Joe Vasicek

A few quick updates

So I thought I would post the Y post today for the A to Z challenge, but I didn’t get around to it so it looks like I’ll be doing Y and Z tomorrow. And yes, I know that “expectations” was a cop-out for X, but hey, at least I didn’t spell it “x-pectations.”

As far as other stuff goes, I’m still at work on Sons of the Starfarers, though I’ve been doing a lot more publishing stuff than writing stuff recently, mostly proofing and formatting. Once the second batch of covers for Star Wanderers comes in, I’ll take an afternoon off to update the rest of that series.

It’s nice to have someone else doing the cover art for you, though it’s still very collaborative since you have to approve everything and give feedback for tweaks. Still, these cover designers are doing a much better job than I could on my own.

Speaking of Star Wanderers, I’ve been getting a lot of reviews lately from people saying that they’re disappointed the series is over and wishing that it could continue. Well, be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it! I already mentioned that I’ve been thinking about writing a full-length novel, but I’ve also got some ideas for additional parts with some of the other characters.

Right now, I’m working on Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers Book III), but I should be finished with that one in May, with an open schedule for a couple months. That should be time enough to write Star Wanderers: Wanderlust (Part IX). I sketched out a couple of scenes for this one last year, but I think I’m going to toss those and start with something new. In particular, I have a great idea for an opening scene with Samson and Heloise (yes, Samson is going to be the star of this one. The title “wanderlust” should have given that away, lol).

Beyond that, it would be interesting to write a story from Captain Elijah’s point of view, and another from Master Korha’s. I suppose it would even be interesting to write a story from Salome’s perspective, though that would be a tough one. If I’m going to expand the Star Wanderers series, I’m going to write at least another four books, so if you guys have suggestions for characters to bring back, let me know.

That’s just about it for now. There are other projects I plan to work on, but Sons of the Starfarers and Star Wanderers should take up most of my focus for the next few months. Hopefully that means I can get the books out to you faster! I’ll certainly do my best.

X is for Expectations

What sort of expectations should or shouldn’t you have when you start self-publishing? What is plausible, and what is unrealistic?

Honestly, it’s probably a good idea to go into it with expectations that are fairly low. Most books don’t sell more than a handful of copies, and there’s no way to tell what will and will not take off (if there was, publishing would be a whole lot more lucrative). There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, but it will save yourself a lot of trouble and heartbreak (not to mention, money) if you go in expecting things to be kind of rough for the first few years.

When I started out with “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and a couple of other shorts, they didn’t hardly sell at all. Then I published Genesis Earth, and while I saw maybe 50 sales in the first three months, after that they fell off to single digits for the next two years (and yes, zero is a digit). I made my shorts free for a while, and they got tens of thousands of downloads, but that didn’t really translate into sales.

I didn’t expect to be a runaway bestseller right out of the gate, so I wasn’t too disappointed, but still it was kind of a blow. It was worse when Bringing Stella Home only got about ten sales in its first month before falling off to single digits just like Genesis Earth. I suppose things could have gone differently if I’d promoted a bit more aggressively, but that seemed like such a crap shoot that I channeled that energy into writing instead.

And it paid off eventually. When Star Wanderers took off, it generated some interest in all of my other books–not as much as I was expecting, but enough to bring them up to double digits every other month or so. My Star Wanderers books are all selling in the double and triple digits, and I couldn’t tell you why other than that the story just seems to strike the right chord with enough people. Those books would probably be doing better if I promoted them more, and since it looks considerably better than a crap shoot now, that’s something that I plan to be more aggressive about.

I think there’s an important difference between dreams and expectations. Dreams can suffer through setbacks considerably better, and help to maintain a sense of optimism that is perhaps one of the most important things an indie writer can have. Expectations, though, are much more practical and down to Earth, and can provide a useful yardstick for measuring progress. They can also provide an anchor in the face of uncertainty. Those are important things for an indie writer to have as well.

Expectations can be negative, though. If you don’t expect a book to do well, then perhaps you won’t put as much effort into it, sabotaging and self-rejecting your own work to the point where it really can’t do well. If you expect a book that hasn’t been selling at all to continue not to sell, you may lose sight of important opportunities to put it in front of the people who are most likely to fall in love with it.

