Is Being An Author Your Dream Job?
I saw some kid on reddit today who wanted to be a travel writer.
Now, I’ve written about why being a travel writer isn’t a particularly good goal before, but let’s summarise before we get into the meat and potatoes of this article.
Why Being A Travel Writer Isn’t A Great Idea
Travelling is a great thing to do. Writing is a great thing to do. Both of those things put together can be great but being a stereotypical travel writer isn’t the best of either world – it’s the worst of both. That’s because everyone is doing it.
The general path with that is: start a blog, spend all of your money living abroad, write about your experiences and try and make this profitable – usually by either a memoir-type deal or affiliate marketing.
Every single one of those stages is inefficient. You’re better off doing the following:
- Writing outside the travel niche and travelling anyway
- Making money from an international business and writing about it as a hobby or for marketing purposes
As two examples, you can travel the world and write by doing something like these:
- Writing as a freelancer in a niche field that’s boring enough but well paid enough that you’ll have consistent clients with no competition (say a niche in health; eyecare or something)
- Travel to SEA, start an ODM business selling widgets and then write about your life as a product creator
Both of those are harder work than starting a travel blog, but they actually work.
So do those.
If you’re a young guy, then keep your options open.
Let’s move on.
Is It Impossible To Write For A Living?
What got my attention more than the hopeful nineteen year old was this reply:
This is the sort of bad advice that stops people from jumping into writing – and particularly creative writing – as a career and it’s founded on a lot of rubbish journalism and not much else.
Take for instance the “99% of writers earn less than $500 a year” line. That’s based on shoddy journalism.
I can well and truly be considered a “writer” and even a “fiction writer.” Nobody has ever asked my opinion or for details of how much I earn. I wouldn’t tell them if they asked.
Most authors who make money are the same. Especially seeing as there are a ton of us now who’ve never had a traditional publishing contract and don’t have an agent or anyone who’d tell a journalist anything anyway.
“The successes like J.K. Rowling are few and far between.”
Yeah… but that’s like saying “business is too competitive because guys like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are few and far between.”
If you want to be a billionaire, being an author isn’t the quickest way to get there. It’s not the most stable.
But it’s not a bad career if you want to make lots of money on your own terms by any stretch of the imagination.
For all the “nobody makes any money” spiel, I know multiple people who have five and six figure months writing fiction. And I’m not exactly the social centre of the universe.
One guy I speak to semi-regularly makes seven figures a year from writing romance novellas. Another guy I know writes straight-up erotica, gives it away for free and still makes thousands a month via crowdfunding.
Across the big genres I know of multiple people making more than $500 a day, let alone year. The medium income figure that guy quotes for New York Times Bestsellers is completely irrelevant because none of these people make those lists. You can go on the big author forums and see stay-at-home mums talking about their $100+ daily Facebook Ads budgets… there’s a lot more money in writing than the journalists would have you believe (because most of them aren’t authors, don’t write very well and are broke.)
“Writing for 12 hours a day is too much for most of us.”
Now, mere mortals might find that to be the case. Sometimes I have 12 hour writing days, but in truth, I’m pretty much a mere mortal too.
Let’s do some maths though. If you can write 2,000 words an hour (and if you’re trying to be a professional writer, that’s not an unreal figure,) then a 12-16 hour day would give you 24,000-32,000 words.
That’s absurd. You don’t need to write that much in order to be a success as an author or writer. I’ve written about my “minimum amount” before but I’ll save you looking it up: 3,000 words a day. That’s what it takes to guarantee some form of success, along with having a brain and writing profitable things.
That’s one novel a month for the novelists. It’s 15-30 short stories for those who write short stories. It’s three blog posts or short sales letters a day. Or it’s ten long-form sales letters. It could be a combination of all of those, and that’s 3,000 words a.k.a. part-time.
Finally…
“writing for money is only getting worse, not better.”
Absolute crazy talk.
Let’s just think about this.
Ten years ago, the Amazon Kindle hadn’t been released. Self-publishing was not a fruitful venture unless you had a very niche product. And publishers thus acted as gatekeepers to both getting your book published and getting sales.
Similarly, other avenues; journalism, advertising, editorials, technical writing, etc… there were no freelance market places, you couldn’t just start a blog and have a global platform, gatekeepers were everywhere.
Most importantly, and this is the biggest change we’ve experienced far beyond all of the above; most people didn’t consume any written media.
Now, the internet works mainly on words. You can deliver those words in countless formats to people anywhere in the world. You can do this without gatekeepers. There is nothing stopping you writing a sales letter or a book or a blog in the next five days and making it profitable by the end of next week.
If you honestly think that writing for money is harder now than it has been historically, you need to broaden your horizons, take a deep breath and then get to researching. After that, if you’re willing to work hard and put in the hours typing at your computer, then the world is your oyster.