Grasshopper #5: Writing and Money
Ok, here we go
I’m ok with making a few dollars for the good things…image: Martin Edic
“I made my money the old-fashioned way. I was very nice to a wealthy relative right before he died.”
Malcolm Forbes
In my world of online writing, there is a serious obsession with getting paid for writing. On its surface, I’m completely down with that. I don’t write for free unless I am doing a pure project like a novel or developing something new.
But that new thing will generally be expected to generate something eventually.
The problem with too much focus on money, especially when you are first getting started, is that you probably don’t deserve it.
Sorry, tough love from an old coot.
My first paid writing gig was a brochure for a hair replacement company. One of those places where you get plugs or a wig or something. There are before pictures of a guy looking in the mirror as he pulls wads of hair out of his scalp. He is miserable.
When does that ever happen, anyway, unless you’re getting chemo or radiation?
The after pictures are a guy coming out of a pool with a babe or another babe running her fingers through his hair.
The message is ‘get hair, get girls’. So writing it was a piece of cake because the pictures told the story.
I was paid thirty-five dollars and I was thrilled. Back then that felt like real money, sort
of, but it was writer money. I probably bought my friends beers.
By the way, I went bald in my twenties, before writing that thing, and I had never had any problem with it.
Any professional writer has those stories. But the message any of them would tell you is twofold: don’t work for free, ever, and get better fast so you don’t have to write that crap.
So here are a few takes on money and writing.
In my world of online writing, there is a serious obsession with getting paid for writing. On its surface, I’m completely down with that. I don’t write for free unless I am doing a pure project like a novel or developing something new.
But that new thing will generally be expected to generate something eventually.
The problem with too much focus on money, especially when you are first getting started, is that you probably don’t deserve it.
Sorry, tough love from an old coot.
My first paid writing gig was a brochure for a hair replacement company. One of those places where you get plugs or a wig or something. There are before pictures of a guy looking in the mirror as he pulls wads of hair out of his scalp. He is miserable.
When does that ever happen, anyway, unless you’re getting chemo or radiation?
The after pictures are a guy coming out of a pool with a babe or another babe running her fingers through his hair.
The message is ‘get hair, get girls’. So writing it was a piece of cake because the pictures told the story.
I was paid thirty-five dollars and I was thrilled. Back then that felt like real money, sort
of, but it was writer money. I probably bought my friends beers.
By the way, I went bald in my twenties, before writing that thing, and I had never had any problem with it.
Any professional writer has those stories. But the message any of them would tell you is twofold: don’t work for free, ever, and get better fast so you don’t have to write that crap.
So here are a few takes on money and writing.
Pure vs Applied Writing
Things changed pretty drastically for writers in recent years
“Money grows on the tree of persistence.”
Japanese proverb
Note: it was never my intent to write about money and writing, but I know there are those who are curious how it works in this new online environment. So, consider this my first and last word of the topic!
For most of my life as a writer I did what I would call ‘applied’ writing, that is to say, writing designed to help solve a specific problem, generally for others who paid me. How-to books, content marketing, various freelance work, etc.
I have no problem with being a hired gun and I worked with some great companies and editors over the years. Then I found Medium.com, a site where anyone can write about anything they want (excepting hate speech or abusive content) and simply hit Publish to put it out there in public.
This was what I call ‘pure’ writing, not because it is superior, but because the subject matter and approach are entirely determined by the writer. This is really the only kind of writing I do these days, because I love it and you can make a little money if people read your stuff.
Medium is a subscriber site where readers pay an annual or monthly fee for access to millions of articles on every imaginable subject. The cost is $5/month or $50/annually. The money goes into a pool that both supports the company and pays writers based on aggregate read time.
The more time paying members spend reading your stuff, the more you make. It’s an elegant system if you write well and publish frequently and build a following. You won’t get rich, but you have freedom and you get immediate feedback, via analytics, that tells you what people are reading and what they are not.
I publish between one and three articles daily, mostly on politics, current events, and climate issues. It’s a lot but I love it and daily writing has changed the way I write and the quality of my work, for the better. To me it is a form of meditation, to practice my craft without feedback other than what counts, readers reading my writing.
