Hey out there! Are you thinking of quitting your day job and
making money writing the book that will set America on its heels? I have one
word for you—DON’T. Don't quit your day job, that is. By all means, write the book.
Let me tell you what just happened to me. Granted, I don’t
have a day job to quit, but on the other hand, the money I make on my books
would barely buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
All of my books are with Amazon and happily so. Some are in
print, some in digital, some in audio, some are in all three forms. Every month
I get an email or two from Amazon telling me that on the 29th I’ll
be getting my royalties deposited into my bank account. They give me ten days
to look forward to that wondrous event. In July I had the whopping sum of $7.30
added to my bank account for digital royalties.
In August I got two separate deposits; the first I assume
was from print books and was for the sum of $3.34. Wow, no Starbucks this
month. The second royalty was from digital books in the sum of ………………are you
ready? The gargantuan sum of one cent.
That’s right, they deposited one penny into my bank account as a royalty
payment!
Now I have my thoughts on this, one of which I’ll tell you
and the others, well, they’re not quite suitable for tender ears. Since absolutely NO royalties are as low as one cent, I can
only conclude that they made a mistake in July and my amount should have been
$7.31 and they corrected their error in August by adding the one cent.
Does this mean I’ll say to heck with it and stop writing
because it isn’t worth it? Not by a long shot. I don’t write for the money
(obviously), I write because I love writing. It makes me happy and, just maybe,
it makes other people happy, too. I can make up a world and fill it with the people
I want in my world and have them say and do what I tell them. Well, okay, more
times than not they tell me what they’re going to do. That’s where the fun
comes in—I have no preconceived idea what’s going to happen in my stories, I
just let the story go where it wants. At the end, I’m as surprised as you are!
So don’t think writing is going to make you a millionaire,
or well-off, or even comfortable, unless your name is John Grisham, Stephen
King, or J. K. Rowling, and, trust me, those names are already taken. If you write, write
because you have something to say and you love having a chance to say it.
Quote of the Day: Live
out of your imagination, not your history. Stephen Covey
