Tax Time Thoughts

Oh crap, where did I put that check stub, or the acceptance letter saying how much I would be paid, or the receipts from Staples?  What about the toll tickets for driving to the con, oh, and the parking lot receipts, that is if I remembered getting them.  Maybe they're still in the glove compartment?  What do I do about the pile of comps on the bookshelf or ......

Filing the US federal tax forms is not only pure freaking misery but forces one to lapse into the reality of their disorganized life.  Don't they understand that all I want to do is write - not be a damned bookkeeper.

Even if you get all your paperwork together there are still problems.  A publisher is only responsible for sending IRS Tax Form 1099 when the total amount paid to a writer in a single tax year is greater than $600.  For the 99.9999% of us who write genre short stories, such huge payments from a single publisher are hardly ever the case - you have to sell a LOT of words to a single market at pennies per word to make more than $600.

In an ideal universe income records automagically flow to the writer from responsible corporations who always file Forms 1099. In this fantasy land the writer should have no problem listing every cent of their income.   But over here, in the real world, this does not always happen - even when payments exceed the limit.  Neither do the publisher/editors who slip payments through PayPal or other e-means provide the necessary forms.  Yet, despite these, the IRS insists that a writer acknowledge ALL income received regardless of whether they received documentation or not. Even if a writer manages to sell a half dozen short stories in a single year they still have to list every one of those pitiful amounts.

Listing a writer's pitiful income is not an arduous task, given a small number of sales, however it is really embarrassing to admit that you received only $10 for a fucking novella that took you six agonizing months to write, even if it was finally (Hooray!) a SALE!

At the absolute bottom of market, one step above fanzines, there are the non-payment "publications" that pay ONLY in complementary copies.  Does a writer count those two or three copies as income and, if so, at what price?  Is it considered barter when you exchange your hard-won words for printed magazines or ephemeral electrons on an obscure website?  Maybe you could charitably consider those as tips except - wait a minute - tips are supposed to be reported as well!

 This forces one into excessive contemplation of work that might be more financially rewarding, of books unread, of shows not seen, and of family neglected.  Putting those aside, the writer grumbles, sharpens the computer keys and drearily enumerates their modest successes, cursing fate, penurious publishers, and citizenship.

Perhaps next  year won't be so difficult.


#SFWApro

A Writer's Taxes

We all start out as hobbyists - writing a bit here and there, sending submission after submission, starting down false paths based on shaky premises, and, in general, learning from our mistakes.  Year after year we struggle with words, grammar, syntax, punctuation, and other arcane arts of the writing guild until finally that magic letter/email arrives stating that you have pleased an editor and they are willing to give you cold hard cash for little more in return than to print your story.  There are few pleasures greater for a writer than to finally find acceptance.

None of this comes without a cost.  Modern writers need their tools - computers, tablets, paper, printers, envelopes, stamps, an Internet connection, and that most critical resource - TIME.  The usual investment greatly exceeds those first few payments you might receive. Sometimes the payments are recycled into better tools or upgraded software to make our writing less onerous.

One sale begets another and you find the modest increase to your income welcome, but give it little extra thought.  That is,  until you have to file your taxes and start receiving those Forms 1099 from the publishers. That's when you realize that Federal and State taxes have to be paid on the full amounts.

Tax deductions are allowed for some of your tools and activities, but not all.  The smart writer keeps track of  their writing income and expenses.  A simple spreadsheet and box beside your computer are all the tools you need.  If you are selling a lot or getting giga-checks from a publisher, you might pop for an accounting system, but that's usually overkill.  Toss your writing receipts into the box for tax time (Be careful to clearly keep your personal expenses separate from your writing expenses) and faithfully record ALL income. Since not all publishers send Forms 1099 to writers you might underreport your income. Starting the practice of record keeping and saving receipts might seem onerous when you have yet to make a sale, but by doing this you are investing in life long and money saving habits.

For detailed advice regarding deductions and income treatment you should turn to your local tax authority.  They can be quite helpful, regardless of whatever news they deliver.

Counting

At a recent writers' meeting I was asked how many stories I'd written.  Since the questioner was a novelist I assumed that he wanted to know the total number so I said, "Just under five hundred, but only five of those were novels."  I was startled by his gasp of astonishment and quickly amended what I said and tried to explain.

You see, a writer writes, and writes, and writes.  Much of a writer's production is cast aside as the idea fails to coalese into a story or, if it survives the initial blush of creativity, then during the long editing process.  For each five thousand word short story perhaps ten or twelve thousand words have been considered, tried, written, found wanting, and cut out.  A writer should not count those words any more than a woodworker should consider their shavings or a mason the shards of brick left behind.

Which leaves us with those works that reach what the writer considers completion.  Only a few of the completed stories are ever accepted and published, the rest doomed for the trunk or to cycle through editorial in boxes forever.
Conversations with other known writers indicate that any lifetime sales ratio above 0.25 should be considered a raving success!  My own ratio is much lover than that (0.20) as indicated in the first paragraph: of the five hundred I've sold only one hundred.

Except that number's misleading as well since any published (and retained rights) story can be resold by the writer to other markets such as foreign and domestic press, audio books, podcasts, etc.  Today, a writer can even put their works out in eBook form and produce a modest, but continuing income.

