There is a massive gap between literary prestige and financial security.

Peter Mountford has published award-winning novels and essays with major publishers, but he’s blunt about the economics of the craft: "Ultimately, the kind of writing I do is slow, labor-intensive, and doesn't pay that well, although I do love doing it".

To illustrate this, he points to his own payouts. "The advance on my first novel was $25,000, which is nice, but not life-altering," he told me. "I've been paid at most $5000 for a short story, and a couple thousand for an essay".

Instead of relying on book sales to pay his mortgage, he built a thriving independent coaching and teaching business that generates a "pleasant middle-class income" in Seattle. A crucial turning point in his business came when he realized he could launch his own yearlong classes and use his newsletter, The Hook, to build a sustainable, paying community without relying on institutions to take a cut.

Because his financial baseline is completely secure, he views publishing his own books as a labor of love rather than a business plan. In fact, the revenue from his fiction is so modest that he earns less from a book than he spends just marketing his teaching business.

"Even if the book does quite well, maybe sells 10,000 copies, I will make less from it than I spend on marketing with Mountford Writing," he told me. "A traditional publishing contract pays the author 25% on e-books and about 12% (or less) on paperback originals. You have to sell extraordinary quantities of books—nearly a hundred thousand copies per year—to make a living wage at that rate".

It requires giving up the romantic myth of the full-time novelist, but Peter embraces the stability his day job provides. "It feels like I went to all this effort to avoid having a normal day job, but I ended up with a normal day job anyway," he said.