Investments That Every Writer Should Make
Funding the backend of your career.
This can be a tricky topic to dive into because it should be talked about more in the writing/art world. People that have more resources have definitive advantages in the industry, whether that be editor contacts or a family that is able to financially support them while they pursue authorship, etc. As a marginalized writer, it helped me a lot to remind myself of this fact when I was starting out as a freelance journalist n 2017.
Finding resources and ways to fund the backend (aka the more administrative things) through grants and beyond will do you so much good in the long run. Artist grants can often be found on a local level by Googling , “Grants for artists in INSERT CITY/COUNTY/STATE/REGION”.
A. An Author Website
Having an author website will give you a central place for people to be able to find your work, read about your background, and understand your ethos. In many ways, I understand the hesitation to want to “advertise yourself”, but as a marginalized creative, I view it as, “Who else is gonna talk about your own work BETTER than you?”
Below are a few screenshots from my own website - princeshakur.com
A few things that I wanted for my website:
A relatively clean, layout. I didn’t want someone to find my homepage and struggle to find my other work easily, so my menu bar is very visible and doesn’t have too many tabs
To have a lot of images and visual elements, from photos to the logos of various publications I’ve written for to my Youtube videos
A lot of ways to engage with my work
A very clear understanding of what compels me as an artist or a sense of narrative …. “His work, whether literary, visual, or grassroots, is stepped in his commitment to black liberation, prison abolition, and queer resilience.”
B. Backing Up Your Work
This tip feels like it should be talked about more. As a teenager when I started to voraciously write novels, my brother was grounded and had his computer taken away. This led my brother to steal my computer, attempt to log on, and accidentally delete my whole hard drive.
At the time, this meant that I lost the first 30k of a novel and best believe that teenage-me was pissed, and learned the value of backing up my work.
A few days that you can back up your work:
Keep an external hard drive or flash drive handy. Nowadays, there are 1TB external hard drives that are solid-state and super portable. I have one for my career-related items and things I want to save, and I try to update it 1-2 times a year.
Utilizing or paying for Google Drive is extremely useful. If you download the program onto your computer and note which folders on your laptop you wish to have backed up, every time you alter a selected folder on your computer, it will also back it up to Google Drive. I utilize this as a secondary option and this method helps me save numerous drafts
Emailing yourself drafts of your work as you go along is a useful tip for people that want to save money and are working on longer-form projects. I’ve used this tip a lot when I’ve traveled.
C. A cheap way to attend a writing conference
HEAVY emphasis on the keyword “cheap”.
I know just as well as anyone that writing conferences can cost a lot from airfare to lodging to social events, but as a DIY, punk-oriented 20-something, I advocated trying to go to these conferences and cut costs:
The Association of Writers and Programs (AWP) Conference is three days, but also offers work-exchange opportunities and one-day tickets, which can help cut the costs.
Some conferences offer a sliding scale for payment or free tickets for writers from marginalized backgrounds.
Attend a conference in a city where you have a friend that you can crash with to save money on lodging.
Share your tickets with someone else and split the cost.
If you have suggestions on other investments that are useful to make in your career as a writer, comment and let the MWL community know.
If you wish to support my debut book, When They Tell You To Be Good, before it comes out on October 4…