Sometime next month, hopefully, I’ll be going to Vancouver to a visit the set of the movie based on my book, Her Knight at the Museum. I’m still trying to get firm dates, but I’m excited about it! My husband and I can’t afford to both go, because that means boarding the dogs and a second airline ticket. After all, we’re already planning a family trip at Thanksgiving, and hoping to go to Kansas City for a few days to see old friends. So I’ll make it a quick trip. 🙂 

I know the cool thing among authors is to never talk about money and act like you’re super successful, but whatever. In the past month, a silly video I put up got a little traction on Instagram (this isn’t the thing that went viral, though). It was about people who ask if you really make any money as an author.

In my experience, when near-strangers ask you this, they often don’t have great motives. Some of them want to convince themselves that writing books, which secretly sounds like a lot of fun to them, is a waste of time (as if everything is a waste of time unless it makes money, and I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who looks at life this way.) Others think that if there’s money to be made, well, maybe they should crank out a book, too…because if you can do it, so can they, right? Of course, some of them are also just curious, and they momentarily forget that “How much money do you make?” isn’t generally considered polite chitchat.

A few people pointed out that peers and coworkers should talk more about money, and I agree with that, actually! But there are practical reasons why I don’t want to get into specifics on a public forum (especially having to do with publishing contract negotiation). I keep thinking about starting a private newsletter that’s about actual author dollars and sense, what works for me and what doesn’t as I try out different approaches to writing and promotion and growing an audience, as well as other behind the scenes stuff like what it was like to be published by a big 5 publisher, what it’s like to work with an agent and to be on submission, and so on. Substack paid subscriptions start at $5 a month, which is too much. Maybe I’d just put it behind a paywall on the blog for like, a dollar, just for privacy’s sake. 🙂

The money I’m getting for the movie is probably much less than most people would guess, but it makes a big difference to me and I’m very grateful for it. Almost all of it is going to pay advance taxes on our small business. Because we’re self-employed and we live in the state with the highest small business taxes, about half our total income goes to taxes and health insurance combined.

Nonetheless, I have a very lucky life, and don’t lack for anything. And hey, I’m doing well enough to give subscribers…

A free ebook! 

Blank Page to Final Draft is my step-by-step guide to planning, writing, and revising a novel. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to write a book, but has never managed to finish a draft…or for anyone who wants an organized way to write a novel and make steady progress while doing all the other things in their busy life. (You can read the reviews on Amazon if you like.) If you do one step a week, you’ll have a fairly polished novel in a year’s time, but of course, you can go as fast as you want.

If you don’t already have the book, click here to go to Bookfunnel.com, where you can download it! I’m giving away this book in order to get more blog subscribers, so if you happen to be reading this and you’re not subscribed, downloading the book means you’ll be subscribed. I hope both the book and the blog encourage my fellow writers as we all pursue our goals. 🙂 

One of my TikToks went a little viral.

When you make a little video, having a great opening hook is key. Honestly, I usually don’t have one! But it turns out that a smiling redhead saying “I am on an FBI watchlist” does get people’s attention.

This is a joke authors love to make about their writing research (and writers, you’re welcome to steal it as a hook). In my book Master Lists for Writers: Gold Edition, my lists on ways to kill people (for mystery authors) and ways to overthrow an evil regime (for dystopian and fantasy authors) did require some questionable online searches, though I also did some of the research with books at the library.

I posted this video in April, and in May, I did promote it: in other words, I paid a little money to show it to more people. But it just kept going hard after the promotion, and now it has 264,000 views. 

Even though we’re not taking a summer vacation, per se…

We’ve been making the most of the summer, and being a little touristy in our own neck of the woods! Last weekend, we went to the top of John Hancock Center, on an absolutely beautiful day; last Sunday, on a whim, we trekked up to Milwaukee on a whim to see our Cubs play the Brewers and get the win in the tenth inning.

We’ve also been rewatching The Office. This is extremely boring of us; everyone rewatches The Office. But we didn’t see a lot of it when it first aired, and we love it. We went to see Toy Story 5—the concerns about screen time resonated with me, and the movie made me cry, like all the other movies in the franchise. And I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers, and finishing the plotting on my own!