Interview #204: How K.E. Semmel Makes Money Writing

K.E. Semmel has spent the last twenty years working deep in the trenches of the literary world. As a celebrated translator and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he has brought major Danish and Norwegian novels into English, navigating a notoriously precarious landscape of flat fees, sparse royalties, and fiercely competitive arts grants. But after two decades of perfecting other people’s sentences, including waking up at 4:00 AM to draft a novel that ultimately died on submission, he’s finally stepped into the spotlight with his own debut, The Book of Losman.

In this interview, K.E. looks past the prestige of literary translation to discuss the unit economics of the field, from standard advance structures to the necessity of NEA grants. He explains why he refuses to rely on his art to pay the bills, choosing instead to use his employer-sponsored health insurance and steady salary as a financial shield that protects his creative freedom. If you want an honest look at how embracing a traditional career can fuel a sustainable writing life, this one’s for you.

• What you do: I’m a writer/translator and communications professional.

• Years writing professionally: 20 (give or take).

• Earnings range: This varies considerably from year to year. But I would say this runs anywhere from $2,000 to my best year north of $60,000 (when I worked as a full-time translator).

💰 Writing is solitary work, but talking about the finances doesn’t have to be. Our archive is now 200+ honest conversations deep, breaking down book advances, day jobs, and real numbers from writers across every genre and stage of the game. Upgrade your subscription to unlock the library and read how they make it work.

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this interview series. I’ll start by stating a simple fact: I don’t make a whole lot of money as a writer.

To be fully transparent, I would not be able to support my family without maintaining a full-time job, including now. It’s true, I suppose, that I could’ve decided to go all-in years ago and translate/write full-time. Maybe I would’ve caught a break and hit the big time. But it’s precarious living on the financial edge, and I’m not a huge fan of the hustle required.

I’ve never been particularly keen on living paycheck to paycheck, or translation to translation; and despite what may appear to be success, given the number of books I’ve translated, I’ve often found it difficult to believe in myself as a writer. You can’t fake confidence; it takes years and years of practice to become the writer you wish to be. Only in the past three or four years have I begun to figure it out.

There are a number of factors that make a full-time translation or writing career challenging, especially in the United States, but health care is probably the biggest one (at least for me). Having a full-time job with benefits eases the psychological burden and provides me with the financial security to use my imagination to write fiction.

Throughout my career, my creative work has always been a financial supplement to what I earn in my full-time job. When I translated Jussi Adler Olsen’s Dept Q novel Disgrace (UK)/The Absent One (US), I would rise at 4:00 am to work on a Beowulf novel I was writing at the time, then switch at 5:00 am to the translation. At 7:00 am I’d have breakfast with my wife and young son (if they were up), and by 8:00 am I was off to work until 5:00 pm.

It was an exhausting schedule, but I’ve always been ambitious—and I don’t like to let a day go by without writing fiction. Even now I find early-morning, late-evening, and weekend hours to write fiction before and after work. I landed an agent with that Beowulf novel, but alas, despite a lot of high praise by important editors at major publishing houses, no one was willing to take a chance on a misfit book by a debut author.