Novelist opens up about mental health and financial difficulties - and one thing you can't get a book deal without
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Each Monday, our Money team speaks to someone from a different profession to discover what it's really like. This week we chat to Lancashire-born author Katy Regan, whose five novels have been translated into multiple languages. People think my job is… Making up stories. They're right - but sometimes it feels more like crafting a very difficult embroidery in the dark, wearing ski gloves.
The most rewarding thing about my job is... Creating characters and a world that feels so alive and real that you miss it all when you've finished the book. Money latest: Traders bet on pound dropping 8%. Writing fiction is a very financially unstable job... I had a job as a magazine features writer, and my first novel came from a column I wrote there. When I got a book deal, I started writing novels full-time and did that for 15 years but always supplementing it with freelance journalism. I found it impossible to write quickly enough and without stress enough to produce a novel per year, which is basically what you have to do to survive financially - especially as a single parent. Six months ago, I made the difficult decision to get a full-time job as a copywriter, and I now do that as well as novel writing and freelance journalism.
Book advances can be huge... But only for a minuscule proportion of very successful authors. Most authors are what we call "mid-list", they tick along, haven't had a bestseller, but earn a living of sorts. The great thing about being a novelist, however, is you never know if the next book could be the one that makes it big - that's inspiring. My advances have always been paid in three parts: on signature of the contract, on finishing and the publisher accepting your manuscript, and finally, on publication. So you need to be good at managing your finances to not spend it all at once. If you "earn out" your advance - basically make more money for the publisher than the advance -then you also get royalties, which are a percentage of the sale of each book.
