1086. What does it really take to earn a living as a writer? Jane Friedman explains the multiple paths writers take — from speaking and consulting to newsletters and hybrid publishing—and offers grounded, practical advice for navigating the business of writing in 2025 and beyond.
1086. What does it really take to earn a living as a writer? Jane Friedman explains the multiple paths writers take — from speaking and consulting to newsletters and hybrid publishing—and offers grounded, practical advice for navigating the business of writing in 2025 and beyond.
Jane Friedman is the author of "The Business of Being a Writer."
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MIGNON:
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Jane Friedman, one of today's leading experts on the publishing industry. Through her website, social media, courses, newsletters, and books, she helps writers understand the business of writing and building a successful writing life. Jane Friedman, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
JANE:
Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here.
MIGNON:
Yeah. The second edition of your fabulous book, "The Business of Being a Writer." I finished this yesterday. I already have heartily recommended it to a friend who is heading off to get an MFA in the fall, and I'm gonna be recommending this to a lot of people. I wish I had had it when I was just starting out. It's so great. Good job.
JANE:
Thank you.
MIGNON:
And it's not common for a book to get a second edition. So, you know, what is it about publishing that has changed that made this second edition necessary?
JANE:
Well, I have to say when I wrote the first edition, I didn't really future-proof it. Part of the blame lies squarely on my shoulders. You know, the book goes a lot into platform building, which is how authors build up visibility to their readers. And so there was quite a bit of discussion of social media in there. I also had significant sections devoted to explaining the magazine publishing industry, online publishing, and digital publishing. And, you know, when I sat down to write that first edition, I want to say it was around 2016 or so. And now, in 2025, it is a very different landscape for magazines. And I'm not going to say magazine publishing is dead. However, I do have to wonder what it means to even say the magazine industry at this point, because it's just not recognizable, at least not compared to when I first got into the industry. So those were some of the areas that needed to be updated. But also my own thinking has evolved a lot over the last five to ten years. And so I just, I mean, books are never done, really, at least for a non-fiction author like myself, it's never done.
It's always gonna be going out of date. But yes, my thinking had also changed, and I was eager to just rectify some things in that second edition.
MIGNON:
Okay, so you've piqued my curiosity now, so how has your thinking changed?
JANE:
Well, I feel like mindset is really vital. In fact, part one is titled "Mindset Matters," and that section did not exist in the first book. And the driving force behind that is if people come into this with a certain mindset, like thinking they don't have any agency, or getting caught up in rejections, or in so many negative messages that exist in publishing, if those things will just stop you dead in your tracks. You will shut down psychologically or mentally, emotionally, and you will check out before you've really had time to make your way on the business end.
MIGNON:
So what should a writer focus on in getting the mindset in the right place?
JANE:
Well, one of the chapters just addresses rejection head-on because it's going to come whether you like it or not. It comes in lots of different shapes and forms. It's not just about rejection from agents or publishers. It's about rejection on so many different levels. It could be readers, it could be pitching yourself for any number of things, any number of opportunities, not getting the sales you want, etc. So not seeing these things as career defining or career ending is quite important. And then I also just talk about what it takes to earn a living.
If you want to earn money from writing and publishing, there are certain expectations I think that people have that are unrealistic. And I think they have to recognize that careers aren't made with one book or overnight, even though it may appear that way.
Like from the outside looking in, that's not how it works. And so there's a great deal of patience and thought that has to go into this thinking through, okay, if you do need to earn a living from this, and not everyone does, how might that happen? And how are you going to have some intention going into this process rather than just letting luck or serendipity or the vicissitudes of the market determine where you end up.
MIGNON:
So let's say the nonfiction writers you see who are able to make a living as a writer, how do they piece that life together typically? Obviously, it's going to be different for everyone, but what's the big picture that you see?
JANE:
So book sales rarely cut it. There are some exceptions out there. Like the big one right now would be James Clear and "Atomic Habits," which hasn't left the bestseller list in what, like four or five years?
