Dan Moren

New year, same old post.

To recap: every year since 2018, I’ve put up a post talking about my finances as self-employed writer and podcaster, with a particular eye towards my work as a novelist.

Having been my own boss for more than seven(!) years now, I’ve grown accustomed to keeping diligent track of my finances1, mainly because I need to. But I also think there’s a utility in sharing this information with others—especially for my colleagues who are working writers, or for those who might be interested in embarking upon it as a career and wonder what it’s really like.

We—especially in the U.S.—often consider money a taboo topic, one that can easily fall into boasting or self-aggrandizement. But I think that making the topic off-limits does a disservice to most people, and to folks in my line of work especially. I’ve greatly appreciated transparency from authors like Jim Hines, Kameron Hurley, and John Scalzi, which has helped to demystify the business for me.

As usual, I’ll preface this with a note: this is my experience and my experience only. If there’s one thing to take away from the self-employed, it’s that we’re all a little bit different, so don’t take this as gospel; it’s merely one data point among many.

So, let’s do this.

As in previous year, I don’t break out the actual dollar figures for my work.2 But to provide a bit of color, my income was up nicely in 2021, making it my second-highest grossing year since I’ve been self-employed. (And probably more than even a few of my years as a fully-employed editor.) However, even that gross figure is still well under six figures.3

I should also note, though I’m not sure I’ve done so in the past, that this is only income from employment, not from any investments or other income-accruing sources.4

Big picture: I’m a little surprised that 2021 ended up being such a banner year, but interest in podcasts, tech writing, and even fiction definitely seems to have stayed stable, if not ticked up, during the pandemic. Advertising for podcasts has seemed to thin a bit; in 2018 and 2019, podcasting was my biggest source of income, but in 2020 and 2021, it’s fallen behind tech writing again.

This did mark the first full year of our membership program for The Rebound, which has been a nice little bonus. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that direct membership payments from all of my shows account for a little less than half of my total podcasting income, with ads making up the remainder—that’ll definitely be something I continue to keep a closer eye on in the next year or two.

Tech writing was up a little bit, thanks to some additional projects that I took on, and a readjusted fee structure for one of my biggest clients, which went into effect in early 2020. It’s provided a stable base for the rest of my income, but it’s not a sector that I’m particularly trying to grow at this point.

Fiction writing jumped back up again after a lackluster 2020, in which it accounted for 4 percent of my income. 2021 doubled that to 8 percent, though still shy of my high-point of 11 percent in 2019. The big driver this past year was selling another book (The Nova Incident, which comes out this July!), but The Aleph Extraction also earned out its advance, joining The Bayern Agenda and The Caledonian Gambit. That means I now get a little bit of royalty income for them each six months.5 However, all three of my books are earning money, which is a nice place to be, even if it’s not live-on-it income.

I’ve also had a surprisingly good year for weird miscellaneous income, which doubled since last year, mainly from merchandising and some affiliate fees. But it’s still a tiny piece of the whole pie.

While I’ve been talking about gross income above, one other big factor helped net income this year: expenses were down. And I mean way down. As a percentage of my income, they were half of last year.6 I did go to my first conference since the pandemic started back in December, but in part it was to use up airline credit that I had from canceled trips in 2020. I also didn’t have any big work purchases in 2021, which I expect to change next year as I probably replace my iMac and my iPad.

As I mentioned in my 2020 write-up, my partner and I bought a house last year, and most of 2021 was spent doing renovations. While those costs don’t directly factor into my business, the fact that our mortgage is significantly higher than our rent does adjust my home office costs. This was also the first full year where I was not paying for my own health insurance out of pocket, which made a huge difference in business expenses. I feel extremely fortunate to have a partner who gets health insurance as part of their job, and it’s another reminder of the deep inequality in our society that not everybody can afford the care they may need.

As always, the life of a freelancer is more inconsistent than anything else. My income’s varied a lot over seven years, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But after doing this for the better part of a decade, I have a better idea of what to expect, how to handle expenses and weather low periods, and generally just how to manage my finances. In general, I’m in a position where I’m not too worried about making it through a given year, though that’s always just a hair’s breadth away: for example, if I were to lose any of my key clients, I would find myself scrambling to make up the difference. But I think I’ve diversified my income enough that it’s not as though it’ll all dry up at once.

As always, I’d still like to continue to expand my fiction income, though there are limitations beyond me in that area. One experiment I’m planning on is self-publishing another Galactic Cold War short (à la my two previous) sometime before Nova comes out in July, and this time charging a small amount for it, just to see how it plays out. I’m also setting myself the goal of finishing and revising a new book by halfway through the year.

