Summary
- Be open to building writing income from multiple different sources.
- Platforms like Substack have made it easier than ever to monetize your blog.
- You’ll probably need to keep having non-writing income as you build your writing income.
- Professional ways of making money from writing include publishing books, writing white papers, and doing content marketing, i.e., writing articles for companies’ blogs and websites.
Introduction
Many of us dream of becoming full-time writers or authors, but achieving this reality is far from easy. Two years ago, I quit my full-time job in data analytics in New York and decided to give it a shot. The result is that I still make a lot less money than I used to, but sharing my writing regularly with the world has made me happier than I’ve ever been. And despite my mother’s concerns about how I would “support myself,” I have survived to tell the tale.
If you truly want to become a writer, you can make money doing it. But, more importantly, you’ll be living your dream! Publishing and sharing your work will bring you joy. Your life satisfaction matters a lot. You just need to figure out how to keep a roof over your head in the process.
In this piece, I’m going to share everything I’ve learned with you about how to make money from writing over the the last two years. I’ll keep updating this article as I learn new things, and hopefully scale my writing business!
1. Have A Vision For Your Writing
Start with a vague direction of the type of writing you want to do. Ask yourself: what is my vision for myself as a writer? Where do I want to be living? What do I want to be doing? Do I want to be an author of bedtime stories for adults? Do I want to do ghostwriting for speeches of famous politicians? Or maybe I want to write baking recipes for an online magazine? It doesn’t really matter what it is, and don’t get bogged down in the specifics of what it needs to be. Having a vague notion of where you’re trying to get to will help you figure out how to monetize your work later.
For a long time, I had a vision of becoming an author, or more specifically, finishing and publishing my teen romance novel. It took me almost 15 years, but I’m glad to share that I have accomplished that goal! I self-published my novel, These Perfectly Careless Things, in September 2023. Of course, I haven’t sold as many copies of my book as I would like to yet. But even just by publishing my book, I achieved the vision I set out for myself, which feels fantastic to be able to say.
To gain more clarity on your vision for your life as a writer, I recommend the Monthly Goal-Setting Workshop, which is hosted for free by the London Writer’s Salon.
If you’re still struggling, take the advice of David Whyte,
“Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.”
Now, my vision is to make 100% of my income from writing-related activities, such as selling books and giving talks. Which brings me to my next point.
2. Get Some Writing Income Streams
Even if you get a massive book deal, your income from writing is probably going to come from multiple sources. Before I share the full details of my 2023 income from writing below, here are examples of how you can start making money writing:
- Selling your books
- Speaking at book events
- Teaching writing classes
- Affiliate marketing money from promoting products
- Paid subscriptions to your Substack
- Writing articles for existing publications
- Freelancing writing gigs
I am not a fan of copywriting or wasting time pitching to existing publications. I like to have full creative control over my work. But if you’re interested in becoming a professional copy editor or book editor, you can check out a platform like Reedsy.
Identifying all the possible ways that you could make money from writing should give you more confidence that it can be done. And if you make $250 writing an article or get paid $500 to give a talk about your work, you just need to repeat that action however many times to reach your financial goals.
3. Create a Transition Plan
If you want to be a writer or any kind of artist, you need to make money. You don’t need to make a lot of money, but you need enough to keep yourself afloat and support your lifestyle while you work on your craft for months, if not years, at a time. Plus, it helps to have some extra money to buy supplies, print your books, invest in your branding, etc.
Given the cost of living these days, it will probably take you a long time to make enough money from writing alone to do it full-time. If this is the case for you, and you do not have a giant trust fund, don’t feel ashamed. Most people have some other income from main or side hustles in addition to their writing.
For example, my award-winning writing teacher, Ann Randolph, worked at a women’s homeless shelter by night so she could write and create her solo shows by day. She thought she would work there for six months or a year, but she ended up working there for ten years. Still, she committed to honing her craft and eventually got her show in front of Ann Bancroft and Mel Brooks. As they say, the rest is history.
So, how might you continue to make money from other sources while you develop your writing platform? It could mean keeping your full-time job and writing early in the morning and on the weekends (and giving up social media), but full-time work isn’t ideal. It sounds like you need the right work to sustain you!
4. Align Your Other Income With Your Writing Lifestyle
The most important reason to have money as a writer is so that you can buy back your time from the hamster wheel of corporate capitalism. Your time is your most important asset. It’s the only thing you need to write, and you can never get it back. So, you need other sources of income to keep yourself afloat during the transition phase. Here is the type of non-writing work you should be optimizing for:
- Easy: Work that requires a very low cognitive load for you to complete so that you have more creative energy for writing.
- High-paying: Work that enables you to save lots of money quickly, so you can buy back more of your time for writing in the future, e.g., taking the summer off to finish your novel.
