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You are receiving Jane Friedman’s self-study class, How to Earn a Living as a Writer. New lessons release every Friday through April 18, 2025. Browse the archive.
Week 4: Is earning a living from your writing a matter of luck?
This year I’ve been seeing more writers than usual leaving their success up to publishers, agents, or good old-fashioned luck. I saw one author in particular claim that individual marketing efforts have little effect on sales—that only publishers can push the needle for a book.
That’s a curious position to have in 2024, especially when the former CEO of Penguin Random House (the biggest publisher in the world), wrote last spring: “Publishers work harder than ever to impact sales. We’ve invested and innovated. But despite these efforts, we’ve lost the power to uniquely influence the consumer. In the old market, degrees of success came down to what the publisher did or didn’t do. In the new market, it’s about the author.”
For years now, I’ve featured a column in my paid newsletter called On the List. It asks authors what they believe led to their book hitting one of the major bestseller lists. Sometimes authors point to strong publisher support, other times they point to their own efforts. Usually it’s a combination of the two. In this week’s issue, Scott Reintgen, the author of 15 science fiction and fantasy books, discussed the success of his new middle-grade book, The Last Dragon on Mars. He said, “I previously hit the New York Times bestseller list with A Door in the Dark—a young adult book. For that book, one of the primary shifts I made was to ask schools to meet a book minimum requirement [for visits],” Reintgen said. “When I started planning for Last Dragon, I knew I could execute a similar strategy, but with a much higher ceiling.”
As Reintgen noted in a recent Threads post, he started reaching out to schools to arrange pre-launch, launch week, and post-launch visits in February in preparation for the October 1 release. He reached out to an estimated 500 schools and libraries in total, most of which were cold emails. While he focused on areas he had a connection to, he made sure to plan enough visits in an area to justify the travel expenses—at least three schools per day of the trip. Of course, the publisher did its own marketing push for the book’s release in addition to Reintgen’s efforts.
“We’re often told that if your publisher isn’t pushing your book in a big way, you just have no chance,” Reintgen said. “Two bestsellers later, I would beg to differ. Yes, there are numerous factors outside of your control. Yes, publishing in general is a very hard, uphill climb. But if you’re strategic about your approach to a book launch, there are tangible ways to impact your book’s success and your own future in this industry.”
Book sales are but one way to earn a living from your writing, and Reintgen could have chosen other methods to build his career, but he’s clearly found a model that works for him that’s tied to school visits. It probably helps that he’s a former schoolteacher—he understands that community and what they need from him.
If you want to earn a living from your writing, it is entirely possible to do so. But you can’t assign responsibility for this goal to someone else, or rob yourself of agency. Would you tell a loved one that their own actions and behaviors don’t matter to their future or their success—to just wait for someone else, or the universe, to act on their behalf? I hope not.
In a recent New Yorker profile, Francis Kurkdjian, a successful perfume maker, was on the cusp of achieving everything he dreamt of when he learned he was overlooked by Dior for a position he’d long sought. He realized then how he’d made a mistake. He said, “When I was a young perfumer, I had to push open all the doors myself. But here I was, expecting them to come ask me? I said, ‘Francis, you have to jump.’ I remembered my audacité.”
No one is going to hand you a living as writer because you deserve it. You have to plan for it and you have to want it. Luck helps, but setting an intention, and acting repeatedly on that intention, matters much more.
Exercise
One of the most powerful books I’ve read is The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. In it they write, “Many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view.”
Consider, for example, the assumptions that art can’t pay, that great writing is created in isolation, or that serious writers never consider the reader. These are all frameworks that can hinder you. An open attitude about what the writing life might look like—based on your own, unique goals, not someone else’s standards—is an invaluable asset. While some may consider the Zanders’ perspective to be hopelessly idealistic or naive (or both), writers rarely coast into a paying, satisfying career that’s free of trouble and compromise. So the ability to reframe dilemmas rather than viewing them as dead ends is like rocket fuel to continued progress.
List your assumptions about what it takes to earn a living as a writer, or what it means to be a “real” writer. Where do these assumptions come from? Are these assumptions serving you?
Explore further
- Benjamin Zander is a wonderful speaker. Enjoy his TED-style talk, “How to Give an A”. There’s more available online if you go looking.
- Ever heard of scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset? It’s an important concept for writers to learn, so you can learn to identify this kind of thinking out in the wild. This brief post by agent Rachelle Gardner is a good introduction that’s specific to the writing community.
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The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (releasing April 2025)
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