8 Brutal Truths You Need To Hear As A Writer (To Actually Make Money)

This is 10+ years of writing knowledge compressed into a short read.

Dear Writer,

If you actually want to make money from your craft, and not just spend your whole life daydreaming about it, then you need to hear these 8 brutal truths.

And I know you need this tough love because this is the kind of tough love I needed at the beginning of my writing career.

10 years ago, I was completely broke living in a run-down studio apartment in Chicago working a minimum-wage job as an entry-level copywriter at an ad agency.

And today, I run a portfolio of writing businesses that does over $6,000,000 in annual revenue.

• I’ve written 10 books

• I’ve built a 6-figure SaaS writing platform, called Typeshare

• I’ve built 2 paid newsletters to 6 figures: Write With AI & Category Pirates

• I’ve built 2 writing programs to millions of dollars in annual revenue: Ship 30 for 30 & Premium Ghostwriting Academy

• And I built the first ghostwriting agency for founders & executives, and scaled that agency to millions of dollars in annual revenue.

So, how did I go from that studio apartment to where I am today?

By internalizing these 8 brutal truths and changing the way I thought about becoming a successful writer in the digital age.

And if you want to listen to me talk through these, give this video a watch (or listen to it on Spotify!)

Brutal Truth #1: If you want to earn a full-time living as a writer, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get there.

Remember:

You’re competing against people like me.

I spend 8-10 hours per day writing. 5-7 days per week.

And I can do that (now) because I’ve engineered my life that way.

But for a long time, that’s not how it was. Instead, I was working a full-time job doing work for someone else 8-10 hours per day—and the only time I had to work on my own writing was from 8pm or 9pm to midnight and weekends.

So, the first step is you need to get yourself in a position where you’re writing or practicing writing all hours of the day.

And my recommendation to accomplish this as quickly as possible would be to start ghostwriting. It’s a very lucrative side-hustle that can quickly eclipse whatever you’re making from your full-time job. Then, once you’re ghostwriting and basically getting paid to practice, you can start to invest more and more hours each day into your own writing.

But the brutal truth here is: you need to recognize that to earn a full-time living as a writer, you need to invest as much of your extra time as possible into practicing your craft.

• That means nights.

• That means weekends.

• That means during your lunch break.

Nobody is going to make it happen for you.

You have to make it happen for yourself.

Brutal Truth #2: If you want to become a successful non-fiction writer, you need to become a world-class marketer. And if you want to become a successful fiction writer, you need to become relentlessly prolific.

If you notice, all the most successful & highest-paid non-fiction writers aren’t just “writers.”

They are entrepreneurs—or at a minimum, entrepreneurial.

And they have other lucrative businesses that allow them to throw money at marketing their books.

• James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

• Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

• Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is The Way, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer. (He’s even said in interviews he makes more money selling his little Stoicism coins than he does his book! And he’s one of the most successful non-fiction authors of the past decade.)

• Even Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

Becoming successful with non-fiction has a lot less to do with the quality of writing or how many books you pump out, and much more to do with your ability to build a content engine around your chosen non-fiction topic category.

Conversely, almost all of the most successful & highest-paid fiction writers actually aren’t that great of marketers.

It’s a huge deficit for them.

And yet, they still rake in huge amounts of money.

Why? Because they relentlessly publish new books.

• Colleen Hoover is a great example of this. She’s not really a world-class marketer, but she’s prolific and constantly publishing new romance novels. Whether you like her books is irrelevant. She writes, and hits publish, way more than the average writer.

• Or an author like Matt Dinniman, creator of the LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, is another great example. He has almost no social media following, and is a far cry from being a world-class marketer. But he’s published 6 books in his Dungeon Crawler Carl series, each one 500+ pages. And a quick sales search using Publisher Rocket shows that between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks, each book in his Dungeon Crawler Carl series is currently doing over $200,000 per month in revenue. So his series is generating over a million a month in top-line revenue, of which he’s probably taking home 10-20% (between Amazon fees and publisher fees).

So…

Non-fiction writers, you need to invest heavily in becoming a world-class marketer (and ideally building a business that can fuel your marketing efforts).

Fiction writers, you need to do whatever you have to do to write and publish a LOT of fiction. If you don’t, good luck achieving your goals.

Brutal Truth #3: Making money exclusively as a “legacy writer” is unnecessarily hard.

