This post, from Jim C. Hines, originally appeared on his blog on 1/4/10.

This is the third year I’ve posted about the income I make as a fantasy author.  (See the Money Posts from Year 1 and Year 2.)  Money tends to be a taboo topic, but given all of the myths and illusions about writing, I think it’s important to get some actual data out there.  Because knowing is half the battle!

The background: I’ve been writing and submitting my work since 1995.  Goblin Quest was my first book with a major publisher, and came out in the end of 2006.  2009 saw the publication of my 4th and 5th novels with DAW.  So while I have five books in print, I’m still an early-career author.

I am not a full-time writer, for reasons which will soon become apparent.  I also write only fiction, unlike a number of authors I know who write both fiction and non-fiction (in part because the latter usually pays better).

Thanks to a last-minute D&A (delivery and acceptance) check from DAW, my writing income for 2009 came to $28,940.

Breaking that total down, I earned:

Read the rest of the post on Jim C. Hines’ blog.

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. "Resolve" seems a stony thing, grim and inflexible. In a mountain river, I’d rather be water than boulder.

Rather than make a resolution, I prefer to set an intention.

An intention seems to better fit the truth I’ve felt attracted to lately: that free will is merely an illusion. As Jay Michaelson says in a Huffington Post essay that brings nonduality into pop culture: "Free will" exists as a psychological reality, but not as an ontological one. Like the individual self, it’s a mirage: "You" exist, sure, but you exist just like a wave on the ocean: here one minute, gone the next, and never apart from the ocean itself. In that light, taking a firm-jawed, self-important stand on a "resolution" just seems silly.

So I have intentions. One intention for the year is to return to regular journaling, using ink on paper. My most creative and prolific writing years were when I was freely journaling, filling up book after book with both mundane record-keeping and giddy flights of inspiration. Then, I would develop the eureka moments on a keyboard, transforming them into fiction. As I’ve moved further into the cyber-world, my use of dead trees has declined, but so has my creative juice. For me, there’s magic in the hand-pen-paper circuit.

Not only that, but blogging is unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, it’s too public, which for me means it’s not spontaneous enough. I craft my blog too carefully for it to fill the uninhibited role of a journal. Second, it feels transient, not actually real. When I’m gone from this sphere, I want my children to have a physical record of my life, rendered in my own handwriting, caressable by their fingers, easy to pull off a shelf… not merely a list of hyperlinks or a shiny thingy full of binary code inaccessible without an electric machine. Maybe I’m not confident there’ll be an infrastructure left by then.

Another intention for 2010 is to re-read some favorite fiction through a new lens. I’m interested in how literary fiction can incorporate principles of nonduality without losing its identity and without becoming didactic or cliched. I want to explore the expression of Unity, from ancient Advaita to the mysteries of quantum physics, in modern realistic storytelling. This is done in several ways: by looking with new interpretive eyes at work I already love, by reading new stuff, and by writing my own.

This intention does not bite off too much: I’ll begin by looking again at some of Paul Auster’s early work, which has been of vital importance to my creative development, and see if it offers up new insights through my nonduality glasses. Then, if I feel so inclined, I’ll move on to Nabokov, Brautigan, Marquez, others. And I’ll keep an eye out for writing I haven’t already read that seems likely to feed this hunger.

Maybe I’ll even write about what I discover. Maybe it will appear here on this blog. Or not. Maybe it will only appear as scribbled notes in my journal. Or not. It will be what it will be. After all, it’s not a resolution, only an intention.

The Road More Traveled
If you’ve looked into the current self-publishing boom at all you’ve undoubtedly heard the advice that you must work on your platform to have any hope of being successful as a self-published writer. If you’re at all like me you probably seized on this mushy advice while also struggling to make sense of it. And struggling. And struggling…

At some point the thought may have occurred to you that while the advice is undoubtedly solid, it’s your ignorance of key terms* that makes it hard for you to seize this golden opportunity. What, exactly, is a platform, and how is it most effectively worked on?

