I’ve Made More Than $300K From Writing — Here Are 8 Honest Lessons That Weren’t Obvious
This is what I’ve told writers who want to make a living from their art
$300K sounds like a lot of money, and it is. It can buy a blogger like me a lot of green smoothies that still don’t stop his hair going grey.
The truth is, I never started out ever thinking one could make money from writing. All the critics told me the internet was too crowded for another writer. They were probably right, but I didn’t listen, in case they were wrong.
I’ve written about making money a lot as a writer already, but I realized one thing I left out: being a writer also got me a short-term gig in social media working a normal 9–5 job solely based on my blogging. That job alone accounted for $60,000 of the total earnings to date.
Even I had forgotten that writing was what allowed that to happen. It’s easy to read the same old stories over and over about people making money online and assume it was either an e-book or an affiliate link that made it happen. There are many indirect ways people make money online. Here are a few:
- Writing can get you a paid weekly column for a publication
- Writing can get you on the board of a company that pays you
- Writing can get you startup investment opportunities
- Writing can get you a new career you don’t hate
There are many ways to make money through writing and the process has taught me eight brutally honest lessons that will help you if you dream of taking a similar path.
You Need to Discover Your Flow
You’ve heard the same old trashy advice about consistency and writing a lot (even I’ve said it — *hides in shame*). What is often not said is how to be consistent. The answer: you get into a flow.
Flow states enable you to write a lot, and for longer periods of time. If you try to be consistent without flow states, you’ll most likely fall short and your willpower will take over.
Each week, I write more than 10,000 words and this is how I get into flow:
- Start with a strong cup of coffee
- Go to the gym and exercise hard for 30 minutes to release endorphins
- Come home and have a warm shower
- Sit down in my office chair and listen to music that has no vocals (experiment with dance music or movie soundtracks)
- Remove all distractions from your environment: phone and watch, as well as hiding all notifications on your laptop/desktop
- Start writing and don’t worry about the outcome
- Each writing session, raise the bar of your end goal (adding in difficulty adds in discomfort that helps supercharge your flow states)
With flow states, you can be consistent and put in enough hours to smash the 10,000-hour rule made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.
You Won’t Make Money From Your First Post, or Even Your 100th
I’ve given this advice to many writers who have taken the time to contact me over the years. Your first one hundred posts are where you discover who you are, what matters to the audience, and what you want to write about. And the number can be more than one hundred for some writers.
Focusing on making money in the early days sabotages you from the future success you can have as a writer. I always tell people I’m six years in as a writer, and there was very little money for a long time.
If you can be okay with making no money in the beginning, you’ll find the six-figure part of earning a living as a writer easier later on.
You Have to Be Okay With Feeling Naked
My top-performing blog posts, looking back, make me feel naked. There’s a part of me that doesn’t recognize the person who wrote many of those articles that have my name attached to it.
Your best writing makes you want to vomit, and that’s what inspires others.
It’s not easy to be yourself as a writer in a world that wants to change you and mold your thinking to be like the masses. You have to fight every single day to be yourself and say what you think.
The best stories are the ones where you can be vulnerable enough to share what’s really going on and how you really dealt with that massive problem, which us, the audience, are likely to face one day.
It takes everything you’ve got to be authentic, and it’s that authenticity that compounds your self-worth and your bank account.
The more you open up, the more your writing opens up (to bigger audiences).
You Have to Be Okay With Getting Paid
“So to make over $300K as a writer, you’ve got to be okay with it? Of course I’m okay with making money, you fool.” That’s what you might be thinking.
It’s not quite so straightforward. When you earn a living as a writer and charge for products or services, you can feel like a sell-out — like having someone click a link that makes you money is unethical. Then if you make six-figures, you can feel odd talking about it or like you must keep it a secret.
Money is weird when it comes to writing. You can think being paid is the goal and then when you finally do get paid, your thinking can shift. You can become guilty or pass off your success as a fluke. Imposter syndrome can set in and that can be followed by humblebrag syndrome (feeling like an Instagram model that brags about how good their life is).
What’s the solution? Adjust your thinking, slightly. Making money means you’re helping people and giving them the opportunity to do the same. If you make money as a writer and teach other people to do the same, isn’t that a beautiful thing? If a single mother can make money from writing and pay for diapers, is that not the coolest thing in the world?
If an author who was rejected more than thirty-times by twenty-two different publishers finally got to earn six-figures and show the world their gift, isn’t that cool?
