The pressure to monetize every creative pursuit often dictates what gets published in the modern literary landscape. For veteran author Nicholas Montemarano, securing a job as a university faculty member provided the exact infrastructure needed to escape the whims of the market entirely.
Balancing his roles as a novelist, short story writer, memoirist, poet, and college professor, Nicholas has spent approximately 25-30 years writing professionally. Because he treats publishing checks as a bonus rather than survival money, he is comfortable accepting an earnings range that ranges wildly year to year. In fact, a stark financial reality defines his career: he earns as much in a single year of teaching as he has in a quarter century of publishing.
While Nicholas has published in prestigious legacy outlets, he never viewed literary fiction as a viable standalone business model. Early in his career, his agent sold a single short story to Esquire that paid more than the advances for his first two books combined. Despite that sudden influx of cash, he refused to rely on publishing checks to survive. Instead, he treated literary income and fellowship grants from organizations like the NEA strictly as mechanisms to secure periods of deep focus.
As Nicholas notes, “Money or income becomes an important commodity in that it can buy time.” Because his baseline needs are met by his university salary, he possesses ultimate creative leverage. “It’s a gift to be able to write what I want or need to write without having to worry about how much income my writing is bringing in,” he explains.
This financial insulation allows him to pivot away from marketable genres like memoirs and focus entirely on writing poetry, an undeniably terrible economic strategy for anyone relying on royalty statements. But judging a literary career solely by advance checks completely misrepresents how authors actually build wealth. We often read about massive six-figure publishing deals, but Nicholas argues that a book’s upfront advance is merely a fraction of its total economic footprint.
For example, his second short story collection secured a remarkably low advance of around $1,000. On paper, it was a financial failure. Yet, the strategic way he leveraged that specific, low-paying book ultimately generated a massive, compounding financial return that fundamentally secured his livelihood for the next two decades. But unlocking that kind of hidden value requires a very different understanding of how a book functions in the academic marketplace.
If you want to see exactly how Nicholas turned a $1,000 book advance into decades of financial stability, you can read his full breakdown over on How I Make Money Writing.
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