Interview #209: How Tobias Jones Makes Money Writing

Tobias Jones is the bestselling author of The Dark Heart of Italy, Ultra, and Blood on the Altar, which was adapted into a television series for Netflix Italia. Living in Parma, Italy, he serves as a cultural bridge, reporting for the Guardian and the BBC on everything from Italian football ultras to true crime. But despite a 30-year career and a “spectacularly good” agent, Tobias admits that his yearly income can be “extremely random.”

In this interview, Tobias explains why he often earns more money when he isn’t writing books. He discusses the financial reality of living in an intentional community, why he treats film options like “lottery tickets,” and reveals an eclectic portfolio of side hustles that ranges from writing opera program notes to working as a private investigator. If you want to know how to survive a 30-year writing career where the income graph looks like a rollercoaster, this one’s for you.

• What you do: Write books (non-fiction and fiction), write newspaper articles / long-reads, present TV documentaries, teach writing, mentor manuscripts and sometimes people. I also co-create intentional communities.

• Years writing professionally: Ach, 30.

• Earnings range: Anything from €15,000 to €40,000 - it’s extremely random.

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Usually it’s about a third book publishing, a third journalism and a third teaching / mentoring. I haven’t published a book for a couple of years and weirdly I’ve realised I earn better when I’m not working on a book project, and am preparing myself for the financial hit of when I sign the next publishing contract (my agent is spectacularly good, and I don’t mean that I get bad contracts, simply that on an hourly rate, book publishing will rarely compare to frontline newspaper work).

It’s taken me many years, but I’ve finally realised that money is not my currency. I have no problem discussing it, but “money” doesn’t mean, to me, what it might mean to you. And it’s only relative to what is going out. So when talking about income, it’s important to understand how intensely frugal I am as a consequence of this career choice, and what my real currencies are (I’m an investor in time and human bonds etc. - but that’s a whole other conversation).

Back to income: for me the important thing isn’t just the pie-chart of earnings, it’s also the longevity of the contract / commitment that you have from a commissioner (how much that slice of pie bleeds into the following years). I might earn a bit less from book contracts (hourly) than I do from journalism and TV, but the long-term nature of publishing, and the fact that they invest in me and pay me in tranches over two or three years, means that I (and my family) have a clear economic base-line into the future.