But that's like one book out of the millions that have been published since that initially launched. Very few are going to earn a living; very few authors are going to earn a living from the book sales alone. Even if you get a nice advance, even if you get a six-figure advance, that’s just, it’ll hold you for a little while, but not indefinitely.
MIGNON: Because it can take years to write a book.
JANE:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there are other methods of earning money. And in fact, most people who come to this from an entrepreneurial background or from a business background, they're actually looking at the book as more of a business card anyway. It's there to support other efforts; it could be to support consulting, coaching, services, speaking, teaching, you know, all these other revenue streams. And in fact, there was a really recent study done for business book authors specifically, but I think it applies to all nonfiction authors, showing that the books rarely give you a positive return. Well, I shouldn't say rarely; maybe half would give you a positive return on investment. That doesn't mean a living. But most people were earning profits off those other things that I mentioned, especially like consulting or teaching or speaking. For nonfiction experts or people who are authorities in their field, that's the much more lucrative side.
MIGNON:
Can you talk about speaking for free versus speaking for money as an expert? If you want to build a successful writing life, do you need to do both? Do you need to do one to get started? Or should you just only do things that pay? How do you advise people to build that part of their business life?
JANE:
Well, there are so many variables here, right? So yeah, I don't want to speak for what every author might do or should do. But I would say speaking from my own experience and other authors who are comparable to me, there's usually a mix of things. And so, in other words, there might be local or regional and even sometimes national opportunities where you're, maybe you're going to speak for free if your expenses are covered, or maybe you're going to speak for free because the opportunity is going to give you some paid gigs as a result, like it's going to provide you contacts or some networking that is just as valuable as that speaking fee. And then there will be other opportunities where they are going to pay you that $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 plus because you have a name that really means something to that event. And your name and the fact that you're showing up at that event actually helps draw attendees or helps the event itself be more desirable and profitable.
So you have to take an honest look at yourself on some level and say, "What am I bringing to this event? Am I worth what I'm asking for?" But I will say, you know, for novelists or memoirists or some of these other folks, you know, that I do not advocate necessarily speaking for free, but you have to consider if you're just starting out, and your book isn't that well known, sometimes the visibility and the networking, meeting people who can advocate for your book is just as important as getting paid.
MIGNON:
Right. And it all sort of builds because sometimes people write books so they can do speaking. Sometimes people end up speaking because they've written a book.
JANE:
Exactly.
MIGNON:
You know, one thing you said in your book that I thought was really wise was to focus on the message and not the container. Can you talk more about that?
JANE:
Yes. I deal with many people who really glorify the book. The book, especially, I don't want to say this is just older people. I think it's all ages, but definitely
people who came of age before the internet and fell in love with books and authors or going to the library or the bookstore, they tend to put a lot of authority and weight on publishing a book, and they really want something out as a book because that, like, then you've really accomplished something. And I'm not saying that's wrong; like, that whole mythology of the book still exists.
But there's also so many other things out there now competing for our attention. There are so many other ways, especially on the nonfiction side, that we consume media, information, different ways we learn, different people that we respect, or teachers—the whole nine yards.
And this, I include myself in this. So most of my writing is not in book form. Most people are learning from me through shows like this, through interviews that I give at conferences, through the classes that I teach online, through the newsletters that I send every week, through my website, and through the archive of material going back to the year 2010. So people interact with me in a lot of different ways. And in fact, some of these I think are more valuable to people in that moment than actually sitting down with the book. I mean, the book, as we just discussed, goes out of date. And I can't speak to some of the ways that the market's changing or people's own unique experiences. So I'm always counseling people to think beyond book. There are so many ways to share a message, to be in front of an audience, to help people on the issues that you care about.
A book is, and books are sometimes hard to break through with the book. There aren't that many, let's say, publicity opportunities to talk about just a book. There usually has to be something else behind it, some message, some problem that you're helping people address in order to get the attention for the book itself.
