Literary fiction is rarely a lucrative standalone business, especially when publishing outside the Big Five ecosystem. For Dr. Karen Lee Boren, the author of novels, story collections, and travel essays, her primary financial engine is not her royalty statements. It is her salary as a full professor of English and creative writing at Rhode Island College.
Because her academic position covers her baseline living expenses and provides critical health insurance, she doesn’t actually rely on her writing income to survive. In fact, she treats her writing purely as a small business, immediately reinvesting whatever modest income she generates directly back into the overhead costs of being an author, funding everything from promotional materials and website hosting to research travel and conference fees.
This financial structure completely removes the commercial pressure from her art. Having a steady, unrelated income grants her the unique freedom to take massive creative risks, allowing her to write potentially unpopular or uncommercial work simply because she is compelled to tell the story.
However, she notes that the tradeoff for this creative autonomy is a severely compressed writing schedule. She is forced to write in erratic blocks of time, mostly cramming her novel drafting into the summer months. She navigates the frustrating start-and-stop rhythm of the academic year by relying on strict thirty-minute writing sprints and treating publisher deadlines as absolute, immovable obligations.
While she has published multiple books with respected independent publishers like Tin House and Flexible Press, she views the financial return of small press publishing through a highly pragmatic, indirect lens. Because her university requires publication as part of her job description, she considers those small press books as the direct catalyst for her academic promotions—moving her from assistant, to associate, to full professor.
To Karen, the independent presses didn’t just pay her a modest advance; they functionally secured her long-term tenure and salary increases, proving that in the literary world, the real money is often found in the institutional leverage a book provides, rather than its retail sales.
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