Why So Many Talented Writers Stay Broke

Your craft and your career. You've found a way to rationalize not learning about the business side of your art. And you have found a way to rationalize not having the clarity of thought and the awareness within yourself to recognize when you should write for love and when you should write for money. Because all of these things are so painful to address in yourself and would fundamentally mean something. Seeing behind the curtain and accepting the capitalistic structure of the publishing landscape for what it is, it is so much easier to instead say, well, I'm a romantic. I just love the craft of writing real writing. I don't want to do it for the money. And then two seconds later, complaining about how nobody makes a living as a writer, or complaining about how you're not making any money from your writing. This is a topic I feel so strongly about because if I'm being completely honest, these were all the things that being a real writer meant, not caring about the money or not acquiring the skills to write things that were in any way commercial. But then two seconds later, I would complain about how my apartment didn't have air conditioning and nobody makes a living as a writer. And it took me a very long time to stop romanticizing the work and just accept the way things are. Writers who understand the business side make the most money. Writers who build audiences have a huge advantage when it comes to marketing. Writers who build the skills to sell their writing have the easiest time selling copies of books or products or services. Writers who produce the most volume tend to be the ones who get better the fastest and make the most money. Quality over quantity is a myth. This is what people who lack self confidence and want to productively procrastinate publishing their work say, what you really want is a high quantity of quality work. Book deals are a scam. The size of the market is what dictates the size and rate of your hypothetical success. If you write romance genre fiction, you're probably going to be more financially successful than the person who writes literary fiction. It has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with the size of the total addressable market of readers. Okay, all of these things that I just listed out, and there are hundreds more, are the way things actually are, not the way you wish they were. And so the real bottleneck to you becoming a successful writer and achieving anything on your list of meaningful milestones is you have to stop romanticizing what you think it's like to write in the digital age. You have to let go of this dream of Hemingway, living carefree in Paris, drinking wine and writing uninterrupted for eight straight right? Never once worrying about rent. Newsflash, Hemingway constantly worried about paying rent, and he was broke most of his life. So whatever narrative you're telling yourself isn't actually true. You've just found a very clever way to avoid doing the work and accepting the rules of the game by saying, real writers don't do that. Okay, let me clarify that for you. Broke writers don't do that. Broke writers don't learn the rules of the game. Broke writers believe being business illiterate is what makes them great and true to their craft. Broke writers think you can only do real writing when you hide away from society in a cabin in the woods. Broke writers defer any and all responsibility to the publisher and adopt a strategy called Let me close my eyes and pray that it all works out. And broke writers spend their entire lives in this cognitive dissonance between these two opposing statements. I want to write what I want to write about, and I want to make money. And I'm here to tell you that until you come to terms with that cognitive dissonance, you are going to stay stuck forever.