How do you make money?

[JuliaAnne2018]

I agree. I consider myself a barely above-average writer (terrible grammar in these smartphone posts don't count), and I do okay. It has its ups and downs. And I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner -- been preoccupied with this transition.

To answer the original poster from yesterday:

I believe if you are persistent enough and you take the advice that was given to me in 2004 -- that you might get rejected a half-dozen or even a dozen times before you get published -- you will find your niche.

I discovered my niche back in college: It's a genre/category, actually.

I found out that I like writing non-fiction versus fiction. I decided this when in a fiction writing workshop that I would (until I get better at fiction writing) go down the non-fiction path.

My first paid work was $100 for a creative non-fiction story that maybe took me about 15 hours to write so you do the math.

It was accepted in 2004. However, by the end of 2005, I discovered a ateadier living can be made off of SEO and keyword writing.

My first two long-term gigs paid so low I sometimes wasn't earning minimum wage, but within a year I was able to let go of my other jobs. For six years, I just did writing although I admit for four of those years I was living under someone else's roof and didn't have to pay much for rent.

In 2013, I joined Writer Access, which is one of few content mills where 3- and 4-star writers can make a halfway decent wage.

I'm also hoping I will now finally start having more time to do affiliate marketing and start making pitches to publishers and clients who pay more, but for now, I can at least afford to feed my dog and me on what I make.




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[travelaround]

I've made many thousands of dollars by writing online. It is great unless the site you're writing for suddenly fails. I still make a little money that way - not nearly as much as I used to.

Google search engine algorithms are everything and if they change your income can fall precipitously and plunge you into poverty within a few months. If you can't get the traffic, you can't earn the money.

And then, there are people who think the way to make money online is to steal your content.

Now I want to develop a real-world income... some kind of vendor/fair/retail business that could eventually include pulling a cargo trailer behind my van. I've been working primarily online since 2001 and am a bit burned out on it.

I have one short novel published and want to publish my other novels as well. Still editing . . .

 

[maki2]

Fortunately I did manage to reach my lifelong goal of having a "trust fund" provide a small but steady income.  It is way more fun to think of social security income as a trust fund. A small pension from a number of years as a real life Rosie the Riveter, a job that taught me many skills that are very useful in building out an RV. But I have lots of other skills as well, learned to sew at an early age, also useful for custom RV work. I do 3D CAD design, I have model making skills.

A lifelong passion for architecture is what fuels my ability to generate a part time income but all those other skills come into play as well. So I design and make miniature sized buildings that serve various functions. I have made high end birdhouses, light fixtures, adult collectable dollhouses.






Right now designing, cutting and selling tiny cardstock buildings as kits provides me with a fairly steady part time income. They are fanciful little things, the first ones were made as a Christmas party craft project for some girlfriends who love to make things for their dollhouses. Some photos of them got posted in forums and people started asking to buy them, no business plan, just one of those things that came along so I said why not? The fall is my busiest time of year for the cardstock building business as they often get used for holiday decorations. They also get used inside of tiny domes for necklaces. Last year I designed a castle to go with the 47 individual buildings that make up the village. Most years I add a new set of buildings to the village collection.





Working in a small scale makes it much easier to take the projects and the tools for making them on the road with me. However next year I will start selling more plans for what I design so that people can pay for them and then download them. I get a lot of request from people who want to do their own cutting. Of course I do have to build prototypes for testing and for photography so they can see how things look when completed. The real fun for me is doing the design work, production work is of course repetitious when you sell thousands of the same thing, I have sold more than 20 thousand of those little precut, ready to assemble, buildings in the last few years. Of course I do not hand cut them, I have a machine for that work. But I am a one person operation from start to finish including all the packaging,  shipping marketing. Another reason for switching to selling the digital plans and patterns is I now have some retinal damage which has resulted in some loss of detail vision which as you can imagine makes it difficult to assemble very small buildings. Fortunately I have been doing this work for a number of years so I already have a good sized client base and have had my work featured in magazines, newspapers and in art galleries.

