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If you actually want to make money as a writer and not just spend your entire life daydreaming about it, then you need to hear these eight brutal truths. And I know you need this tough love, because this is the same kind of tough love I needed at the beginning of my writing career. And just to give you a little context, 10 years ago, I graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in fiction writing. And I was completely broke. I was living in a rundown studio apartment on the north side of Chicago. I was working a minimum wage job as an entry level copywriter. And today, 10 years later, I now run a portfolio of writing related businesses that does over $6 million in annual revenue. I've published 10 different books. I've made millions of dollars from my writing. I've grown all different sorts of writing related businesses. And I went from that studio apartment to where I am now by really internalizing these eight brutal truths that I'm gonna share with you. This is not the surface level stuff I'm not gonna tell you. You just have to work really hard or you just gotta pour your heart and soul into your writing. That's not what we're gonna talk about here today. These are really hard lessons I had to learn along the way. And each one forced me to change the way that I was thinking about becoming a successful writer in the digital age. So brutal truth number one, if you want to earn a full time living as a writer, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else. And what I mean by that is you are competing against people like me today. So just think about that. I now spend eight to ten hours per day writing, minimum, usually seven days a week. I usually do just as much on the weekends. And most people, most really successful writers in whatever industry or whatever niche, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, they all are writing 30, 40, 50 hours a week. And so as a baseline, you sort of have to understand if you're starting from zero, that's who you're competing with. Right? The first step of really building momentum for yourself as a writer is you have to solve this problem called I only have an hour or two a day to work on my writing, which was me in the beginning when I was first starting out. You know, I was working 8, 10 hours a day at this ad agency, not really doing the sort of Writing that I wanted to do. In a lot of cases, I wasn't even writing. I was getting paid as a copywriter, but I was just like editing or doing grammatical edits on proposals and random other things like that. And so the only time I had to write was after work. I would commute an hour to and from work each day, and then I'd go to the gym. And then the only time I would have to write is around 8, 9pm to about midnight. And if I didn't get in my writing in those hours, I didn't get to write that day. And if I didn't do that each day of the week, and I only did that on the weekends, well, then I was only writing, you know, two, five, maybe ten hours a week. And again, you're competing against people who are writing 30, 40, 50 hours a week. And so in the beginning, the first thing you need to solve for is, well, how do I get as many hours as possible practicing my writing? And sometimes that means late at night, sometimes that means early in the morning, sometimes that means saying no to some of the other social obligations and getting it done on the weekends. But you gotta make it happen because if you aren't able to do that, then you're never gonna get over the hump and start building momentum to where you have more and more time to invest in your writing. And I'll tell you, the step that I always recommend everyone takes here is I really, really encourage you, if you really want to become successful as a writer, the first thing I would encourage you to do is to start ghostwriting. Because ghostwriting is essentially this bridge between you working a full time job and you maybe writing on the side and ghostwriting. If you can transition a ghostwriting side hustle into your ghostwriting full time. Well, now, during the day, all of that time spent ghostwriting, you're basically getting paid to practice. So you can double or triple the amount of hours that you're writing and that you're practicing, but you're getting paid to do it. You're providing a service. And then also with ghostwriting is you can increase how much you're earning. And as you increase how much you're earning, maybe you don't need to work as much. And then you have more time to reinvest in your own writing. So step one is really, how do you get yourself out of a scenario where you're working a job that you really don't enjoy for eight, ten hours a day? How can you reclaim more time so that you're Practicing writing, and you're getting paid to practice. And then as you have more time and you're getting paid to practice and you increase your earnings, how do you have more time to reinvest in your own writing? And that is when you start to really feel momentum as a writer. It's very, very difficult to feel that momentum or to get to a place like where I am now when you're only able to write an hour a day, you know, so that's really the thing you need to solve for. And this might seem like a funny example, but I was just watching this really great documentary on Netflix with my wife about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. It's called America's Sweethearts. I did not think that I was going to enjoy it as much as I did, but it's a really great example of the kind of work ethic you need when you want to make your dream come true. I didn't actually know that, you know, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, for example, I didn't know that they weren't paid a full time salary and they weren't dancing for the team all day, every day. All of them actually have