How to Make a Better-Than-Full-Time Income as a Medium Writer

It’s time for us to use strategic planning with our intellectual assets

Like many writers, every morning I sit behind my keyboard (or phone-board) and bang-away a few thousand words. Some of those words are sent to my tribe, some towards my future projects, and some to content.

We writers are in an interesting position when it comes to rewards from our work.

As an employee, you know if you work a certain number of hours you’ll get paid once a week or twice a month. But as a writer, there’s a long delay — sometimes years — between the time we spend doing the writing and they day we get paid for it.

However, writers have a secret weapon.

If we use our tools wisely we write something once, and get paid for it repeatedly, as long as readers are interested in the material. We re-purpose, re-position, and re-allocate our work in multiple different places:

• A chapter becomes an article or blog post
• A great paragraph becomes a social media sound bite
• A big concept becomes a podcast episode
• An over-arching theory becomes a keynote
• A book becomes a training course
• Multiple books become boxed sets
• Print books become digital books
• Digital books become audiobooks

The key is to see the abundance in your work.

We have to spend so many hours of our lives practicing our craft, it’s important to not only develop a work strategy, but also to map the additional income streams available from a single piece of writing.

Earn a lot of money with your writing

Whether you write fiction or non, your individual, finished writing projects are now intellectual assets. As smart writers we know we should’t trade typing hours for dollars.

When we trade hours for dollars we never leave the endless hamster wheel of creation — quickly leading to an earning ceiling.

Nobody likes a ceiling, especially creators who must wait a long time to get paid for their work.

The first step is to take inventory of all your intellectual assets —

This is a virtual cleaning of the digital closet. You probably have hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of content you can re-use, re-purpose, and re-invigorate new life into.

• An article can be an email, or a series of five emails
• That interview you did on CNN can be transcribed and turned into a chapter or course lesson
• The one time you wrote a novel that didn’t sell well — serialize it into a three-month welcome sequence for new email subscribers to buy yourself time as you decide what to do next.

The number one rule of commercial writing is never write anything twice

If you can and and clone your work, you’ll have a dozen assets from a single piece of writing. Think of how big you can expand your work, without typing another word.

How to turn this content inventory into better-than-full-time writing income

So, you’ve got all this content, but maybe you have no idea what to do with it. Well, the model depends on your writing. Fiction writers need to sell more fiction books, merchandise, and inner-circle experiences for their top readers. Non-fiction writers need to expand into courses, mastermind groups, and other products.

Books are inexpensive. Like, dirt-cheap for the work put into them.

If we want to make better-than-full-time writing income from books, we’ve got to sell a whole heap-ton of them — consistently.

Millions of new books are shoe-horned into the system every year. The number of readers available to consume said books is either decreasing, or steady.

Therefore, if we want to do well for ourselves, commercially, we can’t waste a single asset.

We’ve got to think bigger.

Part of this high-income earning is automation (I’ll get to that in a minute). The other part is re-using content — repeatedly — so you’ll have more time to write the next project.

If we spend all our writing time chasing pennies per word and hoping a single article will hit, we end up staying in the perpetual rat-race of grinders. I’m a grinder by nature and it’s an internal fight with myself every day to ensure I use my writing assets in many different ways.

I hope you’ll do the same.

Writers don’t have to starve. That’s a mindset, not a fact. The decision is yours as to whether or not you want to perpetuate the myth.

The final, secret weapon of high-earning, commercial writers

If you want to keep your indoor-living addiction paid for and you want a better life for your family, beyond just squeaking-by — you need email in your life.

For all the whining and old-timey talk about email, it remains the perfect sales vehicle for writers.

Why?

Because, on average, readers prefer reading to other media. Emails are text. Readers like text. They open text. They read text. They buy from text. Not every niche is satisfied well with email, but readers are.

With email, we can take pre-written assets from multiple sources, re-package it, set it up once, in an automated sequence, and have it sell our books, courses, and whatever — automatically. For life (or until the sales go stale).

We’ve got all this hard work we’ve created. It’s time to use it more than once.

If you start building your tribe now, you’ll have a pre-made, rabid audience, ready when you launch your next book (or re-launch your last books).

This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.