Windfall Profits

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Mark Twain

I get an email every quarter - "Royalty payment notification." A few days later, there is a deposit from Amazon (can you imagine...a deposit from Amazon) in our checking account. It is the fruit of considerable labor.

If I was employed to write, and my employer paid me the hourly rate I generate to get a book into publication, I'd be turning them in to the Feds. Here, you might be anticipating a sentence describing how I write for the love of the art, that it expresses the stories that I carry in my heart and blah, blah, blah. Not only did my accountant warn me against professing a non-monetary goal, but it has the added benefit of being only half the story.

It's nice to get paid for my writing. Granted, it isn't much and it barely pays for the power my laptop consumes every year. But...

In the last ninety days, only two of my seven works (six novels and a short story) didn't get some kind of traffic. My first novel, Out of Ideas, generated almost as much as my latest, The Fort in the Harbor. Someone sat down over a weekend and read A More Perfect Union. Heart of the Matter, a book I still treasure because a dear friend edited it and another friend is on the cover, got some attention.

I like to think that these books give the reader their money's worth. I hope they like the characters. I hope that by reading one, they go back for more. I hope they tell their friends. I hope they leave a lavish and effusively positive review.

And I hope they don't mind that I'll spend their money (which, to quote a line from The West Wing, is now my money) on Mexican food and margaritas.