Interview #189: How Michael Waters Makes Money Writing
In this interview, Michael explains how keeping his copywriting job is the only way he can afford to fund his time-intensive historical research.
Michael Waters is an award-winning historian, a journalist, and a remote copywriter. His debut book, The Other Olympians, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and won a Lambda Literary Award. Yet his book advances and freelance fees only make up a fraction of his livelihood. Seventy-five percent of his total income comes directly from his copywriting job. He prefers it this way.
In this interview, Michael breaks down the economics of writing history. He explains why a highly anticipated second book might sell for less than a debut, and he reveals the massive hidden costs—archival travel, photo licensing, fact-checking—that rapidly devour an author’s advance. He also reveals why a dry commercial gig is the exact mechanism that protects his creative energy. If you want to know how to fund resource-heavy writing projects without draining your creative energy, this one’s for you.
What you do: Copywriter / freelance writer.
Earnings range: $20k–$30k (+ day job salary).
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Michael, you live in Brooklyn and maintain a career as a copywriter while publishing award-winning history and journalism. How does the income pie slice up for you between copywriting, freelance fees, and book advances?
Honestly, my copywriting income has added up to roughly three-quarters of my earnings the last few years. Which is really a large share. Part of that is because my book advances are paid in thirds, so I’m realistically only getting slivers of it each year. And while I do still write several freelance articles every year for magazines, those earnings rarely total to more than a few thousand annually.
It’s just hard to beat the steady paycheck, and I think that security (insofar as any editorial job is secure in this economy) is what lets me write so many historically inflected stories that aren’t exactly easy to sell to magazines.
Copywriting requires a very specific, punchy skill set that is often quite different from the nuance required for historical non-fiction. Does the day job drain the creative battery, or do you find that the discipline of commercial writing sharpens your journalistic prose?
I feel lucky to have a job like this: it’s routine, it’s remote, and it rarely cuts into my free time. So it’s less that the writing muscle gets exhausted from copywriting—if anything, a day of writing relatively dry, low-lift copy makes me want to return to a more engaging kind of writing even more—than that it’s so difficult to find the time in the day to do it all. I think by working full time and writing books on top of it, you commit to a life of being perpetually overextended.