Author reflections
Some of the Best Articles I Read This Week (#10)
Brilliant articles from my recent Medium reading
I curate a list of Medium articles every week, aiming to help great writers get more exposure, and to help people like you find some hidden gems. Here is last week’s list.
I know many of us here look at Medium as an income stream or side-hustle (at least, we hope to build it into one!). This week I am going to focus on some of the ways to develop the business and earning sides of your writing.
If you want to discover some ways to become an ‘authorpreneur’, read on.
There is some great advice around about how to build income from multiple sources, and I really enjoy the work of Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi. In this this article, she outlines 6 potential income streams:
Niharikaa doesn’t include Medium itself in the list, or similar sites like Vocal and Simily. I shared my thoughts on Simily in a recent post, and at around the same time, Abena Talks published this excellent perspective. If she can make money on Simily by sharing fiction, perhaps you can too?
A closely-related strategy is to build up web-novels on sides like Royal Road. They have the advantage that if you hook in readers with the first three or four chapters, they will probably keep reading! This piece by E. Ardincaple explains why web-novels are so huge in some part of the world, and are on the brink of exploding elsewhere:
Check out one of my own Medium-based web-novels here!
And in some ways, this is a similar strategy to the approach of my new publication Choose Your Own Adventure — Collaboration. The publication is only just over a week old but you can find 10 stories there so far, as part of 4 main arcs. I shared a couple of them last week, and here is another story start, this time by Jonathon Sawyer:
Another option for writing income from fiction and non-fiction alike is to create ebooks. This piece by Jenny Bravo explains how it can be beneficial to focus on short books, and a high rate of production:
Books can be sold on Gumroad, too, but so can a lot of other things. In this article, Victoria Kurichenko explains how Gumroad can realistically become a source of passive income via things like courses and guides:
A lot of the techniques above depend to some extent on finding an audience. Here, Neera Mahajan explains how to get your first 1000 newsletter subscribers on Substack — a site that can also become a source of income:
Finally, I couldn’t sign off without a shoutout for Scot Butwell, who took the time to carry out this interview with me about how I write fantasy novels. It gets into some of the business side of being a novelist, too!
What have you been reading this week, and do you have any tips for making a living from writing? Feel free to share them in the comments.
