Writing from the heart

For many writers, especially those new to writing, every word you create feels like an extension of yourself. Those words feel important, like have some mythical quality, it often feels like might reveal something about you that nobody knows. And that's fine once you decide you aren't going to show anybody your work. This is a phase almost every writer goes through, and for many this stage occurs at one of the most awkward stages of life: adolescence. I have piles of awful poetry and stories, written in my formative years, hidden away.

They're hidden in a cave just like this. 


Textbroker review

If you have spent any time in the Online freelance writing business, you are sure to have heard about Textbroker, although, what you may have heard about the site certainly varies from forum to forum. It is often referred to as a content mill.


Textbroker, is that you?



For anyone who isn't sure what exactly that entails- think of a water mill, as seen in the pretty pastoral image above, then replace the water with content. Yeah, it's not a pretty image, because instead of whirling cogs and wheels you have writers furiously pumping out content.

Making money as a writer: short stories

 How do you make money by writing? What are you supposed to write? I suppose the easy answer is to write a New York Times Bestseller. But that's easier said than done, right? There's no harm in having it as a goal and working towards that goal, but it's a good idea to make some smaller more achievable writing goals along the way. Over the next few posts I'll be talking about way to make that swag, that moolah (Dollars, Euros, Pounds, whatever you call it, it does the same thing the world over) with your words.


F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote and sold short stories
to pay for his and Zelda's extravagant lifestyle.



Short Stories

This is a tough market to break into. As with all markets there is a sliding scale of pay rates: magazines like the New Yorker pay a months rent or more for a story, while many webzines pay nothing. If you write short stories, a good directory to find stats on a huge variety of magazines is Duotropes Digest. You can search by pay rate, genre, and story length as well as other parameters.

As with any writing job, the key is being able to write grammatically sound sentences and perseverance. You will be rejected. The trauma of your teenage years is nothing compared to the countless rejections you will receive. Because so many rejections are sent out, most magazines employ a standard rejection. When editors receive more promising stories that they are still going to reject, they often add a personal touch to encourage you to submit in the future. A strange thing happens, where you begin analysing your rejections for even the slightest hint of a human behind the email. In the past, when the Internet was still a science fiction fantasy, writers use their rejection slips to devious ends. Some even papered their bathrooms with the slips!

A good idea is to join a writer's group. You can support each other when you get rejected, and help each other to improve your writing skills. You'll also make some writer friends who you can discuss literary gossip with!

Obligatory first post

Hi, welcome to my blog and my very first post.

I'm going to be using this to document my online writing career as I thought it would be a cool way to keep myself accountable. I'll be posting reviews of the different sites I use to sell articles, and generally musing on ways to make money on the internet by selling your words. From my research on how to earn money by writing articles online, I found a lot of websites guaranteeing that you can easily make, $5,000 a week by writing for a penny a word. I have a feeling the people who write things like that would do their very best to sell coal to Blackpool too! In saying that, I'm sure you can make quite a comfortable income from writing online and I hope to find out how.

I've been content writing for a few months now, but I've been writing in other areas for much longer. Here's the skinny on my past, present and future writing ventures:
  • I've just started my PhD
  • I have one trunked novel
  • I have published academic articles and will continue to do so.
  • I have published short stories and continue to write them.
When you add content writing to the list, you can see that it adds up to a lot of writing! So this blog will be a place to relax and take things easy. I'm looking forward to meeting other writers on here, so drop me a line in the comments and tell me about your online endeavors. What sites should I watch out for? And which ones treat their writers well?