MIGNON:
Yeah. One thing I'll say, though, I have subscribed to your newsletter for years, and yet it's so great to have it all in one place.
To be able to tell my younger friend, "This is what you need to know, all this here." So it does serve a great purpose, and in some ways, it's easier to recommend that instead of saying, "Well, subscribe to her newsletter, and over the next five years, you'll learn everything that's really important.”
MIGNON:
I do love books for that reason, but I know what you're saying. And one thing you said in the book that really surprised me is that digital publishing hasn't taken over as much as people thought it would maybe 10 years ago, which surprised me because people send me physical books because they're nice to hold up in the interview. But when I'm reading for pleasure, I typically read an ebook, but it sounds like maybe that's not as much the case for everyone.
JANE:
That's true. So when I was working in the industry in the early 2010s, and the Kindle and ebooks started entering the market, especially with the introduction of the iPad and the Apple Bookstore, I was one of those people who was saying, you know, ebooks are going to be the dominant format in five years or 10 years, and that has not happened. I would say on average, it's about 30% of what traditional publishers sell if you average together all categories, all types of publishing. To be fair, if you just look at the self-publishing market, and the authors who are very successful in genre fiction, like romance, science fiction, and fantasy, that is largely ebook-driven or people reading through Kindle Unlimited. So there are very specific sectors of the market that are dominated by digital formats. But I think one of the reasons that print has had such staying power is that it's still a technology that works. There are also, I think, pricing issues that have been there from the start, where if you look at the price of a print book compared to an ebook from a traditional publisher, the ebook does not look like a good value.
Sometimes it's even priced higher than the print. So that's also, I shouldn't say standing in the way, but encouraging print to remain where it is.
As of today, I think it presents a break from the screen. I think it can be a luxury. It can feel like a luxury to just have this time away from what we do, maybe with most of our days sitting in front of a laptop or a desktop computer.
And now we have deluxe editions—things with the sprayed edges and like all of these things that are helping make tangible the authors that we love, the stories that we love.
And of course, traditional publishing loves this. I mean, they're jumping onto that print luxury. I hesitate to call it a trend, but it's definitely ramped up in the last several years.
Now, one thing that's interesting, though, is audiobooks—digital. This is a digital format at this point. Most people are listening through places like Audible or Spotify. In some areas, audiobooks have overtaken ebooks in consumption. And so that's a very interesting thing to watch as well. It's not something I would have predicted, but it has helped preserve young people's interest in books because of the ability to listen while they're doing other things.
MIGNON:
Yeah, kind of like a podcast. I mean, it's something you can do while you're doing the laundry or walking the dog, and a way to fit that information in when you might otherwise not be able to.
It also sounds from your book like you have sort of changed your thinking about self-publishing, in particular, maybe ebooks for things like romance authors.
JANE:
Well, I've always been a proponent of self-publishing as a valid path, as valid as traditional publishing. And this goes back to my time at "Writers Digest" magazine, where my first is like, they didn't really have beats per se for the magazine. But they had people who were in certain areas of specialization. And when I joined the staff, they said, "Okay, you are going to be our self-publishing expert." And what they didn't tell me is because no one else wants to study that.
And so I dove into it; I read the major guides. And this is when ebooks were really starting to take off in some regard. Far away from the Kindle days, but they were starting to be recognized as a viable format. And I went to some self-publishing conferences, and it made me so empathetic to the plight of the self-published author because they weren't getting any respect.
There was a stigma, and they had to work so hard to be taken seriously. And I think if you fast forward to today, I feel like even though there is some stigma in, I would say, literary circles, like for very particular types of work, the stigma has been washed away as far as commercial fiction and certain types of nonfiction.