Every genre is different, every book is different, and every writer is different. Because of this, no one can tell you exactly what to expect–including me. Like me, you might be stuck making nothing but pizza money for the first two years–or your books might take off fantastically well right from the start. There’s no way to know what will happen until you get your feet wet.

Next A to Z post tomorrow

Sorry, no A to Z Challenge post today. I moved to a new apartment, and when I wasn’t moving I was spending time with my girlfriend … so yeah, not a great day for productivity. On the plus side, though, Lindsey Stirling’s new album just came out, and it’s pretty dang awesome.

Did I mention that I have ADHD? About that

Don’t worry, I’ve got topics for X and Y, and they’re both good ones. But for now, I think I’m going to go sleep in a private bedroom for the first time in over a year.

W is for Writing the Next One

If you want to make a living as a writer, you’ve got to write a lot of books. One book is not sufficient to make a career, unless you’re the exception that proves the rule. But that’s okay, because writing is probably the thing that made you want to do this as a career in the first place. I mean, if writing is the thing that you love, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to do it more?

Sadly, I think a lot of writers put way too much pressure on themselves to produce the next book, and too often that takes all the fun out of the writing process itself, turning it into a miserable slog. I’ve certainly been there myself, and I have to say, the whole thing was just ridiculous. As soon as I regained my own confidence, I abandoned all those silly rules and metrics and just decided to write my own way, no matter whether it was right or not.

I used to keep a detailed spreadsheet where I tracked my daily word count, making all these pretty graphs to show how much work I was producing. Then I went overseas for a year, and the stress of living abroad made it difficult to keep up.

I found myself writing or revising stuff just to boost my word count, and abandoning projects at the first sign of a snag just because I knew that if I didn’t keep my momentum, the stresses of living in a foreign country would force me to take a break. It actually threw me into a funk for a while–not because I wasn’t creating stories, but because I wasn’t keeping my word counts.

So I decided to toss all that stuff out the window, and in the last 2-3 weeks before I went home for the summer, I wrote Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver (Part V) from start to finish. Once the pressure was gone, the story practically wrote itself.

Some writers thrive on external pressures like word counts, timers, and the like. Others think that they thrive, but they really don’t. They cling to writing rules and writing metrics out of habit, or because they’re familiar, or because someone with more experience told them that they should. The truth, though, is that every writer is different, and what works to keep one motivated might just get in the way of another.

It can change over the course of your career, too. The chief advantage of using these metrics is that it gives you a sense of progress, which can buoy you up substantially when you’re first starting out. It can be a real challenge getting through your first novel, or even your second or third, so having a way to measure your day-to-day work can be extremely helpful. But after you’ve written a few books and gotten your feet underneath you, those metrics can get in the way, especially if they make you feel guilty.

Of all the kinds of guilt out there, writerly guilt is probably the stupidest. There is nothing immoral or taboo about not hitting your daily word count. It does not make you a bad person or violate the laws of the universe. Why would you put that burden on yourself? It’s not like anyone else is putting it on you. Life is too short to beat yourself up for not writing.

Instead, learn to channel all the things that make writing fun. It can be, after all–that’s how we all got started in the first place! If you can learn to capture the thing that makes writing fun for you, and not lose sight of that, then even when the going gets tough and the writing becomes a slog, you can still get through it and come out with something that you feel proud of.

Not every part of the writing process is fun, just like not every process of climbing a mountain is fun. But taken as a whole, it’s exhilarating and awesome. I mean, check out this video of these two guys climbing Shkhara, the highest mountain in Georgia. There were moments in that expedition that were tough, but the challenge only made it more worthwhile. It’s the same with writing.

I love writing. I want to write more than a hundred books before I die, and I’m already well on my way. Writing an awesome story is its own reward, even though there are many other rewards that often come afterward. Having people read and enjoy your stories is the greatest reward of all, and it more than pays for all of the hard parts that come before.

