Money, Money, Everywhere

January 31st was this week, so writers are starting to get their 1099's and are digging through their shoeboxes for receipts in preparation for doing their taxes.

Blog posts are popping up, and in general, writers are whining. A lot.

- I don't make enough money self-pubbing.
- I don't make enough money trad-publishing.
- Amazon is charging us too much.
- Amazon is giving free money to scammers.
- Barnes & Noble refuses to pay me.
- Barnes & Noble can't go under because AMAZON!
- Apple could compete if they'd get off their asses.
- Kobo needs to buy Barnes & Noble.
- Wal-Mart will save us!
- Wal-Mart won't save us!
- I launched a book for free and I don't understand why it's not making money!
- I can't live on $30 a month!
- I can't live on $10,000 a month!

*ahem*

It's gotten to the point, I don't read many other writers' blogs any more. Things change, and you gotta roll with those changes. And more than a few of my colleagues have a tendency to throw temper tantrums when things don't go their way.

So...

Let's talk about money with the caveat that I'm not whining here.

My yearly income has slowly dwindled from 2013. The fault, the responsibility, is solely on me. I've had some life rolls. I've made some bad decisions, namely putting other people's needs before my own. So I haven't gotten much writing finished or published. In fact, the only new pieces I had out in 2017 were the seventh Bloodlines novel Ravaged and the short story "Unexpected" in Sword and Sorceress 32. That's totally on me.

For 2017, I hit my lowest total income level since I started writing fiction professionally in 2011. As much as I love indie publishing (and I had to laugh at this when I entered the final numbers into my spreadsheet), a super large chunk of my income actually came from trad publishing.

ASP E-books   $ 506.53
ASP Paperbacks $ 42.13
Trade Royalties (e-book and paper) $ 413.92

TOTAL $ 962.58

(If you really need a comparison, my income in 2011 was $ 131.40.)

The circumstances remind me that I need to diversify my income streams some more. They also remind me that I need to FINISH more stories. Starting them is easy. Finishing them, publishing them, and getting them out into the world is the hard part. And I've got a ton of stories and series started that really need to be finished.

For 2018, I'm working hard to do both. Angry Sheep Publishing has been accepted as a Google Play vendor, and all the currently published Suzan Harden books are uploaded and for sale. Since Wal-Mart is using Kobo, there's not much I have to do there yet.

In the meantime, I've laid out a schedule with the idea of publishing one book a month. Notice I didn't say, "Write one book a month." No, I have a couple of dozen stories, both novels and shorts and in both names, that I'm several thousand words into I just need to finish. I slightly missed January's deadline, which should have been the release of A Modicum of Truth. But considering it's my first book to cap out at over 100K words, I'm not feeling too bad at the moment. I delivered it to my formatter Tuesday night, so hopefully it'll be released by the second week of February.

While I'm waiting on the e-book files for Justice #2, I've jumped back into editing Sacrificed. The Bloodlines fans have been incredibly patient over the last seven years, and it's way past time to finish this series.

And about once a week, I spend a couple of hours on the 888-555-HERO series. After the project crashed and burned in 2015, I'm ready to get this out into the world. I'd forgotten how much fun it had been!

Here's what my schedule looks like:

February - A Modicum of Truth
March - Sacrificed
April - Hero De Facto
May - Hero Ad Hoc
June - Hero De Novo
July - Reality Bites
August - Ghouls in the Grocery Store
September - Resurrected

Maybe, just maybe, I'll get A Matter of Death done by Halloween. But I'm not holding my breath. LOL

Nor does any of this include Alter Ego's books. She hasn't put anything out for two years now because it's hard to feel sexy when life is a shit storm around you.

And that's all the complaining you'll hear from me. When life throws lemons at you, it's time to make some lemon bars!