Taking the bull by the horns, while also somehow following conventional wisdom, you equate your platform with your website or blog or personal appearances, and equate work on with writing and saying things for free so as to induce other human beings to care about you. (Over time, as you dedicate yourself to this apparently-but-not-really more robust definition of a platform, this exchange of labor and skill for attention may also convince you that you can profit by giving other things away, including the books or stories you naively intended to sell before you became so much wiser about self-publishing.)

At some much later point, when you’re lying by the side of the self-publishing road with an I.V. in your neck and blisters on your hands from crawling those last long miles, you may marvel that personal determination seems to have so little to do with success in publishing or self-publishing. While it’s certainly true that you can’t win if you don’t enter, it’s more likely the case that even if you enter constantly and do everything you’re supposed to do — including working on your platform, whatever that means — you still won’t win.

At which point, if you’re a good and decent sort, you will simply blame yourself for having failed. You will man-up or woman-up as appropriate and acknowledge that you never really figured out what your platform was, or how you could work on it. Being a decent sort, however, you won’t hesitate to encourage others to crack the code by working on their own platform, which will endear you to the next crop of earnest, hardworking fools determined to make a name for themselves with their writing.  

Platform Defined
Having said all that, I think the word platform does mean something real, and that there are many ways for you to work on it that will help you sell books. The fact that it doesn’t mean what you think it means, or that it has, literally, nothing at all to do with good writing, or, in some cases, the ability to write at all, must immediately be dismissed as a curiosity, but that’s a small price to pay for success.

In all its incarnations, platform is an interesting word. Because no definition of the word meets the usage referred to in this post, I am proposing the following addition:

plat*form [plat-fawrm]

-noun

xx. Publishing. celebrity: Gary worked hard on his platform by giving nude readings of his book, “Dreams Deciphered”.

Now, whether a lightbulb just went on for you or not, it should be a little clearer why the word platform seems to make sense in some mushy, ill-defined way. If you think of celebrities as having high visibility, and you think of something on a platform as being more visible, then celebrity = platform and working on your platform means raising your own visibility.

(If you ever spend any time in politics — and I encourage you not to — you will learn that candidates for public office spend a good deal of time on what their advisers, aides and managers literally call visibility. Speech at the Ladies’ Auxilliary? Visibility. Kissing babies during a parade? Visibility. Lunch with the mayor? Visibility. Angry speech about hot-button issue that guarantees press coverage even though data conclusively shows that nobody actually votes the issue? Visibility. What’s also interesting here is that politicians traditionally embrace a platform of political views, which are ostensibly the equivalent of policy positions. In practice, however, political platforms are usually designed to placate or seduce supporters — meaning even here the idea of a platform relates more to marketing and celebrity than it does to the work product of politics.)

The Platform Advantage
To see how the platform = celebrity dynamic plays out in publishing (and self-publishing), let’s look at an exhaustive series of examples. For each of the following, imagine that the person in question has just written a book that they are hoping to bring it to market.

• Barack Obama — huge celebrity; huge platform
• You — no celebrity; teeny-weeny platform

I could go on, of course, but I think you get the idea. When you’re being encouraged to work on your platform you’re actually being encouraged to raise your visibility and celebrity. The more well-known you are, the more books you will sell. (And you thought there was no hard science behind all this platform talk.)

So what can you do to raise your celebrity?

Well, the good news is that there are a lot of options. In fact, you’re really only limited by your imagination and morality. Because pathological liars, narcissists and sociopaths have an unfair advantage here, I’m not going to go into specifics about things you might actually do to raise your celebrity lest anyone get any really bad ideas. I will, however, list a few names of people who currently have an absolutely dynamite platform and let you draw your own conclusions.