And that’s all I’ve got for my finances in 2021. I hope this was an interesting read for you, and if you’ve got any questions about it, feel free to drop me a line or hit me up on Twitter.

It’s become a tradition around these parts, when the new year rolls around, to talk a little bit about my writing finances. And guess what? As wild and bizarre as 2020 was, I—like most everybody out there—still had work to do, and a job to get done. For me, that predominantly meant writing and podcasting, and since I know there are people out there curious about what the life of someone in those industries is like, I’m here to share a few details of what my business looked like. (And remember, it is a business, not a passion or calling that’s somehow magically above the need to generate money in order to eat and live.)

Allow me to offer my annual caveat: this is a picture of my career and my career only, and these lines of work are especially variable—and that’s in a normal year. Attempts to extrapolate what someone else’s career looks like from this single data point are unwise and highly inaccurate. Your mileage will vary. As always, I’ll point you towards the excellent annual post by author Jim C. Hines, who has been doing this for quite some time, and whose posts were an inspiration for this.1

With that out of the way, let’s dive in to my traditional breakdown of income in 2020.

As in previous years, I won’t be sharing exact dollar amounts, but I will say that my gross income this year was down a bit from last year, and that number remains under six figures.2

Takeaways! Well, 2020 was…a year. Here’s how it shook out for me. After a meager decline in the percentage of my revenue that came from tech writing, that number went up somewhat surprisingly in 2020, due to a few factors. First, eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that the number of Macworld columns I write every month decreased this past year3; that was slightly offset by a very small raise I managed to secure way back in January, though it still meant a significant drop. Fortunately, one thing that did compensate for that was that I negotiated a rearrangement of my pay structure with another of my regular tech writing gigs, which resulted in a nice bump.

Podcasting dipped a bit in the overall revenue mix this year: notably, for the first time since 2017, it wasn’t the biggest chunk of my revenue. That’s in large part because one of my regular podcasts saw a significant tail-off in advertising back at the beginning of 2020; another show, meanwhile, experienced a dip in the summer/early fall, though it had already bounced back a bit by the last quarter of 2020. Membership has become a more significant revenue generator in my tech podcasts, with Clockwise Unwound now providing weekly bootleg episodes to paying subscribers and the modestly successful Rebound Prime. Those both helped soften the ups and downs of podcast ads, though they don’t entirely compensate.

And then there’s fiction writing. Last year, I was very pleased in the upward trend I saw, which went from 5 percent in 2018 to 11 percent in 2019. That made me—ah, foolish early 2020 me!—bullish on the future, though I did inject a caveat:

Going into this year, I have The Aleph Extraction coming out in May, and…that’s it. Currently, I’ve got no other books under contract, though I’m hoping one or two other projects might hit maturity in the not too distant future. But barring a substantial increase in the value of my deals, I’m not confident that it will bolster the bottom line that much.

Aleph did indeed come out in May, and that was great, though it ended up looking kind of different to my previous releases: no launch events, no book signings, and no cons to attend made it a mostly solitary affair. I did, however, dip a toe into self-publishing by putting out ebooks of two Galactic Cold War short stories, which was a fascinating experiment, though not particularly a profitable one.4

In better news, I did manage to pull in some royalty payments from The Caledonian Gambit and The Bayern Agenda, which have both earned out their advances, and I’m hopeful that Aleph will follow suit. But I didn’t realize any revenue from new deals in 2020, which is the big reason that the fiction percentage went down this year, to pre-2019 numbers.

As ever, the most important takeaway from being a freelancer is that your income is generally not predictable. Here’s what that looks like for me over the last several years.

What I said last year largely holds true: I’m very privileged to be in a position where I can deal with the ups and downs of freelancing. My income remains diversified, I still have savings, and my partner’s job remains stable—or at least, as stable as anything can be in the time of COVID. One silver lining to the pandemic: my business expenses were way down, thanks to a lack of any travel whatsoever, which will likely continue to be a theme for the first two-thirds of 2021, at least.5

Heck, in the middle of this, we were able to actually buy a house, which was an exciting and terrifying adult-like decision.6

But 2021 is a big question mark right now. We’re still deep in this pandemic for the better part of the year, probably, and even after that, some of the effects are likely to linger. Book sales have tended to be up, but as my own agency pointed out on Twitter, the impact is not necessarily evenly distributed.

I’m choosing to remain hopeful for 2021. I’ve got a few projects that I’m hoping might finally get off the ground, and I’m looking for new opportunities as well. We’ll see how the year goes! Just remember: be good to one another.