Make a Nerdy Living

by Alex Langley

  THE PRICE OF PAIN, THE PAIN OF THE PRICE: WHAT TO CHARGE FOR ART?

  “An artist is not paid for his labor, but his vision.”

  —James Whistler

  “Darthfield_The_Cat only charges $5 for a black-and-white drawing!” says one potential customer. “Yes,” you try to explain, “but they do quick MS Paint sketches and I do graphite work with full gradients.” You quickly decide not to say it, fearing it would fall on deaf ears. With a sigh, you lower your price to five dollars even though the work is going to take you upward of four hours. Money is money, right?

  Work ethic is great; any kind of nerdy living will be heavily influenced by how much you’re willing to push yourself. With that in mind, you can’t undervalue yourself as an artist, despite the fact that you’ll be fighting against a tide of people trying to get you to do so. “But isn’t drawing fun?” they’ll say. “You shouldn’t be charging at all if you’re doing something for fun.” While, yeah, art is fun, art is also work that takes time to perform and thousands of hours of practice to master.

  No matter what your creative medium, as someone who will spend the bulk of their time self-employed, you’re the ultimate judge of what your prices should be.

  DON’T PRICE YOUR ART BASED ON WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING

  Some artists charge exorbitant amounts for their art because they’ve accrued the skills, experience, and following that affords them such luxury; there’s a reason it would cost a lot more to hire the Beatles to play at your birthday than it would to hire a Beatles cover band.*

  Most younger artists will undercut the hell out of themselves in the hopes of making something, anything off their work. Price your art based on what you feel is the right price, not because rival artist Darthfield_The_Cat lists their prices a particular way.

  REMEMBER WHAT THE MINIMUM WAGE IS

  If you take an $8 commission that takes you six hours to complete, you’re working for way less than what you’d earn flipping burgers or castrating pigs. Even the most unskilled, entry-level, I-don’t-give-a-bat’s-butt-about-this-job-but-I-need-the-money positions have a minimum level of pay for employees. Figure out how long it will take to complete a piece, multiply that by at least minimum wage, then round up because most artists undervalue themselves and you probably will, too.

  INCLUDE THE PRICE OF MATERIALS IN THE COST

  Making art requires supplies: pens, pencils, digital tablets, human blood, quills made from rat spines and raven feathers, all that sort of thing. Price your work with that in mind.

  DON’T WORRY THAT SOME PEOPLE WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD YOUR ART

  No matter what you price your art, there will always be people who want it for cheaper. It’s okay that there will be people who can’t afford your art; if they like it well enough, they’ll remember it and pay for it when they can afford it.

  BY UNDERVALUING YOUR ART, YOU ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO DO THE SAME

  If you go to an electronics store and see a computer on sale for eighty bucks, odds are high that you’re going to wonder what’s wrong with it. The same principle applies to art—if you don’t present your art as being valuable, no one will value it.

  Change your prices with the ebb and flow of supply, demand, and your ever-increasing experience. If more and more people want art from you, obviously you are doing something right and should charge more because—and this is important—your art is unique. No one else can create your art the way you do; no one else has your vision.

  The same thing goes for experience. When you increase your prices over the years, you’re not just doing it to adjust for inflated cost of living (though that’s part of it, too). You’re doing it because the commissioner is paying for the time spent creating and the time spent studying. As your skills increase, so, too, should your prices.

  NEVER GET DEFENSIVE ABOUT COST

  Your prices are the way they are; don’t let potential customers’ complaints (“B-but Darthfield doesn’t charge so much!”) make you feel as if you should lower prices. By trying to defend yourself, it makes you sound weaker to the customer and feel weaker, increasing the likelihood you’ll do the same work for less than you deserve. When discussing pricing, remember this simple statement: “These are my prices. If you don’t like them, you can buy someone else’s art.”

  IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’RE BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF, YOU ARE

  If you resent your customers, if you feel like they’re just buying your art because you don’t charge enough for it, it’s time to make a change. Raise your prices, take fewer commissions, and don’t let people push you around as much with their demands.

  SOMETIMES THE MONEY ISN’T WORTH IT

  Maybe you have a customer willing to pay a ton for a piece, but you feel uncomfortable with the intent behind it, like maybe you get the feeling the art they want is a not-so-subtle smear piece against an ex they feel wronged by. Maybe the customer is way too specific and the work would be a pain in the ass because you’d have to tweak it repeatedly. Maybe it’s too icky. Whatever your reason, if your spidey-sense is tingling that the customer will be too much of a hassle to work with, don’t do it. The amount of time, effort, and mental energy expended on this one pain-in-the-ass customer could cause you to miss out on other, better opportunities.

  To be an artist—a creator—means to summon something from nothing, to find meaning in madness, to express yourself without knowing that your meaning will be interpreted as you intended. While this is true for all types of creators, it is, perhaps, most true for the creators whose works reside primarily in the imagination: authors.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WRITING BOOKS

  Of the many nerdy pursuits, publishing is still among the most arcane in its path to success, requiring would-be novelists to tame the strange, dark beast known as the publishing industry.

