Introduction
If you’re reading this blog you’re either already published or thinking about it. Or maybe you’re also a blogger. Well… I am sure what I am about to say you’ve probably already read from other sources but the difference between them and this article is I’m not going to bullshit you.
Here’s the rundown. I’m a blogger who is maintaining multiple blogs right now, some of which have half-way decent traffic. I have in the past made money by writing for HubPages, selling short stories to magazines (once) and publishing a book. However all this does not amount to a heck of a lot. Certainly not enough to live off of.
Normally I’m super happy to just let hobbies be hobbies. I mean I think the United States has a sick obsession with having to make every hobby into a side business. Whenever I sculpted, knit, or did other art projects I was always asked why I didn’t have an Etsy store. Let’s see, because I didn’t want my joy of creating to be sucked out of the marrow of my bones just so I could turn a buck? And yet here I am trying to make my writing lucrative. Why? Well the short answer to that is I have terrible health and because of this I am unable to have a normal job and live a financially precarious life on disability – something I would like to get off of and earn a real living, maybe own a place of my own that doesn’t involve living with my parents in my thirties. You know, adult stuff.
Begin the Endless Parade of Rejection Slips…
So I read up on how to make writing lucrative. Back when I started this involved writing a ton of short stories and sending them off to magazines to be rejected. Only when a story was officially rejected (which could take months of waiting) could you send it to another magazine to be rejected again. Sometimes you’d luck out and you could get paid…. 3-5 cents a word. Writers loved to inspire other writers by saying things like, “Jack London was rejected 600 times before his first story was published!” I don’t know about you but that’s a little more rejection than I thought I could muster. Besides that the math just wasn’t adding up. How the Hell was anyone living off this meager paycheck? And that’s when it went from meager to nothing because when magazines became e-zines all of a sudden it was OK for them to write this on their submission page, “We’re sorry we currently do not have the money to pay our writers. Instead we hope they will be satisfied with EXPOSURE.” Like they were doing us some great favor by taking out work for free and not paying us. Sure, they’d paint it in glossy words and make it sound like you had to start this way, sort of like an intern. A lot of people got snowed.
Finding a Platform that Paid Through Ads
At some point I started writing for HubPages. It was a hobby. Although money was sometimes involved I was really just writing for fun. I loved researching articles on weird history, telling the occasional personal anecdote, and dumping years of wisdom on animal breeding somewhere it could be saved. I didn’t expect it to earn anything and for a long time it didn’t. And then years later I came back to find it was earning $60 a month while I wasn’t looking! I started adding more articles and when I got to around 150 of them I was sometimes making as much as $250 a month which wasn’t bad considering I did not write about “salable” topics. However this wasn’t to last. I noticed most of my articles performed poorly. They were on such diverse subjects I struggled to gain any core followers and then HubPages lost its mind and started allowing bots to censor and edit every article whether I wanted it to or not. The result was it took my flowery wording and pulverized it so badly it sounded like someone who barely spoke English was trying to get at something without the vocabulary to do so! And it censored me. I was now no longer allowed to say “sex” even when it referred to trying to separate out male and female animals. That was changed to gender. But you don’t gender animals. You sex them. As the censorship got worse and worse my patience dried up and so did my earnings. Not surprisingly people were not nearly as keen to read my heavily edited articles anymore which I had no power to change back. I decided to move all my articles here to my own little blog-o-sphere. I’d separate them by categories to different blogs as not to be overwhelming, a process I am still going through as I write this.
Monetizing Your Blogs…
But can you make money on blogs?! I mean I am told you can… but how?! When my life turned to shit (losing my farm, relationship, home, and really entire life in one fell swoop) I tried hosting a GoFundMe. This earned exactly $5, which was mine, to test the damn thing. So really nothing. Then I decided to move all my blogs to their own domains where I could add a PayPal Donate button in the hopes it’d at least pay for the money I spent buying the web hosting. I thought that’d be perfect for my travel blog – spare a buck for some gas and I’ll keep finding crazy destinations! This has been up on almost all my entries for Catching Marbles for over a year now and has earned all of $0. People aren’t as giving to travel blogs as they are to weekly comics. Strike out.
The last thing I could do to monetize my blogs was to install AdSense. Since I have no computer skills or knowledge of coding or web design this took me far too long to figure out. When I did I was SUPER proud of myself but it wasn’t easy! First I had to move all my blogs to a new paid for website, then I had to make sure there was enough “quality content” on there, and then I had to apply and hope AdSense would approve. They didn’t always. This last time they denied me because I had a satirical history of condoms up. It was hilarious, one of my best pieces but oh my God, their precious brand couldn’t ever handle having anything that suggested possible sexuality next to their advertising! INTERNET COOTIES!!! I’d heard this was a problem with erotica writers and sex workers and well, I’m sorry, but this is just fucking stupid. Still, I took it down and was approved.
To date I have had AdSense on three main websites and six sub-sites. It’s been up for about five months. To date I have made $12.85, none of which I’ve seen because they don’t actually pay you until you reach $100 or more.
On Writing Books
When I was growing up I thought if I could just write a book then I could really truly make it. People would love my story and although I never thought I’d be a New York Times best seller I did think just writing a book would give me something. And so I did. Instead of going to therapy I wrote a memoir. It felt great! And independently publishing it felt even better! I did it! I finally did it!!! I knew it’d take a lot of work pushing it on social media and maybe doing book signings and whatnot but I truly believed I could make it fly. It’s been published six months now. I have sold less than a dozen copies to relatives and friends, one copy to a stranger, and given MANY away just hoping.
I was told by other authors that books just don’t make bread and butter anymore even with the glorious ability to self publish. People don’t buy books without reviews. You can’t get reviews unless people read your book. It’s a snake eating its own tail.
The Book Side Hustle
Even before I published the few authors I was able to talk to told me I needed a side hustle if I was trying to live off writing. It wasn’t enough to write a book. I had to also find some way to base a career on said book. Have I thought about being a paid public speaker? Do I have any products linked to this book? Do I have a particularly marketable personality? I honestly wouldn’t mind a speaking engagement but guess what? People don’t hire public speakers who aren’t already selling a crap-ton of books!!
And on and on it goes….
In Summary….
Someone reading this article might think I am discouraging people from trying to make money off of their writing. I am not. Sometimes if you have a big enough web presence, a lot of friends, a very charismatic personality, you can actually make it in this business and make it well. Others of us make for delightful charlatans making other people pay to find out how to make money (hint hint, it’s by making still more people pay to learn your bogus secrets!) And there are many of us who just really enjoy writing and like to hope. I’m one of them. Do I expect I will ever get myself to a place of financial security? Not really but I still hope because the alternative for me is too bleak to accept.