Three-part series on What Farming is Teaching/Reminding Me about Playwriting and Theater

Over the past month or so, I've had a three-part blog series running on the HowlRound web site: What Farming is Teaching/Reminding Me about Playwriting and Theater.  It sums up a lot of what I've learned from the past two years of farming.

This year, I'm taking a year off from farming--our site was too far from home, so I need to find a field a lot closer (which is a big challenge), and I need to devote some more time to writing and family.  But I will definitely do more farming, somehow, somewhere, in my double-life as a writer/farmer.

Writing by the Numbers, for 2013

Brett Milanowski and Omar Robinson in my play, Fire on Earth, produced by Fresh Ink in Feb. 2013

I like data. Measuring actions and results allows me to attempt to influence or change them. For a few years, I've been tracking how much time I spend writing, how much money I make from writing, how much I spend on my writing, and how many people I reach with my work.

I was thrilled when Todd London's book, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, came out a few years ago, because it attempted to take a quantifiable look at the state of playwriting in America.  He actually laid out an average income range for playwrights ($25K-$39K, though most of that came from non-theatre work), and that's from playwrights surveyed, who are far along enough in their careers to be surveyed by Todd London.

It's hard for young playwrights to know what to expect from our field, because there is (aside from Outrageous Fortune) so little actual data out there.  I really don't know how much most of my fellow playwrights make from their work or how large of an audience they're reaching.  It's useful, in a way, for writers to know this, to establish benchmarks or aspirations.  Not that I want playwrights obsessing about whether so-and-so is making a lot more money than they are, but knowledge is power.  Maybe the goals you've set for yourself are wildly unrealistic.  Or maybe they're too low.  It might help to know more about the actual reality of the world in which you're operating. 

I'll share my numbers here, in as many categories as I track.  I hope some will find it useful. There is always some reticence about sharing income numbers, either for fear of appearing to be bragging, or for fear of revealing oneself to be woefully inadequate.  My net income is so low, that bragging doesn't seem viable.  And as to my inadequacy, I doubt anyone cares.

I do hope a few other writers might be inspired to share their numbers, to help shed a little more of the light on the state of the American (or World) playwright. At the very least, it might help beginning playwrights have some sense of what they're getting into.

My numbers:


Gross Income:  $7,767.44

from:
published plays:  $1004.85
production royalties:  $475
commissions:  $5,500  (one written and produced fully in 2013, one just started, another is in development)
teaching: $500
ebooks of my novels:  $277.59
misc: $10



Expenses:  $5,758.36
web hosting $99.87
proofing of novel for ebook and paperback:  $250
Office expense:  $1,338  (includes postage and new laptop)
books:  $381.30  (mostly for research)
conference fees:  $655.53   (Mostly Grub Street's Muse & Marketplace and SCWBI)
entrance fees/donations:  $176.99
memberships (DG, Grub, Rhombus, SCWBI):  $555
expenses for readings (snacks, etc.): $40.92
software:  $94.90
theatre events (tickets): $766.41
publicity (photo shoot): $150
office supplies:  $418.89
transportation:  $20
phone:  $789.61 (smartphone + data + line costs)



Net Income:  $2,029.08

For 2012:  Gross Income:  $3,844  Expenses:  $2,808  net:  $1063
For 2011:  Gross Income:   $2,638   Expenses:  $4,665  net:  $-2027

In my case, I'm clearly very, very fortunate to have a spouse with who has a good job with salary and benefits that lets me spend a lot of time writing and farming. We've made a lot of choices to enable us to survive on pretty much one income.


