Modelling my ‘writing is my sanity‘ t-shirt alongside my sunflowers

The idea for today’s post came to mind after listening to the GCSE English class presenting their speeches on the topic of career choices. Out of thirty pupils in the class, describing with enthusiasm the careers they feel most passionate about, do you want to guess how many chose ‘author’?

Did you guess right? Yep – zero.

‘Pilot’ was interestingly enough the most popular choice, with two boys discussing this path. One had even completed an hour of flight time towards his qualification. Impressive for a 16 year old.

Other career choices included midwife, stock broker, acoustician, and one who picked my former career path (archaeologist), among others. While it was fascinating to learn why these young people were inspired to pick their selected career paths, I couldn’t help but wonder why nobody had picked ‘author’. I didn’t ask, but I can guess.

Creative writing, for most authors, simply doesn’t pay a living wage. Unless you sell millions of books, there is no way an author can pay their bills on the royalties trickling in from sales of their books. Sadly for the majority of authors – myself included – we will always need to have a day job. Out of all 8 of my currently published titles, I sold 165 books in 2023. To keep things simple here, I’m not counting estimated KU customers based on page reads here, just straight ebook/paperback sales from KDP (128 sales) and hardcover sales from Ingramspark (37 sales).

165 books sold last year is not exactly going to keep a roof over my head.

Luckily for me, I am content to keep writing regardless of how many, or few, books I sell. I write because I have stories and poems that I want to share with the world. Even this blog, which is non-fiction writing, does not generate much money for me (I had 148 click-throughs last year to my UK and US Amazon stores from blog readers via this website, so I’m guessing some of those translated into book sales).

I write because writing is my sanity.

Posted by on March 11, 2024 in Writing and tagged , , , , , , .

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About Leilanie Stewart

Leilanie Stewart is an award-winning author and poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She writes ghost and psychological horror, as well as experimental poetry. Her writing confronts the nature of self; her novels feature main characters on a dark psychological journey who have a crisis and create a new sense of identity. She began writing for publication while working as an English teacher in Japan, a career pathway that has influenced themes in her writing. Her former career as an Archaeologist has also inspired her writing and she has incorporated elements of archaeology and mythology into both her fiction and poetry. In addition to promoting her own work, Leilanie runs Bindweed Anthologies, a creative writing publication with her writer husband, Joseph Robert. Aside from publishing pursuits, Leilanie enjoys spending time with her husband and their lively literary lad, a voracious reader of sea monster books.

2 responses »

  1. Mary Anne Abdo's avatar Mary Anne Abdo says:
    March 11, 2024 at 12:37 PM

    Great article and I agree with you, writing is also my sanity.

    Reply

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