Best Writer Career Paths By Income & Net Worth

Which skills to build, when, and why—to maximize your earning potential.

The following is a bonus chapter from my forthcoming book, Writer Career Paths.

Dear Writer,

So you want to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible, do ya?

Well, not all Writer Career Paths are created equal. Each one pays you in different ways (status vs money), over different time horizons, with different ceilings. For example: some pay you faster but aren’t as scalable, whereas some are slower but compound like crazy.

As a reminder, the 9 Writer Career Paths for making $1,000,000+ are:

1. Literary Writer

2. Genre Fiction Writer

3. Non-Fiction Writer

4. Newsletter Writer

5. Content Writer

6. Ghostwriter

7. Sales Copywriter

8. Writerpreneur

9. Category Copywriter

So, let’s talk about which paths to pursue when, and why, to make the most amount of money as fast as possible as a writer.

Level 1: $0 to $1

Everybody wants to know how to make $1,000,000 before they’ve even made a single dollar.

Which is a mistake. Because the decisions you make to go from $100k/yr to $1M/yr are very different than the decisions you make to go from $0 to $1.

So, let’s start here.

In the beginning, broke aspiring writers like to believe their primary constraint is money. “If only I had a book deal” is probably the most popular of their self-acquittal nomenclature. In reality, money has nothing to do with it. Their primary constraint is time.

Which means, in the beginning, time is the variable to solve for—not making money.

Let’s walk through the logic:

• In order to earn money from your writing, you have to first “get good” at writing.

• “Getting good” at writing means you have to invest lots and lots of time into building the skill.

• But “getting good” at writing is only 50% of the game. The other 50% is “getting good” at monetizing your writing (the business side).

• And “getting good” at monetizing your writing means you also have to invest lots and lots of time into building the skill of monetizing your writing.

• All of which means you need to engineer a life that allows you to invest the most amount of hours-per-day possible into your pursuit of “getting good” at writing, as well as “getting good” at monetizing your writing.

It’s just hours.

So, in the most objective and unemotional way, if you say you want to become a successful writer (regardless of which Career Path you choose), and lots and lots of hours are required in order to get there, and your life isn’t engineered in a way that allows for more than 1 or 2 hours of writing per week (or per month!), then you aren’t going to reach your goal.

It’s not that you aren’t talented.

It’s not that you aren’t creative.

It’s literally just math. Pretend The-All-Knowing-Writer-Gods said, “If you reach 10,000 hours of ‘getting good’ at writing and 10,000 hours of ‘getting good at monetizing your writing,’ you will make millions of dollars. Guaranteed.” Pretend the outcome is fixed, objective, and measurable. Then, it’s just hours. Things like talent and creativity are irrelevant. (You can decide whether or not these things matter AFTER you’ve put in 20,000 hours.)

So, aspiring writer, what does it mean to engineer a life (and daily/weekly schedule) that optimizes for time?

3 Options To Power-Level Yourself

The way most people think to solve for “time” is by saving up a sum of money and throwing caution to the wind. They quit their job, run away to a cabin in the woods, and then spend 3 months in a state of stress, anxiety, and depression because they’ve given themselves a very small window of time to produce something genius that, they hope, will also (they’re not sure how, but they hope) make them millionaires so they never have to worry about money again.

This is a recipe for disaster, and rarely ever works.

Instead, here are a few options I’ve found that work much better, are lower stress, and increase the likelihood you accomplish your goal of “getting good” at writing:

Option #1: Work the most lucrative but lowest cognitive-load job you can find.

Part of why so many people struggle to find time to write is because their day-job is draining.

It’s not that they don’t have time when they get off work. It’s that they are so brain-fried that they need to spend those last few hours each night recovering (or coping) in order to endure the next day of work, and so on. And no amount of watching motivational YouTube videos about how you need to “just do it” solves the problem. Eventually, if “getting good” at writing is important enough, you need to consider finding a different job. And if this is the route you decide to go, you have to remember it’s not money you’re solving for—it’s time.

• Find a job that pays you the same as what you earn now, but is far easier and less mentally taxing. This will allow you to make use of those last few hours each night because you won’t be as drained from the day.