 

[mpruet]

After many years of working as a software developer, I was fortunate enough to save up enough to retire and travel all over the place in my class-B RV.   I’m currently living on SS, savings, and investments.

 

[LoveCareThinkDo]

I instead ended up taking the SEO writing path. I'm glad I did because SEO copywriting brings in a steady income.

JuliaAnne, I am a pretty decent technical writer. I have never really been interested in copywriting or SEO, but it certainly beats working in an Amazon warehouse. What has SEO writing been like for you? Do you enjoy it? do you find it difficult to write that way? I love technical writing because I like explaining things to people. Do you have any advice for someone thinking of doing SEO Writing?

 

[JuliaAnne2018]

CaravanCaravan, sorry. I didn't see this til now. It has its ups and downs. I'm currently looking for higher-paying work.

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[maki2]

My suggestion is if you are a good writer then try to develop some type of product or start some other type of business and then do your own marketing by writing about what you do.  The very best paying and most loyal client you will ever have is yourself. If you understand the concepts of SEO and things such as visual impact of product photography you already have a huge boost over any other competing businesses.

 

[SLB_SA]

I'm an editor for a small publishing company. Advice for those who want to make a living writing: get an agent. It's virtually impossible to get steady writing income without one.

Sadly, the writing industry is a lot like Hollywood acting--every year there are thousands of people who show up thinking they're the Next Big Thing. Virtually none of them ARE--and the ones who aren't get tossed out like yesterday's pizza box. It is a soul-crushing business.

I am already published but I have the opposite problem; a major publisher asked if I was interested in writing a book and approved my outline.  Now I have to complete the book.  Since I occasionally travel (nationally and internationally) to make money and am occupied with other activities, it is hard to find the time to complete the book. I don't have (or need) an agent.  As an editor, do you have suggestions on branching out to a new genre (not covered by my publisher)?  In which areas do you (or the publisher for whom you work) publish?

 

[JuliaAnne2018]

Maki2, wasn't to whom you were replying, but I agree. I know I have to push through, however. There always seems to be obstacles every time I try to build up my own sites and products, but I haven't given up yet. I have a lot of digital stuff to sell or resell.

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[maki2]

Maki2, wasn't to whom you were replying, but I agree. I know I have to push through, however. There always seems to be obstacles every time I try to build up my own sites and products, but I haven't given up yet. I have a lot of digital stuff to sell or resell.

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When I was a teenager my mother loaned me out to a woman for a whole summer to help with her kids. That woman had her own one woman public relations firm.  So I learned how to get free publicity at a relatively young age by watching her doing it for her clients.  My work has been featured in newspaper articles including on the front page of the Seattle Times. I have had photos of it on magazine covers and feature articles about it inside the magazines. Of course once the internet social media boomed that really helped out as well. Pinterest sends a lot of traffic to my blogs and to my Etsy store front, it is a self perpetuation advertising machine.

Here is my tip to you. Newspapers, magazines, local TV shows, bloggers, etc are always looking for a great story. So give them a story idea. Back when I was making some elaborate birdhouses in the month of January I sent a letter and some slides of my work to the person who controlled the section of the newspaper with articles for arts and the home. What I said to them was that birdhouses had recently become very popular and it would make a great feature article to write about when spring came around. That was all it took to become the focus of a special feature, that and giving them some good quality photos of an interesting looking product. They called and did the interview over the phone. That article lead to more people wanting to do articles and suddenly you have "credentials". It is a snowball effect. But it is up to you to get it started rolling, don't wait to be discovered, just start introducing yourself. They are hungry for interesting stories to tell their readers, they need content to write about.

