Where My Writing Currently Earns

Before you get all excited, notice the headline says “Currently Earns $$$” and not “Currently Earns A Buttload of $$$”. When I say “earns” I mean between $0.03 a month to around $1500 a month. Though the $1500 monthly cash cow will most likely be put out to pasture come mid-May.

If you were hoping for one of those “How to Get Rich From Your Writing” style articles sorry to disappoint. There are plenty of liars and con-artists out there on Medium writing those, but it ain’t me.

I’ll start with the lowest earner first.

Vocal Media

I think I joined them about six months ago, the free version. I earned about $0.11 in that time. A few weeks ago they offered me a free trial of their paid version. Since I wanted to try a few of their challenges, I decided to give it a go. After submitting a short story to one of their challenges I earned an extra $10 from them for publishing my tenth story.

I haven’t really figured that place out yet. They have communities that sort of work like publications on Medium, but the only one that seems to be somewhat tailored to short stories is the Horror one. There is a poetry community though, but it seems pretty dead.

The contests do give you the chance to win thousands of dollars though. I don’t know how competitive there are yet, but as potential big earners they are on the top of my list.

Amazon/Kindle Book Sales

Since 2018 I have Indie Published 20 books on Amazon. I’ve tried Amazon ads, Facebook ads, and BookBub, but I’ve never seen a positive ROI from any of them. During the months that I simply post links to my Amazon author’s page a few times on all the social media sites I’m active on I sell just as many books as those months when I’ve dumped money into ads.

This earns me anywhere between $0.10-$15 a month. I don’t want to give up on paid ads yet, but I really think you have to know what you are doing before you spend a lot of money on them, something I’m still working on. For now I’m going to stick with doing free promos and be happy with the tiny amount I earn each month.

Medium

Yeah, I bitch and complain a lot about Medium. Mainly because of their lack of interest in promoting creative writers. But, they are my most consistent monthly earner. I average around $30 a month on Medium. Not great, but it pays for at least half of the coffee I drink at Starbucks while I’m writing. And out of all the writing platforms I’m on, despite my complaints, Medium allows my weird “all over the place” creative brain to find a home for most of my writing.

I haven’t seen any paying writing platforms yet that will allow you to earn from Haiku, poetry, Haibun, Short Form, flash fiction, short stories, personal essays, and even excerpts from longer work like novellas and novels.

Even though Medium isn’t currently my biggest monthly earner (by a long shot), I have a feeling it might continue to be the most consistent.

News Break

This is kind of sad to admit, but since January 2021 (yes you read that correctly) I’ve earned more than I have in the 22 previous years of my “writing career”. Before you get all excited I should mention that during those 22 years I often earned as little as $25 and probably a high of around $1000 during a single year.

News Break has paid me between $1000 to $1700 per month since January. Again, before you get too excited this money grab ends in May. News Break has changed their policy, again, and more than likely after May the payment system will probably return to earth and be similar to Medium’s in terms of how much writers can earn there. I suspect it might even get worse. Unlike Medium, News Break has become extremely strict about the types of stories they will and won’t accept since April. It is pretty much local news stories only now.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for journalists and freelancers that can do a lot of solid research and write on just about any topic they put their minds to, but that is not me. I’m first and foremost a creative writer. If I’m not inspired to write something I don’t see the point. I already have a day job that pays far better than my writing does that I don’t enjoy doing. Why would I want to do the same with my writing?

I’ll probably get one more good pay day from News Break in May and then after that I’ll slow way down or even stop writing for then all together. It was fun while it lasted though.

Alternative and Weird Sources of Earnings and Potential Earning Sources

I wanted to finish this with a couple of things that are either paying indirectly via crypto-currency or have the potential to earn, but haven’t paid off for me yet.

Ko-Fi/Buy Me a Coffee/Patreon: I have accounts on all of these, I’ve posted some stuff on all of them, nobody there loves me on any of them yet. But I also haven’t done much at all to promote myself. I love writing when I’m inspired. Promoting feels like work. I’d rather put my effort into something I don’t enjoy doing like teaching that at least is guaranteed to pay me for my time and work.

BitClout/Steem: These ones pay, very tiny amounts so far, in crypto-currency. I haven’t been active on Steem for a very long time because for the few dollars I earned there in their in-house coin (Steem Dollars, I think it is called) it hasn’t even been worth it to cut and paste articles from Medium there. When I was active on there, articles about Crypto or cons to steal your Crypto were the only things that got any play. I don’t know if it is still the same or not.

BitClout is extremely new, but it feels sort of like the Twitter version of Steem to me. The difference though is that you only need to post a 280 character Tweet to potentially earn BitClout Coins which they tell us will eventually be tradeable for other coins, which can then be turned into cash. Right now though any BitClout Coins you earn there are locked in the system. I have no idea if anything will ever come of it, but if all it requires me to do is make a few Tweets everyday to potentially earn, I think it is worth the time.

Kindle Vella: I got an email from Amazon about this one about two days ago. It is so new it is still in the beta stage. From what I can tell it is a way to serialize your short stories and books. The payment system is based on something Amazon is calling Fav Tokens which I take to mean their brand new in-house Crypto-Currency. No idea where this one will lead. But I have some stuff I can throw up there, so I’ll give it a shot. Who knows if Fav Tokens will skyrocket in value, sink, or if they will earn far more for me than my regular book sales do?

That’s all I got. As I said at the start, this isn’t one of those crappy “How to Make a Gazillion Dollars a Month From Your Haiku” type articles. This one about a Blue Collar writer who has been at it for decades. I don’t make much, but I do earn something and that says a lot for an industry in which only about 2% of writers even make a living at it.