I’m using the word “unnecessarily” on purpose.

A lot of writers romanticize what it means to be successful, thinking you’re only a “real writer” if you earn money exclusively from selling books.

And this one hurts because this used to be me.

But the reality is, and a hard lesson I’ve learned, is that it’s unnecessary to think that way.

Objectively speaking, as a product, books are a very challenging business model:

• First, they’re price-capped. A reader isn’t willing to pay more than $20 or $30 for a book.

• And second, they’re one-off purchases. A reader doesn’t buy a book more than once. And if they do, it’s because they lost the original, want it in a different format, or are gifting a copy to a friend.

But you can unlock so much more upside for yourself as a writer when you change the definition of “what it means to be successful” from “I can only write books” to “I can monetize all of my writing in all sorts of different ways.”

For example:

• Books (sure).

• But also paid newsletters.

• And also courses, or 1:1 coaching.

• And also by providing a service, like ghostwriting.

There are so many other ways to monetize your talents as a writer. And there’s a reason why non-fiction writers like James Clear, Mark Manson, and Ryan Holiday all monetize their skills in a variety of other ways.

So, if you only measure success by “selling books,” your path is not only going to be harder and take longer, but you’re going to leave a lot of money on the table.

This is also true for fiction writers.

With fiction, you’re primarily making money selling books and audiobooks, but there are so many other ways you can monetize too:

• You can monetize other content, or content-in-progress behind a paywall on Patreon

• You can monetize again with a paid newsletter, “writing about the writing” and giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at your process.

• You can monetize again by hosting writing workshops, showing other writers how to write like you… like hosting a paid webinar, for example. I did this showing other writers how to use ChatGPT and we did over $63,000 in sales in 72 hours.

• You can even monetize again putting together a fiction writing course, sharing your process and frameworks for writing fiction.

I find that most writers don’t do any of these things, and they leave so much money on the table as a result.

And I always find the reason they don’t do any of these things is because of some version of the faulty belief: “If I do that, I’m not a real writer.”

Which isn’t true.

(And becomes less and less true every single day, as the world becomes more and more digital-first.)

Brutal Truth #4: You can’t measure success over days. You have to measure it over decades.

It is very, very, very hard to unlock massive success as a writer Year 1.

Or Year 2. Or even Year 3.

Sure, you can start unlocking small wins. For example, anyone can start ghostwriting Year 1 and start earning $5k or $10k+ per year. I’ve seen it happen over and over again in our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

But it’s very rare for a writer to go from 0 followers to tens or hundreds of thousands of followers online Year 1. Or go from $0 to $20k+ per month in revenue—whether it’s from selling a service like ghostwriting, or selling their own books or digital products.

So you have to really internalize that if you want to “make it” as a writer, you’re not playing a year-long game.

You’re playing a decade-long game—ideally a multi-decade long game.

I am just now starting to see a lot of this compounding in my own writing. I get comments on my social content from people who have been following me since my Quora days way back in 2014. Or we have people join Ship 30 for 30 or PGA who have been following us for the past 4 years and finally decided, “You know what, now I’m ready to take the next step.”

So if you stop 3 months in, or 6 months in, or a year in, you have to realize you’re not allowing any of this compounding to occur.

And a lot of the biggest rewards as a writer don’t get unlocked until year 5, or year 10.

It’s so easy to point at people who are there and say, “Well it was easy for them.” No it wasn’t. The first few years of me trying to get going as a writer were BRUTAL. I was making like $15 per hour, commuting an hour to work each way, and could only work on my writing from 9pm to midnight. I didn’t have AC. Didn’t have any furniture. I had a desk and a bed and that was it.

So don’t get it confused: it’s hard for everyone.

The question is whether or not you have the patience and the determination to gut through the first few years where progress is slow. Because I promise, Year 3, Year 4, Year 5, when momentum starts to pick-up, you’re going to feel the complete opposite.

You’re going to think, “Wow, that didn’t take so long.”

You just have to gut through the first 3 years and trust that the longer you stick with something, the more your chances for success go UP.

Brutal Truth #5: Writing is a lottery, so optimize for volume.

This is true for pretty much every creative industry.

You never know what’s going to resonate.