I have written some stories for magazines now and again about other people's work. If I have seen something interesting I contact the editor and show them what I found and ask if they are interested in it, then when I had their agreement I contacted the person I wanted to do a feature on. But how that came about was that the magazine had already done a story on my work and asked me to write a small how-to segment to go along with the story. That how-to segment required a contract with the magazine so I then had a relationship with the editor. The article in the link below was not a very difficult or long article to write, pay was $150.00 which was certainly decent wages per hour since it did not take long to write it or to interview the person I was writing it about. They provided the photos so that was easy enough. There is still an online copy of the article on the website of the person I was writing about. http://www.shaggyman.com/index.php/...e-collector-features-the-altes-haus-dollhouse

 

[waverider1987]

Selling on eBay currently. But I'm partially disabled, so pending disability as well.

P.S. - Feel free to steal my ideas. 

This is one of my favorite methods, what do you sell?

 

[lenny flank]

I am already published but I have the opposite problem; a major publisher asked if I was interested in writing a book and approved my outline.  Now I have to complete the book.  Since I occasionally travel (nationally and internationally) to make money and am occupied with other activities, it is hard to find the time to complete the book. I don't have (or need) an agent.  As an editor, do you have suggestions on branching out to a new genre (not covered by my publisher)?  In which areas do you (or the publisher for whom you work) publish?

Do not miss the deadline. That would be very bad. 

I still recommend getting an agent. It opens up a lot of doors that will otherwise be closed. There are a LOT of publishers who simply won't consider anything that is not submitted through an agent.

 

[SLB_SA]

Most (published) writers don't make a lot of money and I don't expect to either.  This is more of a "public service" and a summary of my research; it would be a graduate textbook.  How many copies of a particular graduate textbook in a specific  subfield in an academic discipline do you think are sold in a year?  I never received any royalties on my last book and I would not expect this new book to be a bestseller.  With respect to the deadline, there isn't one.  They are happy to wait until I am done.

Part of the reason I am considering writing in a new area (fiction) is that people have praised my informal storytelling for decades, I understand the discipline required to write and something "popular" offers greater opportunity for profit (for me).

 

[theNomadicHacker]

I'm a software dev for a tech company and just went fulltime remote this past september...been bouncing around state parks in NM this winter. In my free time, i've also been getting more into web and applications security with the intent of pursuing white-hat bug bounties in the near future.

 

[USExplorer]

I am 24 years old, been on the road over 4 years, living full-time out of a bare-bones SUV camper while not working. Dabbled with truck driving, got my CDL through a community college program, shot high and struck out. Too many rules and regs, high stress, 168 hour workweek. Good earning potential if you can tough out the 2 years experience needed to be instantly hire-able anywhere.

Seasonal resort jobs for the rest of the time. New Hampshire, Wyoming, Texas, and (maybe) California. Room and board provided, spectacular natural settings. Close knit employee communities, usually a blessing, sometimes a curse. Decent saving potential for those with strict financial self-discipline. My basic formula: Six months resort job paychecks - negligible living expenses = six months travel funds + six months reserve cash.

 

[bullfrog]

USExplorer lots of seasonal garbage truck, boat launching, and warehouse jobs with that CDL in major parks.

 

[towboater]

Hello All:
 My situation is a little different than most as I work a 28 day on and 28 day off cycle. This allows me to travel for about a month and work a month. I have zero expenses for the 28 days I work since my job is all inclusive, (I only furnish work clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant). The drawbacks: I am on a 36'x120' inland rivers towboat, that means no running to Walmart, visiting friends and family, going out for drinks, etc. 
 This is a great job to put money away yet still possibly fulfill your need for wanderlust but definitely not for everyone.

 

[bullfrog]

And you must love mayflies! LOL!!!

 

[towboater]

Hello All:
 My situation is a little different than most as I work a 28 day on and 28 day off cycle. This allows me to travel for about a month and work a month. I have zero expenses for the 28 days I work since my job is all inclusive, (I only furnish work clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant). The drawbacks: I am on a 36'x120' inland rivers towboat, that means no running to Walmart, visiting friends and family, going out for drinks, etc. 
 This is a great job to put money away yet still possibly fulfill your need for wanderlust but definitely not for everyone.

Mayflies; that's what the firehose is for

 

[towboater]

And you must love mayflies! LOL!!!

Mayflies; that's what the firehose is for