Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.47: Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-47-now-go-write-all-the-eggs-in-all-the-baskets

Key points: A tale of hubris. Branch out, diversify your income stream. Try new markets and genres. RPGs, video games, TV, tie-ins, what are the options? Turn down gigs you don't want to do. Don't let a single revenue stream dominate your income. Redefine yourself as a writer in general, not just an author or novelist. Be flexible, roll with the hits! Don't forget why you wanted to be a writer in the first place.

[Season 20, Episode  47]

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 47]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] And this is my episode for our book, Now Go Write. All the Eggs in All the Baskets is a presentation that I do, and now it's a chapter in a book, and now it's an episode. And what this is basically about is the tale of my own hubris. So in 2014, I was on top of the world. I was very successful. I had two successful series, I had a New York Times bestseller. One of my books was being made into a movie. I foolishly assumed that I had made it, and that I would never have to struggle again.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And it turns out that that's not how it works. So, my next series was a flop, my next standalone was a flop. One of my publishers stopped promoting me entirely. The movie was made and it was very good, but nobody saw it because it got released in like four theaters nationwide. And so the career that I thought was secure had kind of fallen apart overnight. And yet my kids still wanted to eat three times a day, and I still had a mortgage to pay. So I realized that I had kind of foolishly assumed that the level of success I had attained was permanent and that everything would be easy from here on out. And to go back to the episode title, I had put all of my eggs in that one basket of novel writing, and then novel writing kind of dried up for me very quickly. And I had to branch out, and I had to do other things. And so this is the... uh... This is the episode where we tell you about all the other ways to get paid for writing words.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] This is... I'm glad that we're doing this, and that it's in the book, because that's one of the things that I've found as a freelancer that I expect. I'm always diversifying my income stream. But I see people who have a day job who think that they will be able to leave the day job and go write as the only thing that they do, but it's not... It's... It's... They're unprepared, even the ones who are having success are unprepared for the dips and valleys of income streams. And so, yeah, all of the eggs in all of the baskets.

[Dan] Yeah. So my first step in this was to try to figure out what else I could do in the novel writing space. And more or less what that came down to is I had a couple manuscripts, my regular publishers didn't want them, and I decided if I couldn't sell to the markets I was already in that I was going to branch out and try some new markets. And so I took two genres that I'd always wanted to write in before, which were historical and middle grade, and... I guess middle grade isn't a genre so much as a market, but... I figured I would try those. And I wrote one of each. And I said whichever one takes off, we'll take off. The middle grade was a huge, like top three best seller on Audible, and the historical has been read by maybe 15 people.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was one of the 15 and I really love it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. I love it too. But it was clear that I was not finding much success there, so I started writing a lot more middle grade. And that was the first step in kind of clawing my way back up the ladder again. out of that valley of success. And then other than that, a lot of it was just about figuring out, like you said, diversifying income streams. What are some of the ways that I could get paid for words? I started writing for RPG companies, I started writing for video games, I started writing for a TV company... Writing for a TV show. All these different things. Started taking on tie-in work which I had never really done before. So there's a lot of other options. And so rather than just me talk the whole time, what are some other spaces, what are some non-novel places that you all sell words to?

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes sell... I have been fortunate enough... This is not an option that's available to everyone. but, I have been... Sold, like, essays. New York Times, Washington Post. I've been lucky in that regard.

[Dan] That's one I hadn't considered.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that I do is my Patreon, which again, I'm at a point in my career where I can do that. But even when I was starting out and the Patreon was very small, the... When your income stream is, like, measured in a lot of money coming randomly from different places, if you're getting 50 bucks, $200, 250... That's money you can use.

[Howard] If you can get pizza money three times a month, you've now paid the grocery bill.

