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2015 Writing Income

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Last year, I did a post on writing income throughout the entire year[1]. It wasn't exactly the shining example of “success” but it was progress when it came to writing.

1: /blog/2015/01/06/writing-monies/

I'm doing the same thing again for 2015, just not in as much detail. The main reason I'm focusing on progress over time is that the data was getting a bit obnoxious. Not to mention, it probably wouldn't be as useful.

Some of the numbers changed from last year, mainly because I spent my New Year's Eve re-entering all writing accounting from 2002 into a proper accounting software (GnuCash[2]) but with a focus on individual projects instead of everything as a whole. So, the numbers I'm talking about are net after income from royalties and expenses for advertisement, editing, and illustration.

2: http://www.gnucash.org/

Because of how most accounting works, you typically don't leave year after year in the same file. Since I'm working with limited data, I kept it in a single file but then had to extract it. Since I've been working with NodeJS[3], I wrote a program that parses the gzip-compressed XML data and pull out an annual breakdown of each project. Well, it does month too but it wasn't as useful or pretty.

3: https://nodejs.org/en/

In 2015, I made a net profit of $978.10. It isn't that much of money compared to others, but I have to remember that I'm really only working against myself. In that case, it was a good year since my net monies since 2002 is $3,365.58. This means that this year had contributed to almost a third of my current all-time profits.

In the above graph, the red line was the net profits over time. Now, these projects includes the expenses and income, which means many of my initial books were negatives since I paid for editing and covers. It also means that when I bought a large block of ISBN numbers, it lowered my profits for the year.

In 2015, my project could be broken down into the following:

As usual, the bulk of my writing income ($1,356.22) comes from commissions and ghost writing.

This pretty much paid for what ended up being a major change in my writing, which is publishing other authors as part of Broken Typewriter Press[4]. It was fun, but I made a few mistakes (two significant typos that caused recalls) but I'm getting better at it. Hopefully it will start to come out of the hole, but this is still in the early years and the $-632.47 won't be an general trend.

4: https://brokentypewriterpress.com/

I wasn't able to get a second book out in 2015. There were a lot of reasons for that, but it was something I knew would happen. Sand and Ash[5] only needs editing and a cover to get it out, but I had other obligations and projects that made it unreasonable. At the end of the year, I decided to use Patreon[6] to help get my books out. I started rather late, so in 2015, only one person gave me $50.00 toward it, but hopefully that will change in 2016 (it already has).

5: https://fedran.com/sand-and-ash/

6: https://www.patreon.com/dmoonfire?ty=h

I also had a number of friends who are really helping me get readers and I have to thank Shannon, Cassie, Tyree, and Barb for that.

And to the one book I do have out: Sand and Blood[7]. Looking at the yearly breakdown, it isn't exactly a good year for having a book out, I only made $83.70, but it was the first year that I had a profit for the year, so I can't honestly argue. That brings the net value of Sand and Blood to $-1,255.37.

7: https://fedran.com/sand-and-blood/

Well, that's my 2015. It isn't exactly an example of a shining success but it is an improvement that is the only thing I can aim for. At the minimum, my writing should bring in more money that it costs. And, given that I've been doing this steadily since 2002, I'm going to say that I'm just leading into a slow introduction to a much bigger story.

Not unlike my novels.