Maybe you thought I’d forgotten. Ha, I say. Ha! Not sure why this is starting on such a confrontational note, but there we are then.
Anyway, here we are again at the beginning of a brand new year. And, like last year, it’s somewhat of a milestone for me: March will mark 20 years of my professional writing career. At this point it’s hard to imagine doing anything else.
So, yes, I’m back with my yearly update on what I still call “my writing finances”, largely for hobgoblin-esque reasons, in which I look back over 2025 and run down how my business went. Mainly, it’s an opportunity for me to take stock of the year gone by, instead of just looking at my top nine Instagram posts or what music I streamed. But I also hope it makes for an interesting data point for anybody else out there who might be interested in the nuts and bolts of how being self-employed works.1
There are, as I perennially mention, a few other writers who document this information, chief among them Jim C. Hines, who has been writing about it for about as long as I’ve been in the writing game overall.2 I always find Jim’s posts super interesting, so if you’re coming here because you’re interested in the finances of fiction writing, go give it a read.
I suspect maybe a few more than average people will be reading this post for reasons—don’t worry, we’ll get there. But first let’s zoom out.