How To Relaunch A Writing Income

I will preface this by saying that I have been a professional writer at various points in my life. By that I mean that I have made a full-time income purely from writing words.

My income has come from various sources that included writing non-fiction for others (business, webmasters), ghostwriting fiction, and writing fiction for myself under various pen names. I've even made some of my income from writing on residual income sites, like Vocal. Not a lot, but some..

So, I am coming at this with some experience behind me.

But everything changes so fast in the writing world. I feel like a beginner. I'm really starting from scratch. Minus the small amount of money I still get from Amazon each month for books published in the past. It's less than $100 and more than $50 most months.

I also have a small amount of freelance work I've kept up with over the years. Two clients. One is social media (Facebook posting) and the other is blog posts. That comes to a little less than $500 between the two of them.

So, I guess I'm not starting from scratch.

But I'm starting again.

Last summer I thought I would try to build up my freelance income again. I figured it would be the fastest way to building up an income on a part-time basis so that I could look towards being full-time. I put all my efforts into Fiverr.

I don't have anything bad to say about Fiverr. There are pros and cons, just like any job. But when it came right down to it, it felt more like a job than I wanted it to. I hated negotiating with clients. I hated the need to work around all of the rules. It just didn't fit the way I want to run MY writing business. I didn't want to have to be available 24/7. I didn't want to have to drop everything to get a client order done within 24 hours. And I hate being micromanaged.

I did manage to get up to $500-700 a month. But I was busting my butt to do it. So, I gave it up.

This time around, I am going to do what I love doing - writing fiction. I'm going to write shorter books (novellas and novellettes) and I'm going to write characters that I like to read about. I haven't got it all worked out yet. But I'm working on a plan.

I have a genre in mind. It's a genre that has lots of room for new writers and I know there are a lot of authors who are successful at it and make a full-time income.

It's also a genre where authors often work together. They collaborate to write series together. They pick a common them and each author writes their own book and all the books are tied together in a series. I've done this in the past and I can see how it works well. All the authors promote each other and that means more eyes on everyone's books.

I'm not going to try to join any collaborations for a while though.

For now, I'm just focusing on getting back into the habit of writing. I haven't written very much in the past couple of years. Here and there I'd get some words on the page but mostly, it was going no where and I haven't completed a project in over two years.

I'm not even going to publish anything for a few months! Other than a short story or two that I might publish here. I'm going to try to get at least 4 stories written and ready for publishing and then I'll get going again on the money making portion of it.

I really need accountability though. So, since I have a year of a membership here at Vocal, I'm going to be updating here. The goal is once a week but more or less, depending on how things are going I guess. LOL

I hope you'll join me on my journey. Hit the subscribe button below and I'll do the same for you. And if you really want to encourage me you could leave a comment with your thoughts or even leave a tip!

Thanks for reading this long and rambling post!