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Posted by John Lockwood on March 9th, 2008

Patient, raising his arm a certain way:  "Doc, it hurts when I do that."

Doctor:  "Well, don’t do that."

A lot of people want to be writers.  As in any profession, a small group of superstars make it look glamorous.  Who wouldn’t want Steven King’s income?  I don’t even know what it is, but I’m pretty sure I want it.  OK, so maybe Steven King’s not glamorous, but he still has more nickels than me.

Of course, there are a lot of writers who aren’t Steven King who nevertheless make a decent living — though I’m sure there are also a lot who are struggling. 

So there are superstars, there are those who are just in the profession in one way or another, and there are those who want-to-be-writers. Angela Booth has an excellent article on her writing blog where she talks about the want-to-be-writers, who fall short of their dreams of writing in the simplest and most time-effective way possible:  by not writing.

Beyond this, there are several other ways to not make money as a writer.  Most of these boil down to either not selling your writing, or not selling it the right way. 

By way of learning how to get paid, let’s brainstorm how to fail at getting paid — and then not do that.

1. Don’t Write Anything
   As we said earlier, this is the simplest way to not making money as a writer.  Just don’t write anything.  If you’re not going to get paid, this is the fast track.  The benefit of this approach is that you free up 100% of your time so presumably you can go get paid for doing something else.

   This is my approach to painting.  Remember the Bob Ross show about learning how to paint?  I used to watch that show and tease my wife that I was a painter — just a very low producing one.

2. Write for Nothing
   There are millions of people on the Internet writing for nothing one way or another.  In fact, if you had to prove that millions of people want to be writers, the Internet is the most eloquent, real time demonstration you could find, since millions of people like writing so much that they do it for free.  In 2006, USA today reported that MySpace had 47.3 million members.  I don’t know how many writers Wikipedia has, but I’m sure it’s a fair number given their content.  If you write for Wikipedia, you write for nothing, though interestingly enough they have started to pay illustrators.  Apparently it’s only us writers who have the strong claim to amateur standing!
3. Write for Almost Nothing
   One step up from projects like Wikipedia that pay nothing are projects that pay no money, but offer some (real or imaginary) benefit to the writer, like recognition or incoming links.  Don’t read me wrong here:  distributing articles and writing on other people’s sites is a time honored way to promote your own web site, especially to the extent you can manage to get your article placed on a site that’s a lot better known than yours is. 

   Where the problem comes in is when you confuse what you do for advertising with what you do for a living.  Web sites like ActiveRain have thousands of users who will write screenful after screenful of content thinking they are promoting themselves, when often if they’d spent the same amount of time on their own projects they’d have more work than they could do.

   In fact, let me offer a new definition for that least-likely-to-have-a-definition phrase, "Web 2.0".  Web 2.0 is a generalized mass hysteria characterized chiefly by the belief that building your web site is more profitable than building mine.

4. Write for Next to Nothing:  The Job Boards
   I almost shut this blog down cold and never looked back the other day, when I took a look at one of the job boards.  Wow, really, $12 for an hour’s work?  No kidding?  Be still my heart!  Look, I don’t want to seem elitist here or anything, and if you’re going after twelve dollar per hour jobs and making a go of it, I certainly don’t want to insult your efforts.  And as a guy who’s brand new to the freelance writing business, one could argue that I’m simply talking through my hat on the whole issue.  But seriously, if professional writing pays twelve dollars per hour, it’s worse than professional typing (which I’ve also done).  As a professional typist I can get $12.00 per hour and let Manpower book 40 hour per week gigs — week after week after week. 
5. Write a Ton and Don’t Sell It for Enough Money
   I’m going to get personal here and let you in on a little secret:  this is my old business model / ailment.  I am in recovery.  

   For many of us who are already writing, the person we met at the outset who doesn’t write anything is a total foreigner.  We write all the time.  So the issue for us is not whether we write at all, because we can’t stop writing.  Instead, the issue boils down to this:  can we sell enough writing products and services often enough at a high enough price to make the sort of living we aspire to?  In my own case, my niche blogging activity already makes me an income that some people in my area make on their full time jobs.  Even this year, with the market falling apart, it’s probably more than I’d make as a full time typist, but I am working on doing better.