The Writers Coin

After running through last month’s stats, it got me thinking about how much money is in writing. As most people know, there isn’t much unless you hit the big time. And it’s especially little when you’re starting out. According to the Department of Labor, the median writer/author makes around $48,000, but that includes copywriters and authors in the same group — two totally different types of writing. If you were to devote yourself full time to writing fiction (and magazine articles, say), it could be feast or famine, and most likely famine for a while.

But those numbers are ethereal, so I’m going to share my own numbers with you. I’m going to talk about the money I’ve made by writing fiction, the money I’ve made by writing on this blog and the indirect money I’ve made thanks to my writing.

Writing Fiction

I’ve written TONS of fiction in the last few years, but none of it has been published. I can’t say that right now I’m trying my hardest at it because a lot of my time is going into this site (a source of great conflict right now), and that’s something I need to work on. But I have gotten paid for my fiction. It happened once: one day after work I decided to just go to the library, sit down and write for two hours. That’s all I told myself was going to happen, and I did it. I started writing, threw the first page away, and wrote for the two hours I had allotted myself. I edited the story a couple of times and then submitted it to a writing competition — not thinking much more of it.

Months later I got a letter — I had won a prize: $300. I can’t tell you how good this feeling was. I was being recognized for my writing, there was going to be a ceremony to celebrate it (along with other writers) and I was getting paid for it! I can’t stress enough the importance of the money part — when I told people that a story I wrote earned me $300, they took it seriously— like I must really be good then. Not that I equate one with the other, but money is a language everyone can understand, and getting paid around $100/hour ain’t bad in any profession. The catch, of course, is that I’ve put hundreds of hours into other stories and nothing has come of it.

It wasn’t going to get published, which was the only downer, but I was so pumped and so motivated when I got that letter that I knew I was going places.

Grand total: $300

Blogging and Freelancing

I put up my numbers every month for what I make as “Alternative Income.” That gives an idea of how much money the site as a whole pulls in, but the only direct way to correlate writing for this and “earnings” is by looking at the money I make with my ads. ING referrals are good and all, but they really have nothing to do with my writing. Freelancing is also writing, but not the kind of creative writing I like to do. Both the ad money and freelancing are directly tied to my writing, so that’s why I’m grouping them together.

In October it’ll be a year since I started blogging on The Writer’s Coin, but I didn’t put ads up until around January and I’ve made a total of $32.86 (per hour I make less than small children picking coffee beans in third world countries). Since I started Freelancing, I’ve made a total of $360.

Grand total: $392.86.

Indirect Blogging Money

This site got me my current job — no doubt about it. It’s taught me a lot about social networking, SEO and I’ve learned a lot about finances along the way. But can I put a price on all of that? Sure I can — I can look at how much of a salary bump the new job was over the old one. I can also look at all the money that I’ve made in ING referrals and any other blog-related ventures, which totals to $184.40.

The salary bump I got from my last job to this one was huge, but I don’t want to get into specifics. I will say that it went up 25%, which was an incredible bump.

Grand Total: $184.40 and a 25% salary bump

Final Thoughts

There’s definitely money to be made out there from writing. The question is, what kind of writing do you like best and how much money do you want to make? The answer for me is a tough one — filled with contradictions and conflicts.

I like blogging — I get a platform to instantly publish whatever I want on two topics I find very interesting: writing and money. But lately I’ve become addicted to the stats: pageviews, AdSense clicks, traffic, PageRank, etc. I spend most of my free time on this site, and I don’t like thinking that I’m doing it specifically for the money (which is so little). It’s starting to feel like a job where I just show up and get paid, only my salary is a joke and I hate my boss.

Writing fiction rewards me like nothing else when it comes out right. It’s tough, no doubt, but there’s something magical about it too. Something about freedom and art and creativity that’s hard to nail down. It can make some decent money if you put the work in, but I haven’t been doing that, and I want to change that.

“Writing” is too broad a term to describe all the different kinds of writing you can do to make some money and make a living. Hopefully, ideally, I’ll be able to find a nice middle ground where my fiction is front and center and I can still have a platform (like this one) to say whatever I want and publish it right away.

