How hard is it to get rich writing?

I thought it was obvious Cubsfan was at least half kidding and also thought it was pretty durn funny.

That, or woo-woo self-help bull pucky. Move over Rhonda Byrne.

This.

We’ve seriously talked about it but have no idea how to bring that cash cow to the farm so we can start milking it. I feel like I’ve got 2 maybe 3 books in me, no more.

What about writing screenplays? They are shorter and should lead to piles of cash and fame right?

Yes. Sell everything, move to Hollywood, and just ask. It’s that easy.

I believe it was Neil Gaiman, who seems to have done okay for himself financially, who said that if you just want to make money you’re better off working at McDonald’s. Most writers never make as much from their writing as they could make as full-time burger flippers. If you can work your way up to assistant manager you’ll be making more money each year than many relatively successful novelists do from their books.

What kind of writing are we talking about? Purely fiction? Becoming the great American Novelist? Or will any kind of commercial writing do?

Unless you hit the top ten on the NY Times best seller list, or get optioned for movies or TV, a novel isn’t going to make you rich. Even if you make $100,000 from a novel, if you only get one published every 2 or 3 years you’re only going to be making a lower middle class income from your writing - $50,000 per year in self-employment income is maybe equivalent to $35,000 per year in a regular job, considering that you have no benefits, no guarantee of future pay, and you have to pay your taxes and you have to pay the employer’s portion of your social security tax.

These days, successful writers are, above all else, prolific. You don’t just write your novel, you write articles for magazines, you publish a blog to keep up interest in your work and promote it, you maybe do some editing for others, or take jobs doing ad copy or whatever else you can find.

One area that is worth exploring is writing for specialty magazines. I used to write articles for computer magazines, poker magazines, and a few others. There are a lot of people who can write well, but there aren’t many people who can write well and also know a lot about poker or the RS-422 protocol. So there’s always room in such magazines for authors. The pay sucks - I think I used to get cheques in the neighborhood of $100-$300 for most of the stuff I wrote. So if you want to make a living doing that, you have to write a LOT.

Well, I’d also say you have to know what sells. A memoir about growing up in Rhode Island sounds like it’s going to have a pretty limited market right off the bat, so that’s not surprising.

The most important rule for someone who wants to be a writer is that you have to actually write things. And finish them. A simple rule that 90% of would-be writers never get past. The nice thing about writing on the web is that you get instant feedback, and that can act as an incentive to keep writing. Ultimately, what makes someone a good writer is writing - a lot. Like anything else, skill comes with practice.

And the need for editing is a valid point, but crowd-sourcing and other internet mechanisms can help there. Write a lot, put your stuff out there, and listen to the feedback you get. You can also get editorial help by joining writer’s groups and publishing online fiction to message boards that specialize in short fiction and critical responses.

I used to write a blog that was mostly short humorous pieces. Doing that, you quickly learn what people fund funny. If you get linked on Digg and promoted to the first page, you know you came up with something really good.

While I agree that striking it rich as a novelist is about as likely as becoming a rich athlete, don’t underestimate the number of people who are making a living writing on the internet. Google Adwords and Adsense, the Amazon partner program, and other programs like it are generating a lot of revenue for a lot of internet authors.

A couple of years ago I put together a single page article for how to make a screen for a home theater. It was linked on most of the home theater web sites. Later on, I did another page showing how to turn a regular drum pedal into one you could use in Rock Band. On a whim, I signed up for Google Adsense and threw their embedded code on the pages to add an Adsense column. That’s all I did - no marketing, no link bait posts on message boards, nothing. A few months later I got a cheque from Google for $100. I got another one a few months after that. I think I’ve had a total of four of them now. Those two pages took no more than a few hours of work each. The key to the amount of revenue they generated was that A) they were about issues that were in big demand at the time, and B) the specialized content meant the Google Adsense showed very relevant links, and therefore the ads got clicked on a lot.

I got curious about that as a model for self-publishing, and started researching it. And found that there are a lot of people doing this. You brainstorm a new idea for a page describing how to do something, and spend a day writing it. You put it on the internet. You do another one the next day. Over time, you have dozens to hundreds of such pages. You add links from one to the other. You promote them as much as you can. If you work hard at it, you can build up a nice income stream.

A hundred dollar check every once in a while? Sure. I have that myself. A nice income stream? Doubtful. A living? Exactly as many as make a living from any other type of writing.

