Writer Desperately Seeks New World Monetization

My passion has long been to write for my living. This is the story of how I reached for my dream and grasped it. Eleven years after I started blogging.

I blogged and my blog posts made up my book. I edited my book on and off for years. Ready or not, I self-published my book in 2019. Now I'm learning how to write better. Learning how to write for different platforms. Earning kind words and recognition for my writing on one platform and earning a living on another. Editing what I wrote in my book, publishing, one chapter at a time and then publishing each one as a short story on two different platforms.

An enormous audience found my fiction on one of those platforms. Then my fans couldn’t find my chapters because the rules changed. That big platform actually liked my writing enough to want to pay me. To pay me enough to live on! So I went freelance

To get the high scores and tick the boxes to get paid over double what fiction gets. I again learnt how to write. Fiction takes a back seat again. My passion and my imagination keep me writing. The passion to write about the weird, the supernatural, the uncanny started when I was eight years old. I heaved a black-bound book down from my father’s bookcase, opened it, and started reading.

Fairies at the bottom of a now-famous English garden in Cottingley. The photos proved the ethereal creatures genuine. All the while thinking fairies exist in Peter Pan and Lord of the Rings, too, they must be real. Remember, I was eight and programmed to believe everything my father, my teachers, and books told me.

No matter how much I write about different myriad non-fiction topics, I long to write about fairies and hobgoblins living in the actual world. To create a world where humans of all ages can see magical creatures if they believe. A world where we don’t stop believing when we grow up. When work and families of our own steal our imaginations.

We don’t lose our imaginations completely. Instead, we adapt our skills to problem-solving. A repurposed imagination is an excellent tool for technical and customer service solutions. Yet, all those decades spent conforming to the system wear on a person.

Little did I know that while I accepted the bumps in salary and perks of skyward progression, I was worshipping corporate greed. My ability to please the corporation took me higher and higher in my career. I offered budget-friendly solutions and delighted the customers because their latest internet bolt-on service would now interact with their unique PC.

Who knew I had it in me to translate tech-speak into the common tongue. A gift. I possessed the ability to ask the engineers stupid questions so I could understand what the problem and the fix were. Then I wrote a step-by-step training guide for the helpdesk to deliver to the end-users.

Satisfaction for all parties guaranteed!

I lost myself in my career for twenty years. In relationships for longer than that. Then, I taught English as a second language in Prague for eight years and in the UK for almost two years. COVID-19 ended that career run. Those minimum wage jobs I did would bore you. One of them bored the 150 call handlers in a call centre that received a handful of calls per day.

I survived. In 2020, I wrote. A lot. I wrote 202 articles and earned only £360. This year, as of May 31st, I published 126 articles on the same platform and earned $120. However, I also qualified for a $500 bonus which bumped up my reward substantially!

My fiction gets half as much recognition as my writing about writing. I feel obliged to pursue the well-trodden path. But everyone does that. Doh.

I also wrote 115 articles for a news platform that paid me $7,600 for the first 5 months of this year. Nice gig. The sum includes a per-article payment and earnings from views.

You can see where we are heading with this, can’t you? Bear with me, though, because while we all need money to live on, life isn’t all about raking in pots of moola. Not for all of us creators.

Creators who crave the conception, design and build elements of a brave new world, may lose hope when churning out well-researched journalistic articles for enough money to stave off poverty. How can we build worlds while writing about homelessness in San Francisco? Oh, lightbulb moment! An idea to save for another day.

A favourite of many writers is to write about writing. Some of us achieve recognition for doing that on a popular platform. Writing about our experiences as writers, our productivity levels, what we do to make us get out of bed in the morning. We write about what we do when our feet hit the floor and how we get through our day. And on and on the merry-go-round spins. Some make a lot of money from this, especially if they possess the smarts to further monetize their teaching skills.

This is far from a dig at these writers who can churn out a slight twist on their most lucrative trope. Many of us would love to be in that position of success.

Most of us can write on any topic that takes our fancy and sets alight our stream of consciousness. That state where we just keep on writing until we can’t. Virginia Woolf, one of the most important twentieth-century modernist writers, used this technique in A Room of One’s Own.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” ~Virginia Woolf

But. What about the creation of fictional worlds? Discworld by Terry Pratchett. All-World, Stephen King. Dune, Frank Herbert, Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski. To name but a few.

What world would you pay a writer to invent and build for you? Because isn’t it about time writers received a living wage to invoke the power of their creative minds to entertain the readers and viewers of this world?

Yes, yes, we could pitch our screenplays to Hollywood. Even brilliant writers have failed at this. Yes, we could write our books and self-publish on Amazon, but mostly they go unnoticed. Two sales in two years.

Most writers have zero interest in marketing and promoting their work. We just want to write. We’d love for publishers to see something in a story and approach us and tell us they want to sell our work all over the world! It’s a fantasy. Of course, publishers are far too distracted by thousands of manuscripts from writers who believe in their words.

Yet there is hope. My top-earning fictional piece generated nearly a month’s pay in February 2021. One hundred and six thousand people across the United States of America read the first chapter of my book. Thousands of readers followed me. The platform considers me an influential writer. That’s got to mean something, right? There must be a publisher out there who would be interested in this story, surely? Okay, okay, I’ll see if I can find some to send my manuscript to. Maybe.

Better yet, what if there were a platform that managed the techie side of things so all a writer had to do was write? Throw in simple website creation and marketing and I would be there like a shot. Complex applications overwhelm me. I can’t even use the “simple” Mailchimp automation platform or ConvertKit’s build a custom opt-in form to create a newsletter email.

Writers are dreamers and world builders, poets and playwrights. Now we have to be business owners too. Or at least have a half brother with a publishing house. As Ms Woolf did. Personally, I can no longer read solid pages of prose. I own a copy of A Room of One’s Own but I haven’t read past the end of chapter one. What I read, though, impressed me to no end. Also, I am not comparing my writing ability with Ms Woolf’s.

This world advanced beyond imagination in the twentieth century. It continues to challenge us in human-crafted ways. Yet, the overarching stumbling block, money, surpasses all other classes of need.

Don’t you think there’s something immoral going on here? Our once-abundant planet pillaged and stripped by humans who now exist in the upper echelons of society. Capitalism requires us to work for people who have robbed their fellow humans of their right to live with dignity and purpose.

Wouldn’t you agree millions if not billions of us could find our passions for life and living by embracing technology? Let robots and artificial intelligence do the mindless work. Let’s reward all humans with a living wage so they can choose a life that instils peace and harmony.

A life where we can discover our long-suppressed gifts and a time when worry and mere survival no longer exist. We get one chance at this life, shouldn’t we all live free from the crushing power of financial wealth?

We can achieve anything we put our minds to, but we have to work together to make it happen. A universal basic income could make this utopia real and allow us all to discover our passions.

I lost one audience, those followers who felt raw emotion which made some of them cry and others rage. The 138 comments gave me a few clues to how they felt. Yet the other audience knows where to find my words. I continue to polish my passion. Because polished work shines. Whether fact or fiction.

One day I will find another one hundred and six thousand readers, not for journalistic articles but for a new world I invented. Maybe there’s even a way technology enables writers to monetize their passion with membership by doing what they love right now.

If Taylor Swift can sell a song and Beeple can sell his digital art via auctions of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), then why not stories or poems tailored to personal requests? It would be just like looking for prompts or waiting for the muse to offer her gifts.

Just drop me a line if you’d like me to invent a world or ghostwrite a story for someone you love. I could even offer the next chapter of my book. You know, the one I’d love for a publisher to read and offer me a deal.