A new UK company has launched offering aspiring novelists an alternative to publication: a salary from £2,000 per month to write novels. De Montfort Literature (DML) will pay writers a salary to write novels which DML will then design, print, publish and promote. After salary, production and marketing costs, authors will receive a 50 percent share of the book sale profits.
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/start-publishing-venture-offer-aspiring-novelists-salary-793601
Imagine having to report to work every day, sit at your desk, and produce a certain amount of work. To earn a full-time writing income, you have to write full-time. A lot of people don’t like that. They think the rigorous schedule takes the fun out of writing. Well, guess what? When a hobby becomes a job, there are days you don’t want to come to work. Just because it’s writing doesn’t mean it’s exempt from a work ethic. Income success correlates with work production.
Write every day.
You get better.
You get stronger.
You get faster.
You build confidence.
You become dependable.
You get to the point that whenever your butt hits the chair, your brain kicks into gear and your fingers itch to write. It’s called habit. It’s teaching your body what to instinctively do. And it makes a mockery out of writer’s block.
Most authors are afraid to write daily. Those who aren’t, are the ones making more money. Doesn’t that just make perfect sense?
BIO – C. Hope Clark is founder of FundsforWriters.com and author of The Carolina Slade and the Edisto Island Mysteries series. www.chopeclark.com
I actually applied to them (probably heard about them here), and am now considering withdrawing my application. It reminds me a lot of the old golden-age Hollywood studios–when they practically OWNED their actors. I just looked at a few of their FAQ’s about an hour ago.
You work on THEIR computers (Nice if you don’t have one or particularly care about your machine, but if you’ve done a lot of writing, you’ve probably worked into your own personal system–which might not match theirs.)
You are prohibited from creating ANY other books through ANY other publisher, even in non-fiction or a completely unrelated genre than what you applied to them to write. Again, it may not be an issue if the only stories you’ve ever written since you were six were science-fiction, or have an idea to create the next Middle Earth and expect it to consume all your creative energies, but if you’re more of an Isaac Asimov, with books begging to be written in multiple genres, in both fiction and nonfiction, this will hamstring you. I don’t know about you, but I think my creativity would tank if I was locked into a single genre. And they own everything: if you ever leave, you have to buy your copyrights back from them.
Your comment is interesting. Thanks for posting. I read little about this before and sounds like a poor deal for the writers. I would leave it.