So the proper question that should have been asked is: "Of all the stories how many saw first publication?"  Which would also produce a misleading answer since writers sometimes selll stories that never see print.

But that's the subject of another blog.

Shout Out

The web is a wonderful thing, connecting people around the world who never might have otherwise met. When I post  a new blog it is interesting to see how the different countries "light up" on my blog map. Apparently this blog is being read by not only people in the US and Canada but also struggling writers (which is probably redundant phrasing) in India, China, Russia, Germany, France, England, Scotland, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa. I am suitably impressed to say the least.

I have no way of knowing who you might be or what perverse pleasure you might get out of my masochistic musings, but I want to thank you for your continued interest in my struggles to understand this impulse that drives me to write. It is somehow reassuring to know that others may be as beset with what appear to be everlasting personal and professional doubts as I.  Welcome, fellow sufferers.

For my own part, if nothing else, I hope that at least one of you is encouraged by the news that they are not alone in dealing with their writing demons. I hope that someone will someday find a bit of my advice that actually helps move their work forward or at least gives them encouragement to continue.  The world needs stories, your stories, and failing to provide them would be a sin.

I will keep posting to this stream of consciousness as long as new devils beset me. I hope that some day I will experience a writer's epiphany that leads to the denouement of happiness and will be able to share that as well.  Until then, I hope you continue to read and enjoy these posts.

By the way, it wouldn't hurt to comment now and then.

Blog Post 100

It seems somehow apt that this one hundredth blog post should mark my return from the breathtaking Rio Hondo week-long critique-fest in the mountains of New Mexico.

Typical critique session

I spent last week high (9,700 feet) above Taos with a group of eminent genre writers who came together for mutual criticism and to discuss the markets, the writing life, and drink. Each of the ten writers brought an early draft of something they felt needed improvement and which they  hoped could benefit from examination by other professional writers.

Each draft was read multiple times and, in a joint session, each person provided an intense, three-minute expression of viewpoints, sometimes helpful suggestions, and penetrating observations about the sample provided.  At the end of each round of comments there were sometimes lengthy discussions among the group on writerly points of style, phrasing, and pace. More detailed observations were scribbled on the manuscripts and returned to the author.

Any writer worth their salt requires a substantial ego to weather the fickle genre fiction markets and this group was no exception.  Despite their strong egos, there was no animosity, no wails of injustice, nor hurt feelings evident despite sometimes searing criticism over some flaw apparent to all but the author him/herself.  Often I felt that my critiques were a young pony in a draught horse show, underweight and overwhelmed.  Nevertheless, I learned a little about going beyond the obvious surface of words and plot to examine the underlying structure of the piece to discover how to convey understanding to the reader.

My piece was neither more nor less criticized than any other and now I have to sort through the notes and written comments/corrections resulting. That everyone read so carefully and multiple times assured me that little was untouched. Strangely, everyone grokked on a subplot throwaway that I  paid scant attention to and which would take the novel in a completely different direction that I was not contemplating (and may not follow.)

I came away both exhausted and refreshed. The knowledge of the field gained far exceeded any costs I may have incurred. I just hope that that knowledge improves whatever I choose to write.

ePublications

A few weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and generate Kindle versions of my stories as either collections around a theme or as stand alone pieces.

Signing up with Amazon was the easiest part of the process but once I had an account I had to figure out how to generate the mobi format the Kindle requires.  My previous experience with producing a Smashwords eDocument was that it took a lot of fiddling to produce an acceptable document.  I did not want to put that same level of effort into each story since the return on time invested would be so slight at best.

Fortunately I use Scrivener as a writing tool and much to my surprise and delight it was able to produce documents in mobi and epub formats through an easy to use interface. The process that evolved while putting a Sam Boone collection together was first to produce txt versions of each story, then paste that into one of my Scrivener "cards" (each card representing a chapter), and finally compile the story in mobi format and review it on my Kindle reader.  This took several iterations until I finally figured out which were the proper settings needed to make the result more book-like.

The only difficulty was producing a decent cover, since it is the cover that hopefully will attract the eye of the potential reader. For this I used a combination of my own photography, Photoshop elements, and Gimp.  It took several tries to get the aspect ratio correct.

The next, and agonizingly difficult step was pricing the collection.  There is damn little guidance in this area so I stepped back and looked at the pricing of the genre magazines.  Analog and Asimov's both sell for $4.99 an issue.  An issue contains roughly 62,000 words, which equates to about 200 words per kilobyte.  Doing the math means that reasonable pricing should be about $0.0000811312 per kb.  But consumers don't like the prices to be too specific, so I had to round up or down AND pay attention to Amazon's 30% and 70% guidelines, one of which has a $2.99 minimum. Using that as a guide I priced the collections to come as close to the 70% minimum as possible while maintaining the integrity of the collection's theme.

Uploading involved putting all of the metadata in place on the Amazon menu and then waiting forty-eight hours for acceptance before it appeared in the virtual store.

Later I discovered Calibre and am now able to produce copies of my collections in any format and, even better, convert any eDocument from whichever of the dozen eFormats to any other.

All I have to do now is hope that someone, somewhere will buy the stories.