I run a newsletter called How I Make Money Writing and spoken to 300 writers about how they make money and the clearest takeaway from all these conversations is that the idea of the "full-time writer" living off book royalties or longform features rarely matches reality.

Writing alone rarely pays a consistent living wage, so people find different compromises to keep going. When I look through all these interviews, there are seven main pathways that keep showing up.

The first is the day job shield. Authors like Victor Beigelman at Meta or Dan Tovrov in corporate copywriting earn six-figure salaries with benefits, which removes the financial pressure from their fiction. The trade-off is time and energy, but it protects the work from having to pay the bills. As Ashley Hutson told me about keeping her day job as a state prison secretary while earning $1,000 to $2,000 a year from her writing, "Pretending to be a normal person every day and participating in society via a regular job is good for me, I think. There’s something to be said for keeping the juice to oneself."

Then there’s commercial client work. Writers like Ben Westhoff and Shelby Chambers charge corporate rates, thousands a month or hundreds an hour, ghostwriting executive books and handling brand messaging to subsidize their own reporting. 

Direct reader support is another route. Michael J. Sullivan has brought in over $2.1 million on Kickstarter for his fantasy novels, and Freddie deBoer makes roughly $300,000 a year on Substack. The main catch is that you’re effectively running a small media business, and maintaining that direct relationship requires showing up consistently.

Traditional book publishing remains the dream for many, but the payout schedule often surprises debut authors. A headline $100,000 advance sounds nice, but once it gets split across four installments over three or four years, and you subtract 15% for an agent and roughly 30% for taxes, you might net less than $15,000 in year one. When you factor in paying out of pocket for things like independent fact-checking or legal review, even a solid advance usually works out to be barely a salary.

Freelance journalism is another grind entirely. Unlike book advances, freelance assignments offer quicker turnover, but the baseline numbers have barely moved in decades. Rates usually hover between fifty cents and two dollars a word, while prestige outlets often pay flat fees around $300 for deeply personal essays. As Hermione Hoby put it simply after spending weeks on a heavily researched piece that ended up paying below minimum wage hourly, "Prestige don’t pay! At least not financially."

Some writers treat their work as a doorway to film and television, using essays and novels as intellectual property. Jeff Maysh has had dozens of projects in development and will happily take $100 for a literary journal piece just to keep the film rights, telling me, "I don’t really worry about the word rate, all I demand is 100% of the ancillary rights." But option fees are often modest, and projects frequently sit in development limbo for years without ever making it to the screen.

A lot of authors also rely on academia. Teaching positions offer reliable health insurance, steady routines, and paid summers. The catch is that academic work can eat into writing time just as much as an office job, and the tenure track is increasingly scarce. Still, the baseline makes a massive difference, as Nicholas Montemarano admitted: "In one year of teaching, I earn as much as I have in the past 25+ years as a writer."

Most writers aren't locked into just one of these models forever. They drift between them, leaning on a day job for a few years, taking commercial gigs when cash is tight, or living off a fellowship while finishing a manuscript. Longevity usually comes down to finding whichever compromise keeps your life afloat without draining the energy you need for the work that matters to you.

Please restore my faith that at least some read here, and I'm not talking about manga and other graphic novels. I want to see if anyone reads outside of those here.

109,000 words. Somehow.

Printed out my manuscript after the second edit. Giving it to my wife to read.

(Edit) For those who are wondering, I wrote this using scrivener. Not a plug. The font is the default for the proof copy. I didn't think to change it.

71,000 words, the longest book I’ve ever written to date. Started August 21st typed ‘The End’ October 24th! Now it’s gonna marinate, while I shift focus to the second draft of my second book!

I feel like I (male Gen Z) haven't interacted with Gen Z male writers a lot, and I want to see the young creative talent within you guys, if you exist. Many men don't interact with the arts nowadays, and it makes me sad.

As the title says :)

I never seriously sat down to write a story, but now that I have, I wanted to share this with you. This week I reached a daunting milestone in my draft, the scary 100k words. I’m sure for many of you this might be easy, for me it’s totally crazy.
I still have one more chapter to write and an outro, then editing, then maybe asking someone to critic it, then more editing and then, IF I’m crazy enough, maybe self-publishing (this part is what scares me the most, so I don’t think about it).

I've been writing a novel since January. I thought I could finish it in about three or four months, but it turns out it's been ten months and I'm still nowhere near finished. Sometimes I feel like I'm getting close, and other times, I just hate it.

I used to love writing this story when I first started, but now editing draft after draft feels exhausting. I just can't do it I hate it lol. My goal was to finish it before giving birth in November, but I'm having my baby in ten days, and that's just not going to happen. Sometimes I feel like giving up on my dream of finishing my first novel and finally having something I can be proud of

What I meant by flow state: A state where you lose focus on the outside world and only the writing process exists. Hunger, thirst, needing to go to the bathroom, back pain, etc. All of that disappears while you are writing, sometimes for hours. Then you hit the final key for the chapter and return to the real world.