Audience.
Number of Performances:  99  (my goal was 100)  (This includes published plays.)
Estimated audience:  6,000   (tough to figure for published plays, but I tend to estimate low, say 40 people/performance)  (This was my goal #.)
Books (mostly ebooks) sold:  133   (many fewer than I'd hoped)


Submissions:
queries for plays:  14
play scripts submitted:  114
queries for books:  42
book manuscripts submitted:  9


Hours spent on writing stuff:  996 hours
actual writing and research:  394 hours (my goal was 400)
rehearsals and writing meetings:  308 hours  (includes a tiny bit of teaching)
marketing and admin:  294

This balance seems about right.  I spend almost a third of my time looking for gigs and for audiences for my work.  I had a bunch of productions this year, so that boosted my rehearsal time a lot.

This year, I spent about 920 hours farming.  Neither writing nor farming includes commuting time.  Both under-report hours spent on e-mails and admin stuff.

Here's how my time worked in:
2012:  896 hours.  (386 writing/278 rehearsing and meeting/231 marketing)    I spent about 734 hours on farming in 2012.

2011: 818 hours.  (I didn't break out rehearsals from desk writing time in 2011).

Somehow, despite adding farming to the mix in 2012, and then doubling the land I was farming in 2013, I still managed to keep increasing my writing time (I might be a little nuts).  I'm not farming in 2014, so I'm curious to see whether my writing time will jump up ( I want it to), or if it'll just be absorbed into daily life activities.  Not all of the farming time will become writing time, I'm certain of that (working from home makes that almost impossible.)



Please let me know if you keep track of numbers like this and if you post about it anywhere, let me know, and I'll post a link below:

What I'm Learningn About Theatre and Playwriting from Farming (part 2)

The folks at HowlRound have just published part 2 of a 3-part blog series I've written on what my last two years farming (at Pen and Pepper) farm have been teaching me about my life in theater.

You can read the opening below, and then click through to read the rest on HowlRound.

Climate and soil matters. If you think global warming is a hoax, talk to a vegetable farmer pulling his hair out after yet another fucking record heat wave. Or when the entire basil crop dies off from basil downy mildew, a fungal problem that’s migrated up to New England from Florida over the past few years, thanks to conditions provided by global warming. All farmers pay attention to the weather, the smart farmers try to understand the climate, too.

In theater, it’s easy to mistake weather for climate. If I have a string of productions, I suddenly think the world has turned around and good things are happening all over. Or the converse—I don’t have a production for a few years, and I’m certain no one goes to plays anymore and no one wants to produce new work anymore and theater has become an artistic wasteland. Knowing the difference between weather and climate matters.

read the rest on HowlRound.

Moving (a life in boxes) is now a paperback (and how it got that way)

Look what came in this mail this week!

Yep, paperback copies of my novel, Moving (a life in boxes).  So the printed version now exists!  And the physical quality of the books is very high.  I couldn't be more pleased with how they've turned out.

If you had wanted to read it, but weren't into e-readers, I hope you'll check it out. 
(And please let me know about what you think about both the story and the physical book--I'm curious to see if the quality continues to be consistent.)

Here's a quick summary of the novel:

Moving (a life in boxes)
Jed and Lila are compulsive movers.  For them, moving boxes, packing tape, and open houses are the ultimate aphrodisiacs.  They meet on a moving day, Jed proposes on a moving day, and they end up moving 18 times in 18 years.  Moving defines their lives, their identities.  They move for fun, to recover from tragedy, and for new opportunities—until Lila decides she wants them to put down roots, in Boston.

Moving tells the story of a marriage challenged by wanderlust, obsession, infertility and adoption, and race.

 So how did I do it, what did it cost?

I'd put off making Moving a paperback because I thought that I'd have to cough up a bunch of cash to preorder copies, or else that the Print-on-Demand (POD) quality would be poor. And I knew that it would take some time to change the formatting from the ebook file to something that was more properly typeset for print.  And right after I released the ebook, I had zero free time, because I was neck deep in farming.

But with the arrival of winter and a gap in writing projects and commissions, I had some time on my hands.  And ebook sales slowed to a trickle.  A lot of my friends and family don't have e-readers and haven't been able to read the book.  And though I'd like the entire world to salivate at the prospect of reading my novels, I accept that most self-published novels are going to be read by friends and family and die-hard fans of my other work.  But for me to reach more of this small cloud of potential readers, I needed a paper version of the book.

