In January I was approached by the PR company who puts together Parade Magazine's annual What People Earn Issue. They wanted to feature a novelist and someone--I've no idea who-- suggested me. I was very flattered to be asked but also a little apprehensive about sharing my earnings from writing. There seems to be an assumption that authors earn a lot of money. And there is certainly the potential to earn a lot of money from writing. But 99.9% of authors, myself included, don't earn enough from writing to support ourselves full-time. Most of us have day jobs. My day job is in a college library, where I've worked for the past 16 years. For me, writing is a supplemental salary at best and I'm actually proud of every dime I've earned from doing something I love. Most of what I earned last year was from my self-pubbed novel Schooled In Lies. It's the fourth book in my Kendra Clayton mystery series, which I took over publishing when the series was dropped by my former publisher.
So I signed the release form and sent in two pictures of myself with no guarantee that I'd be chosen for the WPE issue. I was! The issue came out on Sunday the 13th. Click here if you want to know how much I earned from writing last year ; ).
