Writer Career Path #8: Writerpreneur

Pick a niche. Attract a social audience. Build an email list. Launch digital products. Spin the flywheel forever.

Dear Writer,

So you want to be a Writerpreneur?

This is a career path that began to emerge in the early 2000s.

Before the dawn of the Internet, writers were largely held hostage by legacy media and publishing companies. If you wanted to write a book, you needed a publisher. If you wanted to write opinion columns, or cover the news, you needed a publisher. Anything you wanted to write and share with the world had to be “chosen” by someone with distribution—which meant the number of available Writer Career Paths were limited to the platforms and publishers willing to back new writers.

But with the Internet, to quote a dot-com cliché, distribution became democratized.

Facebook, Twitter, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, etc., changed the power dynamic between writers and publishers. Suddenly, publishing your stories and insights didn’t require permission. All you had to do was press a button and your words could be viewed by anyone else with an Internet connection. But democratized distribution also caused an evolution in business models. The singular “you’ll-get-paid-what-we-decide” legacy publishing deal or columnist contract was no longer the only option.

We now call this buffet of new business models The Creator Economy:

• You can build an audience on a social platform and/or an email list, and sell your writing or related products directly to your readers. (Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc.)

• You can sell your writing (or related products) on your own website. (Squarespace, Wordpress, Shopify, etc.)

• You can sell your writing (or related products) on an aggregation platform with its own distribution engine. (Amazon, Google, etc.)

• You can sell access to your writing (or related products) through a monthly subscription and/or donations. (Substack, Patreon, etc.)

Write what you want. Charge what you want. And earn what you generate for yourself: end-to-end control—from first impression to final sale.

It’s an incredible era to be a Writerpreneur.

The Art of Writerpreneurship

Here’s the playbook for success in the digital age as a Writerpreneur:

• Pick a niche.

• Attract a social audience.

• Build an email list.

• Launch digital products.

• Spin the flywheel forever.

It’s simple in theory, but each step requires its own set of skills.

Of all the Writer Career Paths, being a Writerpreneur is the least writer-ly and requires the most digital savvy. This is both the pro and the con of “freedom of expression.” Everyone says they want creative freedom until they feel the burden of infinite choice. If you want to “just be a writer,” then take the publishing deal where you get paid a minimum-wage advance and a measly 10-15% royalty on your book sales. Just don’t be surprised when you see some Internet Writer earning 100x more than you. That was the trade—the decision you made! You traded not-needing-to-learn-any-other-skills for exponential upside. You chose to “just be a writer.” So you can’t simultaneously expect the same outcomes as someone who chose to be a writer PLUS everything else.

The more creative freedom you want, the more skills you must acquire in order to successfully leverage and monetize that freedom. Writerpreneurs aren’t the most talented, and certainly not the most literary writers. But they don’t have to be. That’s because “writing” is only a small part of the totality of what they do. Which means, if you want to unlock the rewards that come with being a Writerpreneur, then you need to embrace building these other non-writing skills.

*Quick Context: I have generated over $20,000,000 as a Writerpreneur through a wide variety of digital business models. I have also trained thousands of writers on all the following skills, and watched hundreds of them go on to generate tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars themselves.

Writerpreneur Skill #1: Pick An Infinite Niche

The first step to becoming a Writerpreneur is picking a niche.