How to Make a Living with your Writing

hi everyone I'm doing a pen from the creative pen comm and today I'm doing a video for the indie recon fantastic conference all about how to make a living with your writing which I hope will be of a lot of interest to everyone and of course you can share on Twitter and Facebook and whatever you like and use the hashtag indie recon so other people from the conference can share okay let's get on with it so just a little introduction if you don't know about me just so you know I do make a living from my writing but I'm split into two kind of personalities I write thrillers as j-f pen and I'm also the creative pen where I'm a professional speaker and I have non-fiction books and also I have various other forms of income that I will explain in this video but essentially I left my day job as an IT consultant in September 2011 so as of right now March 2015 I've been three and a half pretty much three and a half years now as a full time author entrepreneur and I'll explain that as we go through so I'm being very open with you today about how I make my living in the hope that that will help you as well and you can see how many books I have by the way when I left my job I had three fiction and a couple of nonfiction and I've been working about three years part-time on my website so it was definitely mature and I'll talk a bit later about giving up and giving up the job if that's something you want to do but just to take you back even further this is me in 2008 with my very first book bright-eyed bushy-tailed I was actually a management consultant working with large corporates and small consultancies I used to implement accounts payable into companies so that's kind of my history so I do come from a business background and so I bring that kind of attitude into this writing world now all right so when we talk about making a living with you writing it's very important to decide what is a living because there are writers I know several who have moved to cheaper countries to live so for example I live in central London in England which is pretty expensive to be honest I you know I could be living the life of a very rich person if I moved to you say barley or Eastern Europe or Asia and there are people who do that so when you talk about a living you have to decide what that level is so for example do you want a big house with loads of furniture and that's actually the house I used to own in Australia or do you want to be a bit more free and that's my bike and my backpack and my Kindle which is pretty much what I like to to own these days so I definitely did downsize when I wanted to change careers and so it's more about deciding what do you value what is non-negotiable and designing a life not just another job so I want you to think about that as we go through really challenge yourself to consider what is the life that you want to design and that this actually came to me recently well just this last week I was actually speaking in America and Charleston and then I went down to Savannah and you know I enjoyed being there and it was great I always loved being somewhere new but when I got back I was so happy and it occurred to me that I have actually designed a life I don't want to escape from whereas when I had a day job as a consultant all I ever wanted to do was escape and always wanted to go away but here I also really look forward to coming back because I love my life and my work and where I live so happy times so this is very important as we go through what is a living you need to put a financial number on it and that needs to cover your living costs if you have a family health care insurance all of those types of things so be very realistic about that as we go through also what are you willing to change to live that life so and what are you willing to give up so as I mentioned there that you know that or the house I used to own and we downsized considerably in order for me to change my very high-paid consulting job to become a creative professional to make a living with my writing so I want to be very clear on that you know I made choices around you know ownership of things and I'm very happy doing all the things I do now without owning a big house with loads and stuff but I know many people don't want that type of life so I want to be really realistic about some of the things that are important if you want to make a living from your writing so another important thing is to consider that the journey of an author is to entrepreneur and kind of full-time living is an arc and I call it an arc or it's a journey and most people many people watching this maybe on the I want to write a book or the I've written one book and of course the whole world wants to write a book far fewer people actually do manage to write a book but in terms of how many make a living as with their writing it's a lot less so I've put me on there it's kind of I've written 12 books I run a business as an author I make a full-time living with my writing and then I've got Barbara Fifi Bob May and of course there's a whole load of other people there who many of whom are speaking at the Indy recon conference as well people like HM Ward CJ Lyons lots more people who have written kind of 20 30 50 books and a sort of CEO of their global media empire which is where I'm definitely heading so again you've got to decide what you know at what point you're making a living and then at what point you're sort of running that you're that CEO role of the the business but remember it is a journey and it's not a rush and it's not a race so take it at your own pace so the next important thing that really kind of builds off that last one if you have one book that you publish with one company whether that is Amazon through KDP select or if you go with one publisher one book with one publisher however that's done is one source of income and this is something I care about very deeply because in 2008 along with many other people I was laid off from my job or you know on one day 400 of us were laid off from our department just a pile of letters handed out during the global financial crisis now you know I got another job after that not a problem but the point is that one source of income was cut off in