other careers and they are working six, eight hours a day doing something else. And then in their off hours or at night they go dance with the Dallas Cowboys and. Or they're training or they're practicing with their team. And so, you know, that's a great example of being world class at your craft. That this documentary made me respect them so much because the amount of work ethic you need to do that is insane. But that's essentially the mentality you need to have, and you need to apply that to whatever your pursuit is in life. And writing is a great example of this is if you're currently working a job that you don't enjoy and you really want to make it as a writer, or maybe you're working a job you enjoy, but you want to make it as a writer. You're just not doing that yet. You have to work way harder than everyone else in the beginning and you have to make use of all your extra time, otherwise you're never gonna get over that first hump. Then once you get over that first hump and you're able to start getting paid to practice writing, or you have more hours per day to reinvest in your writing, then it becomes a game of, well, how high can you turn up the volume on that? You know, like every single day I'm like, wow, I got here. But if I slow down, I'M not going to accomplish my goals. So that's why, you know, the more successful even I become, I do not taper down how much I'm practicing. I'm still writing six, eight, ten hours a day on the weekends. I'm still putting in shifts because that's how hard you need to work. So that's the first brutal truth. The second one. If you want to become a successful nonfiction writer, you need to become a world class marketer. And if you want to become a successful fiction writer, you need to become relentlessly prolific. So let me explain the differences here. If you notice, all of the most successful, highest paid nonfiction writers are not just writers. Almost all of them are entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial. Okay? So James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer. Mark Manson, author of the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, has other businesses, makes money in other ways besides just writing books, and is an amazing marketer. Ryan Holiday, author of the Obstacle is the Way, has other businesses, monetizes his writing in other ways and is an amazing marketer. And I even heard him say in an interview that he makes more money each year selling his little stoicism coins than he does his own books. And he's one of the most successful nonfiction authors of the past decade. So something that you really need to internalize is that becoming successful in the world of nonfiction really doesn't have as much to do with the volume of books that you're putting out. And it also doesn't have very much to do with even the quality of writing. There are some very, very, very popular nonfiction books, business books, self help books, finance books that are very mediocrely written. And that's because the value in nonfiction is not the beauty of the sentences. The value in nonfiction is. Are you answering my question or are you telling me a story I find interesting? Okay, so if you want to succeed in nonfiction, you have to realize that the game is really about marketing and in many ways, entrepreneurship. You know, there's a reason why so many of the books that dominate the New York Times bestseller list from nonfiction authors are also from people who have very lucrative businesses because then they can throw money at their books. Tony Robbins is an amazing example of this. Every time Tony Robbins comes out with a book, number one New York Times bestselling author. But that's because he's not really a writer. He's not really an author. He's an entrepreneur with an insanely lucrative business that allows him to fund and market his books. Okay, so that's the nonfiction game. The fiction game is actually very different with fiction. If you notice, all of the most successful and highest paid fiction writers are actually not great marketers. Many of them don't have huge social audiences, they don't have big email lists, they don't follow any of the best practices that, you know, if you're in the marketing world. A lot of them are actually invisible on social media, but they do one thing exceedingly well, and that is they publish a relentless amount of fiction and they just don't stop and they keep going over a very long time horizon. And I find that oftentimes when people ask about fiction, they think that fiction is about hitting a grand slam. And it's like you spend 10 years writing this perfect book or this perfect series, and then you put it out into the world and then this series just explodes. And like, that's it. And that's actually not really the game. The game with fiction has a lot more to do with volume over a long time horizon. Colleen Hoover, if you know who she is, is a really great example of this. Her books are not, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning material, but she is relentless about publishing romance stories. And the fact that she is so consistent and just keeps going over and over and over again, that is really what has made her so successful. Obviously her stories resonate and there's something that's connecting with readers there, but a lot of it has to do with volume. Matt Deniman is actually another good one. He's the author of this LITRPG series called Dungeon Crawler Carl. And if you look at litrpg writers are a great example of this. Or writers that start with web novels or web serials and then they transition into writing books later. Each book. So in this Dungeon Crawler Carl series, each book is 500 plus words. It's a huge book. 600, 700, 800 words. And there's six books in this series. And he's been chipping away at this for years. And another thing that he does is he also publishes