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How Much Would One Have to Earn to Prosper in the Raunch Bidness?

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So I continue to contemplate the possibility that one could make a living and then some (maybe a lot then-some) by self-publishing “spicey” literature. Note how cleverly we avoid the “p” word here by way of avoiding endless annoying spam.

Not that the site’s several spam-catchers don’t do fine in that department. But one supposes it wouldn’t be good to bring oneself to the attention of, oh, say, the NSA or some other black-helicopter set. 😀

Where were we? Yesh. Raunch.

Pour moi, I wouldn’t need to crank 30 grand a month. Far from it. Thirty grand a year would get me out from under having to teach freshman comp and also bring an end to the editing jobs.

To continue to live in my present crimped lifestyle, I would need to gross (not net) $2,440 a month, on top of Social Security.  This would pay the bills — all the bills — and keep food on the table most of the time.

It would be nice to see that income float in the door all through the rest of my life, not just while I still have enough ginger to churn out two or three unclean novelettes a week.

Our spy in this business tells us that he hires out some of the writing to freelances who will scribble 5,000 words of formulaic smυt for $100. Another source I’ve come across keeps the length to 3,000 words.  Even though I probably write more than 3,000 words every day, most of those words are undirected. Hiring “content providers” would guarantee that you could keep the business going into your dotage, assuming you could hire a trustworthy project manager…which I do believe I can.

So let’s consider what the business would have to gross to cover projected costs, per month:

$3,000: 30 novelettes at $100 apiece = $3000
$500: Contract business manager: + commission on revenues above a certain level
$300: Contract accountant/bookkeeper
$400: Editor/e-book template checker (make contract providers use template)
$500: Overseas artist to create cover art
$300: Marketing agent: + commission on revenues above a certain level
$2,450:  Payout to me
$7,450

While that sounds like a lot, it’s not six figures. It really isn’t much more than I was earning at the Great Desert University, especially when you add in the side gigs I had going on at the time.

At the outset, expenses would be lower than those shown, because I can do my own formatting and I can write the “content” myself.

As the business grows, the manager and the marketer would be motivated to ramp up their efforts by commissions on revenues over, say, $8,000. So, supposing the business made $10,000 in a month and each of these worthies got a 10% commission on the $2,000, they’d each make $200 extra, adding up to $2,400 a  year apiece.  If the business actually did make 30 grand (why do I doubt it so?), then each of them would make $2,200 in that month ($30,000 – 8,000 x 10%).

And that would surely make their efforts worthwhile. Mine, too:  $30,000 – 8,000 – (2,200 x2) =  $17,600 of pure gravy.

Heeeee!

Best not to eat that Thanksgiving dinner before the turkey’s hatched. But isn’t it fun to think about?

House Repair the First

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The Funny Farm needs a long series of small fix-ups, most of which I’ve put off for lack of anyone to do them. Recently, though, I found a handyman through Angie’s List who seems to be an experienced craftsman and is a very nice gentleman, to boot.

Abigail’s recent post on the endless costs of damfool things you can’t do yourself (or know better than to try) spoke to me as all this was coming to fruition.

So he came over on Saturday morning to attend to the most urgent matter: A previous owner replaced the doors on one of the bedroom closets with a set of flimsy, cheaply made louvered things. They were great, but a few years ago they began to fall apart. I’ve limped along with them, though, sorta fixing them but mostly putting off the inevitable. Finally they reached the point where they threatened to fall on my head or Luz’s if they were dusted one more time.

The developer equipped the closets with ordinary flat, no-panel, paintable composite bifold doors that slide back and forth on an overhead track. They’re certainly nothing fancy — the place is just a little tract house, after all — but they’re sturdy and unobtrusive. Why on earth anyone would replace them with cheesy louvers escapes me. But there they were.