one day and that's what you can't do if you want to make a living and a successful living over time so don't rely on one source of income for your money develop multiple streams of income and this is very important and it's why I call myself an author entrepreneur because these are you know I don't just rely on book sales as I'll go through in a minute so developing multiple streams that can be multiple books published on multiple platforms so you're not dependent on any one platform for all your income but you have to consider how you're going to do this this could be your day job plus a small amount coming in from your publishing and over time you can switch up the balance as I did I went from full-time work to four days a week before I actually quit my job over three years so very important principle multiple streams of income and as we go through this presentation I will talk about my multiple streams and of course yours may well be different so now we get into the exciting part and I hope to inspire you with the possibilities of being an author and the first thing to consider is scalable so thinking scalable now this is a magic word think about your day job and you get paid per day per month a set amount so based on the hours you work so you get a certain amount of leave for example but essentially you get paid for the hours you work and you work one hour you get paid a certain amount there's no way of raising that amount regularly unless you get pay rises and that amount is the same regardless doesn't matter so you work the hour you get paid once for that time and that's it and that's another hour of your life but scalable income is kind of magic because you create it once and you can sell it forever now that's just when the penny drops on this it's just fantastic because that means you can work X amount of hours or days or months or years even on your book and that time it's not wasted that time that the income that you can earn from that book can go on for for your whole lifetime plus seventy years after you die according to copyright law so that is pretty incredible when you think about it you can leave a legacy for your family or whoever you know after your death it's that super so you think about creating assets that will put income in your pocket for years to come and that's how I like to think about the books it's not just about that launch week it's not about this spike of income that then disappears which is the traditional publishing model really this is the little bits of income that come in every month for years and years and years so that's very exciting so think scalable is the first way to consider making a living so many people think that when they have a finished book like here's how to market a book for example that this is just one book but it's not just one book it's actually a lot of income streams is how you should think about it so first of all think about the e-book Edition so it's not even one format really anymore so you create a format for Kindle for example you create another file for Kobo one for iBooks one for Nook one for Smashwords one for drafted digital one for you know whoever the other ebook platforms you're publishing on ebooks of forever the new library platform from Joe conrath there are lots and lots of ebook editions that you could be creating so but let's just you know say that there's four the four big five big ones that say five big ones five distribution platforms and then imprint obviously you can have print you can use create space engrams bark you can sell your print rights but print is another format it's another stream of income and then audio Edition which is really exciting and I've just today actually is my launch for business for authors which how to be an author entrepreneur in audio format and there's lots of ways to do audio and that adds another stream of income to your portfolio so you've pretty much got you know even if you want to say three or three between three and seven different formats I guess you could say all from different companies all different streams of income so then multiply that by the country markets that these can be available in and I'll talk more about global stuff later but essentially at the moment we can sell a hundred in over a hundred countries and I've personally sold ebooks in 65 countries so if you multiply by country markets often called territory which are sort of groups of markets in the traditional publishing world then you can see that you can again multiply those streams of income by country which is very exciting and then also people are moving into selling in different languages so you can look at okay you know that obviously lots of languages and you can sell your foreign rights you can do translations with narrators you know sorry with translators there are lots of things you can do to get your books out in different languages in Germany for example is German language probably the next big one Portuguese for Brazil which is an emerging market Spanish for the US and other South American countries there's a lot and Spain or Italy there's a lot of options so if you think about you don't just have the one book this may look like one book but it's actually multiple streams of income just on its own and then if you start thinking about multiplying the number of books you have you can see the potential to make a living from your books now that is exciting so just a little bit more on a CX for audiobooks because I think this is an area where many authors need to look at getting into audio and there's a couple of options with a CX you can do a royalty split deal where you don't pay anything upfront you just split the royalties with a narrator if you have a platform several books a good series this is something you could consider you can also pay upfront so you own all the rights and you get the royalty you can also record your own audiobook which is what I've just done for business for authors which is very exciting so you can do any of these and it adds you can see there on the screen it adds the audible audio version on to your book on Amazon looks very professional it's available on iTunes audible and Amazon and yeah I definitely think you should check out ACS also even if