• Bernie Madoff
• Osama bin Laden
• Wall St.
• Balloon Boy’s Dad
• The Owner of the Indianapolis Colts

Again, I could go on almost infinitely, but I assume you get the point. Celebrity, like sex, sells. So whatever it takes to raise your celebrity is inherently a good thing for your publishing career. It won’t make you a better writer, of course, and it won’t increase the likelihood that you have something to say, but it will almost certainly sell more books than being you or caring about your craft. [Tip: if you’re short on time, work ethic and content to give away, there are myriad ways you can jump-start your platform by giving away your dignity as a human being.]

The Road Less Traveled
On the other hand, if you are still determined to put craft first I can offer you a faint silver lining. To the extent that celebrity trumps all else in publishing, you can’t compete. Sarah Palin will always get a book deal, even if she has trouble forming coherent thoughts without the literary support of a ghostwriter.

However. If what you care about is writing, and in particular storytelling, you have a shot at competing on the merits today that you wouldn’t have had a few years ago. The reason for this is that the marketing machinery previously used to raise the visibility/celebrity of other writers has broken down. You as a romance writer or literary author are no longer up against a stacked deck guarded by industry gatekeepers protecting franchise writers. Today, all but the most famous (meaning most bankable, not most talented) of your competitors are in the same boat. Even long-time mid-list old hands are having to figure out what their platform is, and how to work on it, and that puts them on an even footing with you.

Assuming that there ever was a paying audience for the kind of stuff you write, you now have access to that audience directly, and can — at least in part — rely on the quality of what you write, rather than the q-score for who you are, to determine your success. You may succeed and you may not, but believing in and improving your craft vastly increases the likelihood that you will attract attention for your skill set as opposed to your celebrity — which could also lead to offers from publishers, or work-for-hire opportunities.

The choice is yours, of course. I’m going to go the craft route, but only because I wouldn’t want to belong to any group of celebrities that would have me as a member.

* In your later years, after life has beaten you down, you will realize that advice which is devoid of recognizable terminology is no advice at all, and you will either chuckle or shake your head at this realization depending on your disposition. If you still have a fair share of your marbles, and if what you foolishly wanted all along was to be a good writer, you may also realize that mushy advice is the hallmark of the guru, the salesperson and the con artist, and that what you really could have used was the utility and reliability of craft. Again, depending on your disposition, you may or may not punish yourself further by noting that bridge builders spend very little time attending motivational seminars, but lots of time on math.

This is a cross-posting from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk site.

This post, from Bonnie Kozek, originally appeared on her Case Files blog on 4/20/09 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

The writer suffers. London, overdose. Woolf, drowning. Mattheissen, leap. Hemingway, gunshot. Plath, gas. Berryman, leap. Inge, carbon monoxide. Sexton, carbon monoxide. Brautigan, gunshot. Levi, leap. Kosinski, overdose. Gray, drowning. Wallace, hanging. Mishima, ritual suicide culminating in assisted beheading. This accounting, even in the extreme, barely skims the surface.

The American psyche has long been acculturated to the idea of the “suffering writer” – the “mad artist” – the connection between creativity and insanity. Moreover, American writers, as referenced in the above abridged list of suicides, have substantially contributed to the incontrovertible nature of this broadly accepted “tradition.” Indeed, beginning with research first conducted in the 1970s, the scientific community has attempted to explain the phenomenon of the “suffering writer.” In her book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, reports that writers are as much as 20 times as likely as other people to suffer depressive illnesses. Why? There appears to be two principal reasons: First, illness brought on by individual biology and/or traumatic experience, and secondly, a predisposition by way of birthright. Couple this with the inherent downsides of the profession — isolation, loneliness, rejection, financial insecurity – and the glamorization of the suffering writer – so prevalent that it has engendered a kind of “suffering competition” – (Upon learning of Plath’s suicide, Sexton is reported to have said covetously, “She took something that was mine! That death was mine!”)— and there you have it: A foregone conclusion.

