What it Actually Takes to Make $18,000 in 31 Days as a Writer

A deep, honest look at my VERY not-passive-income life.

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you want to earn an income as a writer. Maybe a full-time income. Do you dream about replacing your day job? Or maybe you love your day job and you’d just like to make your hobby into a side hustle.

Either way — you want to be a working writer. I thought it might be useful to explore what that really looks like.

Let’s define ‘working writer’ first.

I don’t get precious about who gets to call themselves a writer. In fact, I think that claiming the title is important. A writer is anyone who writes.

A working writer is a writer for whom writing is their job.

Working writers earn some part of their living by writing. They’ve shifted from writing as a hobby or with a dream of someday being published, to writing for the marketplace.

Sometimes their work bleeds into shoulder industries like teaching or editing.

In October (last month), I earned $18,000.

That’s before expenses. I have two employees, I rent an office, and there are lots of expenses involved in running my business. My actual income in October was closer to $10,000.

If you’d told me four years ago that I’d be making $10,000 a month as a writer, I would have fallen over. Holy crap. Sometimes it’s really hard to believe that this is my life and I get to spend my time doing this thing that I love so much and make a good living doing it.

It’s taken me twenty years to get here. Twenty single-minded, highly-dedicated years. In those twenty years I did undergraduate study in creative writing and got an masters degree. I put all of my resources — money, energy, time, effort — into learning how to be a writer.

So here’s the first thing that being a working writer looks like: a whole lot of patience.

I’d say a solid ten of those twenty years, I had no real concrete idea that all the work I was putting into this thing would pan out. I had to front load my career with a ton of learning and practice.

Maybe it will come easier to you. For sure, if you’re just starting out, you’re in a different ballpark than I was. I had to send query letters by snail mail and self-publishing wasn’t the juggernaut it is now. Blogging hadn’t been invented yet. I didn’t have access to e-courses and online groups and all the resources that are available now.

It’s a more crowded market, but the upside to writing having a golden moment right now is that you’re not flailing around in the dark.

Still — wrap your head around the idea that this is a long game. Think about the first three or four years as your learning years. Just like any professional, you need to put in the time to study. You might make some money during that time, but consider it a bonus.

This is how I spend my time, to earn $18,000 (before expenses) in a month as a writer.

I do some work every single day. This is not passive income — although there is some passive income involved. In other words, I don’t trade every minute of my day directly for dollars, the way I would if I was earning a paycheck at a 9-to-5 job.

I have several income streams. The main ones are: blogging, teaching, coaching, and affiliate and Etsy sales. When I sell a novel, I get an influx of cash (a windfall) all at once three or four times over the course of 18 to 24 months. I sometimes make small amounts of money freelance writing.

In October 2019, my income broke down like this:

• Blogging: $8000
• Teaching: $8000
• Coaching: $800
• Affiliate and Etsy sales: $1200

For me, blogging is an offshoot of teaching — it to supports Ninja Writers, which is my online writing school. It’s a lovely bonus that it turned into a nice income stream, since I would have done it anyway (and did do it for a long time for free.)

So, blogging is one of the ways that I teach and I generally write with Ninja Writers in mind. Blogging brings a good income, but its main purpose is to grow my audience and attract new Ninja Writers.

I work six days a week. It’s a big deal to me that in the last six months or so I’ve started to take Saturdays off of work almost completely. For the first three years after I started Ninja Writers I worked seven days every single week. In fact, I worked from the moment my eyes opened until I fell asleep at night.

Like I said, this is not passive income, even if some of the income that comes in does come passively.

Here’s what it takes to earn that income:

• I spend about four hours a day working on my blog, six days a week.
• I host a variety of live calls for my membership community every week. Lately I’ve been hosting three of those a week — so that’s another 6 hours.
• Four times a year Ninja Writers has small group workshops that run eight weeks each. I personally run five of them. Each one takes two hours, so that’s ten hours a week. (The other live calls are usually reduced to one a week when it’s workshop season.)
• I have a one-on-one coaching clients that I spend 2 to 3 hours with every week (either directly or working for them.)
• I’m a novelist and I do my best to spend about an hour a day working on my own fiction — although my goal is ten minutes a day and I get full credit as long as I hit that. Usually I make it to an hour though.
• I spend another two to three hours a day managing Ninja Writers — writing emails, preparing programs, planning, writing courses, managing and participating in the Facebook group, marketing, working with my assistants, etc.

That’s six days a week — anywhere from 40 to 60-ish hours of work every week. I usually land somewhere in the 50 hour a week range. Maybe more when workshops are in session or I’m on a deadline for a novel.

I easily (easily) write 5000 or more words a day. Many days I write at least 10,000 words.

Usually I’m in my office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week. Less on Sunday. Most of the time I do a little more work in the evenings at home — but not every night.

On Saturdays for the last six months or so, I’ve just written a blog post in the morning and get my ten minutes of fiction writing in and called it a day.

Some of my income is more passive than the rest.

If I stopped blogging today, I’d still make some income for quite a while. I don’t know about forever, but at least for a while. That’s passive income. Right now, that’s about it. The rest of my business requires me to actually show up and work. And I’m okay with that. I love the work.

I would like to have some — let’s call it legacy — built in at some point. Books that sell enough to bring in an income when I’m old and can’t work so hard. Or that provide something for my family after I’m gone.

I would also love to be able to earn a living writing novels. That has alluded me so far. Maybe someday. If I got stubborn and decided that the only thing that counted as ‘being a writer’ was writing novels, then I’d be miserable.

Open your mind. You’ll be happier for it.

For the most part, this business is like any business. I have to figure out how to make it work, every single month. And I have to keep working and save if I want to retire some day. I don’t see it ever becoming fully or even substantially passive.

Here’s what I hope you got from all this.

• Writing is work. It’s art, too. And it’s fun. But it’s a job, too.
• It is not passive income for almost everyone.
• Writing is not a magic unicorn job that will instantly make you rich without putting much work into it. It’s an actual, regular job. You’re going to have to put the effort into learning how to do it and then do it long enough to build up your business.
• Multiple income streams are life. Broaden your mind about what ‘writing’ means to you.
• You might not be able to quit your day job for a long time. If you can shift your mindset around so that whatever work you have to do to make up the difference feels like work you’re doing in service of your writing business, you’ll be happier.
• Sticking around long enough is so important. Almost no one does. The key to winning this game is almost entirely just not quitting.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter and Instagram and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation, and The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.