Comments, Questions & Recommendations
Re the July 4 issue: “I cannot tell you how much I loved this.”
“I waddled thru the opening paragraphs including the poem, which not surprisingly I wasn’t as impressed with as you were… but then came to this piece about your solar panel installer interaction:
“You are doing the right thing,” I said. “Following your passion is what lucky people that get rich say when they are accepting awards. For the rest of us, we must first follow our moral obligations – and the most important of those is to pay for our lives and the lives of those who depend on us.”
He liked that idea. We became friends.
“I cannot tell you how much I loved this. I envisioned this exchange, you telling him this with the same honesty and seriousness that I have seen you direct at others. Honestly, I was a bit choked up at the end.” – CF
A wannabe writer asks for advice
“I’ve followed your career for years and believe you are one of the best writers around. Do you have any advice for a young author who wants to write for a living?” – ME
My Response: Step One, figure out what you mean when you say “write for a living.”
If you are happy earning $72,270 a year (the median salary for writers and authors), you should choose a field to write about that you believe will maintain your interest for a long time. Why a long time? Because, as a rule, writing for a living is a low-paid gig, and getting your yearly comp up to “average” will take several years – at least three and maybe as much as five. Why is that? Because however much natural talent you think you have, the company that hires you knows that it is highly unlikely that you will be writing at the level they want as a beginner. So you have to think long-term. If, for example, you are keen on golf now, you have to think about whether you will be keen on golf 10 years from now and even 30 years from now. Because once you get into a niche, it’s not easy to get out of it. Everything conspires to keep you there, including your knowledge, your skills, and your professional contacts.
If you want to make serious money, you have to research the various subject fields in terms of how much writers typically make and select one with an average income that meets your minimum desire. For example, if you want to make at least $100,000 a year, you should look at the kinds of writing where writers can make that kind of money. Technical writing in the medical field is one. Writing for a public relations company is another.
If you want to make the really big money, you have a binary choice: Become a bestselling novelist or fiction writer or a high-level copywriter.
Once you have a goal in mind, the next step would be to get an entry level job in a competitive environment and spend two to three years writing 12 hours a day to become an expert in your field and a master of the craft of the sort of writing you are doing.
Then, once you have real confidence (i.e., you have proven you are good at your trade), start to step up your compensation by marketing yourself constantly to larger businesses in your field that are happy to pay their writers more than the industry average.
A recommendation from AS: “Hurt,” by Johnny Cash
I didn’t like this song when I first heard it, but when I saw this video of it that AS sent in, it got to me. It’s a heartbreaker.
