Nearly a year ago now, I started researching what it would take to—finally—make writing the most central pursuit in my life. Since then, I’ve completed one book, written a chunk of what may become a novel, researched, written and recorded 9 podcast episodes on the works of Ernest Hemingway, and made 84 posts to this Substack. Through it all, I’ve spent many hours trying to learn what it takes these days to support yourself as a writer, since things have changed so radically from when I first started playing the game, back when I’d make countless copies of stories and articles, weighing them in their large manila envelopes, licking and sticking on stamps, and snail-mailing them to journals and small presses—being sure to include SASEs (self addressed stamped envelopes) if I wanted a reply.
To this end, I recently read a piece on Medium called something like “How to Make Money Writing on Medium.” It was a tempting, clickable title. As I normally do, I skimmed through the opening paragraphs, which were filled with the standard fluff—“so you want to make money writing online…so you’ve tried everything…so no one is reading your work…” As with 99% of these “how to do it” pieces, a significant percentage of the post was spent on the “setup.” But anyone here who hopes to figure out how to make more money on Medium, or Substack, or any other online, potentially money-making site surely doesn’t need you to restate the obvious (especially when this occupies more half of your post).
So I skimmed ahead…. “Where’s the beef,” I asked the invisible writer whose words had so far given me nothing they promised, until finally the author, as if admitting they had been toying with me all along, wrote something like, “OK, so you really want to know what you need to do to make more money. Here goes.…” What followed, as usual, was mundane, dissatisfying. The advice: write better, post consistently, and find a “niche.” Just these three nuggets of wisdom.
When I researched the author, looking at their many dozens of posts on Medium, I found they were all near carbon-copies in form and spirt of the post I just read. “How to make your first $100 on Medium,” “How to make your first $1000 Dollars on Medium,” “How to Step up Your Writing Game to Earn Big,” and on and on—which is when it dawned on me that this writer’s niche was targeting writers desperate to make money online with their writing.
Here was a writer who only writes about how writers can make money writing and who makes money writing by writing about this.
While this seems like a simple enough, not exactly earth-shattering conclusion, for me it struck a deep nerve. Here was a writer who only writes about how writers can make money writing and who makes money writing by writing about this. A troubling tautological logic was at play here, and it got me thinking that so much of what I read online has a similar circularity about it and provides me nothing, really, in return—is ultimately just noise.
Making money online is all about clicks, which is why nearly every “how to make money” article has a “catchy” title and “SEO-optimized” subtitle. On sites like Medium, writers also need “engagement,” for your audience to read through to the end of the piece in order to make money. Hence, the tendency in so much online writing to keep delaying unveiling the promised insights. If the reader were to quickly get the not-so-profound tidbit of info right off the bat, they may well look for the nearest exit, engagement numbers would go down, and you’d earn less hard cash.
All to say that I’m not making much money with my writing, and also to say why I’ve put so much energy into Substack. You can read or not and stay as long as you like, and my only hope is that you’ll find enough value in the content to make a small contribution, or…that one day thanks to enough of you having shared a post or two, or through the magic of google and the vagaries of the Internet…countless readers will gravitate in my direction, and my subscriber numbers, along with revenue, will soar.
While I patiently await that day, for now, I feel good about not playing the writing-noise-game. With AI, still more of the writing we read online will very likely never have been conceived of by organic, flesh and blood brains, but as far as I’m concerned, much of the noise may as well have been written by machines anyway, so this doesn’t really concern me.
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of exceptional online writing out there, and it’s well worth your time to peruse Substack and Medium and other blogs and journalism, poetry, fiction websites and webzines. As an example, just a few weeks back, I was browsing through Substack when I came upon Lynne Wyeness’s Substack, Three Wild Steps. I was instantly impressed with the poetic richness of her prose and the authenticity of her voice. I think Garrison Keillor’s writing on Substack at 80 years old is as good or better than anything he’s ever done—all his years of experience and writing acumen and humor and wisdom coming through in each of his highly personal entries. They almost feel like letters from an old friend. I’ve also so enjoyed my friend and one-time teaching colleague Laura Hurwitz’s writing, The Long and Short of It (and thanks to Laura for recommending Substack to me). I recently attended a reading by my former student, Natalie Beach and her father, Randall Beach, both reading from new books (Natalie’s first!)—and I was thrilled to find out that Randall, a long-admired New Haven journalist, also has a Substack…. (Take a look at my recommendation list to find many other Substacks I regularly read, and please recommend your own favorite online writing in the comment section below).
I suppose you have to take the good with the bad. Never has it been so easy for writers to share their work with the entire globe with just the click of a button (and to potentially make money doing so). My hope, more and more, is that I’m not just contributing to the noise, that at least occasionally I write something worth saying (and maybe even clicking).
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As always, I encourage you to leave a comment. Thank you.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”
Just got round to reading this from my Inbox and nearly fell off my chair - thank you so much for the mention and for appreciating my writing. Really chuffed 😃
You provide the sort of wonderfully rich content makes this platform a pleasure to explore.