There comes a time when a writer has to face the facts. There are only two reasons for a writer to write. For love or for money. This site is about writing for money. If you love to write, that can be a plus. It can also be a serious drawback. People who love to write often indulge in writing for free just because they can.
If you like writing for fun, go for it. Have a ball. The following is for people who want to make a living writing.
Here are 5 surefire ways to fail as a writer to make money:
- Write for free. Whether you want to create a portfolio of your writing, post to a blog, or showcase your writing style. Don’t give away your writing for nothing. It sets a price range in the minds of your potential clients and reminds you that your writing is worth nothing.
- Overbook yourself. You can get so excited about having people willing to buy your writing services that you say yes to all of them without putting together a sensible writing schedule. It’s better to say I can’t get to your job until next week (or next month) than to take on the job and miss deadlines.
- Do not keep records. If you don’t know where you’ve been, how will you know where you’re going? If you don’t keep track of how much you earned and how much you worked, you could be working your way into poverty. If you write 50 hours a week and earn $100, you are working for two dollars an hour. You have to raise your rates or find a faster way to write. Also, if you don’t keep records, how do you know who your customers were and how you can contact them in the future?
- Neglect the investigation. If you rely on your memory for facts or research online using blogs and articles for detailed information, you could be perpetuating misinformation. Make your writing rise above the crowd with pristinely pure facts, not a jumble of outdated information online.
- Ignore the grammar. While people can get away with breaking some of the rules of good grammar, breaking the rules requires knowing them.
So who do I think I am?
Why should I tell you this? Because I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my writing career. The reasons were simple for my beleaguered career as a writer. First of all, I wanted to be a novelist. The need to make a living drew me into a technical world where my specialty was software training.
I kept writing as a sideline and teaching people how to use WordPerfect 5.1 (it was a long time ago). When the internet flourished, I learned about the need for web content and started writing articles online. I kept no records of my writing, clients, or websites. It was something I did for fun and the money came in handy.
I stumbled around writing stuff I knew how to write and using my research skills and some of the programs I love to use, like Web Content Studio, but never really got any momentum. In other words, I know how to fail as an online writer and I’m using my experience as a hobbyist tinkering with web content to shift my direction toward a more functional, high-performing writer.
It’s about focus
I focused on my investigative skills, which was what I learned from my experience as a newspaper reporter (checking all the facts twice) and as a master’s student, digging deeper into the information. And thanks to three years of Latin in high school, I’m really good with words.
The hardest part is avoiding Shiny New Object Syndrome. I love reading about writing and writing careers and the sheer amount of money people make writing long texts (for example). I’ve written press releases, nonfiction ebooks, fiction ebooks, articles, blogs, emails, and speeches.
And yet I was distracted by some of the fortune telling that can be made in other forms of writing. Lack of concentration. I could write a book about the problems caused by trying to be a Jill of all trades and master of none. But that would just be another distraction as I struggle to break free from old ways and finally become the writer I was meant to be: with a plan, a dedicated log, and a really good wall calendar.