Authors: How's the Economy Treating You?

Yesterday my husband found out that his company is shutting down a product line for which he and his staff have some responsibility. That has him nervous understandably. They would have to cut his entire section to cut him, but it could happen. If he went on unemployment things would get darn iffy around here. That got me thinking about how my writing career affects our finances and how our finances affect my writing career. I wonder what the impact will be on your own?

I write full time. If you are tempted to say "lucky you!" I would say I agree but with a caveat.. I had to make a darned significant sacrifice to be able to do this, one I know for a fact without asking that you would not want to make. I had to lose much of my eyesight. 'Nuff said. I don't have any intention of going on with this line of thought. My point is only that if I wanted a "job job" I would have quite a challenge ahead of me just to get one. I finally decided that at this point in my life it would not be worth giving up my creative opportunity.

Here's where my thoughts went last night after Jim and I talked about how to save more money. I am just finishing a novel for an ebook publisher. They don't know about it yet, so clearly I don't know if it will get published by them. If it does I will make some money, very little but on the plus side at least. My already published novel I paid to get published. I did it for reasons I am comfortable with, but that means anything I spend to market it is on the financial minus side as was the publishing itself. Though it is possible, and I am certainly going to dedicate myself to this goal, I doubt I will ever even make what I have spent back from sales. That was a gamble I was exceedingly happy to take. An Involuntary King is a lot more to me than just some novel I wrote.

Looking towards the future and other projects in the works I face something of a dilemma. I think I have it in me to write more novels that could just be saleable, to a publisher and to its customers. But in a down economy chances are even slimmer than the slim chance any author has to get a novel published. It is possible that if I write Out of the Storm, my paranormal mystery set in the late tenth century, it will have to be on my own dime again.. and is that a gamble I should take given how things are?

The alternative might be to continue writing the ebooks and submitting them. The one I am just finishing is an erotic historical romance I wrote on a lark. It is good enough. That's all I will say. I could write other romances, and they would be good enough, maybe even better than average, but they would not achieve the ambition I have as a writer. That is, to write excellent and entertaining novels. I would rather do both. Both are perfectly valid genres. But do I want to give up the "finer" for the more likely to sell?

So that's what I am thinking about as the economy contracts and promises to do so for at least a couple-three more years. Jim and I can economize in other ways and save more money, but ultimately for me it comes down to a threat to what I have been doing and which has made me so happy for the past couple years. That research trip to England looks to be on the chopping block as well.. and time is running out for me visually.

So am I down? Yea, verily. And scared.

How about you?