[Mary Robinette] But the trick that I have found is to... My thing has always been that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. And so when I'm setting myself up for something like a Patreon, making sure that it is geared so that it is stuff that I want to do that does not get in... Or does not get in the way of things that I want to do. So, like, my... I have... I enjoy teaching. So teaching one class a month that's... A lot of it is stuff we've talked about on Writing Excuses. But it's something I enjoy doing, it's not a big time commitment. And it's very scalable. And one of the things  I made a mistake early on was doing things that just weren't scalable. Or they got in the way of the creative work I wanted to be doing.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, non-fiction can be a great place to start with that. Right? And so whether that's a Patreon, whether that's a newsletter, and then trying to get things placed... I mean, one thing that's generally true, although this has changed a little bit as the Internet continues to evolve, unfortunately. But outside of genre spaces, the pay per word is usually much higher than what we're used to seeing in terms of, like, what people pay for short fiction in the science fiction/fantasy space. So short fiction writing, essays, long form nonfiction, all those can be really useful. Podcasts is a great option, depending on the kind of thing that you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] My friend Richard had a... Gosh, $300,000 a year job with a Fortune whatever hundred company, and lost it through mergers and acquisitions and whatever else. And found himself at loose ends, and... But he knew somebody at Forbes. And he started writing basically blog posts for  Forbes, and the amount of money they were willing to pay for someone who knows how to write and knows a couple of things about these businesses and happens to have friends all over that he can call... He was suddenly making a living writing five or 600 words a day.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I forgot about that, that I was... There was a point where we were living in New York. We had moved there thinking that Rob would... My husband was an audio engineer and wine maker because those two jobs make sense together. But we thought he would go into doing film and television when we got to New York. And that was when there was a writer's strike, so there was no production work happening at all. So I was supporting us on my puppetry and writing income in Manhattan.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which was a thing that I forgot that one of my income streams was essentially blog posts, I was writing for AMC and they were paying me moneys... Money to do, like, top five fantasy films with dragons. Like, the most granular lists you could possibly develop.

[DongWon] One thing I do want to flag as we're having this conversation is we are also in a moment... Pulling back the curtain a little bit in a necessary way, that we are recording this in summer 2025...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right now. The Internet over the last year and media business in general have been in a period of enormous flux and change. Right? Over the past few years, we've really seen the collapse of the online ad model, which has impacted most every content website across the internet, and we're seeing major websites going down, being acquired, losing audience, and having trouble making ends meet. So we're seeing opportunities to publish those kind of blog posts, those kind of news articles going away. At the same time, what we've seen is an incredible growth in sort of indie options in terms of journalist-led newsletters, subscriber-led podcasts. Right? We're moving away from the big, like, here's io9 where you get all of your science fiction/fantasy news to follow this creator or this small collective of creators, what are that Defector or Chloroform Media or something like that. People that you subscribe to and support directly, and that's where you're getting your content. Right? So we've seen a little bit of the shift away from you can use these big media platforms to build your audience and get paid for that to starting to need to build your own brands online and getting direct access that way. Right? So we're seeing this shift in that marketplace happening right now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a question I want to ask you, Dan, but I'm going to ask it after our break.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So before the...

[Mary Robinette] Besides recording Writing Excuses, I am kind of always trying to level up my game. So I went on Master Class, and I took this class by David Sedaris about storytelling and humor. It was really thought provoking. Like, Howard and I talk about humor all the time on the podcast, but the way David approaches it is so different and also has so many overlaps. He talks about finding your way into the story, how to end with a weight, which was a really interesting thing to think about. Anyway, at Master Class, they have thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules. So if you're a Writing Excuses listener, and you like the 15 minutes long situation, Master Class has that. They have plans starting at $10 a month billed annually, and you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers... hello, friends... chefs, and like a ton of other things. So with Master Class, you can learn from the best to become your best. That sounds hokey, but honestly, I really enjoy taking classes through there. It is one of those places where you get access, and it has this very intimate quality to it. With the David Sedaris class, in particular, I was trying to figure out  how to work some humor into a short story that was...  around some stuff with my mom, honestly. And listening to him talk about that through that class was just very helpful at getting some new angles to think about it. New ways to be a little more honest with my writing. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. I'm going to say it one more time. Masterclass.com/excuses.

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[unknown] kimi no game system... [Japanese ad for Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] Break, DongWon was talking about how the market has shifted a lot. I am curious. Do you think, if you had to make those decisions now about trying Ghost... It was Ghost Station?

[Dan] Ghost Station.

[Mary Robinette] Ghost Station...

[Dan] And Zero G.

[Mary Robinette] Or Zero G. When you were trying to do that, do you think that you would do the same strategy or do you think that you would do some indie publishing?

