The push to quit a stable day job to write full time is one of the most persistent myths in the publishing industry. For Mike Sacks, a veteran writer and editor, maintaining a traditional salary is the exact mechanism that guarantees his creative freedom.
After writing professionally for more than 30 years, he navigates an earnings range of $100,000 to $200,000. That figure is not built solely on unpredictable freelance checks. It combines his salaried role in the editorial department at Vanity Fair with a diverse portfolio of independent books, articles, and audio comedies.
This two-track system ensures he never has to accept soulless assignments just to pay the mortgage. “No one gets into writing to write pieces they don’t want to write, and I see this quite often with writers,” Mike notes.
Despite publishing with major houses like Viking and writing for prestigious outlets like The New Yorker, Mike completely abandoned the traditional book industry over the last five years. The legacy model simply moves too slowly for comedy. Pitching an agent and surviving the editorial bottleneck can delay a book by four years, assuming it gets published at all.
By taking his catalog entirely independent, he bypassed the gatekeepers and retained total control over production and marketing. “For me, control is everything,” Mike explains. “I write what I want, how I want.” Taking that risk with an absurd, highly unmarketable book directly led to a massive financial breakthrough in the audiobook space.
After independently releasing a project that traditional publishers would have ignored, he secured a major Audible deal featuring Jon Hamm, proving that his audio adaptations consistently bring in two to three times the revenue of the actual books.
But convincing A-list celebrities to perform in an independently produced, absurdist audio comedy requires more than just a funny manuscript. The traditional path of querying agents would have kept the project buried in a slush pile forever.
To bypass the Hollywood machine and get his script directly into the hands of major actors, Mike relied on a very specific, unconventional strategy to make the project undeniably tangible. Unlocking those massive audio deals without a traditional publisher backing him meant entirely rewriting the rules of how a comedy book is pitched and packaged.
For a helpful look at how Mike packaged his absurdist comedy to secure audio rights, read the rest of his interview on How I Make Money Writing.
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