Writers Are In High Demand — But You Won't Get There With Crowdsourced Publishing Advice

If you are interested in actually becoming a professionally accredited writer, with a peerless portfolio of paid works to submit for the highest paying freelance gigs, and you want to learn how to apply for those gigs and how to pitch and query the highest paying mass-market periodicals, you are going to want to read every word of this article.

It will take time, but I promise, the $.01 I get from your effort won’t make me rich. It just might change your life someday though. But it won't be today, or tomorrow either.

A career as a writer is a marathon, not a sprint. However, once you win your first marathon, you immediately have done something very few other people in life have ever done. Being a best-selling or award-winning writer is exactly the same. This is not something just anybody can do. More on that later. For now, keep reading. You won't regret it.

The 'crowdsource publishing' journey for writers

It really is no secret that at least 95% of the ‘advice’ articles that ‘veteran’ users of these platforms post, supposedly with the intention of helping ‘Newbie’ writers succeed faster, are nothing more than hot trash.

There are no less than 1,000 writers (I stopped counting at 1,000) that I have cataloged who write nothing but these clickbait articles aimed directly at new users of the site

When you click on their profiles and look at everything they have ever posted, there are literally hundreds of these ‘How to” articles, but absolutely nothing else. That is, not one single creative piece of writing — not even a grocery list.

They learned something during their time on these crowdsourced publishing sites alright. They learned that there are a lot of people, many of whom have disposable income, who desperately want to be able to call themselves ‘writers’. People who will pay, often large sums of money, to be tutored in the craft by someone they feel is a pro-- a master of the craft.

They feed on this. They will relentlessly tell you that they aren’t going to make you a writer because you already are one. They’ll even tell you that nobody can ever take that away from you-- that your hard work makes you a writer, no matter what anyone else thinks or says.

These people are completely full of shit.

Here’s the problem with that: very few people writing on these sites, and I do mean VERY few, are professional writers or are in any way qualified to teach anyone else how to be a professional writer.

Sure, there are more than a few folks on here who have gotten quite adept at generating clicks and averting your A.D.D. (attention deficit disorder) long enough to accumulate some impressive read times. But that does not, in any way, qualify them as writers. They are good marketers for sure. Probably decent salespeople as well. They sell ideas rather than used cars, but the concept is the same.

Back in the day, used car salespeople used to tell car buyers things like: “You’ll get instant respect in your neighborhood by parking this baby in your driveway.” Or telling single guys that the Mustang he was wanting to just take for a test drive today, would net him more female companionship than a college football scholarship.

Today, the vehicle quite literally has changed, but the methodology and the psychology behind it haven’t changed even a little bit.

As a degreed and formerly licensed Psychologist (I let my license expire because renewals are expensive and I no longer see patients), I am quite often fascinated at how the human ego, particularly here in the US, has grown exponentially over the past 30 years.

People from every walk of life now want to be recognized as better than average at something they consider to be a prestigious skill.

For many people today, that skill is writing. What makes this worse, is that predatory sales and marketing people have keyed in on this widespread lust for people to feel intellectually relevant and superior to others.

This is indeed the ‘one up’ generation. It’s the ‘anything you can do, I can do better’ mentality, and it's a very large part of our society today. Unfortunately, platforms like this have become the ideology’s petri dish. By preaching 'inclusion' -- the 'all you have to do is want it and will it to be so to make it happen', approach, people are falling for these scams by the thousands.

In this ideology, no longer must anyone get formally educated to become proficient or be an expert in any field. Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube will teach you how to be an expert on anything — literally anything, as far as many Americans are concerned.

That’s because there is a growing movement that people can change the requirements of anything they wish through their sheer force of will. This is also extremely prevalent in debates on social media platforms.

I’m going to digress here for a bit to provide a real-life analogy of this exact type of mentality that I experienced just two days ago on Facebook

I recently had a discussion with a very liberal friend of mine, who is insistent that his wife is the victim of a crime because she got coerced since early high school that she needed to go to college. Because she was manipulated, he claims, they should not have to repay the $60k in debt that education cost her.

I have to say here, I usually avoid these like the plague. But since this is a pretty relevant and timely hot button topic these days— what with all the talk going on about student debt forgiveness, I decided to take one for the team, and engage this guy whom I've known casually on FB for a while and who usually seems level headed enough.

So I asked him, what does your wife do? She is a teacher.

I was taken aback. You can’t be a teacher without a degree, I told him. He knew that.

Then she is actually using her degree… every day….the degree is earning money for both of you? Yes, he replied, but after taxes, she only nets about $24k per year, a real disgrace, he exclaimed.

I was really puzzled now. Let me make sure I have all the facts straight...

You went into debt of $60k to get a teaching degree. Y

Shortly after graduating, your wife got a job as a teacher? Y

Your wife still has that job, and that job nets your family about $24k per year after taxes and insurance? Y

So, the degree that your wife was coerced into getting earns your family enough money to pay for itself, with interest, every third year? Well, I wouldn’t say that.

I know you wouldn’t say that, but is it true? If you insist on looking at it that way but it doesn't change the fact that she was lied to and told she had to go to college or she wouldn't amount to anything.

Could she be a teacher without going to college? N

Then where was she lied to? She didn’t have to be a teacher, but she was pushed that way. She figured if she had to go to college, it should be for something she liked doing.

I see. And because of these things, that you’ve just told me, you believe your family shouldn’t have to repay that loan? That’s right. Either that or the government should pass a law that people who do go to college have to make enough money to pay off their loans when they graduate.

So you feel your wife should make what, at least $60K per year? At least that. It's a really hard job and a thankless job. She works really hard and then comes home exhausted.

Did it ever occur to your wife to look to teach at a school that pays more? She shouldn’t have to. She loves where she works.

