How I Make a Living as a Writer
All facts and numbers. This is how I make it work.
As a writer and artist this is probably one of the most common questions people ask me when I first meet them. Can you make a living with this? How do you actually make it work? So if you’ve been wondering the same, here’s an extensive explanation, that perhaps inspires you, gives you a reality check or makes you think: thank god I have a 9-5 job and a secure pension. Who knows.
How it started?
Four years ago, on December 1st 2020, I launched Muse Letter Publishing, my own publishing company. At the beginning of the second lockdown and after the first successful crowdfunding campaign for my first book Things I Have Noticed, it seemed like the logical conclusion. Though it is kind of an unusual path to take as a writer – as the following will show – it sometimes is the only way to allow an artistic vision to come through. I had been self-employed before in Germany as a podcast host and producer for audible and a director and editor of a queer-feminist YouTube show but in many ways I started from scratch again in that winter where a lot of us were huddled up inside, having weird Christmas.
Launching a business in a foreign country, navigating tax, insurance, e-commerce, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, with a big audience in Germany and Europe: jumping through hoops on fire is an understatement. Getting books over the border after Brexit currently includes an Estonian-based start-up company, lots of excel spreadsheets and a regal stubbornness to spend hours online reading fine print.
Somehow it’s been working so far, I like to tell people. Somehow it keeps on working. If you’re a freelancer, self-employed, business owner – however you self-identify – you know that it does take a certain kind of winging-it-energy that makes up the life of the unknown pay check.
So how do I make a living?