The Cost of Art

Book Stuff:

• Bespoke and Bespelled sales have (predictably) slowed down. If you liked it, please drop a review and tell your friends!
• Persephone in Bloom is available for pre-order. (Here for Amazon generally, here for Amazon Australia/NZ, here for non-Amazon everywhere).

Hades, thanks for your email! Congrats to you and Persephone!! Will email Olympus HR policy for workplace dating soon. Points for now:

• she’s an intern, you’re CFO. We need to meet re: potential conflicts of interest
• Your brother is also your boss, so loop him in asap

hope things are going great in the basement!
Mark Hermes

ps. her mom has left me voicemail?
pps. more than one voicemail??

The Cost of Art:

When I decided to take my leap of faith into pursuing an indie writing career, I knew that I would freak out about the money.

I have a long-term and generally pretty well-managed anxiety disorder, but I have some reliable triggers: crowds, natural disasters, travel, and financial insecurity.

With crowds, I gauge how I’m doing and how much I want to do the thing. You’ll probably never see me at a stadium concert, but I go to the theatre regularly, and I recently went to a trans rights rally in Christchurch, where I managed about an hour of joyous singing and chanting before I skedaddled.

Natural disasters are going to happen and I can’t do anything about them (which is frankly infuriating, can I get a hell yeah from my fellow control freaks?). Travel I love, so I factor in extra time for “must go back and check I locked every door three times” and remind myself of the low stats for aviation failure (“I was in more danger driving to the airport!”) and focus on how much I’m going to enjoy the destination, once I get there.

My fear of financial insecurity was well-addressed by acquiring a reasonably well-paid (if incredibly demanding) career and a permanent teaching position at a great public high school. Then I quit to become a full-time writer/part-time relief teacher, and ran directly into the emotional hurricane that is my money anxiety.

Walking into an emotional storm with your eyes open doesn’t mean it’s not a storm; it just means that you’re paying attention to the weather report. I get struck by the money panic lightning every week or so. Then I take some deep breaths and remind myself that I knew this was going to happen. I have anxiety. My fears are real, but they are not always related to any real danger.

The truth is, I’m doing fine. I’ve made it through the first school term and have a cushion ready to see me through the long April holidays. That’s what I was aiming for, and whew, I got it. Now I get nearly three weeks to write!

The truth is, writing isn’t going to pay the bills (yet). Most of the writing income I’ve made this year has been from teaching writing, and all of that is going directly back into the business of writing: commissioning covers, paying for formatting software, book distribution (your newsletter freebies!), research reading and so on.

2023 isn’t about making money from my creative work. It’s about building the backlist: writing a lot and getting it out there, finding my audience, and figuring out sustainable production and creative fulfillment. I have to make some compromises, and one of them is accepting that every now and then, I’m going to have a panic attack about money. For me, that’s the cost of making art.

The good news is, it’s worth it.

The other good news is that at the end of the month, I’m going to open paid subscriptions!

Should you give me money for this newsletter?

If you can’t afford to, then no, you absolutely shouldn’t. The majority of this newsletter—weekly-ish news and thoughts about my creative life—will always be free, for as long as I’m writing it.

There are two reasons to pledge a subscription:

1. You want to pledge your financial support for what I’m doing, and enable me to (essentially) buy more time for writing, for which I will be incredibly, eternally grateful and/or:
2. You want an additional monthly post (for paid subscribers only) about the business of writing - how I set and measure goals, how I do taxes, how much money I’m making from this, what money I’m spending on this, why I think it’s absolutely vital to writers to pay for and value the work of other creative workers, etc etc. There will be numbers. There will be graphs.

Personally, I am a big nerd about this stuff, and not at all shy about sharing the details, but if you want to pledge a subscription and then never open a single one of those posts, then thank you! I will take your money as the reassuring gesture of support it is.

If you have already pledged a subscription (thank you! again! seriously!) your credit card will not be charged until I turn paid subscriptions on at the end of April.

I hope wherever you are—waking up for spring, rugging up for autumn, or equatorially laughing at the notion of seasons—that you are well and happy, and enjoying yourself as much as I am.