you are traditionally published and you you should check your contract to see if you still own the audio rights to your book because you can exploit them yourself even if you have a publisher so that's a possible source of income for everybody alright let's talk about business models related to books so I want to bring this up because there's a trend in certainly in the indie world and in self-publishing world right now to consider this high volume production model as the only way so we're you know mainly because the romance authors in particular are doing incredibly well with their high volume production barbar free fees there HM Ward it's someone who's speaking at the Indy week on conference and certainly someone I you know look at as a tremendous success in this high volume production model and I've also put there Steve Scott SJ Scott who's doing very well in nonfiction with a high volume production but of course not everybody is high volume production capable or wants to be so and that's a really important point many people are writing books that take longer literary fiction that involves you know perhaps more thought less genre focused work you know longer non-fiction works that involve a lot more research there are many people or even personality types where the high volume production model doesn't really fit you know I do I've I guess I'm kind of halfway to that I do by some people's standards I write quite fast by other people's I write very slowly so you know we shouldn't compare ourselves to others of course but in terms of using these models I do have you know I am aiming for that high volume production for my fiction series this is not the only model there were other models too for book related income so book has lead gen to back in sales or lead generation if you're not feeling it familiar with that term a couple of examples here Chris Gill a bow traditionally published the happiness of pursuit chris is a very successful blogger runs a very big conference and also has a lot of courses on his website so the book it and is a speaker a paid speaker so the book leads people to his website which facilitates the rest of his business the same with Jim kook role who runs author marketing club you know who does now self publish but is mainly his books are there as lead generation for author marketing club and Jim's consulting and speaking business and then of course the book as the way into teaching or speaking which I do you know how to market a book for example and business for authors I do a lot of paid professional speaking based on these books so they are you know and actually this is a good point the reason this is quite a long book is because I use it as almost like a course book for my training courses on marketing and my speaking if your whereas someone like Steve Scott would have split that book into probably four or five smaller books that's a chunky book at seventy thousand words it could be split into smaller books if I were going for the high-volume production model for example so when you're thinking about how you're going to publish your book it is a great idea to consider which of these business models you're thinking about and then go that way I mean a lot of literary fiction authors teach writing teach creative writing and that the book can sort of be a business card to get into that model and of course you can use them all as I do all right so if you want to make a living from your writing you have to think about things in a more commercial manner so let's first consider the brilliant site author earnings calm which has some excellent data on the book the top-selling books on Amazon and they have they do this every quarter now so you can go and have a look on that site and check out the data but the first consideration is if you want to make a living writing books that people actually want to buy now this could be controversial because many of us certainly I did and still do to a point you know really I do you know write books that are from the heart first but equally if you are right saying let's take poetry as the most extreme example poets don't write poetry for the money they write poetry for the love of writing poetry and the love of language so when we're talking about making a living with your writing most poets don't it's very rare for poets to make a living just by being a poet so in terms of writing books that people want to buy if you want to sell a lot of books you do have to think about the genre that the books are in so for example I write thrillers now some people you know my books are kind of at the more intellectual end certainly my London psychic series is a more intellectual end of crime thriller but I still would rather it was categorized that way than put in literary fiction because more people buy mysteries and thrillers so I'm just being hardcore about this you know and this graph shows very clearly that nearly 70 percent of the top I think this is 50 thousand year 50,000 best-selling ebooks on Amazon 69% are genre fiction and the vast majority of those also romance romance mystery thriller sci-fi fantasy if you want to write if you want to make a living with high volume fiction for example these are the genres to write in you can see there the fiction and literature green segment is only 5% that would be your literary fiction and poetry probably and children's books they're 3% now remember this is ebooks not print I do believe children's books will be taking off with the advent of Kindle kids ebook creator I think scored which is the new platform to you know do more exciting things with children's books on Kindle Fire and that type of thing so essentially it's very important for you to do your research if you want to make a living you're not going to make stacks and stacks of cash if you're writing one literary fiction novel every five years unless you are Donna Tartt I think it was every ten years but so anyway there are of course breakout successes but you know we're planning on making a living here so you have to be you know have to think more pragmatically I guess so you have a look at the Amazon top 100 look at iBooks look at the New York Times list look at the Sunday Times in the UK whatever haven't look at what