[this post has been included in the Just Write Carnival over at The Incurable Disease of Writing. Make sure to stop over and check out some of the other articles posted over there]

I’ve been posting my alternative income for every month lately and while it’s nice to chart how well I do from one month to the next, I started to wonder how much alternative income I’ve made total since I started to monetize my blog and keep track of this stuff. So I decided to count it all up and see where I stand. Here are all the things I’ve counted into the figure in order of how much they’ve made me:

• Freelancing: Writing, editing and translating.
• ING Interest: As passive as it gets, I just keep my savings in there and they pay me 3% interest.
• Other: Referral programs like Money Exchange and links I’ve sold through the blog.
• ING Referrals: When someone opens an account with my promotional link, I get $10 and they get $25.
• Blogging: Ads on my site.
• Amazon: Links to books on Amazon where people actually end up buying a book.

Since November of 2007, I’ve made $690.

My first month I made $45 and on my best month I made $136. The best part? It’s gone right back into my ING account to continually grow how much interest I get. The bad part? I feed my Roth IRA via that account, so every few months it experiences a drop when I invest.

It sounds great, but keep in mind there are people out there making more than this in a month, so in the blogging world this is chump change. For me, however, it’s a nice way to see how I can grow my income. Even if it’s just a little.

I’ve talked and thought about alternative income and diversifying my income for a long time but I’ve never really counted up all the pennies to see how much I’ve been making. It was just such an “insignificant” amount that I never gave it much thought.

Then last month I saw some actual amounts of money in Adsense—a very modest spike. I’m talking from 2 cents to a whole dollar here. So I got all excited and then this month I saw someone actually bought some stuff from Amazon via one of my links. So I got a whole dollar for that too.

No I’m joining the countless other bloggers out there about to put their alternative income on their blog. Trust me, the only reason I’m doing it is because it’s low. But if it ever gets any higher than, say, $100, I don’t think I would keep posting it. That would be a little weird.

Anyway, here’s how I’ve done since November of last year:

So that’s my income. I count ING interest (and customer referrals, which are $10 each), Adsense, some freelance writing/editing/proofing/translating that I do on a monthly basis, and Amazon. The freelance work goes up to $50/month in March and Amazon so far has about a dollar or so in it, so that’ll be nice to see next month. I just couldn’t wait to get it all in spreadsheet form and see what it looked like. I know some people count dividends and stuff but I’m going to keep that out of this discussion.

The goal for Adsense since I started this was to make $60 in a year, since that’s what the hosting and domain cost me for the same amount of time. We’ll see if we reach that goal, though.

I’ve been freelancing for this one client for a few months now. The deal was one big project at the beginning and some small upkeep on a month-to-month basis. Everything was fine until last month, when that upkeep became more than just minor. I spent five hours working on something that usually took around two.

This meant I was being paid somewhere around $6/hour. Not good enough, especially since it involves translating from English to Spanish.

So I decided to change my rates from a per/project basis to a per/hour basis. I told the client that I would begin charging the new rates in one month and that I would tally up the time worked just so he could see what it would cost him one month after that. In other words, I’d still get paid the same but I would let him know how much it would cost him next month, just to give him a ballpark figure if he didn’t want to pay it.

I told him I’d be charging $25/hour and for five hours it would be $125.

He balked, telling me that was too high and he didn’t like the per/hour charging system because he had no way of knowing how long I actually worked. But he likes my work and would like to continue to use me. I told him I just can’t work for $6/hour anymore.

In his last email, he told me that he could go as high as $50/month, up from the $30/month he pays me now.

It’s still pretty low, but if the work goes down (last month may have been an aberration, but it also may have been him trying to get more work out of me before my rates went up) to two hours again, I’ll be making my ideal $25/hour.

I’m torn on what to do. The whole idea I started this was to have some alternative income coming in, as well as diversifying my income. I know $360/year isn’t much (it would now grow to $600) but it’s still something and I’m torn on whether or not I should drop it rather than get paid less than I’m worth.

It’s not like I have a bunch of other clients waiting in the wings so if I say no to this guy I probably won’t have any side income at all, which is bad. Last month, when I was working the five hours (which were horrible, by the way, it’s menial and boring) last month I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being taken advantage of. M feels the same way.

But I feel if I stick to my guns and turn down the $50/month I’ll be going back to before I had any freelance income, I that feels like a step back.

What do you guys think? What should I do?