- Efficient: Work that pays you really well but requires very little of your time.
- Flexible: Work that allows you to work remotely or choose your own hours so you can spend the rest of your time writing.
- Related: Work that uses your previous professional skill sets in a way that fuels and supports your writing career.
I really encourage you to think outside the box with the last one there. For example, I have a professional skill set in data analytics, which is quite broad. But in the last year, I’ve been applying that skill set to freelancing gigs (flexible, high-paying) in Growth & SEO to help companies improve their online content (related). I’m using my data skills (high-paying) and learning how to maximize the traffic of other company’s blogs (related), which I will use as I build my own blog and get more organic traffic to my website. Maybe I’ll make a tutorial about it later.
5. Reassess Your Lifestyle & Expenses
If you want to be a writer, and your income is limited, it’s time to take a good, long, hard look at your lifestyle. This is not about choosing a drip coffee vs. an oat milk latte, though if you are really broke, it might be. Ask yourself: If I want to be a writer, what kind of lifestyle do I want to have? What do I actually need?
For example, I used to live in New York City. Even when I was making over $100,000+ per year, I was hardly saving anything because I was paying $2,000+ per month in rent, and I had to go to the gym and eat lots of expensive food to keep myself sane while living in that stressful hellhole. To support this lifestyle, I had to keep my full-time job, and so I had very little time to enjoy my life, let alone write.
Now, I live in Mexico City, and my total living costs are about $2,500 per month, which is about the same as my rent in New York. While I might be supporting the Mexican economy, I’m also contributing to gentrification here, so it’s not a morally easy decision. But my life is a lot less stressful now that I only have to make $30,000 per year and not $70,000 just to live.
If you live in a really expensive place, and you do really expensive things like skiing and traveling, you’re going to have to make that much more money to support your lifestyle. Writing full-time is a huge cut to your income, so look at your expenses and see what you’re willing to give up. As I mentioned, it was easy for me to give up living in New York because, apart from having all my college friends around, I hated living there.
6. Write a shit ton of books
I’m a member of this awesome Facebook group called “20BooksTo50k”. The concept is that if you publish 20 books online, you’ll make $50,000 a year in passive income from simply selling 1-2 copies of each per day. I mean, wow, what a concept!
Of course, writing 20 books is going to be an absolute metric shit ton of work. Especially if you’re a perfectionist like me, who casually took 15 years to write, finish, and publish my first book (ouch, these people are putting me to shame). Still, this plan would be a home run for someone who wants to be a full-time writer.
Your books could also include short stories, non-fiction work and guest posts you might otherwise publish as a blogger. Basically, you’re working to become a book entrepreneur.
My 2023 Financials in Full
My current vision is to make 100% of my income from writing-related activities like selling books and giving talks. To give you full transparency of how I’m trending towards that goal, here are my 2023 finances in full. For the record, I don’t have any debt. All amounts are written in $USD.
Income from Writing
Gumroad (digital self-publishing platform): $313.70
Amazon Kindle: $97.46
Audible: $16.36
Book Baby (printed books): $123.14
Substack Paid Subscriptions: $2,430
Total: $2,980.66
Writer Expenses
Reedsy Copy Editor: $1,925
Printed Books & International Distribution: 1,247.97
Audiobook Production: $919.55
Vellum eBook Software: $400
Total: $3,372.52
Total Income from Writing: - $391.86
i.e., A loss of almost $400
Other Non-Writing Income
Freelance data and SEO consulting: $29,810
Total: $29,810
i.e., Money that actually helped me stay alive
Notes on My Writing Finances
I made about 10% of my income in 2023 from writing. Not bad!
But maybe I should have titled this post, “How I lose money writing,” lol. Still, this has been a pretty useful exercise, and I’ve learned some important things. First, I should really focus on digital marketing for my book just to break even and make up for the negative $400. I have sold more books in 2024 so far, so my net income from writing is probably higher now.
I should consider sticking to just an eBook version of a book until it does well enough to warrant an audiobook or print version. That being said, now that I have these alternative versions of my book, it’s all up to marketing, which I’ve done very little of.
My Substack newsletter, Misseducated, is currently generating about $2,500 for me each year. I originally wanted to increase this to at least $10,000 per year. Still, the challenge I am now running into is that putting my work behind a paywall makes it inaccessible, and this is really bad for top of funnel growth of my readership and my target audience. I was considering getting rid of my paid tier altogether. But now that I’m looking at my pretty disastrous writing finances, it seems I really do need the money from my Substack readers, and I should be more grateful for that as they’ve enabled me to offset my other writing costs.
