Long Term Writing Versus Short Term Writing
This article is about the different ways you can make money as a writer. It’s a little off-the-top-of-my-head, because I was thinking about the difference between writing as a career in the short term versus writing as a job in the long term.
In the short term, your writing career should be based on a $ figure per word. It might be one cent at the lowest end, and as high as a dollar per word on the higher ends (in lucrative copywriting niches.)
For the highest amount of money in the short term, you’re going to have to do a lot more than writing. It’s probably going to be your own business (though some clients will pay you that much) and so you’ll have to learn about other aspects of business.
In the long term, you’re going to need to think about copyright laws and terms.
Technically, your writing can make you money for your entire life plus seventy years after you die. So you’re talking a long, long time – especially if you look at your writing in investment terms, and calculate an annual return on each project.
Even a short story that makes you $2 a month will earn you a lot of money in the long run.
The article is a list of things that you should try for both writing long term and short term.
In the long term:
Publishing & Writing Books.
Authoring is what people think of when you say you’re a writer. It’s a great long term investment strategy if you think and act like a publisher. That said, you’re probably not going to be J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, and you’re probably not going to be a billionaire form one book, so don’t run in thinking that you’ll be a millionaire next week.
Authority Websites.
Really, authority websites are a medium term project. They aren’t going to be something that sticks around for eighty years or so in their current form, because the internet changes rapidly. Yet it’s still going to take months to years to build them to be viable in their own right.
Building Content Based Businesses
You can do a mix of the above. Content-based businesses are great. Think about someone like Eben Pagan (Or, David DeAngelo; they’re the same person.) Millions in revenue a year, cornering multiple niches and selling products in pretty much every format you can think of. This book is great for if this is your thing.
Short Term Writing
Whilst long term projects are great, you need to earn money in the meantime. A novel won’t pay out overnight (unless you get a celebrity advance) so you need other forms of revenue.
Ghostwriting
Ghostwriting is a good way to make money, and the pay can be quite good. If you chase the trends (see below) you’ll know what other people are looking to have written. You can do this for them. Don’t ever accept small fees for this, because people are going to make a lot more money than they’ll pay you. (I made this mistake. Don’t write an e-book for a penny a word.)
Freelance Writing
Writing articles and other content is an easy way to make money. It’s not going to have the best pay, but you can bump that up by a) Being better than everyone else, b) being more professional than everyone else, and c) writing about subjects that other people can’t or won’t write about.
Copywriting (For Other People)
Copywriting is like content writing, but you have a focus on sales. I’ve talked about copywriting a lot on this site.
The most lucrative form of copywriting is using your super-secret selling skills to sell your own products. However, you can sell your copywriting services to other people and they’ll pay you considerably better than they would for content writing.
Trend-Chasing E-Books
When you think of most authors, they’re famous for a particular genre. Stephen King writes in horror. Andy McNab writes action novels.
But there are a lot of novelists who don’t do this. They act like pulp writers of the past – seeing a trend, writing a book (or two, or five) and then moving onto the next trend. This is labour intensive, but people make a lot of money in the short term doing this.
The only reason it’s not viable long term is because of the constant updating of the market.
Conclusion
As a writer, there are a million and one different ways your writing career can go.
There aren’t really that many rules. A lot of people I know approach writing in completely different ways to how I do, and among those people there are people who are less successful and vastly more successful than I am.
But there’s one piece of advice to take from all this: Do something from both of these areas; short term and long term.
Writers who think solely in the long term often have to quit because they can’t pay the bills whilst writing their novels.
Writers who think solely about the short term often quit because they don’t have any long term security.
Writing can provide you both, but you have to tailor it that way.