Here’s some ridiculous tiny math about earning a living while writing with Medium

Because to cope with stress I like numbers? Numbers are concrete.

Why I am panicking

It’s actually reached reality that I will 92% need to complete an extra of my PhD (e.g., 5 years instead of 4 years). It’s common for a lot of students sans pandemic, but in my case, there’s a pandemic, a supervisory medical leave, my other supervisor quitting altogether and 36 hours where I thought I was re-enacting the toilet flooding scene from Parasite.

I doubt the flood-scare really added that much time to my actual degree but anxiety distorts time.

What I’m panicking about: how to fund my extra year given that my scholarship runs out at the end of this year and the department seems to believe that students just have to bootstrap their own way out of a global pandemic.

How I’m about to cope: Doing math.

What I spend

I earn $21k a year as a student. (Note: untaxed because this is a scholarship).

I pay $9k a year in tuition, so let’s subtract that from the usual expenses.

That means, I actually spend $12k a year on normal people living shenanigans. That’s $1000 per month.

I take on odd casual gigs in the name of art and hobby. I monetize my hobbies because the scholarship limits the number of hours we’re actually allowed to work, even though $1000 per month barely covers rent. But that’s another tangent.

My average Medium stats

I’ve written 642 articles thus far.

I have earned $309.60 in total across my entire Medium, not including the $500 bonus.

I earn an average of $0.48 per article.

The math-ing

If I wanted to earn $1000 a month, I would need to write 2073 articles a month.

I would need to write 69 articles per day.

Or, if we start out by setting realistic goals of writing 2–3 articles a day:

2 articles per day

2 x 28 (tiniest month) = 56 articles a month

$1000 / 56 = $17.86 per article

I would need to earn $17.86 per article

3 articles a day

3 x 28 (tiniest month) = 84 articles a month

$1000 / 84 = $11.90 per article

I would need to earn $11.90 per article

Important limitations to consider

• $1000 is a small amount to live on; some places in the world have rent prices twice this.
• I live like a hermit and all my hobbies generate income. I shouldn’t need to and would never want to pressure anyone else into this as a way of living, but I always note that I had to.
• About 60–70% of what I write are poems or even tinier, micropoems that are less than a minute read, explaining the average price. That being said, a lot of these poems just flow out of me and take less prepwork than some of the well-researched pieces in longform.
• Despite the conclusion that I have a looooong way to go before ever making Medium a viable source of income to cover my rent, it’s actually generating regularly my utilities bill, which is pretty sweet.

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and thank you for joining this erratic and too-math-heavy piece working out the intricacies of making writing more of a core income over the next year. There’s still much work that I need to do, including boosting my self-promoting across platforms (Twitter is familiar but Pinterest? Instagram? Here I come!)

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