  Being a writer in the twenty-first century is vastly different than it was in centuries past. Today’s writers have to worry about online ratings, word of mouth, social media presence, review bombs, and probably other weird Internet-related things that haven’t been invented yet, all adding up to a pile of extra headaches and social complications. Conversely, there are more opportunities to pursue your dreams than ever before; while decades past saw novelists at the mercy of a few all-powerful gatekeepers, today it’s easier than ever for raw determination to win out in the face of adversity.

  Now, before you worry about sending out review copies of your book to market-friendly sites, before you ply your parents for some five-star ratings, before you ever fret about how to go about your first AMA, there’s something much more pressing you need to do with your book—write the sucker.

  STARTING POINT: WRITING

  There are pa-lenty of books out there devoted to teaching you how to build a career as an author. This book is about teaching you how to build a career as a nerd, and this chapter specifically is about building a career as a nerdy author. As with all things, wordsmithing continues to evolve alongside the Internet, and the modern writer needs to evolve alongside it.

  PUNCH THE KEYS, FOR GOD’S SAKE: DELETING PROCRASTINATION

  Writers read, and writers write. Writing, however, requires a certain amount of willpower to even begin. Posting online videos, streaming, etc., have built-in pressures to keep you on track because if you don’t stay active you’re likely to lose some of your accumulated audience and draw the ire of a horde of irritable commenters. When you’re first starting as a writer, the only person you have to be accountable to is you. Sure, once you’ve got a literary agent and a publishing house breathing down your neck to get the manuscript done, you’ll feel the heat, but there’s a large distance between here and there, and the only way to cover that distance is through self-motivation. This means finding your sources of procrastination and beating them until they’re bloody and broken in an alley.

  Ignore the temptations of the online world. Checking Facebook, rummaging through Twitter, browsing your favorite clown-hunting sites . . . these are all things
that can wait until after you’ve knocked out your target word count. Make a hard rule to ignore the Internet until you’ve accomplished your goals for the day. There are programs and apps such as ColdTurkeyBlocker that force you to get to work until you’ve hit your goal. So if you don’t want to risk temptation, find a program that will use its cold computer logic to prevent you from getting distracted.

  Commit publicly, because peer pressure works. If you’re accountable to other human beings who will be checking up on your progress, you’ll be less likely to foofoo* around.

  Use a to-do list if you’re prone to disorganization. Organize your list to prioritize which tasks are critical and which can be done last. Set up reminders in your phone for deadlines and such so your present self can watch your future self’s back.

  Move around. Light exercise can help get you going if you’re stuck on what to write.

  Don’t strive for perfection, strive for accomplishment. A lot of would-be writers I’ve talked to say they’ve got such perfectionist tendencies that they can’t let themselves write less-than-perfect material. News flash: Even the greatest writers in history don’t perfectly crush their first drafts between their muscular buttocks. By performing the sheer task of writing, no matter whether you’re filling every page with mind-expanding perfection or utter drivel, you’re still doing better than the people who write nothing because at least you’ve created something. Plus, bad writing can become good writing either through editing or by serving as a lesson on what not to write in the future. If you have a tendency toward the need for perfection, channel it into a need to hit a perfect word count for the day or to write for the perfect amount of time. Whatever your method is, just write, damn you, write!

  Everyone procrastinates. Every professional has days when they stare at a blank screen and decide to clean their keyboard instead of getting any major work done. The difference between them and a wannabe writer is wannabes sit around thinking about writing without ever even firing up their word processor. Real writers know getting past procrastination can be as simple as turning on the computer and focusing for a half hour every day to get some words thrown at the page.

  THE NEVER-ENDING HUNT FOR IDEAS

  Ah, great! You’ve got a day free to write, you’re sitting at your keyboard, and you’ve got delicious coffee sitting all warm and toasty in your Darth Vader mug. Time to write!

  . . . Except the only idea you have is fanfiction of Optimus Prime teaming up with the trucker chimpanzee from B. J. and the Bear to travel across America solving crimes. Gotta find some inspiration!

  Story ideas can come from nearly anywhere. They do not, as a rule, come from repetition. If you’re doing the same things every day—watching the same shows, visiting the same places, talking to the same people—you’re limiting your potential for finding new story ideas. If you want to find a new idea for a book, broaden your horizons a bit. Go to a museum. Hang out at a new coffeeshop and eavesdrop (in an artist-searching-for-inspiration way, not in a creepy-weirdo-listening-too-intently-to-strangers kind of way). Browse outside of your usual websites. Talk to people who work at the county fair. Go to a sporting event. Do something out of the ordinary. Even if you don’t find the core element of your next book, you’ll probably find some worthwhile nuggets of humanity worth writing down and examining further.

  Think about something you’re fascinated by, whether it’s a historical event, a location, a person, a phenomenon, a mythological creature, or something else altogether. Find ways to reimagine the object of your fascination to see what sorts of stories might arise. World War II But the Nazis Are Terminators; The Care Bears But They’re Government Assassins On the Side; The Brady Bunch But They’re Secretly Aliens. Sometimes greatness can come from taking something utterly familiar and giving it the smallest twist.