[Dan] Were I to do it today... Honestly, I would probably not do either one. Because the next thing I was going to talk about that we... Is I became a professional game master. Which is not writing, but it is still storytelling. And I supported my family pretty much solely on that for 2 years. And I gave that up basically when I started working with Brandon's company. But were I back in the situation where I was looking for work again, I would absolutely go back to doing that.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Dan] I have become more amenable to publishing my own stuff over the years. I self-pubbed Ghost Station in print, and Zero G in print. So, I don't think I'm very good at marketing myself as an indie author, is what I have discovered.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And when you are indie, that's like 60% of your job is self-promotion. And that's not a skill I have developed yet. Although, clearly one I would work on developing if I didn't have a real job now.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Clear back in... Clear back in 2006, I was at Emerald City Comic Con and there was a panel of webcartoonists including the penny arcade guy and Robert Khoo, who two years previously had basically come up to them and said, "You're not monetizing yourselves well. I can do it. I'm worth $90,000 a year, but I'll work for you for free for a year, and at the end of that year, if you can't pay my salary, it's because I've failed and you won't need to and I'll quit." Penny Arcade went on to launch the Penny Arcade Expo. Which is one of the biggest entertainment Expos...

[Dan] Right now, I think it's two or three of the biggest entertainment Expos.

[Howard] In the world. Exactly. Yeah. It's huge. And this was all Robert Khoo. And even just two years into his run with them, we were hanging on his every word in that panel. And one of the things that he said was never let  any single revenue channel account for more than 40% of what you make. And I hate advice that begins with never, and so turning it on its head, what I would offer is, strive to ensure that you have enough revenue streams that if you lose one of them, you're not losing half of your money.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I thought in the early days... Early days. Through 2012, 2014, with Schlock Mercenary, I thought I had accomplished that, because we had ad revenue and we had another kind of ad revenue and another kind of ad revenue, and we had books, and we had merchandise. And all of it was pinned to Schlock Mercenary.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, Schlock Mercenary has now finished its 20-year run, and we're still making money on it. In fact, making most of our money on it. But I'm in a situation very similar to yours, in which, gee,  I thought I had my eggs in a bunch of different baskets. But all of the baskets were in the back of the same truck.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But what are the other things that... The other lessons that you're kind of wanting us to know that you put into the...

[Dan] Yes. So, the first main lesson is what Howard just articulated. Make sure that you have lots of different revenue streams, that you don't have a majority of it all tied up in one thing. The other one is, I think, more psychological. You have to change the way you think about yourself and the way you think about your career. And this was difficult for me, because I had always, since second grade when I told my parents I was going to write books, I had always thought of myself as an author, I'd always thought of myself as a novelist. And it felt like selling out in a way to start doing other things that were not that. And I really had to redefine myself not as an author exclusively, but as a writer in general. Someone who can write these essays or these nonfiction things or go to RPG companies and video game companies and write for them. Writing tie-in fiction was a very selfish hurdle to get over, because I wanted to write my ideas, I don't want to write your ideas. But if you are going to make a living in this industry, that's a lot of what most professional authors, I think, need to do, to branch out and write words for other people in addition to writing for themselves.

[Erin] Yeah. I think this is something that I struggle with a lot, as somebody who also writes a lot for a lot of different types of people, is that there's  sometimes, I think, a perspective in the industry that, like, certain types of writing don't count as writing. Like, somehow that's not really writing. I remember being on a panel with some folks talking about, like, making money as a writer, and they were all novelists. And so it was basically, like, making money as a novelist was the true... So I was like I'm... All I do is write or teach writing. Like, that is my entire career is writing. But I felt like people were like, well, yeah, but like none of that's from novel writing. And I'm like, that is true. I don't write any novels. But in some ways, I'm like, that's cool. It means I've managed to, while avoiding novel... If I wrote a novel, too, I'd just be rich. No.

[laughter]

[Erin] Not true. But, like, I think it is... There's so much like what is the self... Like, what is the image of what it means to be a writer? And I think, like, divorcing yourself from that is always helpful. Because there are a lot of things that we think of that are being a writer that are not great. That are... That can be harmful. I remember a friend once saying... This is a very weird pivot... That she drank more because she thought that, like, writers would, like, end every day with, like... I don't know, like a cup of whiskey and writing. And then she was like, why am I drinking so much? It's because I came up with this idea...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When I was 10, and now I have to, like, bury that idea because, like, my liver would appreciate it. And so I think that kind of thing, like, stepping away from that, because at the end of the day, like, you're the only one you have to live with. You know what I mean? Like, you have to pay your bills and the people who may or may not think X about your career are not going to be there with your landlord, like, or your mortgage company.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. And the big kind of click over for me was when I stopped thinking of all of these other  writing projects and all of this freelance work as slumming...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] As something I was forced to do and started thinking of it as something that was great, something that was expanding my horizons and my abilities. Today I work as the vice president of Dragon Steel with Brandon Sanderson, who's one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world. People all the time ask how you can get that job. And it's because of this. It's because he came to me, not because I've known him for a long time, but because I had a ton of experience in a ton of different areas that he doesn't have. And he's like, well, we eventually want to do TV shows of the Cosmere stuff. Well, I've worked in TV. We want to make role playing games. I've worked in role-playing games. Every aspect of writing and the writing industry, I have dipped my toe into, which made me a really appealing candidate for this huge entertainment company.

