Making a Living as a Writer and Book Editor

The Freelance Life: Substack is Supreme

Photo by Luke Peters on Unsplash

***Please consider starting a paid subscription to support a working writer. It’s only $35/year. That’s less than $3/month. I put my soul into my work. I greatly appreciate your support.

Roughly since 2010—when I got sober, at age 27—I’ve been writing seriously. Roughly since 2013—after interning for a literary agent—I’ve been doing professional book editing.

The writing comes from my genetic bones: Mom is an author; my maternal uncle is a novelist; two cousins are writers (videogame and travel respectively). I’d always felt the compulsion to put down prose on the page.

Book editing has been a different story. In 2012 I went back to college—for the umpteenth time—and got my Bachelor’s in Creative Writing, finally, from San Francisco State University. (I’d been chopping away at credits at many different colleges around the state for years.) While there we had to get credit in some sort of publishing industry capacity. I was living in North Oakland. I ended up going to my first writers’ conference, the annual San Francisco Writers’ Conference. It was there that I met the literary agent who offered me an internship.

This agent—who shall remain nameless—had been an acquisitions editor with a medium-sized publisher before switching to the business side. Once she realized I possessed both writing talent and a sharp editorial eye (she read some of my work) she first offered to train me in the delicate, fastidious art of developmental editing, and then, later, when my nine months of internship were almost over, unofficially to represent me as her writer-client. Foolishly—or maybe not—I turned her down, at the time a young, arrogant, driven 30-year-old with a few unpublished novels under my belt and reams of short stories, determined to connect with a “big NYC agent” and “make it.” Here I am ten years later with 13 novels, hundreds of short stories, and still no agent. Then again: I have Substack.

My book editing started initially with a blog I began in 2013 while still at the agency. I discussed being “inside” the publishing industry, the ins-and-outs of Slush Pile reading, how to craft a proper, succinct novel query letter, what the first five pages of a novel should look like (action, action, action!), learning about the craft of developmental book editing, pitching books to publishers, etc. Several times a week I got in my car and drove the half hour from North Oakland over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to Tiburon, in Marin County, where the agent’s boss (another, more prolific agent herself who’d represented famous authors) owned a gorgeous home with views of the sparkling blue bay.

Soon I started getting book editing gigs. It was slow at first; a trickle. I charged half a cent per word. Nothing. But I was sober, getting some short stories published in little magazines, writing fiction, interning for the agent, doing my blog, and making a few hundred on editing books.

By 2015 I was charging 2 cents per word and was getting more work. Money was coming in. I’d left the agency just before it became 2014. I had nearly half a decade of sobriety under my belt. This was when I encountered Christian Picciolini, former neo-Nazi-turned-anti-hate activist. He had a hell of a story. From roughly 1987 to 1993 he’d run one of America’s most notorious racist skinhead neo-Nazi gangs out of Chicago. Then he got out, had kids very young, realized the error of his ways, and became an anti-hate activist. He was looking for someone to edit his memoir, which later became White American Youth. I became that editor. From there my career only built. I edited a second book of his in 2018 and 2019, which came out in early 2020, Breaking Hate. (There was also an MSNBC TV series based off the book with the same title.)

The books came in and I edited them. I heard from famous and semi-famous writers somewhat often, but many of them “didn’t have any money” for an edit. But I did end up editing writers like Deborah Holt Larkin, Gini Grossenbacher, Rachel Rose, and many more.

For many years—between 2012 and 2018—I attended writers’ conferences, in Portland Oregon and New York City and San Francisco and San Diego, etc. Some of them I taught writing or editing classes at. It was fun. Meanwhile I was writing more short stories all the time, and getting one or two published in small magazines every year or so. And I kept writing novels, reworking some of them, ditching others in rough first draft.

One novel of mine—the first I ever wrote or completed, begun in 2008, when I was 25 and still drinking, and completed (first draft) in 2011, in early sobriety—I edited, revised, reworked, and even hired a former Random House editor to edit as a freelancer herself. And finally, after years of submitting to literary agents and getting only cold, AI-like standard non-personal rejections, I began, around 2016, to receive personal rejections with little notes of promise. Then an agent requested the first 50 pages after having read the first chapter. Then another agent requested the entire manuscript. Nothing describes the thrill of that feeling. Or the anxiety and dread. And then one agent read the book all the way through not once, not twice but three times…praising me with long, lavish emails…but then she disappeared. Ugh. It was a tough game.