On an episode of Writing Excuses, Tracy Hickman once said that no matter how many books you write, it’s important to believe that you haven’t written your best book yet. I’ve definitely found that to be true. That’s not to discourage you that the stuff that you’ve written is bad, but to encourage you that your next one will be even better. And more often than not, it will!

V is for Vanity Presses

There is a HUGE, HUGE difference between self-publishing as an indie and publishing through a vanity press. So huge, in fact, that the two are not even comparable. An indie author is a professional and an entrepreneur. A vanity press author is a victim of a scam.

A “vanity press” is a publishing company that caters to the vanity of anyone who wants to see their name on the cover of a book. They make their money not by selling books, but by selling overpriced services to naive and starry-eyed writers. If you have any self-respect at all, you should stay as far away from these companies as possible.

I am not an expert on vanity presses by any means, but here are some things that strike me as red flags that a company might be one:

They claim to be a “self-publishing” company (an oxymoron if there ever was one).
They use the phrase “published author” anywhere in their sales pitch.
They offer to publish your book on Amazon (you can publish your own book on Amazon).
They offer a “publishing package” that costs upwards of a thousand dollars.
They offer a “marketing package” that costs even more.
They require you to pay for your own editing and/or cover.
They have any sort of affiliation with Author Solutions.
David Gaughran has written a blog post lambasting them.
They require you to buy X number of print copies.
Their sales representatives won’t stop calling you.
They claim that they can get your book on Oprah.
They claim that they can get J.K. Rowling to review your book.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. If you have any to add, please do so.

The scary thing is that the big-name legacy publishers are not only in bed with these crooks, they’re openly fornicating with them. When Penguin Random House bought out Author Solutions, the largest and arguably the dirties vanity press in existence, they did nothing to clean up the company–in fact, they gave Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss a seat on the board! And other legacy publishers like Simon & Schuster responded by contracting with Author Solutions subsidiaries like Archway to do exactly the same way.

Vanity presses are scams. They exist to exploit the dreams and vulnerabilities of new writers, robbing them of their money and their dignity. They are extremely good at giving themselves the appearance of legitimacy, which has been made all the easier by the fact that the traditional publishing establishment has embraced them. You will find them at large publishing expos like Books Expo America. You will find favorable articles about them in venerable trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly. Their poison has infected the very heart of the legacy publishing industry.

At the heart of the indie publishing revolution is the idea that no one should come between writers and readers. Vanity presses violate that principle in every possible way–they are blood-sucking parasites with no respect for writers or for readers. For the sake of your career, for the sake of your books–hell, for the sake of your own self-respect–you should stay as far away from them as possible.

U is for Uncertainty

There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes with being a working writer. I’m caught up in the middle of it right now as I get ready to launch a new series, and it’s enough to drive me crazy.

First of all, I’m not sure whether this new series, Sons of the Starfarers, will do well or whether it will flop. It’s a spin-off series from my Star Wanderers books, but the story is very different–much more action/adventure, whereas Star Wanderers is more of a sci-fi romance. I hope that my readers will eat up both of them, but until I actually hit “publish,” there’s no way to know.

The uncertainty is harder for me to deal with because the stakes are a lot higher. When I published Star Wanderers, I did so on a shoestring budget as a sort of side project that I didn’t think would take off. For Sons of the Starfarers, though, I’m going all in, commissioning a cover designer and hiring a professional editor. I don’t anticipate the production costs to go much higher than $300 per book, but there’s going to be nine books at least. Those costs add up rather quickly, and at $2.99 it’s may take a while for these books to earn back their costs.

Still, the stakes could be much higher. I’m a young single guy with no dependents, living on his own in a rather inexpensive part of the United States. My health is good and I’m fortunate enough to have graduated college without any debt. At this stage in my life, I’m in a really good position to take some calculated risks. Pursuing this writing career has definitely been one of them, and so far, it’s paid off about as well as I could have hoped.

But things would be very, very different if I had a wife and kids to take care of. If it’s just me that I have to worry about, I’m perfectly fine with taking risks and committing to projects that may fail spectacularly. But if there were a possibility that someone else could be hurt by my failures–someone I care very much about–I’d be a lot more worried.

