The Heck Does This Make Money?: Interview With Author Julia Fine

“How Does This Make Money?” is about Money and Feelings.

This Q+A is with Julia Fine, the author of The Upstairs House (comes out February 23). You can pre-order it here.

Who are you?

My name is Julia Fine.

What do you do to make money?

I’m a novelist and a writing teacher. I’m also a full-time mom. My first book, What Should Be Wild, came out in 2018.

My second, The Upstairs House, is a postpartum poltergeist story about a new mom who is either being haunted by the ghosts of Margaret Wise Brown (author of Goodnight Moon) and her lover (the actress Michael Strange), or experiencing postpartum psychosis.

It’s out February 23rd and you can find it at your local independent bookstore (online for pandemic purposes, of course). 

The fuck do you make money?

Mostly by writing, which is kind of insane. I sold both of my books to a big publisher for 100k+ advances, which pay out in chunks: first on signing the contract, then on delivering the edited manuscript, then on hardcover publication, and then a year later with the paperback.

Because I sold two books in four years, this has been spaced out pretty nicely.

Fifteen percent goes to my agent, who very much deserves it. There’s also taxes, which are definitely a beast. I only get royalties if my books outsell the advance from the publisher, which hasn’t happened for me yet.

I also teach writing classes with Catapult and Story Studio Chicago, which is definitely supplementary income. I apply for grants and generally don’t get them. I offer manuscript consultations, which pay pretty well, but eat up all my free time.

Writing has a pretty nifty way to make a large, but not necessarily livable, chunk of cash.

But really, I’m able to live in the city with two kids and not drown because my husband has a steady job in operations.

What do you spend your money on?

Food. Dumb stuff to help my kids sleep better (a blackout tent for the crib, which currently lives in our master bedroom/office, sound machines, toys to bribe my 3.5 year old to stay in bed past, kid you not, 4:30 am).

We just bought a house, and we’ll be paying less for our mortgage than we have been for rent the past few years, which is exciting. I buy A LOT of books, which is necessity for both my work and my mental health.

For about eight months in 2019 we spent way too much on Jewish preschool, but during the pandemic it’s just been us doing childcare.

The money we saved on child care combined with the book sale is what made buying our house possible.

We also just paid off our combined student loans.

There are big benefits to being in a partnership where one of us makes a biweekly salary and one of us gets a big check semi-annually.  

How do you spend your time? How much of your time “makes money”? Oof. As a writer this is a loaded question.

That’s because a novel is a huge front-end investment that probably won’t pay off.

I was very lucky with my timing—I wrote my first novel while nannying and teaching freshman composition classes (lol adjunct money aka nothing), and then got pregnant right around the time it sold.

Because I have a literary agent, and because the first book was critically fairly successful, I felt confident that if I could write another novel I could probably sell it. I definitely don’t want to do the math on how much it would actually come out to per hour if I broke down the time spent working on the book. But for creative work, to get paid anything feels like a luxury. 

Right now, I’m doing a lot of book publicity, which doesn’t pay on the front end, but if I can sell a certain number of copies I get a bonus and then royalties.

I’m teaching, which means lesson planning and manuscript review and then a few hours a week of face time. Most of my time I spend feeding my kids, trying to entertain them, maybe trying to get a little education in. They are 7 months and 3.5 years old, so trying to get them to sleep or entertain themselves so I can get some work done is also a large part of my day.  

How do your values guide how you make money? I could, perhaps, make more money from writing if I didn’t insist on writing books with graphic descriptions of period blood and postpartum incontinence and “unlikable” characters.

 I want to write books people haven’t read before, books that make people feel seen. I’m write weird shit, which I love, but means I’ll likely never have a NYT bestseller. Not to say that I’m even capable of writing a popular bestseller, but my current artistic choices have made this highly unlikely. 

Tell me about your class background without telling me your class background. I had the luxury of being able to quit a PR job I hated so I could nanny full-time and apply to MFA programs and write a novel. I was without health insurance for a year or so, but didn’t stress too much about it. 

Tell me about a decision you’ve made about how you make money you’re proud of. Quitting PR and sales to write against all advice from literally everyone. I guess my husband (then boyfriend) was on board, but that was about it. I would not advise anyone to take this route—there was a very good chance I would fail miserably, but I worked hard and got lucky and somehow got my foot in the door.

Tell me about a decision about how you make money you’re NOT proud of. For a while, to supplement my nannying and adjuncting incomes, I was copywriting for a new age wellness blog. I wrote a lot of bullshit about chakras and crystals that would go with your manicure and how eating red foods would make you better in bed. 

Tell me about a choice around how you make money that you know was the right decision, but you still feel weird about. My husband is the primary financial provider for our family, and while I wouldn’t change how we operate, it would be nice to not feel so dependent. For a while, I was cobbling together something of a living wage on my own, but now that we have kids I just don’t have time for the odd-jobs. I think this is a fairly common situation for parents—one works full-time and the other provides childcare—but once the kids are more independent I definitely want to pull my weight financially. 

What’s something you were surprised by when you started making money this way? Advances (the money you get when the book sells to an editor) are extremely convoluted! In a way, they’re great because if your book doesn’t sell well, you still get paid. But if you get a big advance and the book bombs, it becomes so much harder to sell your next book. I kind of hit the sweet spot with a respectable but not insane advance, and respectable but not above expected sales of my first book. I also had an excellent editor who really advocated for my newest book. If you’re going for a large NYC publishing house, a literary agent has to pitch your book to an editor, who then has to pitch it to their publisher and get you paid. Sometimes an editor loves a book, but their boss won’t sign off. So much of this business is luck, and timing, and connections. It’s really quite stupid!

Tell me a story about money that makes you feel hopeful.

This past June, the publishing industry slowly started to acknowledge how skewed things are toward white writers. Authors began sharing their advances online, which led to the insane revelation that masterful, award winning Black writers were getting significantly less money for their work than some basically unknown, mediocre white writers. We’ll see how much the tide actually turns, but my agent did sell a book called The Other Black Girl for a massive advance—it comes out in June, and it’s getting the hype it deserves because it has money behind it.

Hopefully it’s not just a blip on the radar, but a sign that things are changing… 

What’s something you do for free, that you will never do for money? Helping other writers. At a certain point, I have to say no when a stranger (or extremely loose connection) emails me asking for help finding an agent, or finding writing classes, or to chat about books, because I just don’t have the time. But when it’s a writer I believe in, or someone whose work I know and admire, I want to kick the door as wide open as possible.