So on Saturday our guy went by the Depot and bought a pair of replacement doors. By some sort of miracle, they were still being made in a size that fit the door opening in a 44-year-old shack. Earlier I’d bought a can of Dunn Edwards’s finest in the desired gaudy color, and so he went right to work. In short order, he had the things installed. And I think they look just fine:

P1030572
As usual, click on the image for a better view.

Still have to get a pair of knobs to go with the fake-pewter knobs that hold forth throughout the manse. Amazingly, Amazon has a style very much like the ones I got years ago at the now-defunct Great Indoors. If I don’t find anything at HD or Lowe’s when I’m up in that direction tomorrow, I may just order those.

That room essentially functions as a hallway to the doggy-door and as storage. Off-season clothing goes in the closet, and the armoire that no longer holds a television set is full of bed linens.

So it was kind of annoying to have to spend $333 to upgrade it. Still, with that cheap little area rug I picked up at Pier One, the room now looks better than any of the other rooms in the house!

Surely would love to have area rugs down in the living room and family room. But a) they’re more trouble to clean than they’re worth and b) with dogs, area rugs are powerfully contraindicated. Because…where does a dog invariably go when it feels moved to barf, pee, or dump? To the softest spot it can find!

At that would be, yea invariably, the nicest area rug in the house.

So we have tile. Acres and acres of tile.

Other handyman chores remain for our guy to take on:

  • Replace the kitchen faucet
  • Replace the bathroom faucet (if I get rich in the porn novelette biz, make that “replace the bathroom  countertop, sink, and faucet”)
  • Install new weatherstripping around all the exterior doors
  • Replace the cracked tiles on the kitchen countertop
  • Replace the cracked tiles in the living room
  • Replace the laundry room faucet
  • Repair the cracks around the fireplace hearth and touch up paint
  • Repair popped drywall nails and cracks in three rooms

And I’m sure I can dream up all sorts of other things to keep him amused.

All of these will have to wait until I have more money. But the door was a major annoyance, and it was becoming unsafe.

 

How Did We Miss This Guy?

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Following a  lurid story on Google News, I googled up the name Randy Howard — that would be the drunken country singer who was murdered by a bounty hunter. YouTube videos bring up a few performances whose value seems greater in their testimony to sadness than in their quality.

Turns out there’s — or there was — a real talent named Randy Howard. My goodness! Check these out:

The man died in 1999 at the age of 38, of cancer. The good die young, so they say.

Median U.S. Net Worth: I’m Shocked!

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Shocked, I tell you!

Have you seen Ali’s post at Anything You Want, ruminating about how our net worth compares to the typical American figures?

Holy maquerel! The graph she posts shows that at the height of one’s earning power, age 65-69, the median net worth — including the value of one’s home! — is $194,226. Exclude the dwelling’s value, and you see net holdings (presumably including depreciating assets such as vehicles) of $43,921.

{hyperventilates}

As DC at Young Adult Money remarks, it’s kind of pointless to compare one’s net worth with the median, or for that matter with any other individual’s, because we can’t really know the factors that bear on the figures.

But I think it is useful — and interesting — to consider the relative poverty that faces 21st-century Americans. No, we’re not trolling through the garbage dumps in Bangladesh…but there is simply no way anyone can go into retirement with 43 grand in savings without looking at a future of real poverty. Social Security would help, but it would not keep the wolf far from the door of a person with so little net savings.

My father, who was a Merchant Marine deck officer, figured he could retire when he had accumulated $100,000. That blessed day came in 1962. Actually, by then he had enough to buy a home and a car in cash and still have a hundred grand left, plus enough to send me to college (in those days four years at a state university cost about $4,000). Today a hundred thousand 1962 dollars would be worth about $783,440.

And I’ll tell you somethin’: my father spent the last years of his life in poverty.

He didn’t bargain on the rampant inflation of the 1970s. By 1975, the $100,000 in his bank had the buying power of 56,134 1962 dollars.

Interestingly, that still is more than the median savings of a 21st-century American on the cusp of retirement.