people are buying and make sure that you understand how those lists are done so for example the WH Smiths in the UK those slots are bought they're not based on popularity so that's really important to make sure you look at popularity which is why Amazon is a better list often okay so the other thing is if you write nonfiction think about writing books that people want by search so Amazon is a search engine and people type often type questions in and find books around these topics so the reason again why I wrote how to market a book is because people search for the phrase how to market a book that seemed like a not a clever title but an SEO title with search engine optimized title so here if you go and if you go onto Amazon and you know start typing anything you know go to the Kindle Store area start typing anything you'll see there's a drop-down these are searches that are going on every day the most popular searches so if you write a book with one of these titles how to be a Christian without being religious for example you know if you wrote a book with that title you may well be found in when people are searching for that the question is also how many people are searching for this so you need to you know have and how many competitors there are this is my fiction keywords tend to be more difficult like paranormal romance for example but here you can see I imagine that how to be a cuckold is not particularly overdone book term book title but might be interesting to have a look at so how have I used this myself yes so my first book as you saw earlier is called how to love your job or find a new one and even though I rebooted the cover later on I then discovered this kind of keyword thing and decided to change the title as well so I changed the title to career change and you can see there the number of searches and that is from Google search terms keaton google keyword search terms so you can have a look at that but essentially the number of searches for career change are streets ahead of like 10 times the amount of how to love your job which doesn't even come up on amazon so i changed my title and it made a real difference to the sales the you know the book actually sells as opposed to not selling at all so and i don't have a platform for career change at all it's not something I talk about on my website very much or you know I don't aim for that career change niche at all so if you're writing nonfiction consider writing books that people want by looking at search terms so another tip whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction is to write a series and get people hooked into that series or have branded nonfiction titles in a niche so again I'm using the example of HM Ward here who is her arrangement series right now is on number 18 really gets people hooked in Steve Scott has is focusing on the habit niche and has multiple books on habits so if you are interested in productivity you're likely to buy several of those books and I have my arcane series what this does is it sort of feeds into the binge consult consumption culture that's going on right now you know when when Netflix dropped a house of cards for example all at once people just binge watched the whole thing over a weekend we certainly did it over a couple of weeks but still you know wanna watch the whole thing fast as possible the same thing is when people discover a series that they love they want to binge read everything so you know thinking about your back list how many books you have if you're writing in a series whether it's fiction or nonfiction it's easier to write because you have your characters you have your world you just have to find a new plot for the books so that really helps with income you can also put the first in the series free to draw people in and many authors certainly note an income at book 3 and book 5 I noticed a drop of soya drop I noticed an increase at book 3 in my series and I've just continued writing in that series the other way of course we're talking about multiple streams of income is to write across multiple genres and many people use different author names you don't have to but for example Steve Scott there SJ Scott his habit books Steve Scott for his kind of entrepreneur online marketing niche I use Joanna pen for my nonfiction and I use jf pen for my thrillers but then someone like Dean Wesley Smith uses his own name for everything he writes you know fiction and nonfiction and James Scott Bell also does fiction a nonfiction under his full name so writing across multiple genres will mean you target different audiences and you can get more income from those different books I also find it easier to switch between you know I can't do like thousands and thousands of words of fiction at once but what I can do is a couple of thousand words of fiction break and then write some nonfiction because it's kind of a different part of the brain so that's a very good example if you're if you want to create the multiple books scenario and of course we've talked about writing more books but if you do want to make a living with your writing obviously you'll be writing a lot and there's a good example there of Joe conrath you you know it's tipped into the seven-figure Mark barber free thing who is the highest earning author Kindle author I think it's four million she sold now that's an older screen print but definitely top-selling indie author and there's a lot of Indies who have now hit as the seven-figure mark many of them in romance and many of them with a lot of books so certainly you know you get more digital shelf space with more books and your total number of sales will grow even if you're selling you know a few copies of each book a month so I mentioned going global and I always love to share my Kobo writing life map because it always makes me happy to see new countries emerge on my map Namibia is there a Kenya there Nigeria very exciting so they're not of course lots of others around the world so just focusing on Africa II it's very it's very easy to just think well you know the biggest market is the US which you can see it is and you know the other mature markets Canada well this is obviously the biggest one here it is Canada this is Kobo but the most people make the