• Find a job that pays you the same as what you earn now, but is fewer hours. If the job you’re working now expects you in the office from 8am to 7:30pm every night, then finding a different job that is just 9-5 immediately gives you 3.5 more hours each day to invest in your writing. Huge upgrade!

• Find a job that pays you less than what you earn now, but is easier, fewer hours, and/or allows you to “practice on the clock.” If the job you work now requires you to be “on” all day, what might it look like to consider working a simpler job that doesn’t require as much from you? Like working the front desk of an apartment complex. I’m always seeing those guys sitting there on their phones with nothing to do. You could take that job and practice writing one, two, three, four more hours each day… on the job!

For example, this is what Brandon Sanderson, one of the best-selling science fiction writers in the world, did in his early years. After graduating from college, he took a job as the night desk clerk at a hotel because they allowed him to write while at work. These are the kinds of decisions you need to consider making if becoming a professional writer is “that” important to you.

There’s no right answer. However you get there is up to you.

But the point is, you have to solve for time, first.

Because if you can’t solve for time going from $0 to $1 as a writer, then even if I hand you $100,000 in cash tomorrow, you’re still faced with the same problem. You might be a little richer, but you’re still stuck—with no path forward to “getting better” as a writer.

Option #2: Get paid to practice.

The other option is to find a full-time job that is writing-related (if you’re not working one already).

Which essentially means getting paid to practice.

This is what I did.

My first (and only) job out of college was working for an advertising agency downtown Chicago. For the entire first year, I got paid to write social media content and blog posts for brands—like a local pizza chain, a burger joint, a coconut water company, and even a female gynecologist and sex-after-menopause expert (I learned a lot). The second year, I got paid to proofread proposals for website redesign projects, brand strategy retainers, even national brand campaigns. The third year, I got paid to write taglines, billboard ad copy, and the little blurbs that appear on a product’s packaging. And the fourth year, I got paid to run entire projects by myself, pitch and land clients, manage accounts, and even run accounting for my small department.

Now, was this job my be-all-end-all? Of course not.

It was very taxing, very demanding, and paid slightly above minimum wage. But I saw it as an opportunity to acquire all the same skills I was going to have to acquire anyways. I was getting paid to practice. And after 4 years of working at this advertising agency, when I finally decided to quit, I felt incredibly prepared for the real world as a writer, working for myself.

Option #3: Get paid to practice with a lucrative side-hustle.

The third option, and this is what I encourage most people stuck in a full-time job to do, is to get paid to practice by starting a lucrative writing-related side-hustle—aka Ghostwriting.

This accomplishes a few different things, all at the same time:

• First, it’s much easier than trying to find a new full-time job that pays you to practice. It just is. Easier to get started. Less mentally taxing. Etc.

• Second, it de-risks everything. A lucrative side-hustle means you’re less reliant on your full-time job; a lucrative side-hustle means you have a path forward incase you get laid off; a lucrative side-hustle means you can eventually quit your full-time job (unlocking even more hours to “get good” at writing); a lucrative side-hustle gives you more disposable income, faster, to reinvest in yourself or your future runway; etc.

• Third, it pays you to practice. More time spent writing is the goal. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing for yourself, or someone else. Writing is writing.

• Fourth, it holds you accountable. When you “work for yourself,” even on the side, you can’t talk yourself out of taking action as easily. Your clients will hold you accountable simply by having the expectation that you do what you said you were going to do. This forces a lot of quality hours of practice.

Which is why I tell every single aspiring writer the very first career path they should pursue is Ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting costs $0 to start.

Ghostwriting pays you to practice.

Ghostwriting can be done in addition to a full-time job.

Ghostwriting gives you a path out of your full-time job, allowing you to earn more AND reclaim more hours in your day (which you can reinvest in “getting good” at your own writing).

And Ghostwriting will hold you accountable. Watch how fast “Writer’s Block” evaporates when you have a client emailing you asking, “Hey, where’s that draft you said you were going to send me by today?”

The Big Mistake

Now, before we move on, here’s where people go wrong.