Risk And Writing
The number one thing that paralyses writers doesn’t really exist.
Writers will routinely paralyse themselves with various fears and try and juggle hypothetical scenarios, calculating risks that aren’t there.
- What if I lose my money?
- What if people hate me?
- What if I’m wasting my time?
The happy and honest fact is this:
Writing is a low-risk industry.
Compared with trying to become a lawyer or a drug kingpin, the potential upsides of writing as a business are high and the risks are low. With writing, if you’re willing to learn the fundamentals and put in the hours, then your chances of doing well are pretty high.
Compared to the above professions where you can get killed – or worse – have to wear a suit every day, the risks in writing are low.
In this article, I’ll talk you through them.
The Time Investment Is Minimal
If you’re willing to spend a working day in your computer chair typing out words, then you will succeed sooner or later. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, have no particular aptitude for writing and don’t know how to apply writing skills to business, you’ll learn.
The majority of your competition won’t have the basic fundamentals down, and this means a lot of opportunity. You can literally start offering writing services by the time you’ve finished reading this article, and if you follow the basic rules of a) providing a service, b) doing it on time and c) doing a good job, you can start succeeding by the end of the week.
This is nothing compared to other endeavours; if you want to be an artist, you’ve got hundreds of hours of practice ahead. If you want to be a doctor, you have years of training ahead.
Writing takes time, but overall, the time investment for learning is practically zero. Also, the time-risk to reward ratio is high too: It takes maybe an hour to write a sales letter. If it fails, it fails. It takes less than a week to write a full-length book – again, if it fails, it fails. The potential upside is massive when you earn royalties on your work for the rest of your life.
The Financial Investment Is Minimal
You can start writing for free. Even when you’re a professional writer, the costs are low. You can release a book without parting with a penny if you can throw a book cover together. If you can’t, then you can get everything from the cover to your book formatted correctly for the outrageously high price of ten dollars on fiverr.com
Blogging is cheap. $5 a month will easily cover you for hosting and a domain name, and after that you don’t have to spend any money either.
Freelance writing is free for you, and you can build up a treasure chest for funding your other projects quickly and without hassle.
Nobody Is Watching
The biggest risk that writers think they face is the fear of failing – of some social stigma that comes with being a failed writer. Writers will hold off on manuscripts for years because they’re scared of someone reading it and not liking it.
This is ludicrous for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you never try anything, you don’t have a track record to ruin. All those manuscripts that are stuck in the desk drawers of would-be writers don’t affect anything. Neither would they if the person just released the god damned thing.
There are millions of books for sale. There are billions of web pages. If your website flops or your book is terrible, nobody is going to remember. Nobody is probably going to see either.
Can you remember all the good things you’ve ever read?
I struggle a lot because I’ll read a fantastic article and then not know where to find it when I want to read it again. That’s something I thought was amazing. If I can’t remember something great, then why would I remember something terrible?
Nobody is going to watch you fail – and you might think, “Yeah, but what about that kid who hated me at school?” or “What about my friends on Facebook?”
They don’t care. You don’t have to tell anyone anyway, but anyone who is making a tally of your failures has too much time on their hands. (Seriously, who has time to look up people who fail?)
Besides… writers have a secret weapon anyway.
Pen Names
Let’s say you want to write a book. It might be risqué: maybe you’ve heard that writing erotica is the latest hot trend and you’ve seen people making good money from it. Inevitably, you don’t want the world to know that you’re making money from whatever smutty titles you churn out on a monthly basis.
Guess what? The risk is absolutely zero providing you’re not shouting about it from the rooftops. You can use a pen name, upload your books to Amazon… and that’s it. Nobody is going to come and get you. Amazon don’t care one way or the other what your titles are (providing you’re not breaking their rules) and they certainly don’t send your tax information to the government with a note on it saying, “THIS PERSON IS WRITING DISPICABLE OBSCENE MATERIAL!”
“But what about my family?”
You don’t need to tell them. Just say you wrote a book about something so boring they’ll never ask. You could even write a book about something so boring they’ll never read it, and then point them to it whenever they ask.
Nobody really cares and they’re certainly not going to say, “I saw your book about early railway bridge engineering but I know that’s a cover for PORN BOOKS”
The same is true with whatever you might write about. When you tell people you’re a writer, it’s a point of curiosity at most. Nobody knows what you write or how the business works.
However… a word of caution here.
Caveat: Don’t Write About Stupid Stuff AND Attach Your Name
Every single day I see people writing stuff online that makes me wince in social uncomfortableness.
I know I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: If you care about “risk” and your writing “career” – or your life at all – don’t write stupid stuff on the internet, especially not if you’re using your real name.
I could say to a young guy, “You should write Twilight-style romance books for teen girls” and he might say, “No man what if someone found out?”
Meanwhile, that same guy can be on Twitter an hour later writing about sex, politics, drugs and cracking jokes about retard midgets or whatever.
I’ll keep it short: Don’t talk about politics, sex or any other controversial topics unless you’re a) neutral and b) getting some sort of financial incentive to do so. By that, I mean real financial incentive. Not, “My blog is for men and I’m talking about how Trump is gonna kick the immigrants out because it’s manly!” Don’t be stupid.
If you’re anonymous, I still wouldn’t advise it. I’ve spoken to too many people who live in fear of being “outed” for the stuff they write online. What’s the point? You could be writing stuff that 1. Makes you money (political opinions don’t make anyone money) and 2. Doesn’t land you in trouble with whoever gets offended first.
Final Thoughts
I’ve written about most of these topics before, but seeing as the world doesn’t wait with baited breath for every pearl of wisdom I drop and so writers are still paralysed by fear, I’ve written on this subject again.
Writing is a low risk activity. The world is not going to fall to pieces if you write something stupid. In all likelihood, your writing won’t be terrible anyway, and you can work on it if it is.
There’s no point in worrying about it; you’re wasting time when you could be typing. Drop the fear and get to it.