This Is What All The Highest Paid Writers Have In Common

One of the things I try and educate writers on is business model matters a lot. So this was the— I don't know if you've seen this, but this is the book I published recently called Writer Career Paths. So the whole— what inspired this book is I think one of the big mistakes that writers make is they don't actually understand that when you say, "I want to become a successful writer," That is a very broad bundled term, and there are lots of different definitions of what it means to be a successful writer. And so first of all, like, most people haven't even unbundled the big vague, "I just want to be a successful writer," right? When you start to unbundle it, you realize that there are lots of different career paths for how you can monetize writing. But each career path leads you to very different outcomes, and each career path you want to think of as its own business vehicle. And so what that means is you can't pick one career path but expect the outcomes associated with a different career path, because each career path promises different levels of status, it promises different levels of income, and it promises both of those things over different time horizons. And so I'll use an extreme example. You can't say, I want to write literary fiction, and then 2 seconds later look at a writerpreneur selling digital products on the internet and go, why aren't I making as much money as that person? Those are 2 different career paths with 2 different definitions of success as a writer, and they promise completely different outcomes. If you write a great literary novel, you will get paid in status. You will not get paid in money. If you, if you make a very lucrative digital product, you will not get any status, but you will make a shit ton of money. And so this, this is, this is a really important thing to have clarity over. And it's something that I find nobody talks about in the writing world. And it's like one of the most important decisions you can make. The second thing is when you talk about making money from books. So this book that I wrote is a great example, The Art and Business of Online Writing. This is to date the book that has made me the most money. Now, to be clear, I love this book. This is great. I'm happy I wrote it. This is not in my library, my favorite thing that I've ever written. So, so the book that makes the most money is not always or often the book that is most fulfilling. The book that was most fulfilling for me to write was my memoir that almost no one has bought, but it is the best thing I've ever written. Okay, so like the, the two goals are different. And then second is, even though this book has made money, this book has probably made, I don't know, maybe like $400,000, $500,000 in royalties over the past 6 years. $1,000, something like that, okay? But this book was the foundation of all the things that we taught in Ship 30 for 30, and Ship 30 for 30 generated millions of dollars. Same ideas, right? And so I think it's important when writers say, like, I want to make money from my book, you need to expand your scope and your definition of success because Like, why, why are so many writers fixated on the book has to be the thing making the money when the book could literally make you $0, but if you build something on the back of it that makes you 10 times or 100 times more money, like, that's not a bad outcome.

By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.