At least the nice thing about being an indie writer is that you get your royalty checks like clockwork every month. I can look at my sales reports for March and know exactly how much money is going to come in in June. With legacy publishers, I hear it’s not unusual for royalties and advances to come four or five months late, or to be wildly off when they do come. That’s one uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about because I’m an indie.

Another uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about is that something out of my control in the production process will doom my book. I’m totally in control of my book’s production–if the cover art sucks, I may have to scrounge up a couple hundred bucks to hire a new cover designer, but I can do that without having to worry about my publisher ignoring my concerns. There may be a lot of uncertainty, but as an indie there’s also a lot of flexibility and control.

Uncertainty is a fact of life, whether or not you’re a career writer. Generally, though, where there’s more uncertainty, there’s also more opportunity. When I took the plunge and became a self-published writer, I was under no illusion that my success would be guaranteed–but I also knew that the only limitations would be the ones I put on myself. And personally, I like it that way. The uncertainty might be enough to drive you crazy when you’re staring it in the face, but when the risks pay off, they pay off very well.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret.

T is for Thousand True Fans

How many fans does an independent artist/creator need in order to make a living? That’s the question that sparked the idea of the Thousand True Fans. As the original blog article mentioned, the basic idea is that

a creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Sounds fair enough. But what’s a “true fan”? As the article describes it,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

The article goes on to crunch the numbers, showing that if each of these thousand true fans spends, on average, $100 per year on the creator’s stuff, that this adds up to $100,000 per year. If the creator is able to produce all that stuff independently, cutting costs and keeping a large cut of whatever it is they sell, then that can very reasonably add up to a living (or so the theory goes).

So how does this apply to writing? I doubt there are many readers–even true fans–who spend $100 a year on their favorite author. Maybe for the ridiculously overpriced hardcovers, but even then, most readers are so voracious that they can’t afford to spend that kind of money very often, even on their favorite authors. Also, most of us indies tend to price our books pretty low, to the point where we probably don’t publish enough books in a year to add up to $100.

Still, the basic principle of the theory still applies. Lindsay Buroker has an interesting take on it:

The gist is that you don’t have to be a mega seller. You just need X number of true fans (people who love your stuff and will buy everything you put out), and you’re assured that you can make a living at your art, so long as you to continue to produce quality material.

I believe, for an indie author, the number is probably around 10,000 rather than 1,000 (we only make a couple of dollars on a sale, after all). This is a large number, but, given that we can so easily get our work into Amazon, B&N, etc. where millions of eyeballs await, finding this many loyal readers isn’t infeasible, especially when you realize you can collect them over years, maybe even decades, so long as you’re in this for the long haul.

She crunches the numbers like this: if you publish two novels per year and price them at $5, at the standard 70% royalty you will make $60,000 per year if you sell at least 10,000 of each of them.

Lindsay Buroker has more experience with making a living on her writing than I do (she’s basically been doing it since 2012 or so, whereas I’m almost there but not quite). However, I think it’s possible to make a living with a lot fewer than 10,000 true fans, and perhaps even less than 1,000.

True fans are the key, but not because they’re the only ones who buy your books. For every true fan, there are lots of casual fans, and perhaps even more readers who buy one of your books but don’t necessarily go on to buy all the others. However, the true fans are the ones who will rant and rave about your book to all their friends and help to generate word of mouth. Thus, your true fans will help to bring in a steady stream of new readers, some of whom may become fans themselves. It’s this constant process that keeps a book selling for years and years, even after all the true fans have already bought it.

I doubt that I have more than a hundred true fans right now. I’ve met a few of them, so I know that they’re out there, but there’s only about a hundred people on my mailing list and only about a third of them click on the links in the new release emails I send out. However, I’m definitely more than halfway to making a living off of my books. It’s not just the true fans who are making that possible, but everyone between true fans and casual readers.

However, I do think that the Thousand True Fans theory is a useful way to think about things when you’re an indie author. For one thing, true fans make your income more predictable. If you know how many true fans you have, you can guesstimate how many books you’ll sell in the first couple of months after release, which helps to make your earnings more predictable. It also helps to give you a way to measure your career.

