Sure road to failure as a writer

There comes a time when a writer has to face facts. There are only two reasons for a writer to write. For love or for money. This site is about writing for money. If you love to write, that can be an advantage. It can also be a serious drawback. People who love to write often take pleasure in writing for free just because they can.

If you like to write for fun, do it. Have a ball The following is for people who want to make a living writing.

Here are 5 surefire ways to fail as a money-making writer:

1. Write for free. Whether you want to create a portfolio of your writing, post to a blog, or showcase your writing style. Don’t give away your writing for nothing. It sets a price range in the minds of your potential customers and reminds you that your writing is worthless.
2. Overbook yourself. You can get so excited about having people buy your writing services that you say yes to everyone without putting together a sensible writing schedule. It’s better to say I can’t get to your job until next week (or next month) than to take the job and miss deadlines.
3. Don’t keep records. If you don’t know where you’ve been, how will you know where you’re going? If you don’t keep a checking account of how much you earned and how much you worked, you could be working your way into poverty. If you write 50 hours a week and earn $100, you are working for two dollars an hour. You have to raise your rates or find a faster way to type. Also, if you don’t keep records, how do you know who your customers were and how can you contact them in the future?
4. Neglect research. If you rely on your memory for facts or research online using blogs and articles for detailed information, you could be perpetuating misinformation. Make your writing rise above the crowd with pristinely pure facts, not a mix of outdated information online.
5. Ignore grammar. While people can get away with breaking some rules of good grammar, breaking the rules requires knowing them.

So who do I think I am?

Why should I tell you this? Because I have made many mistakes in my career as a writer. The reasons were simple for my beleaguered writing career. First of all, I wanted to be a novelist. The need to earn a living drew me into a technical world where my specialty was software training.

I kept writing as a sideline and teaching people how to use WordPerfect 5.1 (it was a long time ago). When the internet flourished, I learned about the need for web content and started writing articles online. I did not keep records of my writings, clients, or websites. It was something I did for fun and the money came in handy.

I stumbled across writing stuff I knew how to write and using my research skills and some of the programs I love to use, like Web Content Studio, but never really got any momentum. In other words, I know how to fail as an online writer and am using my experience as a hobbyist writer who tinkered with web content to shift my direction towards a more functional and higher performing writer.

It’s all about focus

I focused on my research skills, which was what I learned from my experience as a newspaper reporter (double-checking all facts) and as a master’s student, digging deeper into information. And thanks to three years of Latin in high school, I’m pretty good with words.

The hardest part is avoiding Shiny New Object Syndrome. I love reading about writing and writing careers and the huge amount of money people make by writing long texts (for example). I have written press releases, nonfiction eBooks, fiction eBooks, articles, blogs, emails, and speeches.

And yet I was distracted by some of the stories about fortunes that can be done in other forms of writing. Lack of concentration. I could write a book about the problems caused by trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none Jill. But that would just be another distraction as I struggle to break free of the old ways and finally become the writer I was meant to be: with a plan, a dedicated journal, and a really good wall calendar.