When Covid hit—I was living in New York City, for a while in East Harlem—the publishing industry, like almost everything else, naturally contracted. And book editing dried up quickly. People weren’t going to spend $2,000, $3,000 to have their book edited when the whole nation was in a collective panic and people weren’t able to draw an income when everything shut down. I wrote feverishly during the pandemic, even pumping out a whole novel (extremely rough draft) in one month, with the help of a good writer friend who read my new chapter each day and sent it back later that same afternoon with feedback. It was the second in a literary trilogy in the vein of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, covering my three major hitchhiking adventures in the first decade of the 21^st century, when I was wild, drunk and out of control.

In 2021, as most of you know who’ve been reading me for a while now, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I left NYC and moved to Santa Barbara to care for him alongside my mother. During that time I edited a few books but mostly I wrote constantly (roughly 190,000 words/750-pages worth of personal diaries, which I plan to publish on here at some point), walked dogs for cash, and joined Substack, which has changed my life.

I first heard about Substack while walking around The Great Lawn in Central Park during the riotous, titillating summer of 2020. At the time the major liberal media (read: The New York Times) was being hysterical about Substack and was claiming that it was some sort of Right-Wing hack-job. In other words: They feared it would cut into their dwindling subscriber base. Which it clearly has. Mostly it terrified them because Bari Weiss had left the NYT and started a Stack and she was making hand over fist more money than as a journalist at The New York Times, where, at least when it came to culture war topics, it was suspect to even continue calling it (meaning the NYT) “journalism” at all. (That has thankfully since changed.) I remember strolling around the lawn and thinking, Interesting.

The second time I heard of Substack I was strolling around San Roque, the neighborhood where my studio was in Santa Barbara. I was listening to my favorite honest political podcast—The 5^th Column—and they were interviewing Hamish McKenzie, co-creator of the platform himself. The 5^th Column had just moved from Patreon to Substack. They were discussing, with Hamish, the new possibilities on Substack, the simplicity and pro-free-speech nature of it, the uncoupling from the traditional model and even the Patreon model. On Substack you owned your own site. You controlled your own email subscriber list. You could stay on the platform for free. There were NO ads, which was a mega-plus. All you had to do was pay them 10% out of any paid subscriptions you got, if you got any.

So I joined in August, 2022, with 50 friends and family as subscribers, and never looked back. Now I have over 1,000 subscribers with nearly 70 paying. I make roughly $300/month, which isn’t a lot but it’s also definitely not nothing. Most important I get to speak freely and openly and don’t have to worry about being censored, edited down against my creative desire, or forced into any ideological container which feels illiberal or stifling, either from a right or left perspective. I get to be honest and tell the truth, “my truth,” and that is worth everything.

I edit books still when one appears or moves my way which I connect to. I write on Substack regularly. I’m working on a novel about my Dad’s cancer journey and of course there’re the collected diaries. I’m also seriously considering self-publishing my debut novel, the auto-fiction punk rock literary YA I started in 2008 and almost got an agent for in 2016. It’s by far my strongest, most edited and revised piece of writing, and the favorite of my family and friends. I’ve built up a good readership on Substack so I figure I could post the book and/or promote it for paid subscribers.

The freelance writing life is not exactly easy or simple or straightforward. There are contracts to sign, emails to go back and forth with, phone and Zoom calls with clients, free samples that end up going nowhere, long gaps where no work comes in (thank you dog-walking and Substack), etc. But I have no boss, which scares many people but thrills me. The idea of working a “regular 9-5” scares the shit out of me at this point. No way. Just the other day I walked into a grocery store near my house and I almost fell into a panic watching the early twenties employees doing their thing, stacking shelves and whatnot. Could you imagine having to do that kind of boring, mechanical work? I asked myself. It’s funny, because for many years, roughly from ages 14-28, that was all I did: Boring, mechanical, low-wage dead-end jobs. I worked everywhere. Here’s a post about that. I worked at grocery stores. Clothing stores, mostly. And many other things.

But now I’m 40. It’s been too long since I got yelled at by some asshole who thought I wasn’t working hard or fast enough. I can’t do it. I have to do things my own way, at my own pace. Like many an alcoholic—even sober—I have a fiercely rebellious spirit. I don’t like being told what to do, how to think, how to act, how to dress, etc. I have never been a follower or a conformist or a joiner. I’ve always been a thinker, an independent person, someone who does his “own thing.” Just my nature.

Substack gives me the freedom to be the person I am. It’s the least restrictive platform around. They stay out of your way.

That’s what I want.