  Find writing prompts and do them. Some writers scoff at the idea of using writing prompts to come up with story hooks; the rest of us call them pretentious goobers. Writing prompts can be great ways to uncover your next big story idea, or, at the very least, give you a decent exercise in creative thinking. If you’re stuck for some prompts, here are a few you can have:

  A parent wakes up convinced their kids have been replaced, but no one else sees it.

  A teenager discovers they have the ability to enter other people’s minds and steal their talents, fears, and desires.

  A promising young scientist invents a time machine and receives a note from themselves in the future saying to destroy the machine.

  A disillusioned former spy gets called back in by the organization they abandoned. The mission? Take down the spy who taught them everything they know.

  A man has a simple goal: Eat a sandwich on his birthday.

  Another way to get a story idea is to take the concept of one story and reverse it. For example, let’s try reversing the sample prompts above:

  Two kid siblings wake up convinced their parents have been replaced, but no one else sees it.

  A teenager discovers they have the power to let others enter their mind and lend out their talents, fears, and desires.

  A washed-up scientist gets a mysterious note in their own handwriting; it’s a blueprint to build a time machine, with an invitation to come join them in the future once it’s finished.

  A disillusioned former spy gets called back by the master who taught them everything they know. The mission? Take down the organization they abandoned.

  A sandwich has a simple goal: Eat a man on his birthday.

  Smash together two disparate story ideas, otherwise referred to as “start with the hook.” The quickest, easiest way to hook people with your story idea is to use existing stories people are already familiar with. “It’s like Dragon Ball Z meets Vampire Hunter D!” “It’s like Metal Gear Solid meets Gilligan’s Island!” “It’s like The X-Files meets Golden Girls with a little bit of Tyler Perry’s Boo 2!: A Madea Halloween!” Start smashing together previous works to see what you can make out of it.

  Follow your curiosity. If something grabs your attention, follow it. Research it. Learn everything you can about it. You never know what might end up inspiring your next work . . . so long as you don’t go so deep down the rabbit hole that you never end up starting/working on/completing that work.

  Don’t worry about someone stealing your idea. Here’s another mistake I see newbies make—they’re so afraid of someone else stealing their idea that they refuse to let anyone see it (though I’m sure this secrecy also stems from a fear that someone else will give a critique they don’t like). An unknowable number of stories exist already; the likelihood that you’re going to create a compelling story that’s 100-percent unique is 0 percent.

  There’s an old, cynical writer’s adage that states “There are no new ideas.” That’s true, from a certain point of view, yet entirely false. Consider this: If J. K. Rowling and Stephen King both tell a story about a little boy who discovers a magical being in his basement, those two stories are going to be very different. A story isn’t about the core concept; it’s about the execution of that concept. My Hero Academia is kind of Heroes, which is basically s-CRY-ed, which is sort of The Tomorrow People, which is more or less X-Men. All of these stories have powerful similarities, and yet they’re entirely dissimilar because their themes, their characters, their execution is different. Don’t worry about someone else stealing your perfect story idea; worry about taking that perfect idea and instilling your voice perfectly into it.

  Mine your past, but don’t strip-mine your past. Using pieces of your personal history for inspiration is an excellent idea. What you should probably not do, however, is write a no-holds-barred more-or-less-true novel about your life. While many interesting things have probably happened to you, it’s unlikely your life story will make for a good book unless your name happens to be Malala Yousafzai. Mine your past for useful story nuggets and take those nuggets to refine into something greater in your fiction.*

  WORDS FROM WORKING NERDS

 
Bethany Claire is best known for writing the USA Today–bestselling Morna’s Legacy series. Bethany is also cofounder of MasteringSelfPublishing.com, a site dedicated to helping writers by providing online courses and resources for their self-publishing journey.

  I started writing creatively in college. It was my outlet, something I did to relieve stress and distract myself from the fact that I was working toward a major I truly had no passion for. I was an elementary education major, and, while I love children and think teachers have one of the most important jobs in the world, I knew deep down I wasn’t supposed to be a teacher. The more time I spent writing, the more I knew I wanted to write full-time. Finally, while I was sitting in a summer session education-methods class—my last class before my semester of student teaching and graduation—I had a moment of total clarity. I quietly gathered my things, left the classroom, and walked down to the registrar’s office, where I withdrew from the university on the spot. I then threw myself into learning everything I could about publishing—both traditional and self-publishing—and quickly decided self-publishing was the only side of publishing I had any interest in. I worked nonstop for the next five months, learning, writing, and preparing for the launch of the first three books in my series. I launched them in November 2013. Within six months, the series landed on the USA Today bestseller list, and I’ve been writing full-time ever since.

  What has surprised you the most about online publishing?

  I think the most surprising thing has been discovering how much is possible if you stay constantly on the lookout for new things. If you continue to keep up to date on how the industry is always changing, the possibilities really are limitless.