We tried Dave Ramsey and I also suggested a financial planner. he said no to the financial planner because he said we’d pay someone to tell us to terminate cable…etc. etc and that wasn’t what he wanted to do. I mean no one WANTS to do this…but geez.
I just feel like we live in the perfect house now – we have the perfect life – now I have to find a way to make sure we can afford to buy it. That’s basically where we are at. The books …he talks about those books and how they are doing ALL the time.
Ok, I need to address this. I am actually a professional editor for a small publishing house, and I see what happens to 99.99999% of people who write, and that includes people who write romance and/or erotica. (I know that is the best-selling genre, but what I am going to say still applies.)
Most people get rejected. Straight up, straight out of hand, most people will not even make it in the door. Of the ones who are accepted by publishers (and being accepted by an agent, itself a difficult feat, is no guarantee of being accepted by a publisher), most make a pittance. I know personally multiple authors who make under $200 a year from their work. Obviously no one is quitting her day-job over this! Furthermore, it is one long slog of trying to drum up attention in a glutted market.
And as for 50SOG, well, that is an interesting situation. 50SOG was written originally as fan fiction for Twilight, where the hero and heroine were actually Edward and Bella from Twilight. The author belonged to a fan forum, and thousands of the fan forum members read the fan fiction. She was published by a tiny publisher, who quickly found that the thousands of fan forum members were buying this book because they had liked its earlier Edward-Bella incarnation, and a larger publisher bought the rights from the smaller one. It was a snowball effect due to her extremely large pre-existing fan base.
The 50SOG phenomenon is not one you will be able to duplicate unless you just happen to be a member of an extremely large fan-fiction community with a large fan following there.
Your husband is dreaming if he thinks you will be able to make much of anything writing romance/erotica.
Obviously, I have not read any of your writing, but speaking strictly as a member of “the business”, writing romance/erotica is usually a hobby, or at best a very small supplemental income. Don’t expect to be able to pay for even the Catholic school tuition with royalties, let alone live on them.
If you want to put your husband in touch with me, I can explain these things. PM me if you need to. But seriously, do not try to rework your life around this source of income. If you do, you (and your husband!) are setting yourselves up for disappointment. Writing erotica just to “cash in” on the 50SOG thing will not work. There are already hundreds and hundreds of established authors trying to do the same thing, and they have a head-start.
There isn’t a “next” 50SOG any more than there was a “next” Twilight or “next” Da Vinci Code or “next” Harry Potter. Those were all breakaway best-sellers, but they were not connected to one another, and they were not “next” big things. Knock-off vampire novels, paranormal historicals, and fantasies are already all over the market. None of them are the “next big thing”.
Seriously, your husband needs a HUGE reality check. Again, if you need to put him in touch with me, feel free to send me a PM.
It’s going to be a problem for you, not for him. That little vignette about getting a scooter told me everything about him that I need to know. Ridiculous.
