No one would bother being a writer or illustrator if she took a cold look at her potential for earning money. According to the Author’s Guild report from October 2015 called “Wages of Writing,” and I quote, “Most authors can’t survive on writing alone.”

As Chris notes: the royalties from the sale of a single book bring in $1.70. "The price of a small coffee, he adds.

From “Wages of Writing:” Full-time authors with 15+ years of experience saw their incomes decline, on average, from $25,000 in 2009 to $17,000 in 2015. Part-time authors’ incomes dropped from $7,250 to $4,500 in the same period.

Chris started working as an illustrator in 1986, when we lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There was no bright line between not earning and earning—it was a blurry process and continues to be a process with no sure outcome.

For 20 hours a week he worked as a driver and a “runner” for a lawyer; for 20 hours a week he worked on illustration, often without any compensation until he got a few jobs, including one illustrating articles for the Michigan Bar Journal.

The spread in the picture tracks his accounting journey over more than a decade in the 2000s. (Sadly, he lost his first accounts book from our early days in New York.)

“I wanted to make visible and concrete that iffy feeling of money coming in,” he says. “If you think about it theoretically, you will decide that no one can survive as an artist or as a writer. You would never begin if you thought about it that way.”

He filled in the squares and hoped to get another contract so he could fill in a few more squares. (It reminds me of the Lego towers our son used to make, brick by brick.)

“It helps to be conscious of what you have gotten in the past and to see the ups and downs." he says. "I've made graphs from the very beginning even when I wasn't making money. This gives me awareness—a real, handleable awareness. I might be thinking I’m doing really well and I’m not, or the other way around.”

Since I earned my first dollars writing in 1997, I haven’t kept track like this, but I wish I had. Still, I can remember how thrilled I was to earn my first $30 for writing, and when I passed the $2,000 mark in one year from writing alone, then the $5,000 mark, and so on. Each benchmark is one I never, ever thought I would reach.

When I was a Montessori teacher, I began the school year with five “great lessons,” a traditional Montessori practice. These include “the history of writing” and “the story of numbers.” The earliest marks in the history of writing were likely accounting marks used to keep track of goods at ancient warehouses. Pre-numerical counting systems pre-dated even written language.

Income and writing, writing and income. You can’t easily have one without the other.

“Make it visual,” Chris advises.

Seeing is believing, in his world view. He regrets the fact that money transfers have made record keeping by hand more cumbersome.

“Coloring in the squares calms me down,” he says.