And let’s be frank–a thousand true fans is not very many. Even ten thousand is still a pretty low number when you consider how many hundreds of millions of readers there are. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the Thousand True Fans theory is that you don’t have to be a rockstar mega-hit bestseller to make a living–you just need a modest but dedicated fan base. From there, it’s just a matter of consistently producing new stuff and connecting with the fans well enough that they know when you’ve got something out.

S is for Success

What are the markers for success when you’re an indie author? How do you know when you’ve “made it,” whatever that’s supposed to mean?

The implications of this question are more far-reaching than you might think. Just this last week, I visited with Howard Tayler (of the awesome webcomic Schlock Mercenary) up at Salt Lake Comic Con. Howard and I have been friends for a while, since both of us are part of the local writing scene here in northern Utah. As we were talking, he referred to me as an “up-and-coming writer,” then immediately apologized, figuring that I must hate it when people talk about me in such a condescending way. But when he tried to think of what else to call me, he struggled to come up with the right term.

When I first got to know Howard, I was an “up-and-coming writer.” But now, I’m something else. I’ve got twenty books out, a small but growing fan-base, and strong enough sales that writing is my primary source of income. I’m not a beginner, or an amateur, or an aspiring writer anymore–I’m a professional author. I’m living the dream.

At the same time, I don’t really feel like I’ve “made it” yet. I’m not quite making a living off of my books, though if things keep going the way they have been, I should be by the end of the year. I haven’t won any awards, I haven’t hit any bestseller lists, and none of my books are on tvtropes. Outwardly, I haven’t hit any of the obvious markers for success, and that’s what threw Howard off.

Then again, most of the outward markers for success in the book industry are flawed. The bestseller lists are mostly rigged, and even if they weren’t, they still only measure velocity–selling a high number of books in a short amount of time. There are companies that will put you on a bestseller list by buying up a couple thousand copies of your book and disguising the sales so that they look organic, so that even if you never sell another copy again, you can still put “New York Times Bestseller” or whatever on the cover.

As for the awards, they’re probably less rigged, though I suspect that the nomination process for most of them is all about who you know. In speculative fiction, the Hugos and the Nebulas set the standard. The Nebulas are juried, and I doubt I could ever get into them without first forming the right connections. The Hugos, however, are open ballot, and I could get onto them without too much difficulty if I had enough fans among Worldcon attendees to nominate me.

But are awards the best measure of success? Is it possible to succeed without winning any?

I definitely think it is. In fact, I believe that “success” is something that everyone needs to define individually, based on their own goals and aspirations. For some people, getting on a bestseller list is the ultimate measure of success. For others, the recognition that comes from an award is the standard. For me, my primary goal is to make a living as a full-time writer, so that’s how I measure my own success. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to go indie.

At the same time, though, there is something to be said about the need for a standard. There’s basically two kinds of success: inward success, which is how you measure your own efforts based to achieve your goals, and outward success, which is necessary to put you on the map and get people outside your immediate fan base to take you seriously. The latter is the kind of success that I’m struggling the most with now–how to distinguish myself as a professional within the sf&f community.

But honestly, I’m not too worried about that. I’d much rather focus on pleasing my small but dedicated fan base than making a name for myself in the genre community at large. Perhaps that’s yet another reason why going indie appeals so much to me–there aren’t as many outward markers of success, but it gives you a lot more flexibility and opportunity to reach the inward ones.

To be fair, there are some pretty obvious outward markers for indie success. Every book on Amazon has a sales ranking that is updated in real-time, and every genre is broken down into a series of subcategory lists, each with their own top 100 list. But what all of that exactly means is still very much in the air. For some subcategories, you can hit the top 100 lists with less than 10 sales per day. Also, there are numerous ways to game the system, some of them white-hat (like buying a promotion or doing a giveaway) and some of them black-hat (like buying reviews or using sock puppet accounts).