The good news for me was that I already had a great cover for the ebook that would work for print (thanks Keary Taylor!) and I'd already paid to have it proofread (thanks Diane Sepanski!).

I had a friend who'd just used Createspace from Amazon to self-publish one of his novels, so I asked him, and he said it was easy.  And cheap.  Which, if you know you're not going to sell 10,000 copies, is a good thing.

It turned out that Createspace was indeed easy to use (though not quite as simple as publishing an ebook). They already had templates in place for the size of book that I wanted to print, so I could load my manuscript text from the ebook directly into the template.  I found a few online sites that gave me some tips--the most valuable was from Anne Charnock  which laid it out for me step-by-step, and gave me warnings about potential problems. 

The entire process took me about 14 hours (I track such things), and a lot of that time was spent trying to get the cover just right (they provide a template for that, too) and on proofing the layout.  Every time you submit the book to receive final electronic proofs, there's a 24-hour turnaround, and I found mistakes a couple times, so that dragged the process out over quite a few days, but I really wanted to get it right.

I spent $20 to get two expedited paper proofs (see the image above), which turned out to be of excellent quality.  POD and digital printing has come a long way.  My first novel, Tornado Siren, wasn't POD, but the publisher used a digital printing process (they'd run small batches of 250 copies or so), and the quality was acceptable, but the POD copies I have from Createspace are even better (higher quality paper and cover and image/text quality).

That $20 I spent for proofs was all that it cost me to do this.  Period.  (Because I'd already paid for the cover and proofing for the ebook.)  I've set the price at $10, which seems not bad for a paperback (the minimum I was allowed to charge was $9.13).  At that price, I get $2.35/book sold through Amazon.  (Which means it'll be a while until I make back the money I paid for cover and proofing, but I might get there.)  It also sells through the CreateSpace store (but who ever goes there?) where I'd make $4.35/book, and other venues, where I'd make about $0.35 per book.  (Think Amazon wants me to sell through them?)  I can buy copies for myself for about $3.65/book, plus shipping. 

When my first novel, Tornado Siren, was traditionally published, through a small press, the cover price was $14.95.  I could buy copies for myself for $7.48, plus shipping.  (I bought more than 200, which I sold and gave away to friends and family.)  For books sold through Amazon or other sources, I generally made about 67 cents per book.  Yep, 67 cents (I was getting 10% royalties off net sales price, not cover price, and wholesalers get a serious discount off the cover price).

When the book finally went out of print, I was able to buy copies of Tornado Siren for $3 (I still have a big pile of them), but hundreds of them were pulped.  (Here's a nice post about the policy from EditorialAss).  Every year, the publishing destroys/recycles MILLIONS of unsold books, because of the bizarre way that the publishing business works.  With the quality and ease of POD books, I've got to wonder if the practice of over-printing might someday be greatly curtailed, at least for books that aren't likely to become bestsellers.  With POD, there's really no need to warehouse backlist copies of a book--a bookstore can just order a new copy to replace one that's just been sold, and it can be printed and delivered.

With the economics of self-publishing through Createspace or or other services, you can see why we're seeing a huge surge in self-published books, and why the mid-list is basically collapsing into self-published books.  Publishers don't want to take risks on printing lots of books that don't sell, and authors who are only going to sell hundreds of books, to select outlets (friends, family, hard-core fans) can do a lot better financially by going it alone, rather than using a small press or getting a weak deal from a larger press.  Publishers continue to offer huge benefits when it comes to exposure and distribution, without a doubt.  It is very hard to sell books, and it is very, very hard to sell books without a publicist and marketing team.  And book stores don't want to deal with individual authors.  And readers are overwhelmed with choice and wary of crappily-written self-published books.  But if you've got a book that's going to sell less than 1,000 copies, it might make sense to do it yourself.