Generally speaking, I’ve learned that the piece you spend 100 hours on is probably going to flop. Whereas the piece you spend 10 minutes on and just publish on a whim (even though you hate it or think it isn’t your best work) ends up going massively viral.

You have no idea what’s going to work and what’s not. So the best approach is to actually forgo control and stop trying to plan it all out.

Writing is a lottery, so optimize for volume.

The more shots on goal you take, the more likely you are to succeed. The less shots on goal you take, the less times you spin the lottery wheel, the less likely you are to succeed.

So, don’t over-complicate it, and don’t think you know better than the market—because you don’t.

The market is fickle. You never know what the market is going to like.

Just let your ideas rip, and allow the chips to fall where they fall.

Brutal Truth #6: Reading doesn’t make you a better writer. Writing makes you a better writer.

This is a hard one to understand as a beginner, but I’ll tell you the moment this clicked for me.

Back in like 2014, I was watching the Lil Wayne documentary about him making The Carter III album. And there’s a clip in there where an interviewer asks him who he listens to for inspiration, and he says, “Myself.” And then the interviewer, confused, clarifies and says, “No but I mean, who else, what other artists do you listen to for inspiration?” And he just looks at them with this dead-faced stare and says, “I don’t. I record all day. I listen to myself. I hear what I want to improve. And then I record again.”

And that was the moment I realized that if I wanted to become a professional writer, I needed to write a LOT more than I read.

Now, obviously reading can be a great supplement to your writing.

I am always studying other writers, and I know the value in reading.

But I find the vast majority of writers over-rotate here, and what happens is they start using reading as a way to productively procrastinate. They use reading as a vehicle to AVOID writing—because writing is hard, and it’s much easier to just read other people’s work and tell yourself, “I’m studying! I’m improving!”

No, you’re not.

The more you read, the more you get better at reading. But not writing.

The way you get better at writing is BY WRITING.

Which is why, to drive the point home, I like to say very bluntly to beginner and even advanced writers:

Reading doesn’t make you a better writer. Writing makes you a better writer.

Brutal Truth #7: There’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” writing. Only effective and ineffective writing.

Good & bad are subjective terms.

Your favorite writer might be somebody I really don’t enjoy, and my favorite writer might be someone you really don’t enjoy. And that’s fine.

The subjectivity of writing is what makes it so fun to consume.

Which means, as a writer, you really need to understand that there’s no such thing as being a “good writer.” Because good is entirely subjective.

Instead, a much clearer aspiration for yourself is to be an effective writer.

And when I say “effective,” what I mean is:

• Are you able to speak to your target reader?

• Do they see themselves in your writing?

• Are you EFFECTIVE in reaching them, helping them, or entertaining them?

Because if you are, then you are a great writer. Because your writing is effective, and it is causing the outcome you desire. Which also means it really doesn’t matter who, outside of that target reader, doesn’t like your writing.

That’s a subjective decision.

The only thing that matters is you are reaching the sort of person you want to help or entertain, and you are doing so EFFECTIVELY.

Brutal Truth #8: If you aren’t achieving your goals as a writer, it’s your fault.

And I say this as an empowering statement, not a demoralizing one.

There is always a reason why something isn’t working. There just is. Which means, objectively, if something isn’t working, your ONLY job is to figure out what it is.

Because let me tell you a 100% guaranteed way for you not to succeed:

• Blame the platform

• Blame the industry/niche

• And blame the customer/reader

You gain nothing when you blame “external forces” for something not working.

But if, instead of pointing the finger, you pull the thumb and you ask yourself how YOU need to improve, well… now you have a path forward.

Ask yourself these questions:

• “What DON’T I know how to do?”

• “What do I think is true, that isn’t?”

• “What am I not doing enough of (volume)?”

• “What am I doing enough of, but need to do better?”

• “What am I doing enough of, to the best of my ability, but might not actually be the thing that moves the needle for me?”

These are the self-reflective questions you have to ask yourself to find your path forward.

And I can tell you after mentoring thousands of writers in our writing programs, a lot of writers don’t do this. Instead, they just kick their feet up and say, “This doesn’t work for my niche” or “That worked for you but it won’t work for me.” And they defer responsibility.

So stop blaming external circumstances you can’t control, and start focusing on the 1 variable you CAN control:

Yourself.

Your habits.

And the actions you choose to take on your journey of becoming a successful writer.