Why I'm Glad I'll Be Retiring Soon (More About Money)

I'm one of the few people around who likes Mondays.

Since I'm self-employed, I choose when I'm going to work, and therefore Monday isn't necessarily the start of a workweek for me. I've been known to plow through a weekend, just so I'll be finished by Monday. Or I could start a job on a Tuesday. So there's no reason for me to dread Mondays.

I've been represented by two literary agencies in my career. The first took care of me from my 4th book through my 73rd; the second for the three books that followed (the ones that are currently earning me money).

The first agency always mails its checks out on Fridays. While this doesn't mean every Monday I'll find a check in my mailbox (I wish), it does mean should they send me a check, whether I'm expecting one or not, it'll show up on a Monday. And thus, I am very sentimentally attached to Mondays (and to my mailboxes).

I get very little money from books 4-73. What money I do earn pretty much comes from three titles, Kid Power, The Year Without Michael, and Courage, Dana. Last year, out of curiosity and an intense desire to predict my future, I added up how much Monday money I've gotten over the past few years. It turns out to range between $3,000 to $5,000. Not enough money to live off of (obviously), but a pleasant little supplement. One of the benefits of being a self-employed freelance children's book writer, as opposed to many other self-employed careers I could have stumbled into. My hope (and it can only be a hope) is that Life As We Knew It, the dead and the gone, and This World We Live In will each chip in a thousand bucks or so per year for many years to come. I'll never be able to count on it (as opposed to Social Security, which I'm choosing to believe will last my lifetime), but whatever comes comes and I'm sure I'll find a way to spend it.

Google, as you know, takes great pleasure in telling me what's going on with my career, and over the past couple of weeks, it's led me to places where LAWKI can be downloaded for free. Someone, somewhere, has taken the time to illegally upload it, and then cheerfully informs people who might be interested, that it's available for them. It's possible Google itself has done this; there's some kind of writer/Google copyright conflict that I'm supposed to understand, but no matter how hard I try, I can't figure it out.

For the most part my attitude about all this copyright violation is that it's gin joint, as in the line from Casablanca about all the gin joints in the world. I figure LAWKI isn't the only book being so offered, and that with all those other gin joints around, the damage to my income from the illegal downloads will be minimal. To me, this is the advantage of not being a super duper best selling author. People are much more likely to look for and find the super duper best selling authors' gin joints than mine.

But I really don't know how writers starting out now and writers who are just on the verge of starting out are going to survive this kind of theft in years to come. I'll be living off the money I've saved and Social Security, and the thousand here and the thousand there, until those thousands stop drifting in. But those other writers, those new kid writers, are going to be starting off in a world where their royalties could be seriously affected by this unthinking thievery. The people who are stealing my works may well just be kids; they don't understand that what they're doing is as morally wrong as stealing my wallet. And in days, weeks, years to come, there'll be more and more of those kids, and more and more grownups, who will post other people's books because they want to share what they've read, or share what they're thinking about reading, or share for the pure joy of making new friends. I'm willing to believe there's no malice involved, just ignorance.

I should be fine, although annoyed, the way you feel when you're bitten by a couple of fleas.
But all the new writers are going to have their incomes leached away from them, and I really don't know how they, and the whole publishing industry, will handle it.

I wish them luck. Because it's not going to be easy.