We also now even have Insta poets or the TikTok poets who are able to find their audiences through social media. And what's happened, what really actually makes me quite optimistic for all authors, is how much traditional publishers have kind of started being more flexible and more partner-oriented when they see self-publishing authors succeed rather than saying, "We won't work with you unless you fork over every last right. Instead, we're going to partner with you, and we're just going to take the rights we need, usually print rights to distribute to print retail, we're going to take those rights, and then you keep your digital rights, keep doing what you're doing, and then we'll partner to lift the sales of all editions, and we'll focus on …” What the publisher focuses on, what they're really good at, which is the bricks-and-mortar distribution and also just facilitating things like foreign translation rights and subrights and things of that nature. Anyway, for those who are curious about this phenomenon, I would point you to Sourcebooks because they have several imprints that do this now, most prominently Bloom Books.
And to give you an idea, for those who know E.L. James, the author of the "Fifty Shades of Grey" series, she's essentially a founder of that imprint and has worked in partnership with Sourcebooks to help authors find better business partners because they know as much about their audiences, if not more than the publisher does. So that's one development since I've entered the business that has been very positive, and I think gives self-published authors who know their readerships, it's your path into the industry without needing a gatekeeper to say yes.
MIGNON:
Yeah, oh, that's really cool. I didn't know they were doing deals like that now. Yeah, nice. That makes sense. And so, I mean, the other thing, you know, we always, it seems like we always end up talking about AI now on the podcast, because it comes up in so many areas. And I know you've had some experiences with the problems that come about because of AI. Can you sort of share what you went through and how you think you are thinking about it now?
JANE:
So in August of 2023, I stumbled on about half a dozen books that had been written by AI. I can't prove it, but it seemed pretty obvious. They were released in quick succession, full-length books with my name on them that I had nothing to do with. And it was actually quite difficult to get Amazon to take down these books because they weren't infringing on anyone's copyright; AI had written them.
So it's not like I could claim copyright. I didn't have a trademark on my name at the time. I've since rectified that. And so it took like a PR campaign, essentially, to get Amazon to take these books down. Looking back, that now seems like a very kind of provincial limited-time problem because since then, Amazon and others in the book ecosystem have really tightened the ship in terms of what you're allowed to self-publish. Those were self-published books, of course. You can only self-publish three books a day through the Amazon system—just three.
MIGNON:
Just so many.
JANE:
There's now author identity verification. So they're taking steps to limit just how bad things can get, but I have to say it's still bad. So essentially what's happening now is you see all sorts of copycat books coming onto the market that kind of approximate books that are on the market or about to come on the market.
So you know, for instance, there's an author who just did a literary cats coloring book; it's by Andrew Schaefer. And a week before his book came out, there was the same type of book. It was like, not literary cats, but cats of literature, you know, some slight twist, and it was the same concept. And what I can only assume is that the people who are doing these AI projects are looking at forthcoming titles; they're looking at what's going to be coming out in the next month. And then they use AI tools to generate something like that and then try to skim off sales from the marketing and publicity that those new titles will, hopefully, you know, the authors hope that they're going to get or that the publisher is supporting. So that's really ugly.
And I haven't seen any attempts from Amazon to slow that down, although there are greater protections through retailers and through Ingram, but there's still so much pollution out there.
MIGNON:
That is really crummy.
So if someone's searching Amazon for a book that is coming out that they've heard about, they can easily stumble upon these similar things and be confused.
JANE:
Easily.
It's awful, I think, for memoirists or people who are writing about their lives. It's—Yeah, they see this book come out that is just summarizing their life in this really shoddy way. And it's like, what? Like, it feels personally insulting.
MIGNON:
Yeah. Wow. And so you think this is another problem?
JANE:
It is long term with books. I think it could be nipped in the bud, or it could be stopped if Amazon had the will to do so. Why they allow it to continue, I'm not sure, because it's a really poor customer experience. I think people mistakenly buy these books, not realizing what they are. And some people just don't understand how much AI has progressed, that it can produce these things. And they just think it's a poor-quality book. I'm not sure that all consumers realize it's an AI-generated book.
MIGNON:
Do you have any other thoughts about AI and how it's going to affect the publishing industry or the lives of writers trying to make a living in the next year or two?