Since the ebook world is still developing and changing, I don’t put too much stock in any of these new measures of success. In time, I’m sure we’ll figure out what they all mean. Until then, though, I’m going to focus my efforts much more on the inward measures of success and achieving my own goals. Maybe along the way, I’ll hit some of the outward markers by accident, but even if I don’t, the only person whose opinion on my success I care about is me.

R is for Reviews

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That’s my cardinal rule.

I know that some readers love interacting with authors on their books’ review pages, and I know that some indies try to make it a point to respond to every review, but I’ve seen that sort of thing blow up so many times that I strictly avoid it. Just this past week, a spat between an author and a one-star reviewer turned so ugly, the author calculates that he lost $23,000 over it. Whether or not that’s true is anyone’s guess, but the author’s response to the reviewer certainly hasn’t made anything better.

Reviews are an inevitable fact of life when you’re an indie writer. If you value your sanity at all, you have to learn not to attach any emotional value to them. Sure, the positive reviews feel great and can really boost your ego, but the negative ones can really throw you into a funk if you let them. The sooner you can learn to shrug your shoulders and shake it off, the better.

But aside from the emotional dimension, so reviews have a practical effect on sales of your books? Probably, though I suspect that the number of reviews matters a lot more than the average star rating. Plenty of readers report buying a book after reading the negative reviews, and plenty of others say that they just ignore the star rating altogether. Also, having lots of generic five-stars can hurt more than they help if they all sound vapid or fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That means that I stay out of the review sections as much as I can. On some very rare occasions, I’ve popped in to clarify an obvious mistake, but I never stick around or engage longer than I have to.

For example, here’s one of my one-stars on Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I):

Boring in the extreme. No new ideas – just shooting up aliens. Big deal. I could have gotten the same watching my kid play his video games.

The book actually has nothing to do with aliens (or space battles, for that matter), so in order to clarify, I responded with the following:

Hi, I’m Joe Vasicek, author of the STAR WANDERERS books. I don’t normally respond to Amazon reviews, but I thought I should point out that you may have reviewed the wrong book in error. There aren’t any aliens or futuristic gun battles in this particular book. Perhaps you found it boring for other reasons, or perhaps you meant to attach this review to another of my books. I’m not opposed to negative reviews, but I thought I should point that out in case there’s been some sort of mistake.

Either way, thanks for giving one of my books a try!

The reviewer was actually quite nice and responded with an apology, saying that he would check out the book again and remove the review if it turned out to be a mistake. He hasn’t removed the review yet, probably because it’s slipped his mind, but I’m not going to push it. There’s really no way that I can graciously do so, and besides, the review probably isn’t going to do much harm anyway.

Every once in a while, I’ll receive a negative review that does bring up enough good points to make me wince. When that happens, I try to remember that reviews are subjective and that just because one person thought the book was horrible doesn’t mean that everyone will. No two readers are alike, just like no two books–thank goodness for that! And if the review stings because there’s an element of truth in it, at least I can take lesson to the next book.

I do read all my reviews, but that’s because I’ve got a thick skin and I’ve learned how to deal with it. I wouldn’t recommend that to everyone, since some authors really do get worked up over the negative ones. Personally, I’d get more worked up not knowing what people are saying about my books than knowing that they’re saying something bad.

As to whether I solicit reviews, I can’t entirely say that I don’t do it, because at the end of every book I include an author’s note where I encourage readers to leave an honest review if they liked it. But I never, NEVER pay for reviews, or participate in review exchanges, or do anything like that to game the system. Reviews are for readers, not writers–gaming the system is one of the worst possible ways to violate that. Besides, readers aren’t stupid–they can tell what’s real from what’s fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. At the core of that rule is the principle that readers should have a safe-zone where they can talk about books without having to worry about any sort of blowback from the author. Towards that end, even positive, gracious engagement with reviewers can turn around and bite you. There really is no way to win this game–or rather, the only way to win is not to play.

Q is for Quitting the Day Job (or never having one to begin with)

Writing is one of those gigs where everyone expects you to have a day job, since common wisdom says that writers don’t make money. In traditional publishing, that may be generally true, but self-publishing is an entirely different game. It isn’t necessarily easy to make a living as an indie writer, but it is possible–much more possible than it is in the traditional industry.