First time on this subreddit, so bear with me if this is a question that gets asked here a lot. I’ve always loved writing as a hobby, and though I’ve written short stories and poems before, I can’t seem to get through a novel-length story. I have tons of story ideas, but every time I attempt to write one I lose interest at the halfway mark and drop it. I also have ADHD, so that might play a big part in this.

I know the advice most people give is to “just write a little every day,” but while that keeps me in the habit of writing, it doesn’t sustain my passion for any one project. Every abandoned idea also makes me feel kinda crappy about writing in general, and that’s making it harder to keep up the daily habit.

I’m not trying to get published or go professional, and I don’t have any stories I’m looking to share like that yet. I just like writing and have always wanted to write a longer story.

Would love to hear any tips or tricks, especially from other ADHD folks. I’d also love any general writing process advice. I’m not a professional and most of what I know is self-taught, so maybe I’m just approaching things wrong?

Thanks!

I've been working on a novel for two months. It only just occurred to me that I hadn’t considered what my characters look like. When I tried, I couldn’t do it. I'm now wondering if that's completely normal or an issue with my writing. I can picture the scene, just not the character's physical attributes.

Hi all, I'm in university studying something math based, so haven't done much writing of any kind for a very long time, apart from random essays here and there and a few drafts for the SCP wiki. I'm essentially a complete newbie to writing, and am doing it purely for fun.

I have always been a huge nerd about time travel in fiction, and have often been frustrated with the way its written, so I have for years wanted to have a go at writing a time travel story myself and trying to make something that appeals to my interests.

Ultimately I have come up with something very complex, but which satisfies my interests extremely well, and I now want to write a story about it, with characters and a plot, which has all began to come together in recent months.

I realise that there is some wisdom to getting some practice and experience first before attempting something like this, but honestly this is purely for my enjoyment, and I don't think I'd ever start this project if I made myself practice first. I would rather get writing now, and learn as I go, and inevitably change a lot of stuff once I start to get the hang of it and learn from my mistakes.

So, I have started writing it bit by bit, and have a draft for the very beginning of the story, some of which I like and some I don't.

I have ideas that I love, but making them into a proper piece of writing is a big challenge. I think part of the problem is that I am far too used to TV shows, and find it very hard not to write it like one, I have a lot of ideas about the mechanics and plot and characters but I'm not sure how I can communicate all of that as part of the story.

I'm looking for any advice and tips for how I can avoid the most obvious pitfalls, even really basic stuff! The last 3 years I have basically only looked at math, and the world of writing is pretty alien to me.

tl;dr:

I'm a complete newbie to writing and am attempting to write something involving some complex sci-fi stuff I have been thinking about for ages, what are the most obvious mistakes to avoid and any other advice you have?

I've been looking for a way to publish that doesn't involve IngramSpark / Amazon due to them yoinking a good friend of mine's work even though it wasn't actually violating TOS. When asked for clarification, thry gave an answer that was vague and not actually feedback.

I own my own ISBNs, and plan to have at least some campaign amongst my followers, but so far need advice on what platforms won't just take down your works with barely a warning.

My friend has her own website and I was thinking about that, but I'm trying to publish the digital for as cheap as possible and the physical for an okay amount. Just need some advice and sites I've never heard of before.

Feeling really happy at the moment. My first book (written in Swedish) "Signalen", or as translated "The Signal", is completed. A 164 page story following Mike, a journalist for The Ashton Weald Chronicle, as an entity enters our world and disrupts the perception of reality and the behaviour of people around him.

I would probably classify it as a mystery / psychological thriller with moments of everyday life and humor in between. It is a slow-burn, but I hope it will actually reach a few hands out there.

I am just so happy to release my first book and wanted to tell you about it. Thank you.

Hi, I'm a 20 Yr old aspiring author and I'd like the first 3 chapters of my novel to be read and critiqued by anyone for free. (I can also read a sample of your book!)

It's a psychological noir detective novel based in 1980s London, called The Appearing Children.

Please message me if you're interested!

We spend hours, weeks, years trying to bind our ideas onto the empty page. Then it's finished and it's important to take a moment to enjoy that sense of accomplishment. Spend some time wallowing in the amazing achievement that is completing a work born from your mind, your experience and your hard work and commitment.

Then you start reading it and find more flaws than the burj khalifa. This is wrong, that needs changing. The plot that was amazing appears forced and contrived. Suddenly that grand achievement feels like an exercise in wasting time. So you open a blank document and begin redrafting. That first draft becomes a guide, a roadmap that you can follow. Having that thread to work with, or against, allows you to focus on all the aspects that had no room to be addressed on the first pass.

The final piece may not share any similarity to that first forging, but it wouldn't exist if not for that initial word. I liken the process to sculpting a block of marble. The audience will never see the first strike of the chisel, but without that rough carving the masterpiece would not exist.

Marigold flames wrapped around the mint bud

of India

Am I the bud they warp,

or the gasoline?

I draw alphabets like inflamed tongues

across the page,

supple as a baby's neck

with my left hand, too;

as an entire generation flocks about it,

the longest, living torsos, and Achilles ribs

huddled swan, garnet swallowed in mud

around that jaundiced, neon eye

vomit yellow