I'll report back on how the book does, in terms of reaching readers.  I imagine the numbers will be very small, but I also know that more people will read it now that it's not solely available as an ebook.  And it feels awfully good to be able to hold a copy of the book in my hand.

What I'm Learing About Theater and Playwriting from Farming (part 1)

The folks at HowlRound have just published part 1 of a 3-part blog series I've written on what my last two years farming (at Pen and Pepper) farm have been teaching me about my life in theater.

You can read the opening below, and then click through to read the rest on HowlRound.

 What Farming is Teaching/Reminding Me about Playwriting and Theater:

My first play was produced in 1987, by a tiny theater in Upstate New York, along with work by Elaine May and Tennessee Williams.  I’ve been deeply involved in theater ever since.  But being buried over my ears in theater can make me lose perspective.

Spending the past two years running a tiny organic vegetable farm has helped me take a fresh look at my work in theater. As part of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project,  I grew vegetables on a quarter of an acre my first year, then half an acre the second year, with the help of a lot of infrastructure and guidance. But I put in the labor and what I grew and where I sold the produce was up to me. This year I sold 6,000 pounds of vegetables, with help on the weekends from my wife and teenage children.

I got to spend a lot of time outdoors, working with my hands, doing something completely engaging and really, really, really hard. And it seemed to have nothing to do with my life in theater.

But I was wrong.  Because theater life, as much as it sometimes feels like an isolated lost world of dinosaurs and unicorns, is life, too. Taking a step, not back, but to the side, helped me see a few things about my old (and current) world.

Theatre is not the only profession where you can work insanely hard and make almost no money.  

Read the rest on HowlRound

y first play was produced in 1987, by a tiny theater in Upstate New York, along with work by Elaine May and Tennessee Williams. I’ve been deeply involved in theater ever since. But being buried over my ears in theater can make me lose perspective.
Spending the past two years running a tiny organic vegetable farm has helped me take a fresh look at my work in theater. As part of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, I grew vegetables on a quarter of an acre my first year, then half an acre the second year, with the help of a lot of infrastructure and guidance. But I put in the labor and what I grew and where I sold the produce was up to me. This year I sold 6,000 pounds of vegetables, with help on the weekends from my wife and teenage children.
- See more at: http://howlround.com/what-farming-is-teachingreminding-me-about-playwriting-and-theater%E2%80%94part-1#sthash.AfCJKRFI.dpuf

What Farming is Teaching/Reminding Me about Playwriting and Theater—Part 1

Patrick Gabridge

December 14, 2013

In a three-part series, playwright Patrick Gabridge writes on how spending two seasons farming revealed a lot more than just how to grow vegetables.
My first play was produced in 1987, by a tiny theater in Upstate New York, along with work by Elaine May and Tennessee Williams. I’ve been deeply involved in theater ever since. But being buried over my ears in theater can make me lose perspective.
Spending the past two years running a tiny organic vegetable farm has helped me take a fresh look at my work in theater. As part of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, I grew vegetables on a quarter of an acre my first year, then half an acre the second year, with the help of a lot of infrastructure and guidance. But I put in the labor and what I grew and where I sold the produce was up to me. This year I sold 6,000 pounds of vegetables, with help on the weekends from my wife and teenage children.
I got to spend a lot of time outdoors, working with my hands, doing something completely engaging and really, really, really hard. And it seemed to have nothing to do with my life in theater.
But I was wrong. Because theater life, as much as it sometimes feels like an isolated lost world of dinosaurs and unicorns, is life, too. Taking a step, not back, but to the side, helped me see a few things about my old (and current) world.