bulk of their income from sales in the US the UK is the big one in Europe they're Australia but remember each of these other countries are starting to happen slowly what we've got to think is we're only in the toddling years of digital and ebook adoption globally so if you think that where we were five years ago and five years ago I mean we were 2010 I you know I think the Kindle there was certainly no Kobo the Kindle it just come out internationally you know ebooks were just emerging previously it'd just been PDFs sold on people's websites you know many people doing that in the entrepreneurial space but in terms of commercial ebooks certainly in bookstores and unheard of so in five years the the world has kind of radically changed around digital publishing self-publishing and and in another five years we're gonna see you know just as much of a shift in that the worldwide adoption will be changing and you know I would say probably two year or two years ago I would have only if so books in a couple of countries maybe five now my sales are in 65 countries and growing every month pretty much and I think that's very exciting iBooks has 51 country stores amazon has 171 countries you can get into all of these places I mean Google Play with Android you know all these stores have pretty global reach so if your books are available in all these countries you know that's fantastic the other thing to consider again if you have a traditional publishing deal is have I you know have I sold my rights to alien Pacific for example you know could I self publish in Australia could I self publish in Asia you know how I just sold my us rights can I self publish in other countries if you've sold world English rights you are pretty screwed but if you haven't consider we know self-publishing in other territories and of course you can use print-on-demand to sell through Amazon and they own a number of other print on demand services around the world Ingram spark that type of thing you can reach people with print and audio as well as ebooks so just talking about some of the trends also that I think will make a big difference to this this future income is you know mobile phone penetration smartphone penetration you know it's got here by 2017 nearly 70% of the global market and I also love the factor to I mention Africa reason being is that it's jumped it jumped from you know nothing to a cell phone economy there you know you can see people with cell phones and smart phones all over Africa now running businesses with cell phones using apps to do all kinds of things and this is why people are buying ebooks now in Africa South America Asia because they have smartphones not because they are on a PC or a Mac or laptop or whatever they have skipped that and gone straight to mobile so if you think about that that way people who don't have access to a physical bookstore for example that's one of the main reasons ebooks were adopted in the US so well because many people lived in the middle of nowhere a long way from bookstores and digital became a really brilliant way to get books without driving for hours to the nearest town whatever same in Australia so with cell phones people can get stuff so much more easily so that's a big deal the other demographic shift we have is the move into cities you know look at anything the move to urban places is you know grows around the world because that's where the money is smaller living spaces because denser accommodation you know again I moved from a four-bedroom house in Australia to a smaller flats in London where we live on top of one another literally but it's such a brilliant city that it's well worth it there's also the trend towards less stuff you'll hear phrases like the sharing economy books like stuffication you know people more willing to use things like Zipcar and sharing cars and uber rather than owning cars this will continue to grow this kind of sharing economy and of course the rise of the digital native have you seen a two-year-old with an iPad so essentially you know this this is a shift this is a march that won't change we won't lose print books of course but this digital shift is happening the other thing is the aging population I saw an amusing tweet from someone who said isn't it weird that you can't change the font size on this print thing that I'm trying to read and it's true I mean the aging population likes digital big market for eBook readers in the over-60s because you can change the font size and that's pretty pretty important if you think about that population and the audiobooks can read to you when you you know if you want to stop reading for example you can and listen which brings me on to another exciting thing and why you should definitely look at audiobooks for making a living as another stream of income apple carplay and google auto will become mainstream in the next year in all the biggest car manufacturer so what we're going to see is streaming audio directly in cars without having to fiddle with attaching your smartphone to your car radio somehow with your Bluetooth thing you'll just be able to get in and deal with that you can have your podcast you can have your audiobooks it will be it will make these things mainstream so you can leave your house you know stop reading on your device get into the car turn on your the audio and it will you know with whisper sync on Amazon it will just carry on reading from where you left off so that's very exciting just one thing there I think that this will also make a big difference to podcasting for marketing so definitely be looking at podcasting as the new guest blogging in the future and of course we've just heard about Google's algorithm change where your website will need to be mobile optimized in order for them to rank you highly in the search engines so that is another kind of admission that we're moving to a very mobile centric world and authors have to consider that for their multiple streams of income so the other thing really about if you want to make a living with your writing is you have to change your attitude about marketing the number of people I hear who say oh we just want to write I don't want to do the marketing well you know whether you get a traditional deal whether you