these on a site called Royal Road. And so he's constantly getting feedback. And so when you look at the output of someone like that, that is so far above what the average fiction writer thinks is necessary. And I did a quick search. There's a great tool called Publisher Rocket where you can pull sales data from Amazon. And it's not always 100%, but it's directionally accurate. And this series, Dungeon Crawler Carl, between print books, ebooks and audiobooks, just for this six book series altogether is averaging over $200,000 per month in revenue. Okay, so that means his book series is doing, you know, over a million a month basically in top line revenue, because each book is doing 200 grand. So 200 grand times six, 1.2 million a month. Ish. Top line. And he's probably taking home 10, maybe 20% of that. So he's making a hundred grand a month writing. But I would also bet that he has been writing for 30, 40, 50 hours a week for years. And so again, you don't always have control over. You very rarely have control over the outcome. I don't think he even knew that this series was going to be as successful as it became. But the thing that he knows he has control over is how many hours he's racking up and how consistent he is. And the more that I study genre fiction, the more that I see this to be a universal truth is that it really doesn't have to do with some clever marketing strategy. It doesn't have to do with having some giant social media audience. What it really comes down to is your ability to, yes, write great stories, but write a lot of them and continue to do it over and over and over again over a long time horizon. So those are the two big things you need to understand about becoming a successful nonfiction writer or becoming a successful fiction writer, which leads to brutal truth number three. Making money exclusively as an author or a legacy writer is unnecessarily hard. And I'm using the word unnecessarily on purpose. I find that a lot of writers really romanticize what it means to be successful, and they think that you're only a real writer if you are earning money exclusively from selling books. It's like the same definition of being a successful writer that we had back in the 1920s, but today, and that just doesn't make any sense. And I know how challenging this is because I have struggled with this for years. This was my definition of success for a long time. And in many ways, just to be fully transparent, I still feel that feeling of I see some other writer win the Pulitzer Prize, or some other writer gets all this press coverage saying, oh, this new novel they came out with is just absolutely incredible. And they have a publisher behind them and they have all these legacy badges and all of these things that say that's what it means to be a successful writer. And I have moments where I go, oh, I must not be a real writer. I don't have any of those things. But then I remember how much freedom I have and then I remember that I make 10 times more money than that writer. And so it depends on how you want to define success. And I feel very strongly and whenever I have those moments, I always come back and I reground myself and I'm like, oh yeah, I wouldn't trade what I have any day of the week. You have to really remember that books are far from the most lucrative way to monetize your talents as a writer for two reasons. One is that books are price capped. Readers are not willing to pay more than 20, maybe $30 for a book, maybe $50 for a book if it's some super ding dong hardcover, leatherback, rare, signed edition. Right? But typically books as a product category are price and then second is that they're one off. When someone buys a book, they're done. And the only time that there's repeat purchases is if A, they lose their book, they need another one, B, they want it in a different format. So they're like, I have the print book, but I want the audiobook. Or C, they gift it to someone else. But even still, right, that you have no recurring revenue. Like yeah, maybe they might buy a second copy, but there's nothing about that. There's nothing recurring baked into the business model. And so as a business, selling books is very, very far from the most effective way to monetize your talents as a writer. And yet that is the business model everyone associates with being quote unquote successful. And that's why I use the word unnecessary. Because we don't need to only monetize our talents that way anymore. It is unnecessary to think that way. You unlock so much more upside for yourself as a writer when you consider the other ways you can monetize your talents. So sure, you can monetize through books, but you can also monetize through paid newsletters. You can also monetize through courses. You could also monetize through providing coaching, working with other writers one on one, or working with businesses one on one. You can monetize with providing a service, you can get paid ghostwriting, whatever you're really good at writing for yourself. You can earn a dividend on those talents by providing that as a service to someone else through ghostwriting. Right? So there are so many other ways to monetize. Ryan Holiday writing about stoicism and then sell stoic coins. He makes more money selling the stoic coins than he does the books. There are so many other ways to monetize your talents as a writer, and I think it is one of the biggest Mistakes that writers make today thinking that they aren't a real writer, if they aren't living that, you know, projected dream of. If I'm not the modern day Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, then I'm not a real writer. And that just couldn't be farther from the truth. All of these different ways that you can monetize, you are still writing. It's very hard to have a lucrative paid newsletter. If you can do that as a writer, you are a real writer. Okay? So it doesn't