However incontrovertible, an examination of the links between writer and depression – and the questions that logically arise from such inquiry – continues to be written about and debated by scientists, psychologists and writers alike. One subject of contemplation is the age-old question of whether psychological suffering is an essential component of artistic creativity. There are those who, based upon the mountain of empirical evidence and technical research, conclude that it is. Others disagree – citing literary giants – Shakespeare, e.g. – who had no significant psychopathology. Both positions are reasonable and, effectively, indisputable. Ergo, there’s no clear victor in this particular piece of the dispute. Yet, how can both be right? During a recent interview I was asked why I chose to be a writer. I answered that I have an irrepressible attraction to the words, to the letters – that I sense something beneath the surface – a kind of code. That I’m forever trying to break the code – to decipher the mystery – to find in the words something that is true – to craft a story that someone will want to read. And then I added, “But then again, I’m not so sure if I chose writing or if it chose me.” And, there it is — the articulation of uncertainty about the “choosing” or the “being chosen” — that offers one possible answer to the question.

Writers are born of two distinct and disparate sources. Some come to the world with innate talent – a talent which is either recognized early on, or discovered and nurtured in time. Their gifts are immense. Their minds are healthy, or rather, comparatively healthy. Others come to the world with burden. They write to survive. Of this latter category, the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author J. Anthony Lukas once said, “All writers are, to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. In my own case, I was filling a hole in my life which opened at the age of eight, when my mother killed herself . . . ” (Lukas, diagnosed with depression ten years earlier, hanged himself in 1997.) This category of writer starts with a less intellectual methodology. The personal risks are titanic. Talent, not wholly inborn, is learned and earned through the sweat of the flesh and the letting of blood. Some writers of this sort are able to effectively compartmentalize their suffering – fight their personal demons on the battlefield of human relations – between themselves and others – rather than on the written page. In this case, the resultant work may be indistinguishable from that of the writer unburdened by disease. Others are capable of redirecting and baring their pain in less conspicuous ways – through plot, character, and subject matter. And then there is the writer whose entire body of work is drawn solely from the wellspring of personal despair – a seemingly bottomless and unforgiving pit. This writer’s illness devastates – subjugates every aspect of her life. Her world becomes small, her purpose compulsive and single-minded. Such crushing depression may eventually suck all the oxygen out of her being, extinguish what flicker of hope has managed to survive the storm of her insidious affliction. Ultimately, this writer is consumed by the illness that fueled her creativity. There seems no way out. But might there be?

What if a writer under the influence of depressive illness became “un-depressed”? What if some combination of treatment – drugs, electric shock, psychoanalysis – was successful? Would the writer’s creativity – would the writer’s work – become negatively impacted? Would the writer stop writing about “depressing” subjects like defiant human emotion? Would, for example, an Artaud, Baudelaire, or Poe start writing “happily-ever-after” prose if “cured” by Zoloft? Of course, we won’t have the technical answers to these questions until future researchers – basing their findings not on the work and lives of dead authors but on the work and lives of writers currently living with depression – both in and out of treatment – provide them. Yet, un-technically – via experience, observation, and intuition – answers can be deduced. A Samuel Beckett, even partially restored, would not produce a “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The “change” for the writer, I submit, would come not in content, but rather in fecundity and endurance. For, when the annihilating destruction of depression – the “storm of murk” as William Styron so aptly described it – is muscled into symmetry with the writer’s purpose and faculty – when creative juices are feeding not just a single monster – there is an opening up of the universe – a vision that allows the writer to “rewrite” the inevitable – to comprehend what had previously been incomprehensible: That when it comes to writing and living, there is a choice. And finally, this writer, given the option, may choose not one or the other, but both: To write . . . and . . . to live.

When reflecting upon the vast, poignant, and enduring anthology of work produced by writers who have suffered from depression – as those mentioned in this article – and assuming that literature is necessary – that it matters – that it enriches all humanity – it is not hard to imagine that the “freeing of will” would bestow gifts far beyond those given to a single beleaguered soul.

Bonnie Kozek’s highly-acclaimed noir thriller, Threshold, is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Powell’s Books and other online sites. Her follow-up book, Just Before the Dawn, will be published in 2010. Learn more about her work at: http://www.bonniekozek.com or contact her at: bk@bonniekozek.com .