self publish you will have to do marketing so it really is about changing your attitude so marketing becomes part of the job as such it becomes part of making a living and you'll make a better living if you change your attitude to marketing so this is how I reframed it and this really helped me which is marketing is sharing what you love with people who will appreciate hearing about it so for example you know I love I love action movies I love the supernatural I love traveling these are the things that I put into my fiction so why wouldn't I want to share those with people who like similar books or you know I want to share my own you know love of what I do as a writer so that's why I write books about marketing business for authors that type of and then if you think you know that if that naturally leads into sharing other things that you like so I might share pictures of a graveyard I visited and put them on Twitter and some people really like that and will mainly check out my books for example or I'll go to a conference and I'll share my lessons learned from thrill fest for example and that will help other people so and that's it markets me as an author as much as anything but it's also helpful so you definitely need to change your attitude if you want to make a living with your writing so let's talk about other streams of income and just on the blog the blog as writing because of course main most people are writing on their blogs of course there are video blogs and podcasts but we are talking about making a living with your writing at the moment so do you need a blog or other kinds of written content on the Internet well my opinion is if you do high-volume production fiction or nonfiction you probably don't need a blog or anything else you just need a website where you can collect email addresses for example for your marketing efforts this is the you know so for the high-volume fiction production and and nonfiction you don't need a blog although many authors do anyway for the love of writing and sharing with others but if you want to do the book as lead gen and the Booker's away for teaching speaking and other sales off a web site as I do then yes you probably do need a way to share other content as a form of content marketing that will attract the right people to your website so it really depends on your business model but if we look at my own business model around a blog and many other people's there are mainly five income streams from a blog there may be more but these are the ones that I use and we'll be talking about so first of all is the product sales so books courses audios downloadable things that people can pay for and there's lots of ways you can sell those direct from your website for example paid professional speaking so my website certain brings me speaking opportunities around the world for which I am paid so that is another way for the blog to be useful consulting or services and those services may include freelance writing many freelancers have blogs to showcase their work and attract clients sponsorship or advertising which is mainly traffic based you're not going to get sponsorship or advertising if you have no traffic or very low traffic to your website and traffic often comes with content so you will need a blog or podcast or video whatever if you want to make money that way and in fact sponsorship and advertising is the way most youtubers will make a living and then affiliate income which is and the difference there is sponsorship and advertising you get paid for doing a certain thing so you know mentioning a product or you know per number of click throughs affiliate income is you get a percentage of the sales so I sell someone else's product and I get a percentage so those are some of the business sort of income streams multiple income streams around the blog but also there are other reasons to have a blog and when I've put here reputation social proof and traffic obviously marketing and these are some of the other things I mean for me it's been amazing I would say that being a blogger has changed my life that's me speaking in Bali and INSCOM and on Sky News one morning you know so certainly you can get on media you can develop your voice find a community and that community can lead to many things so when I was in that deadly dozen box that and we hit the New York Times and the USA Today that was based on a relationship based on community based on my blog and the platform I have so it attracts opportunity to put your words out there on a professional looking site but when you do it you should really think about these type of things because I see too many writers blogging with no real thoughts about these questions who do you want to attract how can you help them or entertain remember people want inspiration education or entertainment so one of those three things you should be doing or more than one what do you want them to do on your website so sign up for an email buy a product that type of thing and how does the site and to your business if you want to make a living from your writing you have to consider the flow of money to do with the website how is the site monetized and is there a point to the blog is it just therapy for yourself or is it aimed at attracting people for financial reasons that may change over time I certainly my first blogging experiences before the creative pen were entirely kind of hobbyist and then I decided that I would have a more business focused site so really think about that when you are looking at how to make a living so just briefly on each of those income streams from from the blog or from a website idea first of all product sales so I've certainly done video courses over the years you know video a bit like this going deep into various topics there's udemy which is a very popular place to sell these types of courses now or you can sell them from your own website but I would say that it's very important to do your research into what people want that keyword research that market research what do people want and then build something people want very similar to the way we talked about writing nonfiction books earlier and obviously you want to relate it to your work somehow by cross selling so I mean you could do