I realized something about myself and running a small business the other day:
I don’t want to do just anything. I want to tell stories.
I started three small businesses in addition to my books back in 2016. They clipped along quite well until that fateful March in 2020, none of them earning me a ton of cash, but all of them together earning me enough that I could work a very part-time “day” job and was making a nice little income. I loved doing all the things I was doing. Dog training, teaching drawing lessons, and reading tarot cards. On the side, I wrote books and played hand drums in a band. I was constantly running from one appointment to the next, but I was having so much fun.
When the pandemical happened, all of that came to a screeching halt, and my part-time job as the front-desk person at an assisted living facility became nearly full-time — and very stressful.
I’m now at a totally different full-time job, with very little time left over at the end of a day, and all my spare time is devoted to writing and getting this book thing off the ground.
Why?
Out of all my gigs, the books have always paid me the least. It’s a harder thing to sell fiction than pretty much any other of the things I was doing. Harder even than selling music, and anyone who’s been in a band knows that when six friends say they’ll come to a show, none of them will show up.
Tarot has been the most lucrative. People love my readings — I’m compassionate and accurate, and my reputation locally is very good. My repeat clients were always sending me new folks. I always enjoyed doing tarot.
Dog training and drawing came in next. I love animals. I love art. I love giving people the power to communicate with their pet and have a better life with them, and I love showing people that they, too, can be artists. One of my drawing students went on to exhibit and started winning prizes. How cool is that?
Even the music shows that almost none of my friends came to paid me in free drinks and enough money for a tank of gas quite reliably. The band had weekly shows, sometimes more.
The books?
If I sell three e-books in a month, I make $8.10. My best month ever so far, I’ve sold twenty. More usually, I sell one or two. Selling books from a booth at an art show, I will maybe make $200-300 in a few hours, and usually only about $150-175 of that is actual profit above my expenses. But art shows are reliant on when they happen and if I’m free to attend and have the funds to pay the entry fee. The book business has been self-sustainable for years now, but it doesn’t grow much, and it doesn’t make enough for me to buy groceries after expenses of running the business. I think there are some things I can do to change that, but I’m still getting ready to launch all that. We’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, as the panini cools, why haven’t I revived my previous businesses and gone to something more part-time for work?
I don’t want to. I want to get my books off the ground. I want to tell stories. I want to make my living as an author.
I love doing all those other things, but they have always been in service of finding time to write, having some money to pay for book covers, having cool life experiences and meeting neat people to write about. If I was in the middle of a good writing flow and a tarot client called, I’d let it go to voicemail and reply once my writing time was up. The books always came first.
I’ve heard other people give entrepreneurs the advice to try a few things and go with what makes the most money. It seems like sound advice.
I just can’t. I need to write. I want to tell stories.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
