ecstaticYesterday afternoon, I turned in my badge and left my day job for what will hopefully be the last time. I am finally in a position (thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act) to make a go of it. This means I'll have more time for work, more time to have a social life, and best of all, more time for glorious napping. I had a nap this afternoon. It was the best thing.
It also means that I'm going to be even more conservative, financially speaking. I regularly have to turn down conventions and speaking events that don't come with compensation for travel/lodging. I've been doing it up until now because it was a way to winnow things down to something I could handle with my available vacation time. Now...I can't afford it. I mean, right now, right this second, maybe I could, but in six months? In a year? I need to be careful, because I want to be able to do this, just this, the thing that I love, for as long as humanly possible.
Thank you all so much for supporting me as much as you have. You are why this can happen, and I am more grateful than I can express in words. I will do my very best to be worthy of your faith in me.
Because I know some of you will ask what you can do to help (and I am grateful for that, too), this is what you can do: buy my books. Buy my albums. When I say "here is a poster," or "here is a print," buy those, or point them out to people who will. Mostly, buy my books. That's what leads to royalty checks and more contracts, and wow are those going to be necessary going forward.
Again, thank you all, so much. I am so excited, and so relieved, and so looking forward to getting some actual sleep.
Comment amnesty is declared for this post! Because I want to spend that time napping.
January 17 2014, 21:05:10 UTC 3 years ago
Being financially cautious because you don't know when or how much the next check will be is the hardest part of self-employment, and it gets old really fast. When I was about eight, my dad explained it to me like this: "Imagine a pool of water, with one stream flowing in and one stream flowing out. The stream flowing out is mostly going to be flowing out at about the same rate, but occasionally something will happen and the water will flow out even faster. The stream flowing in is pretty fickle, however. Sometimes it rushes in all at once, and sometimes it barely even trickles. The key to being responsible is to make sure there's always enough water in the pool so that it can't go dry." Betting on future income is a bad plan for the self-employed, and it is totally reasonable to limit conventions to paying gigs. It's less good for going out and personally finding new readers, or for networking, but it's a lot more responsible financially. It's easy to forget that selling stuff at cons has to pay for the con before it even starts to make a profit, and as an author I imagine getting stuff to sell is somewhat less financially feasible than it is for a little independent publisher like us (where we can just take some of the stock we already produced, but you have to go and get it for the purpose of selling).