As of December 2014, my savings amount to less than the 2014 equivalent of my father’s retirement savings, but  with the value of the paid-off house added in, the net worth comes to a heckuva lot more than his ever did.

But. All it would take is one period of crazy inflation — and don’t fool yourself; it can and will happen again — to put me in the poorhouse.

That Cat Has GOT to Go…

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This morning Other Daughter’s goddamn cat came over the wall and attacked DUCK. The dogs and I chased it off but DUCK is so terrorized she won’t come back to her nest. So presumably the eggs will die.

God DAMN that fucking cat. It came over the east wall where the vines are kind of thin. I’d hoped they’d be enough to stop the animal from jumping up there (some of them have grown over earlier layers of carpet tacks). But that was wrong.

I set the dogs loose on the damn thing.

Cassie of course will go after anything you sic her on. She shot off like a rocket. Ruby also went after the cat in the direction I was pointing — it went to ground under the Texas sage and cassia on the east end of the pool. But she was easily distracted and tried to chase DUCK, too. DUCK was  terrorized.

Interestingly, though, Ruby stood down when I told her NO, and despite all the hubbub, she even came right to call.

Eventually DUCK came back and landed on the cool decking, quacking piteously.

I went out to the sidewalk and began zip-tying and taping more carpet tack strips up, to fill in the areas and the slump-block support column caps that weren’t covered. That whole side of the yard was a bit neglected in the de-cattification scheme.

Eventually Sally came over to ask what on earth I was doing. When I told her what was up — cat, duck, and all that — she agreed that she ALSO hates Other Daughter’s damned cat, which jumps over the wall into her yard and poops in the GRAVEL landscaping.

She came over to see DUCK, who was still standing miserably on the cool deck. While we were ogling her, she flew off.

I figured she wouldn’t come back. They say if a duck is frightened off a nest, it’ll abandon the nest.

Here we thought that STUPID woman had decided to keep the cat in hand because she imagined a cat she found dead in the alley had been killed by coyotes.

But no. I guess she can’t maintain a train of thought in her batty little brain long enough to stick with any plan very long. Other Daughter is on disability for her mental illness. Her husband, now estranged (again, probably temporarily again) is also on disability — he’s schizophrenic. Did you realize that a parasitic disease carried by cats is believed to be a cause of schizophrenia?

It’s far from the only disease the little darlings carry.

Did you realize cats can carry MRSA?

Did you realize cats kill more than a billion birds every year in the US?

Did you realize Trap-Neuter-Release programs not only do not work, they harm cats as well as humans?

* * * 2 hours later * * *

DUCK is back on the nest, amazingly enough. I covered her eggs with debris, the way she does when she leaves to forage — you’re not supposed to mess with them, but apparently that didn’t disturb her enough to aggravate her fear any further.

Game and Fish says a nesting duck won’t come back if she’s scared off the nest, but there she is out there. That is ONE determined Duck.

My friends out in the sticks have a cat trap that they’ve used to deal with their cat problem. I’m going to pick it up in tomorrow.

They discovered that if you catch the cat in a trap and then soak it liberally with water from the hose, the cat will take off and never come back. At least, not to your backyard. This cat and the neighbor’s other collected stray cats continue to use my friend’s front yard and front porch as their toilet.

The other option is to get a motion-activated sprinkler. Trouble is, I’m not sure the cat came in over the east wall. That was how she got out, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t come in over the west wall. Those sprinklers are expensive, besides the fact that they tie up a hose bib. I can’t afford even one, much less enough to cover four long fence lines.

Damn it. I thought those carpet tacks were working.

Sally says she’ll shoot the cat with her BB gun the next time she sees it in her yard. Sally, despite being quite an old gal, is still a pretty good shot.

I can’t find the air rifle. Think SDXB has it. I may borrow it so I can zing the little monster. Problem is, I can hit a stationary target but have never tried to shoot at anything in motion. And it’s been a mighty long time since I’ve even shot at a target.

w00t! A Whole Day Pulled Out of the Hat!

