How to encourage your spouse to sell their creative work without ticking them off (too much)

This past week, my wife published a 430-plus page novel she had been working on in one way or another for the past twenty-two years.  It's quite the milestone, and we're keenly interested and very excited in how things progress from here.

For a time, though, I had resigned myself to the prospect that her writing would be a great creative outlet for her, and would help her to make peace with the thoughts that haunted her for whatever reason.  As far as anyone else ever seeing her writing (including me) that wasn't an option for a time.  But even keeping her writing as close as she did, she knew that the quality of her writing was better than quite a bit of what she had read, so she had thoughts of trying to make a go at it.

“You'll never know until you try!”

At the same time she was seeing how good her writing was, she was also keenly aware of how much of herself comes out in it.  It used to be that getting a novel published was a long, dues-paying process with many technical, editorial, and financial barriers along the way.  Now that the cost of publishing has gone through the floor, and now that it's economically feasible for distributors of both publish-on-demand works and e-books to all but remove any editorial screening, the major barrier is just building up the courage to unzip ones fly and get the stuff out there. As recently as three years ago, my wife was looking to jump through the hoops to work with an agent — not for economic reasons, but more for assurance that her work was really good enough.  She figured if it got past the scrutiny of an agent and editor, then it was actually good enough.  That, and she was concerned about whether people would take her seriously if the book were self-published.

Why you should try

After nine years of marriage, one would hope that I'm getting better at not needlessly or deliberately irritating my spouse. 🙂  So why is it a good thing for her to get her book out there even though it's outside of her comfort zone?

• Passive income. Royalties are passive income.  Royalties are recurring income.  Invest the time up front once, and receive payments again and again.  It's one of the better kinds of income to have.  Book publishing provides passive income.
• More baskets for our eggs. It's wise to get more than one income stream going.  What's more, depending on the subject matter of the book, this could end up being a substantial basket.
• Disaster insurance. Right now I bring in most of the income for our family.  My wife still works very hard at maintaining the family, of course, but as valuable as that work is, it's not a paid position.  We have some insurance in place, but that's a money source, not an income source.  That will eventually run out.  Developing an income stream that is more or less my wife's alone can take a small amount of the pressure off should something really bad happen to me, because she doesn't need me to do it.  She went through the publishing process herself, and she could do it again.
• It's low-hanging fruit. My wife already can write.  She has been writing for a very long time, and she loves it.  Why not make money at it?

How the other spouse can encourage this and still remain married

Encouraging my wife to do this took years.  I've found this to be the same when I've suggested it to my other creative friends.  It's a process to get creative people to sell their work.  Sometimes this process has risk to it.  Friends might just tune you out after a while, but if the person you're encouraging is your spouse, you still have to live with them.  If I recall correctly, the first time I ever was able to read my wife's book, she basically threw the manuscript pages down in front of me.  It gave me the feeling for a second that I had won the battle but lost the war.  (When my wife thanked me in the acknowledgements she said that I had bullied her into finishing the book.  That was probably part of the bullying.)

All of that was to say that this process has to be done carefully and with real investment. I certainly made mistakes along the way, but I think I did a few things right along the way, too.  Here are some of those things:

1. Start sooner rather than later. The process takes time, and it's far easier to go through the process when you're not depending on this income.  It can be stressful enough without adding overdue bills in the mix.
2. Be patient. Like I mentioned before, I'd been suggesting this to her for years.  Choose appropriate times to talk about it.  I can tell when my wife is getting overloaded with technical details and I stop.  I learned how to do this the hard way at times.
3. Be sure to do it for the right reasons. If it started getting to be more about me than my wife, then it's for the wrong reasons.
4. Keep it light. My wife loves writing.  If it started to get to the point that she didn't enjoy writing, or talking to me about her writing, then that would be a worse failure than publishing something and never selling one copy.  I have to make sure that I don't take away her joy of being creative.
5. Take a genuine interest. I know very little about the Civil War, and given three hours, I probably wouldn't have chosen to read that kind of book.  But I did read it.  I listen to my wife, and ask her questions.  Learning something about what my wife is an expert on is part of my job description, as far as I'm concerned.
6. Be there for emotional encouragement. By nature I'm a problem solver, but sometimes I have to put away my thinking cap and expose my ears so that I can listen to what she's feeling.
7. Invest money. My wife had put in the time for the book.  Along the way, she made use of reference material that cost money.  Printer supplies by the case, the real Microsoft® word processor when the free OpenOffice one would have worked just fine :), etc., all cost money, but it made her finishing the book easier.
8. Investing time. Money is one thing, but for some activities it's cheaper to put time in.  That's an investment, too.
9. Doing some of the non-creative drudgery. Now that my wife's book is out there, she's already told me that promoting the book is something that I'd be better suited to tackle.  And that's fine!  I'm glad I can help.  I certainly can't write or research the way she can.

Afterword:  So what is the book about?

My wife's book is titled An Uncivilized Yankee.  It's set in the American Civil War.  The two main characters are on opposite sides of the war, and they're of opposite gender, and that's about all I'm going to say of the plot. 🙂  Civil War buffs will appreciate the historical accuracy.  Like I mentioned before, this isn't the kind of book I would have chosen, but I had a hard time putting it down while I was reading it.  It's available in paperback or on the Amazon Kindle.