just have to be a novel. You can monetize in all these other ways. Brutal truth number four, you can't measure success over days. You have to measure it over decades. So it is very hard to unlock massive success as a writer. Year one, oftentimes year two and even year three, okay, you can start unlocking small wins. It's very easy and very doable. Year one to go from I have zero followers to I have a couple thousand followers, right? It's very easy to go from. I want to start monetizing my talents. I want to get into ghostwriting. Oh, now ghostwriting is paying me five, ten grand a month. I've seen it happen. I've coached hundreds of writers doing it. I know that it's possible. I've seen it over and over again. However, it's very rare that in the first year or even two years, you start unlocking outcomes like, oh, all of a sudden I'm making 30 grand a month for my writing, or I'm making 60 grand a month from my writing, or oh, I've turned myself into this super lucrative service and I'm killing it. I'm making 100 grand a month, or oh, I wrote this bestselling book or this amazing book series and I'm just raking in the cash. Very, very rarely does that happen in the first year, two or three, okay? And so you have to internalize that if you want to make it as a writer. You're not playing a year long game. You are playing a decade long game, or ideally a multi decade long game. That is one of the reasons why I love writing so much is because unlike athletics or even in many ways business, you don't see CEOs stay CEO until the day they die. But very often you will see prolific writers write until the day they die. And I love writing because it is such an infinite game. I know that until I die or my brain goes, I'm going to write and I can write and there's nothing that's really holding me back from that it's not like being an athlete where past the age of 30 or maybe 35, your body, you just can't do it anymore. That's what makes writing very different. And so you have to internalize that and go, this isn't a game that I'm focused on winning in 365 days. This is a game I'm focused on winning over the next 30 or 40 or 50 years. And when you elongate the time horizon like that, you remove so much of the pressure off of yourself. Okay, so the other thing that here that a lot of writers misunderstand is that a lot of the rewards that come from writing, it's actually impossible for them to happen in the first year or two. So a lot of the rewards are things like compounding word of mouth or compounding trust. Like, I see writers now that join Our program ship 30 for 30, or premium ghostwriting academy that will say, I've been following you since 2014. I've been reading your writing since your Quora days. And then they didn't. They just haven't purchased anything until now, ten years later. Right. Or someone going, you know, I've been on your email list since 2020, and now, finally, I'm ready to take the next step. Well, if you don't stick with it and you don't continue building year after year after year, you never start unlocking all that compounding, and it becomes a very powerful thing. You know, from a perception standpoint, when someone discovers your work and, you know, say you write something that goes massively viral, doesn't have to be. But for the sake of this example, say you write something that goes massively viral and someone discovers you for the first time, well, if they see that you've only been at it for 30 days or you've only been at it for three months or six months, yeah, they might follow you or they might pay attention to you, but there's this unconscious bias where they go, yeah, but you're still new to the game. We'll see how long this lasts. Right? We all do this. Whereas when someone discovers me, the first thing they realize is, you've been at this for 10 years. And once you see that, your likelihood of wanting to listen to that person or wanting to follow them or wanting to pay attention to them is so much higher than the person that looks like they've just started playing the game. And so these are the types of rewards that you don't really unlock in the first year or two, which is why I really Encourage you to not get so caught up measuring success in the first 365 days. It doesn't matter. This is a game that you should want to play for a very, very long time. Okay? And it's hard for everyone. Everyone starts at zero. The first year is grueling. My first three years of trying to, quote, unquote, make it as a writer were so hard. I was working that full time job. I was commuting an hour back and forth to work. I didn't have air conditioning, I didn't have any furniture. I just had a desk and a bed. And I would just try and get in my two hours of writing each night before, before I went to sleep, you know, it was really tough. And that whole first year, I just really didn't know if it was going to go anywhere. And even year two, I like started to see some success and started unlocking some little wins, but I was like, maybe this is short lived. I don't know where this is going to go. Okay, so it's hard for everyone. And it doesn't help you to look around at other people and go, oh, well, it was easy for them. They had the fast track. Like, it's easy. It's just too hard for me. No, it's hard for everyone. You just have to have the grit and the determination to get through those first couple years. And then when things start picking up momentum, you're going to think the complete opposite. You're going to be like, wow, this is amazing. Everyone needs to do this. Okay, so do you just internalize that? The beginning is tough and that's just part of the process. And all of the real rewards get unlocked as you get through that phase. Brutal truth number five. Writing is a lottery. So optimize for volume. And this is one that took me a really long time to learn. And I think it's true for pretty much