Roundtable: Commercial Writing

Tim Pratt

I’ve been trying hard to balance commerce and art. It’s a juggling act. A couple of years back my wife was laid off (was unemployed for six months, and is even now underemployed), just as Bantam Spectra declined to publish any more of my novels, and the same month I lost a lucrative regular freelance non-fiction gig. (And did I mention I have a kid with glaucoma who requires occasional eye surgeries?)

Since then I’ve written two roleplaying game tie-ins and two pseudonymous horror novels. Entirely commercial decisions — I wouldn’t have written any of them if I hadn’t needed the money, but I found things to interest and challenge me in writing all of them; otherwise, I don’t think I could have done the work. But I’ve also got a small-press literary fantasy novel coming out later this year (the publisher paid me less than I get for many short stories, but I love the book), and I’ve done a couple of successful crowd-funded novels in the urban fantasy series that died at Bantam, publishing them as free online serials. (Sales of the e-book editions pay my kid’s preschool tuition every month.)

The days when I sold books to Random House for $20K a pop were certainly easier, but I’m managing to cobble together a career.

I always say, it’s nice to be a headliner playing the main stage, but if you can’t do that, there’s nothing wrong with being a session musician.

Cecelia Holland

Writers are always starving. I have no idea how I managed to get through the last 50 years, including raising 3 kids.

Gardner Dozois

You have to do what you have to do, I guess.  Even in this situation, though, I think that a little passion helps.  I can think of two SF writers I knew who were forced by economic need to write Star Trek novels.  One didn’t like Star Trek at all, was contemptuous of it in fact, and wrote a bad Star Trek novel that was soon forgotten.  One loved Star Trek, and wrote a very good Star Trek novel that’s still talked about fondly by Star Trek fans to this day.

Jeff’s comment about writing what you’re able to write is also germane.  I might badly need to write a media novel to pay the rent, but I doubt that I could actually do it.  What I can write, I write.  And if the passion isn’t there, then the mechanism just doesn’t work at all.  I knew another writer who was going to cynically knock out a series of hack novels, one every three months, and he found that he couldn’t do it–it took him more than two years to write one of them, and he ended up putting as much work into it as he would have if he’d written one of the novels he wanted to write, so it was not “easy fast money” at all.

Cecelia Holland

Grub street.

But then, there was the convention panel I was on a few years back where one of Jeff’s two-fisted pros–female, it’s worth noting–asserted, “I’m a pro.  I can’t just write whatever I want.”  Which led me to ask myself, “Then what’s the point?”  Which led me to answer myself, “To pay the rent.”  Back to that.

Karen Burnham

I have to admit, I’m very glad that I’m not relying on my involvement in the sf/f community (as a reviewer, editor, freelance writer, etc.) to pay the rent. I keep thinking that if I had to worry about making a living from all this, it would be a lot less fun.

Of course, I’m lucky that my bill-paying day job is also often fun (and pretty much never less than interesting), so I’m really incredibly lucky.

Cecelia Holland

Smart, you are.

The trouble is writing is a full-time job in itself. I don’t know how people do this when they have to do something else.

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