This is part of a big movement online of user-generated content. If you can build a base you can leverage that base to make money. On Medium the base are your Followers, readers who choose to see your content by following you. I have a little less than 4000 followers, which puts me somewhere in the top two or three percent of writers on the platform. These days I’m adding 100-300 followers monthly, so I am seeing growth.
Btw, this is as close as I’ll get to divulging any numbers, but this info is public so I’m not really revealing anything. Medium has a glut of writers bragging about success, often without evidence of any actual success. I consider this a form of mental pollution that diminishes the experience for readers.
So, that’s the background of how I got into this stuff and why. You are likely reading this on my new newsletter, The Grasshopper, which is based on another platform called Substack. Substack gives you the ability to acquire subscribers who receive a regular newsletter. You can charge for your newsletter or for premium content, to be determined by you, or you can keep it free.
I only started The Grasshopper in March of 2022 so it is entirely free, and will be until I feel like I have enough momentum to try monetizing it. My subject matter here is creativity and change. I see the two platforms as a way of diversifying my work and potentially having two income streams.
But either way it is really about me being able to write what I want.
Which gets me to the dark side of writing for money. Beginning writers are notoriously desperate to get published. Too many will write for free just to get their stuff out there. It can be pretty sad to see their neediness displayed for all to see.
This is called scarcity thinking and it will hold creatives back as they waste their time trying to find the ‘secret’ to success.
I learned from Medium that the only secret is to do the work and be passionate about it. I’m in no hurry with The Grasshopper and see it as a long term project that may or may not work out. I’m unconcerned about that at this point and I’m just having fun working on it.
And I’m very glad a few people are reading it. That’s all the payment I need.
For now.
“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.”
Steve Martin
Is Your Time Worth Anything to You?
This is a real question
“Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.”
Françoise Sagan
Do you know what a ‘sunk cost’ is? It’s an important concept in business and since writing for money is business, it’s important for you to understand.
Let’s say you are a woodworker and you buy an expensive new tool to make a product you just designed. You’re pretty sure it’s going to save you money and the product is going to sell like hotcakes. So you take a risk on the investment.
And the stuff doesn’t sell. The tool sits in a corner, unused. You tried to sell it to get your money back, but had no takers at the price you needed, or thought you needed. Eventually you give up and it gathers dust.
One day a customer comes in and sees the gizmo in the corner. They ask if you want to sell it and offer you ten percent of what you paid for it, say $150. You tell them it is practically unused and you have $1500 into it, but the buyer sticks to their offer. You’re about to turn it down.
Your helper, who is taking business courses, pulls you aside and tells you to sell it. He just learned the concept of a sunk cost, money spent that didn’t work out and that you won’t get back.
Just take the $150 he says. He’s a nervy kid but he has a point. You sell it and never think about it again.
The work you do as a writer to get to the point where you might make a few dollars is a sunk cost. You may know you spent many hours on that stuff and be irritated that you’re not making more than pennies on it.
That’s the cost of building value into your work. Writing doesn’t pay by the hour. I have written pieces on Medium, for example, that took fifteen minutes and made me $900 or more. I have also written stuff that took hours that I was sure would pay and made me $20.
I don’t think about it. I have two measurements of the value of my time as a writer. First, I love it when a piece makes money. Second, I love writing. When they coincide, life is good, but I’ll take either.
Writing online has no guarantees. No matter how many gimmicks people will tell you or sell you, there is no secret sauce. The payment systems are entirely merit-based. If people like it you make bucks, if they don’t, you don’t.
That being said, when you have tested enough niches, voices, perspectives, etc., you may find your audience, but you have to do the work and you have to let a lot of it go into the great chasm of online info.
Btw, it is no different with fiction. I know writers who wrote novels, got some kind of a publishing deal, and sold no books. It’s far more common than not. Don’t even get me started with poetry, but poets never expect to make anything. Like the rest of us, they do it because they have to.
It happens to be my preference to get paid.
That’s one take.
If you find this newsletter/monetization thing interesting or you have your own newsletter, you might want to check out The Sample. They send you daily examples of newsletters they find interesting or provocative.
It’s the Wild West out there!