Whether she should have to or not is pretty irrelevant, the fact remains if she could be making more elsewhere and that additional income would go a long way to helping your family, shouldn’t she consider it? No, she shouldn’t her debt needs to be absolved and her pay increased and we would be just fine where she is. Besides, we live in South Carolina. Teachers make nothing in this state, it's pitiful.

That might be so, have you ever considered relocating to a state that pays its teachers more? No, we like it here. Our kids like it here. We shouldn't have to move for more money. The government just needs to forgive her student debt and mandate that teachers make more.

So, in conclusion, I just want to make sure I have all the facts correctly…in journalism, we call this recapping…to recap,

• You feel that your wife was lied to and manipulated into $60k worth of student loan debt for a degree that she uses every day and that earns your family a net of $24k per year after taxes and insurance…which means she really makes about $35k per year gross…..
• You're further dissatisfied that the school district your wife works in doesn't pay enough but she refuses to look elsewhere for higher-paying teaching jobs because she likes where she’s at….
• As a whole, the state you live in pays teachers for shit, but relocating to a state that pays teachers well is unfathomable because both you and your kids like it in S.C…..
• And even though your wife’s degree actually pays for itself every 2 years ( we don’t go by net, we go by gross because everybody has to pay for taxes and insurance so we don't just deduct them from our salaries to make ourselves look worse off than we are) you feel that she’s been treated criminally by the system and by her high school advisors…..
• Because of all this, you feel 100% justified and entitled to have her entire $60k student loan debt be removed and placed upon the shoulders of the other taxpayers across America.
• You also feel that even once her student loan debt is gone, the government should pass a law requiring her to make at least $60k per year because that’s what her degree cost America

Did I get that right? Pretty much that says it yeah.

This is why I don’t see patients anymore.

The situation with this guy and his wife is far from unique, and it’s analogous to the situation with writers, in that, he and his wife want what they want when they want it, but they only want it the way they want it. That is, without imposing self burden or sacrifice. Many of today’s wannabe writers look at careers in writing in exactly the same way.

They want to be writers, but only if the title, skills, and expertise can be somehow embossed onto them or fed into their minds as if by osmosis. Very few of them want to expend the effort necessary to become qualified professional writers — so they fall prey to the wolf-like marketers constantly telling them falsehoods like:

• You don’t need to have a degree to be a professional writer
• You don’t need any formal education in English or creative writing to be a professional writer or a published author
• If you write, you are a writer
• If you publish on these sites and get paid for it, or on Amazon KDP and people buy your books, you are a professional published writer/author

Then, even worse, when honest and professional writers try to properly educate these poor, misguided bastards, we are rebuked. Not only by the ruthless marketers baiting these poor schmucks into buying their worthless advice and their even more worthless ‘courses’, but by the schmucks themselves!

So much do they want to believe in the dream these sorry-assed marketers are selling them, that they will actually turn rabid on genuine writers who have been working in the industry for decades!

They call us ‘elitists’, and make the most ridiculous comments like “you elitist scumbags think there's only one way to become successful and you’re just jealous that someone else has figured out other ways that bypass and surpass you!”

Uhm…no. I promise — that ain’t it.

The fact is — and it will always remain — that to be an accredited professional at anything, you need to be formally educated in the field — by masters of the craft, and then tested and certified by those masters, confirming that you too are now a master craftsman.

Now, if you want to point out the handful of uneducated, non-professionals who have had tremendous success as writers, feel free. Literally, there are only a handful. Further, between all self-pub and indie books and articles produced last year, there were over 70 million new works added to humanity, by about 20 million unique writers/authors. In all of that, and probably more, only a handful sold more than a few hundred copies of whatever they self-published.

The Indie book market specifically is even worse. Bowkers, the company that tracks all global book sales for both indie and traditional book publishers, reports that 99.87 % of all self-published books never sell more than 300 copies in their lifetime. They also add that of the 300 sold, 82% of those are reportedly sold as author copies, which means they are bought by authors and their families to give away or sell at book signings, etc…

It would truly be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

Yet every day, devout educators like myself, struggle to teach people who are interested in becoming professionals, what it takes to actually reach that plateau. That is, to be recognized as such by your colleagues and have a respectable portfolio of paid, published clips that will get your foot in the door to sell your work to globally circulated mass-market periodicals like The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, Motor Trend, Car & Driver, Family Circle, Better Homes & Gardens, Reader’s Digest, etc…

The bottom line

If you want to legitimately be able to call yourself a professional writer… if you want to have other professionals read what you create and immediately offer to buy it from you or represent you in selling it to someone else, you will almost certainly never achieve that by teaching yourself.

Is it possible? Sure. Hitting Powerball on two consecutive draw dates and then getting struck by lightning on your way to the bank is also possible. If that’s how you make your decisions in life, you should probably stick to the lottery.

That might hurt, but it’s the truth.

If you’re interested in becoming a professionally accredited writer, with a peerless portfolio of paid works to submit for the highest paying freelance gigs, and you want to learn how to apply for those gigs and how to pitch and query the highest paying mass-market periodicals, subscribe to my newsletter.

I will soon be calling for applicants to submit work demonstrating their writing abilities — writers who wish to be personally tutored by me (an Ivy League-educated 30-year professional writer and former Associate Professor of English). The students I select will be taught not only how to write better, but how to sell what they write.

If that’s you, I will teach you how to master your craft and sell your work to the big boys for up to $2.00 per word instead of on crowdsourced publishing platforms like Medium, Vocal, Substack, Fiverr, or Upwork for pennies per thousand clicks or $10 per gig.

When I begin my courses, I will basically be offering the trade school equivelant of a bachelor's degree in English and creative writing — which won’t break you and can be paid over time, just like any legitimate school tuition.