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Seven Ways to Grow Your Writing Business · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to the Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to grow your business or make more money as a writer, you're definitely going to relate to today's question from email subscriber Josiah, who's a pastor and also one of my former college students.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this is an especially fun episode.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what Josiah says.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Professor Sanders, I was wondering how to get into the writing world.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to be a paid writer.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've written theology books and self-published my sermons on Amazon.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm writing a Christian fantasy novel.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: However, I'd actually like getting paid to write.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Any suggestions on how to break through into writing?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Josiah, as you can imagine, I do, of course, have some suggestions.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Seven suggestions, in fact.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And each of these will help you to move toward the goal of building your business and making money as a writer.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first thing that I want to say, however, before I dive into any suggestions is that I think you've done a super great job so far putting your work out there.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Just having the initiative to put out sermons and theology books out there already really, really says something about what you want in life and the fact that you're willing to take initiative.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So great job on that.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to make sure I say that up front.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's dive into seven suggestions that I have to help build your writing business and make some real money.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: First and foremost is this choose the channels where you can share your thinking with people.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I highly suggest having an email list where you email your readers on a regular basis, in addition to something like a good author website and using social media to connect with people.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Those are all really important because unless you're going to market your work, it's going to be really hard for people to discover you.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Second, make sure that your books have good covers and are professionally edited and formatted.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: To give you an example of this, um, actually, it's a negative example.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: A little while back, a friend gave me a copy of his new novel, and he was very excited about it.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: But the interior of the book was literally a double-spaced Word document.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was completely unreadable.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I just, you know, I was very grateful to receive the copy of it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate the hard work that this friend did to create the novel, but the interior was so ineffective it made it really hard to take this book seriously on any level.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I would suggest that you invest in professionals who can make your book look and read really top-notch.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Third is engage with your readers.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Your readers will give you feedback and support that are really critical to your success as a writer.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the reason that I answer questions via this podcast in my email list, like I'm doing right now, is because I want to know what my readers and listeners are thinking and also how I can help them.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, I just love engaging with people.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the whole reason we do this, the whole reason that we write is to put our ideas out there into the world, our ideas and stories, or whatever kind of content you create.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we want those to impact people.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it's got to be a feedback loop.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have to engage with people to see what's clicking and how what we're doing is impacting them and what we can do better, and so forth.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Number four is monetize your writing in various ways.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And gosh, we could do a whole many, many series of episodes on this.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the short story here is that this can include things like doing courses, special editions of your books, speaking engagements, coaching.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you name it, there's all kinds of ways to do this.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea here is to grow your streams of income so that your money doesn't just come in from one single source.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Number five is write or edit for publications.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I first got started growing my business, this has been about 10 years ago.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: For a few years, I was an editor and a writer for the Goodman Project, which is a large publication site with millions and millions of monthly readers.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really good experience that helped me to connect with a lot of readers.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I didn't make a lot of money in that role.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was a few hundred dollars a month or something like that at the time.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: But having that extra cash was helpful.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: But much more importantly, it gave me really, really good experience in writing quickly, writing a lot of articles, and also editing other people's articles, which in the long run was far more helpful than writing my own stuff on the side.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you edit for other people, you learn what works, you learn how to work with people.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's all kinds of benefits to doing that.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I suggest writing or editing for publications.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Number six is take the long view.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really, really important because building a writing business is going to take more time than you think.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: But once you accept that being a well-paid writer is a long game, not a short game, you can relax and let yourself experiment and make mistakes and figure out what works for you.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: But this is the only way to learn, isn't it?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is how as humans we grow into who we're supposed to be.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: We have to make some mistakes and we have to experiment and we've got to take the long view because this is definitely a long game.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: It took me five years to build my business part-time on the side while I was teaching college before I went into this full-time.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it does take a while.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: But again, if you accept it up front, then that's just part of the game.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then finally, number seven, if you want to accelerate your income, offer writing services.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why I chose ghostwriting as my main income source.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get paid really well by writing books for other people while also building my author platform on the side.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the thing, though, is that a lot of people who want to write their own stuff, they will kind of look down on things like ghostwriting or editing or service-based work because they just want to do their own stuff.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing is that it's not just about the money.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: When you ghostwrite for other people, you gain experiences and knowledge that you cannot get any other way, in my opinion.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: So when you write for other people, you learn how to write fast.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: You learn how to write on deadline, you learn how to not take your you learn how to not take criticism personally because authors that you write for always want changes.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's just how the game works.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you will develop some really, really good skills that help you in your own business.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I actually love having both sides of the equation where you're working on your own stuff and making money that way, but you're also writing for other people and you're making money that way.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: To me, that is a really, really killer combination because each of those sides of your business reinforces the other side.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think of it, there's lots of people in lots of industries who do this exact thing.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think of let's say uh one of my favorite musicians of all time is Prince.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Prince was a very successful musician in his own right, of course, but he also wrote a lot of songs and did a lot of producing for other artists.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that, you know, front stage, backstage kind of thing where you have two parts to your writing career.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: That to me is a really, really big uh that's an important thing that I don't hear talked about very often.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to give you a bonus, number eight, here.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: I know I said seven suggestions, but I'm gonna throw in a bonus here, which is if you want to accelerate all this even further, start a podcast and interview other successful authors.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is a really good way to build connections and learn from people who are far down the road ahead of you.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's really kind of a shortcut to success in many ways.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've actually given you not seven, but eight ways to accelerate your writing business and start making some real money.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And my suggestion is to choose one or two of these and start putting them into practice immediately.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the big takeaway here is you can absolutely do this.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: If I can do it, you can do it too.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: It just takes some time and it takes being consistent over the long term.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: But when you decide that this is the life that you want, and then you take action every day toward this goal, you might be surprised at the great things that start to happen for you.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks so much for listening.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Keep writing and keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.