Joevan Evri, Hello, Joe edited her pledge up. Oh my God. That’s amazing. Juliet Martin, thank you and welcome. Sarah Bailey, who has a recently arrived. She edited her pledge up. And Sarah, thank you for your beautiful kind words. Sometimes you meet somebody that already feels like a friend and Sarah found that in my essays and now I’m finding it in her. So thank you, Sarah, I really appreciate that. Yvonne Bennett. Welcome, welcome. Thank you. I’m wondering if some of you are new patrons because you felt sorry for me on the last podcast. And if that happened, I am sorry about that. That was never a goal, but I really, really appreciate every single patron. It means the difference. It makes the difference in me having to go out and get a second job. And I get to sit at this desk and write those essays that I love writing so much. I always say that, but it’s very, very true if you’d like to look at the Patreon and what the levels are and what you get at those different levels, patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) 

[00:23:02] What else did I want to tell you? You guys I’m out. I’m out of breath. I’m out of energy. I need to go lie down. But I also want to take this moment to thank you. It is because you are here and it is because we communicate that there has been so much added joy in my life. Just this fire hose of joy that I get from being with you, from sharing time with you, from sharing interviews with you, from hearing back from those of you who respond to my emails, if you’re on my writer email list, which you should be RachaelHerron.com/Write. I love hearing from you. I think that’s where I hear from the most readers is in response to those writing emails, so keep that up. I really, really love it. I will say. And I just, this just crossed my mind that I should say this is going out on Friday, which is January 8th, 2021, because I pushed 90 Days to Done. It’s not starting until January 15th and the first class is January 19th. In the session of 90 Days to Done, which is not the revision, it is 90 days to getting your book done in the 11:00 AM Pacific time. Which is 2:00 PM Eastern time on Tuesdays in that particular class, I have two slots because two people had to drop because they had plans in those last two weeks of the class because the class got pushed out. Those are the only people that I had dropped. All the other classes are full. But if you are interested in 90 days, then you can go to rachaelherron.com/90daystodone and read about it. See if it’s something you would like to do and then just email me. If that is something you would like to do at Rachael, rachaelherron.com 

[00:24:56] So, I’ll just mention that. But if those, if that class remains smaller than other classes, that is also fantastic. I’m fine with that. And I would really, really like, as we go out of this podcast, I would really like to know what your goals are for this upcoming year, I’d like to know what your goals are for yourself, for your writing and tell me some of those wishes, if you would like, I think the comments are working over at HowDoYouWrite.net. So try that, but if you can’t leave a comment at HowDoYouWrite.net, then come over to RachaelHerron.com, go to the blog and leave a comment on the most recent blog posts that will get to me and other people will be able to see it. I want to know about your goals and about your wishes for 2021, because when we say these things out loud and when we keep saying them, that is when we start to get stuff done. I don’t believe that saying it once out loud is enough. I believe that saying it, stating it, repeating it, telling it to the same people over and over again, that’s when we start to do stuff. In RachaelSaysWrite, every single week we talk about what our larger current goal is. And that larger current goal gets pushed out all the time, goals and deadlines or something to create and then blow past. And then rejigger. Right now I have been sick, so I need to rejigger that goal for the book I’m writing. That’s just right now called Quincy in my head. And I had to push that out too. And that is okay. But every single time I go to RachaelSaysWrite, I type into the box of what my current bigger goal is, because eventually you get tired of seeing yourself, continue to push things or say the same thing without motion. 

[00:26:50] It’s kind of like doing morning pages. You can’t write three pages to yourself every morning without hearing the same things, come up over and over and start to do something about them. So, being accountable to somebody, to a group of somebody is important. Oh, and I’m just realizing I should invite you to Onward Writer, my Slack group, which is free and open. I haven’t been there in a couple of weeks because I have been avoiding work and just trying to rest. However, the people in it are great. And at HowDoYouWrite.net, I always leave the link to join. So go over there and join our Slack channel. That is a built in community of writers. And you get what you put into it. If you go over and post every day, you’re going to have people commenting back to you. So, I would love to see you over there as well. Totally free. All right, my sweet friends. I’m fading. So happy writing to you. Happy 2021. May it be better to you than 2020 was and by God for a lot of us that will probably come true because 2020 was difficult. Congratulations for making it through. All right. We’ll talk soon. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.