I can’t speak authoritatively on when it’s right to quit the day job because I never really had one. I graduated in 2010, during the height of the “jobless recovery”–the soporific catchphrase invented by Washington policy wonks to describe the weird phenomenon where GDP was improving but unemployment was still in the crapper. For everyone outside of the Emerald City of Washington, we were still deep in the quagmire of the Great Recession.

I had just gotten back from an internship in the Emerald City that had severely disillusioned me to all things political. That rendered my degree in Political Science pretty much useless, and I found myself hitting the streets of Provo looking for something–anything–that would pay. I sold my body as a plasma donor, I sold my soul as a call center interviewer, and eventually I settled into that weird blend of mercenary prostitution that constitutes temp work. But even the temp jobs were scarce, and I found myself living from month to month, barely scraping enough to get by.

That’s when I learned about self-publishing. By this point, I already knew that I wanted to be a full-time writer. That was my plan A, and since it didn’t look like I’d ever land a steady day job, there was no plan B to fall back on. The stuff I was writing didn’t seem to be anything New York was interested in–not enough to pay a living wage, at least–so I jumped into self-publishing with both feet and never looked back.

When you first start out self-publishing, chances are that you’ll languish in obscurity for a while, barely selling enough books to make pizza money month to month. That was certainly the case with me. My economic situation wasn’t improving, so in 2012 I decided to go overseas and teach English in the Republic of Georgia.

GEORGIA | hyper – travel from Piotr Wancerz | Timelapse Media on Vimeo.

Besides temp work (which doesn’t really count), teaching English is the closest thing I’ve had to a day job. And while I loved the adventure of living in another country, the job itself wasn’t really all that fulfilling. It was really hard to balance writing with all the other stuff going on, even though the job took no more than 20 hours per week. It took up a lot of mental space, and that was enough to make writing really difficult.

So I came back to the States in 2013 and did my best to settle back in. Then, a weird thing started to happen. My books, which before had only earned pizza money, suddenly started earning grocery money. That soon grew to grocery and gas money, and before the end of the year, I was making rent money on top of that as well. My Star Wanderers books had started to take off, and even though they weren’t spectacular bestsellers, they pushed me up to the point where writing was my primary source of income.

Today it’s still touch and go, but I’m more or less making a living off of my books. I’m considering going overseas again, only this time, I’d live off of my royalties instead of getting an ESL job. Then again, there’s this girl I’ve been seeing, and she might keep me in this country for a while. If things work out, I have no idea how that would change things, but I imagine it would raise the making-a-living bar pretty substantially. With the way my book sales are growing, though, I’m confident that things will work out.

Back when I still planned on getting a day job, I thought that there would be some sort of magic threshold where, once I crossed it, I would make my entire living off of my writing career and would never work another job again. Instead, what I’ve found is that it’s more of a zone, where some (or perhaps even most) of your income is from book sales, but you still have to take on an occasional paying gig to make ends meet. There is no magic threshold at which you’ve “made it,” it’s more about just making it up as you go along.

All of this is made much, much easier by the fact that Amazon pays monthly royalties like clockwork. Barnes & Noble does too, and Smashwords and Kobo are also reliable, though a little less predictable as to when they’ll get their money to you (Smashwords seems to be holding onto my royalties until the end of this month, which is really annoying because usually they pay in the first week of each quarter). Since sales reports are instantaneous, I can look at how my books sold in March and know how much I’ll make in May.

It also helps that my earnings per book are significantly higher as an indie than they would be if I were signed with a traditional publisher. I don’t get an advance, but that’s okay because advances these days are pitiful anyway (seriously, $5,000 paid out over the course of two or three years? That’s less than I made as a volunteer ESL teacher in Georgia). And since I can publish as many books as I can write, I’ve been able to put out a lot more books as an indie, without the hassle of trying to run them past a committee of overworked editors in the bowels of some New York publishing house.

As for when it’s right to quit your day job, I have absolutely no idea because I never had one. But the fact that I (a nobody) am making it even without a day job says a lot. If you want to quit your day job and make a living as a writer, your chances of making it are a lot better if you take the indie route.