What It Costs to Be a Working Writer, Part 2: Time

I am still wrapping up my year-end assessment of my writing business, so if you consider yourself a writer in business for your writing life, these two posts are for you.

Part 1, from last Friday, discusses the money we spend on our writing lives, specifically what I spent on mine in 2024, and what worked or didn’t. I was grateful to take time for this assessment, because the flurry of publication and marketing left no energy for it, and I was getting uneasy with money going out each month for subscriptions I no longer wanted.

The other half of my assessment explores the effort part of our business. The actual work, the hours we devote, and what exactly we spend time on to keep our writing life going.

I think of this as business maintenance. But it also includes the work of querying or submitting, the maintenance of equipment, correspondence, posting a newsletter or updating a website, and research for the business (as opposed to research for a writing project).

Anything that doesn’t have us putting words on the page towards our writing goals is part of the business side of being a writer.

Again, I’ll recommend Jane Friedman’s classic guide to being a writer as a businessperson: The Business of Being a Writer. Jane says it all so well. Worth a look! And Kerstin Martin’s Calm Business program, if you want a different approach than harried.

Inventorying your time

I trust that if you’re reading this, the bulk of your creative time is spent on your creative project—your book, your story, your essay, whatever you’re making from the heart and soul of a writer. That’s the way it should be.

Maintaining a business is important, because it’s a structure that supports your creative flow. But it should never take up all your time. Writers need to write.

It’s insidious, though. The maintenance of a writing life can slowly take over your available writing time. Say your printer goes on the blink. Suddenly, you’re running to get a new printer, finding someone to fix the old one, researching your options. That can eat away an entire writing session or more.

Or you commit to blurbing a book because a good friend asked you. I love supporting other writers, especially debut authors, and I enjoy blurbing, but I’ve had to be careful about how many I agree to do. Just reading the manuscript alone can take days. Others have blurbed for me, and I believe in paying that forward and back, but not if it sucks away all my energy for my own writing.

My goal is writing every day. Or at least most days. I don’t feel right in myself if I miss this because business maintenance or a commitment to someone else takes over. I need to write because it feeds me, uplifts me, makes the world seem OK.

But it takes consciousness to guard your writing time. Part of that is becoming aware of where you’re spending your energy and time right now. And if it’s worth it.

Energy and time assessment

Like I did with last week’s money assessment, in January I also did a time assessment. What was I spending time and energy on, to further my writing life?

I listed all the activities I could think of, that were not about actually creating words on the page.

I felt torn about how to consider these weekly Substack posts. I believe they are writing time, because I do all the steps for them that I do for my other writing. But my goal for them is not sheer creativity. I think of them more as service to the writing community, a way to continue teaching and sharing my experience. They also have an element of marketing, to be honest, whenever I have a book or new publication success or an award to share. But I did want to assess how much time I put into this part of my writing life, so I included them below.

I included research for business maintenance, like checking out new software. But not research that’s directly for a writing project—a story, essay, or book.

Here are my categories, and I’d love to hear about yours!

Education

Taking a weekly writing class online—three hours on Zoom plus reading the week’s submissions or assigned material

Watching art videos—about three hours a week, give or take

Following the Substacks I love, commenting on the posts, being part of this community—an hour a week, ideally not more

Feedback

Giving feedback to my writer’s group—reading the submission, making track changes in Word, meeting for a few hours each month

Giving feedback to my writing partner—this goes in bursts, depending on where we each are in our projects

Blurbing for other authors—I estimate this takes me about thirty hours a year right now

Newsletter

Writing and editing these newsletters, one each Friday, monthly on Sundays—ten hours a week, give or take

Addressing subscriber issues—very infrequent

Posting my newsletters onto my website—about an hour every few months

Marketing and community

Posting my own Notes on Substack—5-10 minutes every other day

Podcast interviews—this was taking a good chunk of time each week when my books were just launching; now it’s infrequent

Updating my website—regular maintenance an hour a month, updating chunks of the site takes a lot more time

Other social media—I’m moving away from this, because I prefer the community here on Substack, but many friends and family are on IG, Threads, and FB, so I still post and comment there about an hour or two a week

Creating graphics in Canva and scheduling them on Later—I do this in bursts, because it’s not one of my favorite activities, so perhaps two hours every few weeks

Corresponding with readers and other writers—an hour a week, maybe?

Equipment/space

Updating software—an hour every two or three months

Filing—something I hate, so I avoid it; maybe two hours every six months

Organizing my writing project stuff and room—a daily sort for 20 minutes, a monthly clean and organize for one hour

Backing up my computer—an hour each month or less

Any equipment problems—hard to estimate and can take hours but infrequent right now

Accounting

Bookkeeping—two hours a month

Taxes—about ten hours once a year

What’s worth it?

Once I have my assessment of time and energy spent, I can look at each item and see if it’s really contributing to my life.

Just from making this list, I can see that I want to reduce the social media time. There are friends and family on Facebook, for instance, that I only stay in touch with that way, so I don’t want to ghost them there. But it can become a real time suck.

I experimented with hiring out some of the maintenance. I worked with a tech person to help me troubleshoot computer problems last year—totally worth it. Also a bookkeeper for a while, when my income was higher before retirement. That was great too. And an accountant for taxes when my business was an LLC.

I’m ending my podcast tour now, so that will free up time. I will also slow down on the Canva and Later involvement, since marketing is slowing down too. And blurbing will take a backseat now that I’m involved more in my online class.

But I am thrilled to have this list. It immediately shows me the balance—the actual writing time should be 90 percent of the writer’s life. If it’s not, adjustments are needed.

Assess the writing time against the writing business time. How balanced is it, for you? Maybe you’ve just launched a book. Or you have finished stories or essays you’re submitting. That might take the balance in a different direction for a while, which is all good. Only you can know!

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Make a time log this week. Write down whatever you do that contributes, even in a small way, to your writing life. How many hours do you actually write, compared to how many hours spent doom scrolling on social media or organizing your space or fixing stuff?

Only you can know—often by an uneasy feeling inside—if your writing life is getting the time and energy it needs.

What other activities do you spend time on?

Anything you learned from doing this assessment?