Allowing yourself to be paid as a writer is harder than it looks.
You Talk Way Too Much About Yourself
I don’t like making this comment, but it’s true. Readers don’t want to pay you with their attention to have you talk about yourself non-stop.
An audience wants to know your story and how it can help them. What the audience loves most are clear and concise takeaways that are spelled out for them and not hidden in cryptic metaphors that require a key to unlock.
Writing is not about documenting your life in the form of a journal and then expecting to be paid for it while sitting in the front row of your own movie, basking in the applause and expecting an Oscar.
Your writing is not about you. With that said, there are huge benefits for you as you write.
The biggest one is this: writing is therapy.
You Must Be Empathetic
Helpful writing that ends up making money is empathetic.
If I approached you in the supermarket and screamed in your face, “You fat pig, stop buying ice cream! You’re going to have a heart attack and die, you moron.”
Would you listen to that advice, or would you be upset? You’d probably be upset. Not eating sugar and consuming healthy food is a factual statement, but the delivery was harsh and made you feel like crap. You’re unlikely to act on advice that is cruel — and the same applies to writing.
An audience wants to be helped, but they’d prefer you didn’t assume they were stupid and swear at them. It makes sense when you think about it. My top-performing stories are always the ones that are most helpful and treat the audience like a friend, not an enemy.
If you haven’t made money as a writer yet, you may be acting cruelly towards your audience. Respect your audience and they’ll respect you, thus helping you make a living as a writer.
Your Writing Output Is So Much More Than the Word Count
There’s a good chance your brain will lie to you and make the goal of earning money as a writer seem easier than it is. Don’t get me wrong; it’s way harder than you think because you have to write a helluva lot.
Weekly writing is a must, and 1–2 articles a week of 1000 words or more will get you a long way.
The writers who really crush it go far beyond 1000–2000 words and how they do it is deceiving.
You can look at a writer’s output from two angles:
- How many stories they publish. This one is easy to measure.
- How many stories they publish plus the research time.
There are great writers who publish 1–2 stories a week, but what you can’t see is the hours of research they may be doing behind the scenes. You can write ten stories a week or two stories a week full of research, and have the total time to produce both outcomes be the same.
Writing time includes the following:
- Book reading time
- Research time
- Editing time
- Feedback from other writers time
- Picture selection time
Each of these areas can improve your earning capacity as a writer if you allocate more time to each of them. And the time it takes in each area is longer than you might think. Don’t just think about how many stories you publish and the word count.
You Need to Spend More Time Looking at Other Writers
A lot of what I’ve learned about writing came from other writers.
Other writers taught me to spell better, use more colorful language, format differently, speak in a new way, express feelings, add in emotion, widen my vocabulary, and get in touch with new ideas. Your fellow writers teach you just how far you can go and it pays to watch them from afar.
If all you do is read your own work, you can get trapped in a bubble thinking you’re doing everything right and the audience or writing platform is to blame. By looking at other writers, you learn the craft better.
Being a writer means being a continuous learner and consuming heaps of information to then regurgitate what you learned back out through your mind through the words you write. As you ingest and put that information back out into the world, your mind adds value to it in the form of personal stories, experience, and different perspectives.
An idea that enters your mind never fully comes back out in the same way again through the words you write and that’s the magic of writing.
Wait, There Is Still One More Problem…
Even if you understand and practice all of those lessons, you can still fall short and never make a dollar. How is that possible?
Well, when you write heaps and publish your work, there are some days that completely suck. There days where you won’t feel like it, or when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. There are days when making $300K as a writer can seem impossible or a goal that’s not fit for you.
On those days that suck, you will want to give up, and you’ll complain a lot. You’ll doubt yourself and believe that everything I’m saying is BS. These bad days will then lead you to the inevitable rabbit hole of comparing your results to other writers. This happened to me back in 2016.
A friend of mine interviewed Tim Ferriss, and as I listened to the podcast, I thought to myself “That will never be me.”
I compared my results to Mr. Ferriss Wheel and got stuck complaining about how hard it was. I had some success as a writer, but it never felt like enough.
Solution
The way you overcome the problem of comparing yourself to other writers is by not comparing your chapter one to their chapter thirty-six.
You can do everything right as a writer, but if you get stuck in the game of comparing your results to other writers like I did, the chance of failure increases.
Your results are deeply personal. What matters is that you keep writing and maintain a learner’s mindset. If you do that, you too can make ridiculous amounts of money as a writer.
