Every year, I write a post about how I make a living as a writer: where my income has come from during the previous twelve months, and what my earnings look like when spread across the financial year.
Why? Because writing can be such a lonely business (all those hours sitting in your garret, eating your crust of bread and pouring your heart and soul into the written word), that it makes sense to counteract that with some openness and honesty within the profession – to help each other know what to expect, and to stop the industry becoming a closed shop. After all, how do we know what might be normal if nobody talks about it? And how can we advocate for ourselves if we’re not sure what we could be advocating for?
So, at the end of another UK financial year, I thought it was time to make some more colour-coded graphs, and analyse my finances.
Want to see last year’s analysis?
Where did my income come from in 2023-24?
In 2022-23, I listed 6 income categories:
Funding: money from grants.
Facilitation: both workshop facilitation and facilitation of creative projects.
Writing: commissions, royalties, ALCS money, PLR money, prize money – anything that comes from the actual writing of the actual words. (Want to know a bit more about where this comes from? Check out LINK)
Events: panel events, chairing and readings (in person and online)
Residencies: stipends & payment from attending writing residencies, or fulfilling Writer in Residence roles
Admin: paid admin for other organisations.
As a reminder, here’s what the graph looked like for last year:
This year, my categories look slightly different. I’ve kept the Events and Writing categories, but there are a few categories I’ve deleted:
Funding: I didn’t receive any grant funding this year – despite spending a chunk of the time working on an Arts Council-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project. This is because I received the first payment from this grant at the end of 2022-23, and won’t receive the final instalment till the current tax year (2024-25). So I’ve deleted this category for 2023-24.
Residencies: While I did go on a residency this year – to Svalbard, of all places! – it wasn’t a paid residency, so this year I’ve had to delete it from my income graph. Hopefully this one (along with funding) will make another appearance in years to come.
Admin: I’ve made a conscious decision to move away from doing admin work for the past few years, partly because I have so much of my own admin to do already. Last year, I reinstated the category because of the work I did with Kendal Poetry Festival, but it was a one-off for a very particular event and organisation, so this year, I’ve removed it again.
So those are the categories I’ve deleted. But I’ve also played around with the category of Facilitation (workshop facilitation and facilitation of creative projects), in that I’ve split it into three smaller categories:
Workshops
Mentoring
Judging
While I’ve been both mentoring other writers and judging prizes for a number of years, the income from it was always negligible in comparison to my overall earnings for the year, so I’d always been happy just to lump it in with the other facilitation work. But this year, they’ve both made up a much more significant aspect of my income.
Partly, this is because of my work with the Writing Squad, with whom I now mentor young writers as a member of the Squad’s Core Team, which works out at around 35 days a year. Plus I’ve also mentored a couple of writers privately (through DYCP grants), and been mentoring three fantastic poets through the Nine Arches Primers initiative – for which I was also the judge.
So, with all that in mind, what does this year’s income graph look like?
For the first time since 2019, writing has made up my biggest income stream!
Back in 2021, 44% of my income came from funding (such as grants for work-in-progress, and Covid-19 support grants). In 2022-23, that income level stayed pretty steady at 42% (largely from a Northern Writers’ Award to work on my novel-in-progress, and from an Arts Council England ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant).
This year, none of my income has come from grant funding. Instead, for the first time since 2019, writing has made up my biggest income stream! This has largely been down to two advance payments on my second novel, The Edge of Solitude – as well as another deal I’m not allowed to talk about yet – but has also come from writing articles, and from book sales at events.
The income from events themselves has been quite small this year, but not insignificant. The same with judging for competitions.
As for mentoring and workshops, both have been a fairly healthy 24%.
And, for those who are interested, here’s what my income has looked like on a month-by-month basis:
As you can see, some big months, and some really small ones. Some of this fluctuation comes from bigger individual payments (such as the advance on my novel). Some comes from the fact I’m paid in quarterly instalments for the Writing Squad, and in half-termly instalments for the young poets’ workshops. March is often a pretty big month, as projects often want me to invoice for ongoing work before the end of the financial year.
But other than that, the up-and-down nature of this graph is just a reflection on the up-and-down nature of working as a freelancer.
So what does this mean going forward?
Obviously, it means I need to keep writing! I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: writing is the foundation of everything I do. Even in other years when it’s been a smaller portion of my overall income, it’s still the most important part, because it’s the thing that everything else rests on. And this year in particular, it’s been wonderful to have that bear out financially. Let’s see how this next year goes!
I’m also going to keep mentoring with the Writing Squad. Aside from being a nice reliably chunky payment every year (which, let’s face it, is a huge consideration!), it’s also work which feeds my own creativity. Working with other writers stimulates the same bit of the brain as active reading. When something in another writer’s work is working well, I want to know how it’s working, to see what I can learn for my own writing as well as for theirs. When something isn’t working as well, then I also want to unpick that. It’s about deepening my understanding of the craft of writing – while also thinking more consciously about living and working as a writer. So many times this year, I’ve caught myself giving advice to other writers, which I also ought to be taking for myself.
I’m aiming to keep up with workshops this year, and to increase the number of book events I’m doing – especially in light of The Edge of Solitude coming out in a couple of months!
So – in order to hold myself accountable – here are my income goals for 2024-35:
Focus on earning income from:
Writing
Residencies
Events
Maintain earnings from:
Mentoring (through the Writing Squad)
Workshops (through ongoing regular young poets’ workshops via Wordsworth Grasmere, and through a new workshop I’m currently putting together, and hoping to roll out sometime later this year – watch this space!)
As for everything else, let’s see what rolls into the inbox!
Thank you so much for sharing this Katie x
Super helpful. Thank you.