JANE:
Well, I mean, everyone right now is so angry about the training that occurred without permission or payment. And that's going to be handled in court, right? It's out of authors' control. So I don't particularly like to focus on the anger and the outrage because I don't know how productive it is. Let's let the legal process take its course.
And then, so once you get past that part, and maybe some people won't, you have to think about how can I ethically use these tools to support my work? And I do worry for authors and publishers who are automatically anti-AI because other people are going to use these tools and, in my opinion, have an advantage. It's going to make them more efficient; it makes me more efficient. I use these tools. And so you have to think about where do I draw the line in what I'm having the AI do for me, because there are definitely authors today, no question, who use these tools to write entire books, chapter by chapter or scene by scene. And they may or may not be transparent about how those books came about. And even though the US Copyright Office says you can't get copyright on that book if it's purely AI-generated, you can still get copyright for the arrangement of words. But the thing I always think about is how does anyone know? Like, there are no tools that tell us exactly what's been AI-generated or not. And it just gets really fuzzy really quickly.
So in any event, I think there are some transparency issues that everyone's going to have to work through. And it's just this very confusing time because I don't think—no one really has put out policies or standards. I'm thinking here of publishers in particular. Everyone is kind of tiptoeing around the topic because they're afraid of someone getting angry or laws being broken.
And so I couldn't be more eager to kind of get past this time period because it's just confusion and lawbreaking. That's what it feels like.
MIGNON:
Yeah. I do feel like in the long run, I mean, the relationship that the author builds with their readers has always been really important, but I feel like moving forward, it's going to become even more important.
JANE:
I agree. I agree. So this, I'll share a quick anecdote. Okay, because it's so—I think it shows that human-authored content or books are still going to be primary. There's a digital literature company called Inkit. They have a serialization app where they have authors come up with ideas, like bullet points of what the book should be like, and then they have AI write the stories. And the company is trying its utmost to build author personas to make it appear as if real human beings are authoring these books, even though it's AI operating behind the scenes. And the CEO is pretty direct. He's like, if people knew it was AI-generated, they wouldn't care about it. And I think he's right.
MIGNON:
Yeah, yeah, I was just reading about that last week. It's fascinating. And I think there are two Jane Freedmans in publishing. And I think it said Jane Friedman was an advisor to that company. Is that you or is it the other one?
JANE
It's not me.
MIGNON:
Okay, then the other one. That's always confusing.
JANE
It is.
MIGNON
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's funny when I sometimes I still think about writing books, and it has crossed my mind that like maybe I should live stream myself writing the book so that people know I actually wrote it, or write it, you know, try writing by hand too so I have proof that I have written it. I mean, it's the kind of thing that I think about now, which never I would have thought about before.
JANE:
Well, yeah, I think it makes the relationship so much more important, the relationship between author and reader and showing how you're involved in however that book came to exist.
MIGNON:
Yeah, wild. Well, again, this is just a fabulous book, "The Business of Being a Writer" by Jane Friedman. Jane, and you have so many amazing resources on your website too.
Maybe can you give people a rundown of some of the things they can find and where to find you?
JANE:
Yeah, JaneFriedman.com is the best place, and I have a lot of cornerstone posts on the business of publishing, how to get published, self-publishing, hybrid publishing, how to market and promote your work. And then the book also has a dedicated website with examples of submission materials like queries, synopses, and book proposals. So that's all free. You don't even have to buy the book, actually, to benefit from all of that.
MIGNON:
Wonderful.
MIGNON:
And then, so for our Grammarpaloozians, Jane has two really successful newsletters.
MIGNON:
And in our bonus segment this week, she's going to give us practical tips on making your writer's newsletter better.
MIGNON:
I felt really inspired after reading the book, and I think you'll feel inspired after hearing her tips too.
MIGNON:
But for the rest of you, thank you so much for being here.
MIGNON:
That's all.
MIGNON:
Thanks for listening.