every creative industry, which is you never know what's going to resonate. I promise you. The things that you sit there and obsess over and spend 100 hours refining and thinking, oh, this is my masterpiece and I'm going to put this out into the world. Those are the ones that flop. And then the things that you write really quickly and you're not even sure if you like it, and you barely bothered editing it and you're like, I don't even know if I really want to share this, but whatever, and you hit publish. Those are the things that catch fire. And I have lived this hundreds of times. The things that I spent so much time on and obsessed over weren't the things that ended up working, weren't the things that ended up really resonating? And then the things that I just almost threw off the cuff and just went through quickly or acted on an idea in a very short amount of time, they ended up catching fire. And I am always surprised, even to this day, I am surprised at how much I don't know what the market wants and I don't know what's going to work and what doesn't. And so you have to sort of internalize that and just trust that you are not the smartest person in the room. You don't know what's going to resonate. And so it doesn't help you to sit there and obsess over your writing. Instead, it's much better to optimize over shots on goal volume. How can you get as many ideas as possible out into the world and then just let the market take care of it? Let the chips fall where they fall. That's the only thing that you have control over. You don't have control over the outcome. A lot of writers think, well, if I obsess over this, I'm going to control the outcome. I'm going to make sure that this performs well. And a lot of times that's not how it goes. And so you have a lot more to gain by almost foregoing that and just saying, I'm going to get out as many of my ideas as possible into the world. Brutal truth number six. I always love this one. Reading does not make you a better writer. Writing makes you a better writer. And I will tell you, the moment that this really clicked for me. This was probably back in 2014, 2015, like right after I had graduated from college. And again, I was in that first year, it was a slog. I was trying to figure out how to make it as a writer. I really didn't know where the path was going to go. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just trying. And I remember I was watching the Lil Wayne documentary, if you've ever seen it, when he was making his most famous album of all time, which is the Carter 3. And this documentary is the year that the album comes out. They're on the tour bus with them, and there's this part in the documentary, documentary, where the interviewer goes, who do you listen to for inspiration? And Lil Wayne goes, myself. And the interviewer is confused and clarifies and goes, no, no, but who else do you listen to? What other artists do you listen to for inspiration. You know, who, who do you admire? And Lil Wayne, just with the most dead stare goes myself. I record, I listen to myself. I listen for what needs to be improved. I record again. And that's what I do. And I remember watching that and going, I am spending too much time reading and not enough time writing. And there was something about seeing it with someone else, you know, versus just reflecting on it in myself that made me realize how much the more that you consume and the more that you read, you aren't really getting better at creating, you're getting better at consuming. Reading makes you a better reader. You have to create in order to get better at creating. Writing is what makes you a better writer. And obviously, obviously, I understand the value of reading. I read, I enjoy reading, I enjoy studying other writers. I do it often, but there isn't a single day when the amount of hours or the amount of time I spend reading exceeds the amount of hours or time I spend writing. It never happens, ever. Because I know if I'm forced, if I only have a free hour, if I have a really busy day and I'm like, wow, I just had a ton going on, I only have an hour, I only have two hours. The hierarchy of decision is if I want to keep getting better and better at being a writer, I need to spend those two hours writing. Okay? And if I spend those two hours reading, and that day my time spent reading and studying exceeded my time spent creating and pushing output, then I am not advancing myself toward my goal. And whenever I explain this to beginner writers, it's so hard for them to wrap their heads around. And I find the vast majority of writers really over rotate here and they think that reading is how you become a better writer. And so what happens is they start to use reading as a way to productively procrastinate. Because writing is hard. And so instead of writing and doing the hard thing, they read and they read and they read. And the whole time they tell themselves, I'm getting better at writing, I'm studying my craft. But the reality is you're not. You're getting better at reading. And reading is only beneficial when your time spent creating is already locked in. Reading is a supplement, it is not a replacement. Okay, you could say the same metaphor about going to the gym. It's like everyone wants to know what the supplements are. And if you're not going to the gym regularly and you're not eating consistently, it doesn't matter what supplements you take. The supplements are not what get you There they help, but they are not the core. And reading is the exact same way. Brutal truth number seven. There is no such thing as good or bad writing, only effective or ineffective writing. So the terms good and bad are entirely subjective. I promise the writer you love probably isn't the writer that I love, and the writer that I love probably isn't the writer that you love.
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