Lots and lots and lots of people have thought to make money this way. It doesn’t work any better than any other approach.

See this thread for a discussion of how all the sites that use this as a model are scams.

I’ve been away. Is Charles King now?

People often think that because screenplays are relatively short and consist almost exclusively of dialogue and brief description that they are easy to write. Actually, the opposite is true; instead of being able to define your characters and environment by the wide variation of acceptable prose and style, you have a very rigid format to follow with little allowance for individual writing style. You have to express your story almost completely through the words and direct actions of the character, knowing fully that unless you are also so privileged as to be the director, you will have almost no input into the mise-en-scene and nuances of character behavior. The director, the editor, the actors, the cinematographer, the costume designer, and even the makeup artist and key grip probably have more eventual control over the movie as a product than the writer.

Even worse, your hard sweat will be regarded as mere nuggets of a story which a team of professional no-talent executives will mangle beyond recognition and then hand to hired gun script doctors to form into some papier-mâché pastiche of your original story, which will go on to make the studio millions while you sue for a fractional point “story by” credit. Your well-researched screenplay about the dark side of prostitution with a crack-addicted hooker who stays clean for a week to earn $3000 to take herself and her roommate to Disneyland but instead ending up dead in a dumpster will instead become a rousing Cinderella-esque rom-com featuring pretty vacuous people saying improbable things and learning valuable life lessons to succeed in the end. Unless you are the writer-director-producer and have complete creative control anything you submit as a screenplay is likely to bear about as much resemblance to what appears on screen as a cow does to a well-broiled fillet mignon. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; most agents can attest to the fact that more than 99% of spec screenplays are unspeakable crap, and even those that may have some essence of entertainment value to them are not filmable, because most screenwriters don’t know a camera from their left nostril.

If you really want to be a screenwriter, and don’t want to play the incredible lottery that the very, very few successful spec scripts from unknown screenweriters enjoy, you need to start in the bush leagues and work your way up. That means working the sit-com or soap opera circuit, working your way into more innovative t.v. comedies or dramas, make connections with people who can get your work and reputation known by the few truly capable executives, and then pitch your script. Or, do like many successful writers like Lawrence Kasdan, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, John Sayles, and Paul Haggis have done, and work as preferred script doctors and then use their proceeds and gravitas from successful hack films to produce the personal projects (independent films, stage plays, et cetera) that you really want to do at break-even or loss.

Of course, none of these guys got to be a script doctor by walking off the street into a studio and offering up their incredible talents as an unknown; they all have spent decades honing their abilities to a razor sharp edge, and are held in such high regard because they know how to turn an unprofitable steaming pile of crap into a hugely profitable steaming pile of crap. If you haven’t spent ten years or more in the gutter leagues honing and demonstrating that kind of skill, much less all the networking you have to do just to be known, you can forget about making a dime on a screenplay.

If you really want to make money writing–and by that, I mean a steady stream of reliable income, not the spectacular but unlikely piles of money that J.K. Rowling has managed to pull in–and believe you have some magnificent talent and unique insight into the human condition, go into advertising. There is no end to the need for clever and catchy soundbites, and that will be true regardless of the medium that advertising takes. You have to prove yourself there, too, but the odds of making a living are much, much better and for far less work and disappointment than writing fiction, screenplays, “How To” books, and other forms of “real” writing.

Stranger

As an indie film producer, I can vouch for most of that.

When it comes to financing a film, be it studio or indie, the writer is at the end of the line to get paid, and even if there is money for some at the front of the line, there may well not be money for people at the end.

Thus, if you are writing spec scripts, you might as well play the lottery, the valuation of any individual ticket, minuscule as it is, is probably higher than any spec script.

Now, if you want to be in the business of selling scripts, that might be a somewhat different beast, because at least it means you will need to address your costs and revenue, your marketing and sales, your benefits and risks, all in a tidy business plan.

Then you can decide how to finance the business and go for it, instead of writing some stuff that you hope will be more discoverable than Lana Turner ever was.

Not that I would recommend such a business model - quite the opposite, I would recommend partnering with up and coming filmmakers and producers and other team members and building a business on that as a better option than doing your part and hoping each sequentially will value what has been done before but independently.

IOW, find a promising filmmaker who can’t write and then together go out and find a producer who will go out and build the business while you two create.