The Truth about Writing Online

Even though the same stories have been written over and over and over again, they still pop up in my stories feed, my social media, and even as banner ads.

“Make your first million by writing online!”

“How to make six figures on Medium!”

“Start making residual earnings for the rest of your life, just by writing!”

They all make it sound so easy. Just throw some words together with some semblance of meaning and you too can make a fortune with words on a screen!

Now, this is going to sound a little condescending coming from someone who makes five figures as a professional writer, but it’s just not that easy.

By my calculations, I have earned $838 here on Medium. That works out to about $3.50/story (I have 238 listed stories, I’m not counting my 98 unlisted stories or the ones I have in draft or review with publications).

At this rate, I would have to publish 28,572 stories to earn six figures cumulatively — not every month, but in total.

When you consider the time that it takes to research, write, and edit stories, I’m making roughly $1/hr. Some of my stories I can knock off in an hour, but others take me 4–6 hours (plus editing time from publications) to get out into the world.

When you write about a variety of topics, you need to give yourself enough time to get the story right, or else you run the risk of losing followers. If you get it wrong often enough, you won’t get anything back at all.

What can you realistically expect?

Here’s the unvarnished truth about Medium and earning thousands of dollars here.

You won’t.

At least that is what you should be expecting.

You see, Medium isn’t a get rich quick scheme, and neither is writing. You have to get up every day and put the work in before you can expect to see returns on your investment. And that’s not just the work of writing.

You see, writing is actually the result of your work. It is all of the other things that are the real work: research, editing, improving grammar and vocabulary, and even experiencing life itself. Those are the things that make your writing worth reading.

Writing on its own is just the product of all the work you’ve done before you set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

If you don’t do the work, then your writing is hollow and empty. You just repeat the same thing day after day after day after day.

How I make a living as a writer.

I mentioned above that I make my living as a writer. I can tell you right off the bat that I don’t make my living from Medium. I make it in spite of Medium and with the help of Medium, but not because of Medium.

Most months, my earnings on Medium are less than $10.

I’ve had one story that has earned me the vast majority of my total income on Medium — about $700. I happened to hit upon the right mix of curation, publication, and SEO to get 15,000 views and a 49% read ratio.

My total earnings from that story are less than I earn for a single week of writing. I’m a freelancer on contract to a non-governmental organization for content writing. My contract pays me hourly, not only for the time I’m actually writing, but also for the time I’m researching, editing, and learning.

One of my tasks is to write a weekly blog that includes information from sources around the world. On a good week, this is about 2,000 words.

Those 2,000 words take me 4–6 hours to get out the door, and most of that is not spent writing. In an average week, I will visit 14 websites as part of my research — most of these are news sites from which I will pull information and links. This results in 6–8 pages of links, about 150–200 raw links that could have some relevance to that week’s blog.

From these raw links, I have to find connections, determine themes, figure out if each of these sources is reputable enough to be included, summarize the contents and events, and then put it all together in a format that passes muster with my editor.

All of this for a blog that might top out at 2,000 words.

Most of that time isn’t spent writing, it is spent doing the work so that I am able to write. By the time I actually get down to writing, I pretty much already know what I’m going to say.

The real work of writing isn’t writing.

The truth is that you’re not likely to make a fortune simply by writing.

If you really want to make a living by writing, then you need to be doing all of the work that comes before writing. You wouldn’t expect a surgeon to operate on you without having done the work beforehand. Nor would you expect a pilot to take control of an airplane without having studied planes and flight extensively.

You can’t expect to be a writer without doing the work, and very little of that work is actually writing. If you want to earn six figures a year from writing, then focus on learning about the topics you want to write about. Experience them, either by living them yourself or by talking to people who have lived them extensively.

Learn how to write persuasively and professionally — especially if you are writing in a second language. I speak passable French, enough that I could fairly easily navigate Paris or another French City. I would never dream of trying to write professionally in French because there are all sorts of nuances that affect how writing can be received and perceived that I don’t fully understand.

It’s not good enough to just run it through Google Translate and call it a day.

Take the time and do the work — it will show in your writing, and then you can start working towards six figures.

This was originally published over at https://medium.com/look-again/the-truth-about-writing-online-7d7509974e17