Managing Money

John Scalzi wrote a very, very good article about how to manage your money if you wish to be a full-time writer. Heck, it even has good advice for those writers who already know they don't want to quit their day jobs.

Inspired by Scalzi's article, Jennifer Jackson wrote on writers spending their advances. As in, they shouldn't spend their advance before the money is in their hands. I'd recommend reading the whole post, but here's a part of it:

From the time the offer was received to the time the author was paid the full advance, you can see that 15 months have elapsed, and that was with very prompt editorial revisions on the part of both the editor and the author, and really nice turnarounds on the agent's part for payments.

And, finally, for those sci-fi/fantasy writers out there, how much can you reasonably expect to be paid as an advance? Tobias Buckell ran a survey on How Much Does a Science-Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make. The survey also compares the advances of agented authors versus and unagented authors. Victoria Strauss also wrote a post on how much money writers make. Interesting stuff.