something like for fiction authors you can that can do something like write a best-selling thriller and then use your own thrillers as all romance or whatever as examples but that's still not going to have a massive sale rate compared to things we'll just go and have a look on udemy you'll see what's selling it's actually fascinating you know decide on how you want to sell it do you want to do a site like udemy do you want to go from your own website you know and I promote learn Scrivener fast for example you know there are other products like book design templates which is also fantastic which are templates for authors so they can do their so you can do your own book formats easily so think about what people actually want deliver that and you will sell things which is quite exciting and the main thing to think there is you will get a higher price if you do multimedia so if you do video and audio it will you can price it higher than a book okay if you want to make an income stream from professional speaking which I do I really recommend that you start speaking for free get some experience get some testimonials and then start looking for opportunities put a speaking tab on your website so people know you are a speaker or put a hire me as a speaker or something and on your business card put speaker these things are very important for advertising the fact that you do this also get some training join a professional organization I joined the PSA in Britain I also joined the NSAA in Australia and the National Speakers Association and of course there's one in America as well and realistically those those organizations work to help you become a professional speaker as in a paid speaker if you join something like Toastmasters which is also brilliant the aim is not really to become a paid speaker but more a good speaker so you know obviously the PSA and NSA actually want you to be a good speaker and a paid speaker so it's more a level of professionalism whether you want to learn confidence through something like Toastmasters or join a professional organization and get the high level training which is what I did the other thing is in terms of your speaking rates if aim for markets I hope you know if you can aim for markets who will pay higher rates and if you speak for things like author conferences like I do the speaking rates will be a lot lower than if you speak for companies so the price for speaking fees heavily depends on the industry so consider that if you want this to be a significant income stream and I can't go in too much detail here but I have a book on public speaking for authors creatives and other introverts if you're interested in having a look at that shares everything that I've learned about speaking over the years okay then you can also offer services so this might be freelance writing coaching consulting that type of thing I offer very occasional consulting services to people I I prefer people to buy my books for a lot lower price but I do have some services and that's my friend Mark McGinnis who's a poet and creative coach lateral action and he's also speaking indie recon - so um you basically need to develop a reputation show Authority again usually by blogging and podcasting and all that content but include the option of people hiring you early on and you might be surprised what happens certainly many authors indie authors now offer if they have design skills they're doing formatting or cover design some people are doing editing some people are doing you know all these types of things that we need as authors and so it's always nice to to hire another author who's who's doing this but definitely do some work for free get some testimonials and see how it goes and if you want to do freelance writing work and remember this is work for hire this is not a scalable work and you're not creating your own assets I recommend these two websites make a living writing and the write life both of these have a lot of information about freelance writing work if that's something you want to do so then briefly on sponsorship and advertising I have a podcast that is sponsored by Kobo writing life and 99designs so you know they're paid per episode that I do that you can really only get this type of income stream if you develop a niche audience and you have a decent size list and traffic and you have a regular way of talking to those people so you need that kind of recurring traffic you also need evidence of that traffic you need to have you know Google Analytics data podcast Hosting data that you can show to advertisers to prove the size of your audience and over time people will approach you or which happened to me or you can also talk to appropriate companies about this proactively and certainly many people many companies are now sponsoring podcasts so that's another good income stream and then affiliate income is also based on traffic because you need to send traffic to someone else's product and then you receive a percentage again developing a niche audience so I have a niche audience that creative pen of writers and so I have some products that I use myself and I think that's very important that I recommend and receive affiliate payment from so I you know in terms of ethically I think it's very important to only recommend services that you think are good and you know you also need to be upfront that things are affiliate links and then promote those products in an authentic way so I do webinars and I have blog posts about the various services and you know I'm very I'm very happy with the few things I promote because I use them all myself so those are the main income streams for making a living with your writing of course there are others but those are the main ones I make my own living from but if you want to make a living from your writing it really is important to learn the business you know you can if you learn the craft you will be able to write books but unless you learn about the business you're unlikely to make a living from your writing and even if you have an agent and a traditional publisher you still need to understand the money flow and your rights and how to manage this life because there's a there's a great book called the e-myth by Michael Gerber which is very