- See more at: http://howlround.com/what-farming-is-teachingreminding-me-about-playwriting-and-theater%E2%80%94part-1#sthash.AfCJKRFI.dpuf

What Farming is Teaching/Reminding Me about Playwriting and Theater—Part 1

Patrick Gabridge

December 14, 2013

In a three-part series, playwright Patrick Gabridge writes on how spending two seasons farming revealed a lot more than just how to grow vegetables.
My first play was produced in 1987, by a tiny theater in Upstate New York, along with work by Elaine May and Tennessee Williams. I’ve been deeply involved in theater ever since. But being buried over my ears in theater can make me lose perspective.
Spending the past two years running a tiny organic vegetable farm has helped me take a fresh look at my work in theater. As part of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, I grew vegetables on a quarter of an acre my first year, then half an acre the second year, with the help of a lot of infrastructure and guidance. But I put in the labor and what I grew and where I sold the produce was up to me. This year I sold 6,000 pounds of vegetables, with help on the weekends from my wife and teenage children.
I got to spend a lot of time outdoors, working with my hands, doing something completely engaging and really, really, really hard. And it seemed to have nothing to do with my life in theater.
But I was wrong. Because theater life, as much as it sometimes feels like an isolated lost world of dinosaurs and unicorns, is life, too. Taking a step, not back, but to the side, helped me see a few things about my old (and current) world.

- See more at: http://howlround.com/what-farming-is-teachingreminding-me-about-playwriting-and-theater%E2%80%94part-1#sthash.AfCJKRFI.dpuf

The One Minute Play Festival returns to Boston

The One Minute Play Festival will be returning to Boston, January 4-6, at Boston Playwrights Theatre (949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston), for its third year.  I will have two of these micro plays in this year's festival--House Rules, directed by Jeff Mosser (who just did a fabulous job directing my full-length historical play with music, None but the Best, for In Good Company), and Diamonds Are Forever, directed by Vicki Shairer (who co-directed the very fun Project Project piece, How May I Connect You?).

The One Minute Play Festival is a super fun blur of plays--more than 100 in one night--that gives a quick barometric reading of the creative mental state of Boston's theatre scene.  It's the kind of evening that requires that you gulp it down now and then reflect back later on the moments and sparks that made you laugh or that hit you hardest or surprised you.

Writing for this festival requires me to write quickly and openly. For me, the trick to writing a good one minute play is getting the hell out of the way. I'll set aside a few hours and write at least four of them, as fast as I can.  There's no point in dithering about them, though there's plenty of work to be done in honing them once they're down on paper.

Tickets are $20 and are available at www.bostonplaywrights.org.

Here's the list of playwrights into whose minds you will get a brief flash:

Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, Jack Neary, Elisabeth Burdick, Steven Bogart, Bill Doncaster, Stephen Faria, Peter Floyd, Patrick Gabridge, Deirdre Girard, Rosanna Alfaro, Kirsten Greenidge (fellow Rhombus member), Israel Horovitz, Colleen Hughes, Dan Hunter, Emily Kaye Lazzaro, Christopher Lockheardt, K. Alexa Mavromatis (fellow Rhombus member), Walt McGough (fellow Rhombus member), James McLindon, Rick Park, John Shea, Matt Mayerchak, Donna Sorbello, Mwalim *7 (Prof MJ Peters), Heather Houston, Thom Dunn, Michael Bradford, Eleanor Burgess, David Valdes Greenwood, Tyler Monroe, Nina Louise Morrison, Lindsay Soson, Noah Tobin, Lila Rose Kaplan, Ginger Lazarus (fellow Rhombus member), Joyce Van Dyke, Obehi Janice, Clifford Odle, Cliff Blake, Robbi D'Allessandro, Mary Conroy, Shari D. Frost, Steve Barkhimer, Karmo Sanders, Payne Ratner, Terrence Kidd, Cassie M Seinuk, Ceelia Raker, James Ferguson, Jess Foster, John Greiner-Ferris, Fiona Kyle, Laura Neubauer, Max Mondi, Mike Meadors, & MJ Halberstadt.


I hope to see you there!