You Want to Make a Living From Writing? Welcome to the Toughest Business in the World

If you are not willing to work the first few years almost for free, you have already lost.

When I started writing my first novel in 2006, I had great expectations. This book would be the start of a great, successful career.

I was already calculating how many books I would have to sell per month to live comfortably from it and concluded that I could easily manage that.

I was sure that I could write well. I was probably even right. But I also thought that that was all it took to become a successful author.

The readers are not waiting for you.

I don’t know how many books there are already on Amazon and how many are added every day. I also have no idea how many authors there are who all dream of becoming rich and famous.

But even without knowing the exact numbers, you can see at first glance that the competition is stifling.

And this is not only true if you write books that you want to sell on Amazon or other platforms. Also, if you try to become a blogger, you will be faced with hosts of competitors.

For readers, this diversity is a blessing. Never before have they been able to choose from such an inexhaustible wealth. But you as an author are lost in this mass when you are new. Nobody knows you, and nobody wants to get to know you.

The readers do not ignore you; they do not see you at all. You are invisible and can do almost nothing about it at first. Your first book will hardly sell at all. Your first blog post will probably not get any views at all. And yet, you have to keep going. Only those who can cope with this inevitable disappointment at the beginning of their career have at least a glimmer of a chance to make it in this industry.

You are a nobody and will remain a nobody for a long time

The bad news is that not only are you a nobody at the very beginning, and no one notices your genius. This condition lasts longer than you can imagine.

I had to write five books before I earned more than twenty dollars (or Euros). In most months of my first four years, I didn’t sell any books at all.

My point is that the dry spell at the beginning of a writer’s career usually lasts years, not months.

And you have to continually work on your skills during those first years without any success. You have to write, revise, rewrite, and additionally read everything you can find about writing.

You will spend many months or years, typing alone on your laptop. There is no fan mail or encouragement from your relatives interested in your hobby initially, but not anymore.

And while the world ignores you, and no one believes in you, you must continue to work hard on yourself with full conviction and overcome your own doubts every day.

Writing is always a lonely business, but in the beginning, it is the worst.

What works and what doesn’t, you only learn by publishing

When I started writing, I thought it was best to write what I loved to read most myself. That’s why my first two novels were Urban Fantasy novels with a good portion of action. I assumed that people would want to read something like that.

Also, my favorite books were all over 500 pages long, so I wrote books of that length, which meant that it took me almost seven years to write my first book and still more than a year for the second one.

When the first book didn’t sell at all, I thought it was only because I didn’t have an audience yet and wrote the second book in the same genre. When that didn’t work either, I didn’t finally switch to one of the mainstream genres but tried horror. That went a bit better, but still not very well.

The good thing about this series of failures was that I now knew for sure what didn’t work.

Next, I listened to the advice of other writers I had met in the meantime and who were all more successful than me. I wrote my first thriller. Thrillers, I learned, are the most popular genre among readers besides romance.

I was skeptical. Why should I suddenly be successful just because I write in another genre? On the other hand, my writer friends all earned thousands of Euros in the month in exactly this genre. So I decided to give the thriller a chance. I had nothing to lose anyway.

In 2015 I published my first thriller and managed to stay in the general Top 100 in the German Kindle Store for a total of twenty-one weeks. This was breathtaking for me because none of my previous books had even made it into the Top 1000

What have I learned from this? No matter what you think, what kind of story can be successful, you don’t know until you publish such a story.

You listen to the market, or you starve, and you earn almost nothing for a long time until you suddenly earn a lot

Now I knew that it made a huge difference whether I was writing in a niche genre or a mainstream genre. I used this insight and wrote another thriller. And then another one after that. Fortunately, I decided to put the same characters in all of these thrillers and make a series out of them, and my fanbase grew, and I got readers who were really waiting for me to publish the next book.

When the series was seven or eight books long, it suddenly happened. I first had a month with 5000 Euros, then one with 6000 Euros and finally I made 8600 Euros in a single month.

That was when I quit my full-time job. That day is two years ago today.

If I hadn’t learned the lesson and continued to write what only I am interested in, but which is not in demand on the market, I would still only earn monthly pocket money.

Writing will be the least of your problems

When people dream of earning their money by writing, they imagine themselves sitting in front of the computer with a coffee in their pajamas and hammering exciting stories into the keyboard. They look forward to creating worlds and juggling with words.

A part of my everyday life as an author actually looks like this. But this is the smallest part. The time you spend on writing is short compared to the time you spend on other things.

As a writer, you have to be a marketing professional, dealing with Facebook ads, Amazon ads, social media, and a thousand other things. You need to learn all about the platforms you sell your books on to create the perfect launch strategy for each book. You have to build a newsletter and deal with dozens of software and service providers.

You will find yourself in the role of a spokesperson, a webmaster, and start to learn about productivity techniques. You won’t avoid understanding your own psychology because you have to prevent writer’s block from developing. You will have to deal with taxes and liquidity planning, and you will have to coordinate your team of cover designers, editors, and beta testers. You will have to set your own deadlines and book advertising slots in popular newsletters in time.

And while you are dealing with all these administrative things, you must never stop developing your writing. You need to read other authors, learn new techniques, and always have a feeling for the changes in your genre.

As an author, you are much more than just a writer. If you don’t want that, you should let it go right now.

When you have achieved everything, sometimes you have to start from scratch

There comes the point in a career where you have to reinvent yourself. A formerly successful series suddenly doesn’t work anymore, your most important platform (Amazon, Medium, etc.) suddenly changes the conditions and robs you of large parts of your previous income, or a large tax back payment makes the budget for your next release shrink to zero.

It is brutal when you suddenly earn only twenty percent of what you were used to for years or months before. These situations always come suddenly, although, in retrospect, you could have seen them coming for a long time.

Suddenly you have to go completely new ways and try to get back to the income level you need with other things. But this does not work overnight. Even as an experienced author, it takes many months to get out of such a hole.

So sooner or later, you will probably go through a time when you have very little money, although before, after years of hard work, you finally had a lot every month.

This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is very likely to happen. Can you survive such an unexpected lean period? Are you willing to suddenly work twice as much in such a case and also do part-time jobs for a limited time to continue financing your life?

If so, you are one of the few who seriously consider a career as a writer. But if you can’t stand such lean times, then keep your 9–5 job and save yourself the stress of being a full-time writer.

Final note

I don’t want to talk anyone out of trying their luck as an author. But if someone tells you that anyone can make a living writing, you must know that this is a lie.

You should not be afraid of this hard way, but you should know that it is tough. If it is really your greatest desire to earn a living by writing, then this knowledge will not take away your courage.

Professional writing is passion paired with hard work over many years. Whoever is willing and able to make the necessary sacrifices will be richly rewarded.

Will you be one of the few who really fight for this dream?

René Junge a published author writing on The Full Time Writer

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