As you can see, the $30,000 I made as a freelance data consultant has been instrumental to my continued existence. While this work is ultimately not writing, it is helping me build related professional skills. The work is also flexible, high-paying, and efficient enough to be worth it for me.
Other Hot Takes
- If you want to be an artist, study business. This sounds counterintuitive, but the reality is that unless you have a giant trust fund or a rich husband, you need some form of income that is going to pay the bills while you explore your craft, fluff it up, and start over again. Studying business or computer science will give you technical skills that are a lot more valuable in this economy, so you can get the most efficient, flexible, and highest-paying sources of side income to fund your writing career.
- You have to spend money to make money. Not only do I need money to live, but you can see that in 2023, I spent money hiring editors and buying physical copies of my book.
- Invest in yourself. Even if you start with a smaller audience, I believe that self-publishing and investing in growing your own platform over time will be far more valuable in the long term. It’s hard work, but in my experience, it’s far more awesome to have full control over all your creative writing.
FAQs
Can I earn money from writing?
Yes, you can earn money from writing, but it really depends on how much money you want to make. If you want to make lots of money, writing is probably not the best field for you to go into. But if you simply love writing and would gladly welcome any additional, small payment on the side, then go for it.
Can I make $1000 a month freelance writing?
You definitely can, but it will require you to find your own freelance writing jobs, i.e., paying clients who you can write for. You can write search engine-optimized (SEO) articles, for example. Becoming a content writer involves sending potential clients writing samples, but it could also include creating content for podcasts and published authors. It’s going to be a lot of work either way.
Is writing a good side hustle?
If you are only trying to make money, there are better side hustles than writing. For example, you can make a lot more money writing code and doing computer programming than writing articles. However, if you’re passionate about writing, your work will provide you with a career you find way more fulfilling. Choosing to write as a side hustle depends on whether writing is important to you. Motivated by the passion of writing alone, then yes, writing is a good side hustle. And writing is better than sitting around boring yourself to death on social media.
Why should I pursue freelance consulting?
I’ve written extensively on how to make money freelance consulting. Freelance consulting works for me as a lifestyle because while client work can be hard to acquire and stressful, you’re not wasting your time on Slack from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday. You can do your work at any hour of the day, and it’s better than a full-time job because you can often charge more for less work, and your job is not your entire identity. I’ve always had so many projects I wanted to do that devoting myself to a job full-time never jelled for me.
Why did you not pursue traditional publishing for your book?
Oh, I did. I queried about 70 agents in 2022, and I didn’t get a single request for my manuscript. Of course, I would love to have a literary agent and have the cushion of a book advance and a fancy number of pre-orders on the way. But the reality of the book industry these days is that these projects take forever. I may or may not ever get the representation that I want, and most of my friends that I have spoken to in traditional publishing do most of their own marketing anyway, which blows my mind. I eventually decided that I would rather maintain all my creative control because I have to learn marketing either way.
Why not do freelance writing for publications?
What publications? Lol. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I’ve worked at Vox Media, which is, at this point, a giant media conglomerate. And the state of the media industry, and even journalism as a whole, is an absolute shit show. Of course, at some point, it would be awesome to get a big feature piece published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic. Don’t get me wrong. But what I don’t like about submitting to publications in general is that they can reject your idea.
If I have a piece that I have written that is genuinely good, and I even have a couple of friends who have enjoyed reading it, then I believe my work deserves to see the light of day. And it’s a far quicker turnaround time for me to write, edit, and publish something on my own Substack than wait for a billion years for some editor somewhere to decide that what I have written is vaguely worthy before they rip it to shreds.
Why not do copywriting?
I am a big believer in publishing your work under your own name and doing the damn thing. But maybe you want to be a copywriter, so go ahead! Be my guest! Maybe I’m an egotist. Or maybe I’m just missing a couple of screws that stop me from caring about what other people think and writing about female pleasure, hosting naked parties and taking psychedelics as my writing niches.
Why not find writing gigs on online platforms?
In my opinion, do not bother joining any writing platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. If you really want to find potential clients to write for, I highly recommend reading my article in full on how to make money freelance consulting. Having your own clients and updating blog posts for them is a major way that people make money writing online. But you are not going to find these clients on online marketplace-style platforms for freelancers.
These marketplaces go against the most fundamental rule of microeconomics: supply and demand. Why, as a freelance writer, would you put yourself in a giant pool of people who have the same writing skills as you? You are going to be eaten alive by the competition. Instead, you need to hit up your old coworkers on LinkedIn, find businesses struggling to find copywriters or freelancers, and pitch yourself as the exact right person for the job.
Yes, there is an entire industry of content marketing and content writing. It’s how a lot of people make a living writing. But with the rise of AI, who knows how long those writing opportunities with good money are really going to stick around?