[Howard] You've written ad copy.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When I did the collaboration with him, he came to me because I had audiobook experience and he did not. There's a thing that Jim Henson says, or said, which is the secret to his success was to hire people who are better than him and let them do their job.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's... I think as we're talking through all of this, when I think about a  writer's career, I think one thing that's really, really important is the writers who make it long-term have a certain kind of flexibility, a certain willingness to roll with the hits. I don't care who you are, your career's not going to go as smoothly as you thought it was going to be. Right? And I don't care how much success you've achieved, you're still going to be hitting roadblocks, you're still going to be running into things that are challenges or frustrating. One book's not going to work as well, or TV deals are going to fall through or whatever it is. Right? Nice problems to have, but those are still problems. Right? So whatever it is, I think a writer's ability to succeed as a published author in the publishing industry, as a professional writer in the world, often comes from your ability to roll with the hits. Right? And then to keep going. The good news is no one gets to take writing away from you as a job. That is a thing that you can always be doing. What that comes down to. though, is how flexible can you be about how you see that job and what opportunities are you willing to pursue to keep furthering that? Right? And so, all of that said, though, I do want to put one note in here about don't forget also why you wanted to be a writer in the first place. Right? And even as you're pursuing these other projects, defend the time that you need to work on the projects that are near and dear to your heart, that are important to how you see yourself as a writer. Right? And so, yes, don't be drinking whiskey every night...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Let go of, like... Shed the parts of, like, this dream of being a writer that don't serve you, but also don't forget the core of it, of, like, why you're pursuing this art in the first place. And then figure out, okay, I need this amount of time to do that, I can spend this other time writing, pursuing these other things. Doing comics, doing games, writing for TV, whatever it is.

[Erin] I just want to say one quick thing, which is that I think part of what that does is open you up to Kismet. Because I think that...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Sometimes you forget some of the things that you used to write or some of the things you used to do. Like, I've taken work doing script writing, and when I was in college, I wanted to write for soap operas. Like, because I love them as an art form. And so, like, I wanted to be a script writer, but I forgot. Like, sometimes you get really focused on one particular type of writing because it's the type you're doing. And you forget that, like, each project to me is. like, what can I learn from this? If I don't think I can take something interesting away from it... And sometimes it's like I'm interested in still feeding myself. But a lot of times, it's what can I take that's inter... Like, that's interesting that I can learn, and I will sometimes be surprised like you were saying, Dan, that, like, later somebody will look at you having done something, like this is really valuable experience in a way that you could never have anticipated when you did it. But the thing that you learned still stays with you and then you can end up using it in the world once you're out there doing other projects.

[Dan] Yeah. I know we're going kind of long. I want to make one final point before the homework. As Howard mentioned, I've written a lot of ad copy. Before I broke in as an author, I spent 8 years in advertising and marketing. And so I freelanced as a website writer. It can still take a long time to break in. Like, some of what we're talking about sounds very pie in the sky, like, I didn't have a career, so I started writing for TV. Like, that's... It's not that easy. You have to put in the work, and a lot of your early writing might be really boring stuff that you don't love. But stick with it. If this is what you really want to do, doing these kinds of add jobs and marketing jobs and website jobs can be a good way to get your foot in the door.

[Dan] Anyway. Here's our homework. I want you to try writing in a genre or a format that you've never tried before. If you have always been writing novels or short stories, kind of classic prose fiction, branch out and try something else. Write something in a script format. Write an episode of a TV show that you love. Write a role-playing game adventure. pick a... Try doing tie-in work. Pick a book series or a video game series that you love and write a short story using those characters and set in that universe. Do something that you've never done before, and see how it feels.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.