🚢 Atomic Essay #18: “Nobody Makes A Living As A Writer”
My very last week of college, all my teachers ran through the same speech:
“Writing is thankless work. It’s hard. It doesn’t pay very well. When you do the math on the hours you spend writing and what you end up earning in the end, you’re making pennies on the dollar. Nobody makes a living as a writer.”
Eight years later (I graduated when I was 23, and I’m almost 31 now), I feel like this couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you write in a vacuum and only produce one piece of finished work every five years, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
If you want to write flowery fiction (a consolidating category) that imitates your favorite writers of old, and not push yourself creatively to create a new category of your own, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
If you choose to invest zero time and energy into learning the business side of publishing, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
If you refuse to acknowledge the power of the internet and use real-time feedback and data to help you decide what to write next to best engage the audiences you want to reach, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
If you continue to think that “only authors who publish with major publishing houses are real writers,” giving up 90%+ ownership in what you create for a paltry advance, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
If you only define “making a living as a writer” by one metric (being book sales) and refuse to monetize your talents in other ways, then yes, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer.
When I graduated from college, I entered the real world thinking in order for me to do what I loved, I would need to live a life of poverty.
I’ve since discovered the complete opposite.
Never in history has it been easier to make a living as a writer.
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My name is Nicolas Cole, and I'm a writer, ghostwriter, and entrepreneur.
Want the full story? Start here 👇
I started writing online early on.
At 17 years old, I was one of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the first e-famous gaming bloggers on the internet.
I wrote a book about it, called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. amzn.to/3p7ffYc
After HS, I spent a year at University of Missouri studying journalism. Wasn't my thing.
My sophomore year, I transferred to @ColumbiaChi and studied Poetry, then Music Production, then Piano Performance, before finally settling in Fiction Writing.
- How to create new categories and redesign existing categories.
- Why "Product-Market Fit" is flawed & dangerous thinking, and what you should be focused on instead.
- Why category creators generate outsized returns for investors.
Through our research, we found that 21% of the 600ish companies on the Fortune 100 list are category creators. For 79% of fast-growing companies, $1.00 of revenue growth = $1.77 in market cap growth.
For the 21% category creators, $1.00 of revenue growth = $4.82—nearly 3x more
When I was 26 years old, I started my first company with one of my closest friends.
18 months later, we had 20 full-time employees & several million in revenue.
❌💸Here are the mistakes we made that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars ❌💸👇👇👇
Mistake #1: Scaling the wrong product.
Our V1 offering was 12 ghostwritten articles per month for 1 executive/founder client. That level of output was absurd, but at the time I was used to writing 1 new article per DAY for myself.
Clients signed up, but many fell behind.
Every time a client fell behind, they would "pause" and then we'd be stuck with the balance of overdue articles, which ate into our profit margin heavily over time.
We scaled with that broken V1 product for months without even considering bringing the workload down.