Earning $10,000,000+ a year from writing is no accident.
Early in my writing career I met a writer that inspired me. They wrote about many topics but there primary one was self-improvement.
Over the years we’ve got to know each other. We both hit 6-figures from writing around the same time.
Then we both got to 7-figures in the same year.
But now they’ve progressed past me to 8-figures a year. I couldn’t be happier for them. There’s so much you can learn from writers ahead of you. I won’t name this writer as they’d probably want to remain out of the public eye.
But I will share with you everything they taught me. Here goes.
Build multiple writing income streams
Getting to 8-figures is a lot of work. This writer did it with the following writing income streams:
- Blogging for royalties
- Three paid newsletters
- Self-publishing a dozen books
- Freelance ghostwriting that turned into an agency
- A course business that turned into high-ticket group coaching
See the pattern?
They didn’t publish one book and become an 8-figure writer. That’s a naughty fantasy Hollywood used to promote. Their writing helps them make money from multiple different sources.
As they’ve matured and progressed, they’ve removed freelance-hamster-wheel writing and Uber-driver-writing-royalties from the mix, and focused on the other income streams.
As you grow as a writer you should become smarter about money.
Otherwise, you get taken advantage of by people who essentially use your writing for free to progress their goals, not yours.
The newsletter becomes the book (not the other way round)
Writing a blog used to be a good way to create the content for your book.
But as ChatGPT an AI have murdered the google search algorithm, far less people are using search engines to find great writing anymore. The market has shifted to newsletters.
Newsletters are the new blog.
What this 8-figure writer did (that was smart) is they wrote several paid newsletters for a number of years. They then turned this content into multiple best-selling books.
A newsletter is a never-ending book.
It’s pre-vetted content that has reader engagement and feedback built into it. The reason he started with a newsletter is because it’s an audience he owns from day one.
If he just put his book on Amazon, then he wouldn’t get to collect the readers’ email addresses and have an ongoing relationship.
Newsletters fix this problem.
You go from a rented audience with a pain in the ass landlord, over to an owned audience with a gorgeous backyard you can run free in with your kids. By starting with books instead of newsletters he built a flywheel.
- Publish newsletter
- Take best pieces and make them book chapters
- Publish a book on Amazon
- Tell newsletter audience to buy book
- Get newsletter audience to leave Amazon reviews
- Amazon shows the book to more people because it has traction
Now books sales are automated. Publish more newsletters, sell more books. Books feed the newsletter and vice versa.
Because his three newsletters are paid he has to try harder than the average writer. To get readers to pay for content is difficult. By relentlessly publishing his three newsletters until he got traction, he found product-market fit.
Most writers don’t do this.
They think people pay for their unbelievable writing that’s better than s*x with a Victoria Secret model.
Let the readers paying you help you to figure out what your value is.
People don’t pay for nice-to-have writing
He also taught me about ROI.
Good writing that people pay for is tied to an ROI. People need to be convinced their lives will progress thanks to your writing.
Readers want to:
- Save time
- Save money
- Make money
- Become healthier
- Exercise and be fit
- Advance their careers
- Become better parents
- Improve their relationships
If you don’t call this clear ROI out in your writing, no one will read it, and they 100% won’t pay for it. But traditional writers make excuses.
“I help people find their purpose. There’s no ROI.”
Wrong. There’s always an ROI that ties back to a benefit people care about. You just have to dare to use your imagination and use napkin math to figure out what it is.
If you ignore this step your life as a writer will be hard. You’ll be publishing nice-to-have writing that people scroll right past because you didn’t make them give a sh*t.
Readers buy painkillers, not vitamins (or worse, magic woo-woo potions).
Tie your writing to an ROI if you don’t want to starve.
Writing is a business. Hobbyists don’t make it.
There’s no way you can make 8-figures a year acting like a writer.
The typical writer’s mindset is one of a homeless broke person stuck in victimhood and red-versus-blue-nowhere-thinking. They have fantasies of publishing some sci-fi novel that they think will randomly blow up on TikTok and get turned into a Warner Bros movie.
There are people who play the lottery, and then there are writers.
Writers are more delusional than gamblers. It’s as if they don’t do the math or can’t understand basic statistics.
When you think of writing as a business, it’s not so much about the money. What thinking of writing like a business does is…
- Force you to take writing seriously
- Help you come up with a vision
- Solve real problems people give a damn about
- Make you think long-term, instead of chasing “I got published in X publication” sugar pills
Romantic writers don’t want to make money from writing.
They can’t explain why. They want it to be a hobby because they haven’t figured out how to make it a career. Instead of admitting the truth, they just hide behind “making money from writing is a pyramid scheme.”
Read this ten times: Money is a resource to enhance your writing.
When your writing earns money you can:
- Invest in editors
- Pay for custom illustrations
- Get your book formatted correctly
- Buy ads to promote your digital products
- Hire a virtual assistant to help with your social media
Hating on a writer’s income is stupid. Instead of getting upset by 6,7, and 8-figure writers, reverse engineer what they’re doing, then do it.
Final Thought
Most people won’t become 8-figure writers. And that’s okay.
The point of me sharing this story is so you can understand what the best writing income streams are and start stacking them.
Because you likely won’t make a full-time income from any one writing source, so it pays to have a few.
The beauty of this approach is all the different types of writing feed into each other to compound your stats faster.
Write after hours. Build your income. Then go full-time when your writing business pays more than your salary.
