How Important Is Making Money From Writing?

Many purists will tell you that writing is an art form and so you should never be so vulgar to discuss money in the same sentence.

And to that I say, rubbish.

We all want to earn money from our writing and we want to earn enough so that we can quit the day job and write.

But how important should money be? Should you care more about earning money than about your writing?

No.

Writing and publishing should lead to money but wanting to earn money shouldn’t lead you to writing.

You should write because you love to write and not because you think it’s a fast and easy way to make money.

If you do that, your writing will never be good.

A perfect example of this is a writer I heard from who said she’d studied the market and discovered that the fastest selling ebooks were romance novels.

She wanted to write ebooks because, she said, they were a good source of passive income and so she could work once and go on earning money from her novels for years.

Her goal was to write 30 novels. By her math it would provide her with over $10k/month income through ebook sales.

To get the money faster she wrote her 30 novels in less than a year by writing each ebook in 10 days which is 3 a month and so she’d reach her income goal in a year.

The problem with the plan was that she was writing the books so fast and under so much self-inflicted pressure, that her novels were badly written, full of typos and the plots were trite and uninteresting.
The result is that 18 months later, her ebooks sales are still low.

I thought it would be a better plan to write one really good novel a month instead of 3 really bad ones.

But she wasn’t really a writer to start with. She just thought writing was a way to easy money.

There’s plenty of food for thought in that, isn’t there?

If you’re not a writer, and by that I mean someone who enjoys writing, then you’ll never make a lot of money as a writer.

Writing is a talent that some people have and many don’t.

Most experienced writers find it difficult to write under so much pressure which would make it impossible for a non-writer to do it.

But she tried.

And failed.

Just enjoy writing and keep doing it and eventually you’ll get faster naturally.

I know I did.