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I came unstuck in time during the night and woke up convinced it was Saturday morning. Workman supposed to show up at 9:30. Pigpen house therefore had to be picked up. Pool tending to do. Duck accommodations to be made. Dogs and human to be fed. Clothes to be washed…ugh. More potentially productive work hours lost to trivial pursuits.

Stumbled out to get the paper and found LO! It’s Friday!

WaHOO! This means I can use at least part of today to work on the Boob Book, something I’ve had to put off repeatedly in favor of constant nagging other tasks. The only thing that absolutely positively HAS to be done is to pick up a container of dishwasher water softener stuff. And maybe some food would be useful. Otherwise, here’s a WHOLE DAY to get something constructive done.

After yesterday’s full-bore Day from Hell, I was too whipped to spend the evening on anything that requires full intellectual engagement, much less on writing about the intricacies of the mammography controversy. So spent a couple of hours pouring Fire-Rider serials into one of the templates to create e-books out of them. Got two of them mostly done last night, sitting in front of NetFlix. I still have to write intros and enter some links to a site that has yet to exist, but because the artist is still working on the (18!!) covers, there’s time for that. The scutwork got done, anyway.

I think I’ll create the Fire-Rider website on WordPress.com, probably using the very template we’re enjoying for Funny about Money. Or something very like it. The banner image is a little deeper than I’d like. But the template does have three columns, no longer easy to find in the Google-enforced mobile environment. Gary’s FR image is something to behold! It’s so arresting I’m afraid readers may not scroll down to the content but will just be transfixed by the artwork.

At any rate, I’d like to get that site up and have it in “private” mode until such time as the first installment hits Amazon.

And I need Twitter, FireFox, and Pinterest sites for the thing. That’s going to take some figuring out, since I’m not very fond of social media. However, a lovely young man recently surfaced at SBA: his new business is social media marketing! If he doesn’t propose to bankrupt me, I’ll probably hire him to at least start these sites up and set them so that the FR website feeds into them. We need sites for Plain and Simple Press, too, which also could feed Writers Plain and Simple into those things. Then we also have Periscope and Meerkat. Exactly what these would do for a person who spends most of her time in her garret escapes me, but Meerkat also can be made to feed to Twitter and Facebook.

More to do — much more — on those fronts.

Meanwhile, my friend who reported on her friend’s $30,000/month porn-writing income is every bit as interested as I am in that as a money-making strategy. She is a much better writer than I am, especially when it comes to fiction. We’ve been looking into the whole thing and…well. To say one is sitting on a gold mine is to understate…

So I hope to get together with her to consult and plot. She’s interested in hooking (heh) into the first stage of my business plan — which actually is a strategic plan. In the first phase, more than one person could certainly collaborate in studying the market and learning how to exploit it.

The only question I have about this scheme is how I would keep the existence of the proposed business enterprise away from my son (who, don’t worry, refuses to read Funny about Money). He already suffers from chronic shock brought on by the activities of his aged mom. One hesitates to contemplate his reaction if he learned his mother was making her way through the world as a porn queen.

And if this works the way quite a few folks claim it does, after I croak over he’ll find a stupefying amount of money in the corporate account…holy mackerel. What on earth will he think when the accountant explains where it all came from?

😆 😆 😆

Moving on…

In search of a lampshade for the living room, something a little better quality than a Target Special, I visited the Lamps Plus website. Lamps Plus was my last choice, partly because they closed their mid-town brick-and-boards stores, forcing people who live in North Central to drive way to Hell & gone to the far east or to the far west valley, and partly because they have a pricey reputation.

But lo! Lamps Plus is underpricing Amazon! And they have free shipping, no $35 minimum purchase bullshit entailed. I found the same shades, same brand, same sizes, for a whole lot less than what was on offer at Amazon.

So after the current budget fiasco settles down, I’ll probably order a new living-room lampshade from them.

And speaking of moving on, it’s time to go to work!