Two Writing and Publishing Lessons from the First Hours of A Hurricane

I’m writing this from an apartment packed down for impending cyclone/hurricane due to hit Brisbane some time in the next 24 hours. It’s expected to be a category 2—possibly levelling up to a category 3 if we get unlucky—and it’ll be the worst storm to hit Brisbane in 70 years.

We’re 100% certain to lose power over the next few days. There’s a flood expected in our neck of the woods, although it usually stops at the end of the street rather than reaching our position on the hill.

Naturally, this makes me think about writing and publishing, because everything makes me think about writing and publishing (It’s also a nice distraction from the looming desire to freak the fuck out because we’re as prepped as we’re going to get, and there’s literally zero control over what the weather does next).

So, what can we learn from this moment? I’ll start with the obvious.

WRITERS NEED A CASHFLOW BUFFER

Even if we make it through the storm unscathed, the cyclone is going to be mildly catastrophic for me as a freelancer.

I get paid by the hour for many gigs, and I’m conservatively estimating that I’ll be losing about eight hours of freelance gigs that normally cover my living expenses. 

This is not a huge problem for me, because the first rule of freelancing is to get ahead of your expenses. I do my best to keep a month’s worth of living and business expenses in the bank for circumstances exactly like this. 

Ordinarily, it would be more than a month. Three months of expenses is an “I don’t have to stress about things” reserve, while six months is ideal. Alas, I already had to dip into my capital twice this year, and I hadn’t finished building things up again.

Fortunately, I’d built it up some, because rebuilding the savings buffer is always the priority after it’s depleted. 

And so long as I’ve either relocated to somewhere with internet access or we’ve got power and Wi-Fi by March 16, I’m good to pick up my regular gigs and bring up cash flow up to speed.

But the core of this is simple. If you write for a living, and you’re self-employed, you can’t count on things going right. You need to prepare for the weeks where things go wrong, and you lose valuable time to unexpected events. 

But that brings me to my second thought of the week:

YOUR WRITING IS AN ASSET, NOT A PAYCHECK

A lot of my freelancing is paid-by-the-hour work. I trade an hour of my time to mentor other writers or run workshops or provide layout and design skills, and they pay me an agreed upon fee.

This isn’t so different from working in an office job, except I’m responsible for my own taxes and resources. And there’s no sick pay. 

I occasionally work with small business mentors who look at my income streams and note that I make more from my freelancing than my writing and publishing endeavours most week. 

“Why don’t you pare back on publishing and put more effort into teaching?” they ask. “You could double your cash flow easy.”

And while there are many answers, the most important is always this: an hour spent doing freelance work will only ever earn me what I earn in that hour. 

An hour spent working on a book builds me an asset, which I can leverage down the line to earn future income.

Most writers aren’t taught to think of what they produce as assets. We lock into the work-for-hire mindset: I produce; I get paid. This is particularly true in the old, velocity publishing model where writers earn an advance and then a trickle of royalties.

But make no mistake: writing is an asset-based business. As Australian agent Alex Adsett is fond of saying: your books and stories are like owning a house. You lease the rights to do something with it to people, but you still own it.

And when folks are done with the lease, you can lease it to someone else or move into the house yourself. 

The trick used to be that you could only lease things: you needed publishers to get work out to readers.

Fortunately, writers in the 21st century have other options. 

One of the nice things about this week has been the number of existing assets that have quietly earned money in the background. I can’t ship physical books right now—and probably won’t be able to for a few weeks if the flooding is bad—but ebook sales have been ticking along.

My newsletters are quietly picking up new readers for both Brain Jar Press books and my own GenrePunk titles. 

Even my coffee mugs and merch tick along without me needing to be online.

But that’s just the start of the things that bring me comfort right now. 

FINDING NEW WAYS TO LEVERAGE ASSETS GIVES YOU OPTIONS

The nice thing about assets is this: they give you options. Even if things are catastrophically bad and the cyclone wipes out my print stock here at the offices, there are still things I could do in the aftermath to help shore up my cash-flow and restock my buffer.

For example:

• I can write and schedule a bunch of newsletters directing people’s attention to projects I can sell without being present, all of which can reach people outside my immediate location where we’re all huddled out of the storm. 
• I can pull together short-term bundle deals and market them to readers as limited-time “help me get back on my feet” options. With my own online store set-up, this has the advantage of getting cash in my account in a matter of hours.
• I can take some of my existing bundles and put them in front of new audiences by uploading them to storefronts I don’t currently offer them. My Urban Fantasy bundle, for example, is only available at the Brain Jar Press store.
• I could kick start a new edition of an existing project, or move one of my prior projects up and launch it as a Kickstarter. There’s a range of possibilities here, stretching back over 25 years of writing across multiple genres, with plenty of markets to tap into.
• I can take a bunch of books and publish them in new formats, either by putting them into print for the first time, or by doing hardcovers.
• I can scour my old social media feeds and produce a bunch of new mugs for writers. 
• I can hit the internet and find reprint/translation options for some old short stories (I’ve got stories that have been reprinted four or five times, earning me ten times more than the check for the first publication). 
• I can generate new books on the fly by dipping into some of the writing I’ve done that isn’t yet published in book or ebook form. I’ve been meaning to do a follow up for You Don’t Want To Be Published for a while now, and have enough writing stuff to fill two or three books in a pinch. Ditto old blog posts about RPG gaming, or running a small creative business, and launching a writing event.
• I can take some old writing workshops and record online versions. Or offer to do a live version as a one-off event via Zoom.

All of which gives me options before writing and release something new, which is also happening in the background. Some of those options draw upon work I did back in 2004—and I’ve built a lot of assets own the two decades since.

The main reason I haven’t done a lot of the above is time and the short-term opportunity cost of doing them instead of freelancing.

Once you remove freelancing from my week, I can pick one or two options and get them prepped for launch using a notebook and a laptop.

Plus, cyclone recovery ads a compelling marketing event to the pitch to potential readers, answering not just “why do I want this” but also “why do I want to pay for it now”.

I’m usually loathe to engage in pity marketing, where you tug at a reader’s heart strings instead of offering them a compeling deal, but needs must. 

It does lead me to the thing lots of people misunderstand when they go into a writing career. We’re often told there’s no money in writing, but what it usually means is there’s no steady paycheck in being a writer.

And that’s true: there isn’t.

But asset building is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you know how to leverage what you’ve already done and earn money from it again and again. 

I’ve got a lot of assets.

So I’ve got a lot of options for when things calm down again. 

Which gives me a nice, calming activity to focus on as the wind picks up and the rains arrive, because I’m definitely going to need a distraction.