important because it talks about the problem of specialists going freelance and running their own business because most people are expert and they you know use the example of a plumber if someone is a really good plumber you know working for a plumbing firm and then they leave that plumbing firm to run their own plumbing business you suddenly realize you need to attract customers make sales process the money do the taxes all the things that you need to do on top of the actual work so it would create that to writing you don't just write the books you also need to attract the customers whether that's agents publishers or readers you need to do the marketing you need to do the books you need to do accounting these types of things so and this should be looked on as fun I certainly enjoy it all that's why we're very happy happy author entrepreneur I guess but it's also important to you empower yourself about these things many authors are scared of words like business or entrepreneur but if you understand how to make a living with your writing and you get to grips with this stuff you'll be fine I mean you learnt to write a book you learned perhaps to self-publish to be an indie author you can learn the business of making a living with your writing I also suggest continuing to learn from others because things change every week in this crazy publishing world right now and I recommend the Alliance of independent also to of course run indie recon and we have great community lots of information and I do a monthly Q&A with owner Ross who the founder of Ally and lots of information for authors by authors with no vested interest in things just sharing what works so definitely continue to learn from others so if you want to make a living from your writing at some point you're going to ask when should I quit my day job at which I hear quite a lot when I speak on this topic well again let's just go back to the multiple streams of income idea don't quit your job if you just have one book or you're writing a book and you really that's not going to give you enough income to make a living in my opinion unless you get a massive book deal which is a lightning strike that you can't rely on so think about developing these multiple streams these are just some of the different companies that I make money through every month when you have sustainable income from multiple sources and you're not so stretched then you can consider giving it up when you've downsized or you know looked at your expenses and reduce them so you're under less risk and I'm very low risk when you know this is what you really want to do there were plenty of people who write books who either love their jobs or don't want to write books or write full-time it is difficult and it can move it from something you love as a hobby to something that is linked to income and becomes less fun because of that so you have to know that you want to do this so for me it was after three years of part-time work on the creative pen and writing books and j-f pen and and I now earn about half of what I used to as a IT consultant at the end of a 13-year career so I've put there a quarter that's because this is an older slide but that's nice to know also that it has gone up and this is another thing I guess I'm you know the realistic aim of anyone and my aim my personal aim is that at five years full-time which will be next year 20 September 2016 at five years I want to be making the equivalent of what I made at when I left my day job originally so that's a good goal to have but it takes time because of course with any job you know how much you worth on day one how much you worth after a year you're not worth much in any job so think about that very realistically when do you start becoming valuable in an in a career probably after year five you know by year ten you're very valuable so that's what that's type of thing to keep in your mind you know how does this equate to any other form of employment I guess and so we've covered a lot in this session about the various aspects of making a living as an author but one thing I've learned is strategy is choosing what you don't do as well as what you do do and we all have limited time so I've given you loads and loads of stuff but what you have to keep in mind is you know do you really want what is your definition of success what is a living what will help you create a body of work you're proud of in your life whether that's books whether that's other art whether that's you know your family whatever it is what we look back on and be proud of and also help you create a life you want to live right now and we've talked all about the business side and about money and about income but this is what's on my wall and that I look at every day have you made art today so that's what it comes down to for us as writers if you want to make a living from your writing this still is the core of your day but you do have to do all the other stuff too but this is what it comes back to you is this what you love so I hope that has helped and giving you some inspiration and ideas about how you could make a living from your writing and you can find me at the creative pen comm or on Facebook or Twitter you can check out my podcast the creative pen podcast on iTunes and stitcher or on the blog which has over two hundred and ten episodes at this point all free you can also get a free or 42.0 blueprint and a video series if you want more video from me and you can get that at the creative pen com forward slash blueprint and you'll also get that basically how to be a successful author entrepreneur ebook the author 2.0 blueprints ok so thanks for your attention today and I hope you've enjoyed the indie recon conference and yeah all the best with making a living with your writing

Channel: The Creative Penn

Views: 32,673

Rating: 4.9025383 out of 5

Keywords: Writing (Interest), entrepreneur, how to make a living with writing, how to make money writing, writing for a living, indie author, Business, business for authors, joanna penn, alliance of independent authors, thecreativepenn, the creative penn, how to make a living with your writing

Id: r2-bMS9US0k

Length: 54min 58sec (3298 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2015