How to Make a Living as a Writer
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
Only a good writer, that truly enjoys their craft, is able to masterfully insert a witty dry pun like that into their work. Bravo!
Another cute one!
That stopped after a while. I guess it was all the strokes and over work that got him.
For most people, writing is not sufficiently lucrative to sustain a living income and supplements other income streams or is net negative.
Also: read "new grub street" by George Gissing, 1891
There's another piece of journalistic writing about erotic Potter fanfic where the article author realises they're possibly good at it and have recruited followers. It's https://www.vice.com/en/article/my-quest-to-become-a-harry-p...
Editing and proofing may be a better deal. My partner did this for over 25 years and rarely exceeded the taxable income threshold.
I do know some successful freelancers but they're the generally fairly well-known exception (and are presumably still not making the kind of money many on this board would consider great).
It never even occurred to me to make it a core part of my identity - it’s just pain and numbness, and they aren’t about to drop off and catch fire, even if it feels like it sometimes.
Just remember, Jack Antonoff (musician turned music producer for acts like St. Vincent) benefitted from his Dad being a millionaire diet supplement multi-level marketing huckster, Taylor Swift’s Dad was (and still is) a Merrill Lynch high earning banker, Redfoo of LmFAO is the son of Barry Gordy…he’ll, even Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is the niece of famous guitarist Tuck Andreas. Tell me with a straight face having those connections isn’t a thumb on the roulette wheel and I’ll politely go away for obvious reasons.
There is also one and only Adele, whose father left when she was two and who had a very modest upbringing.
You can experiment without worrying that you will starve or be homeless if you fail.
Some corners of the arts are full of people like this - some talent, more money, so they get to have "careers" with nothing tangible on the line except loss of face. The family fortune protects them from everything except wilful self-destruction.
The obvious corollary is that failing to have rich, well-connected parents hugely lowers your odds of success, even if you have equivalent talent. Some people still succeed, for all kinds of reasons. But the odds are forever not in your favour.
It's not a binary, it's a significant tilt of the playing field.
But the thing is people always use the extreme outlier as "proof" that something is possible. There is both survival bias and moral rationalisation when it comes from rich people.
Sure enough, such and such poor person who started with nothing and a terrible environment succeeded. But how many like them with comparable merit/talent didn't? And what was the key event that put them on the good trajectory? People always underestimate the importance of luck.
On the other hand, coming from a rich background practically ensures a minimal amount of success. Even if you fail to become good/great you will be able to truck along with very little risk and still access to plenty opportunities.
About 15 years ago, I met some people who had true generational wealth. The brother went into music and the sister into design/art. They currently have a moderate amount of success and the reason is solely the connections/opportunities their parents provided. The work isn't bad per se, but I have met people who are much more talented and never got anywhere near the same type of opportunities. Many (most) have to switch to some sort of boring job to put food on the table. Meanwhile a rich competitor can afford to only work on his stuff until he succeed/make it somehow.
Life is fundamentally unfair and it's not a big deal but I really hate it when people pretend, they "made it" purely on talent/merit/hard work.
"How to get a Mediocre Job and live an Unremarkable Life"
Where the content of the article or video was, simply:
"Be born a human. You'll have a 99.99% chance of succeeding!"
It'd be pretty grim, it'd last about 15s to read or view, so no-one makes that video. Instead, they make videos about becoming pilots at 21, or owning your own house at 23, etc.
It's hard to accept these percentages as real, because it's about the opposite of what is presented on the content farm platforms, and that's partly as I said the fact that the story is too grim, but also the fact that the "unremarkable" people are not the ones producing "content".
You don't need to have rich parents. I also make a living as a writer, and I'll say an alternative to having rich parents would be to get a high-paying job for a couple years and just save a little. Just for when the initial pay is a little low.
"If you don't have rich parents, an alternative is to get a high-paying job".
Like holy f**k, can anyone be more out of touch with reality?
Sat here after a night of crappy sleep poking this out with hands that feel like they’re in tight rubber gloves, but life goes on, but it’s never even crossed my mind to see it as a disability, just as “one of those things”.
The only things that it has made extremely difficult for me are things like rock climbing or climbing very long ladders - but not impossible, if I take the time to pause and windmill my arms until they aren’t useless numb pain obelisks, or until other people start to get impatient with me. Other things I’ve had to just adapt to - stuff with fine motor control I have to take frequent breaks and ensure I’m supporting my hand and arm. Washing dishes, which she cites in another piece, I deal with by pincering a sponge between my fingers and using the back of my hand. It just became the new normal. Gross stuff, I find little difference with, although it definitely aggravates it if I spend a day doing heavy work involving my arms. Buy now, pay later.
Maybe it’s a generational or cultural thing. Maybe hers is worse than mine. I don’t know - I just found it jarring to hear someone describe it as a disability, as that idea has literally never even crossed my mind.
IMO it's very possible to convey authenticity via video, if you know what you're doing. I'm thinking of someone like Dry Creek Wrangler School:
I think we're already seeing that in the most-watched Youtube videos. The most followed Youtubers usually are the ones who are most "way-out-there" in terms of personality.
Better, because creators are no longer dependent on a film exec in LA / publishing exec in NYC / etc. to "make it" as a creative.
Worse, because while those gatekeepers did lock out many talented people, they also had the function of allowing the creator to focus excellent, "pure" work. I'm thinking of anonymous/semi-anonymous authors that wrote world-famous novels while being unknown. I don't think that is going to be a viable route anymore, because it depended on the middle-men.
Now that I think about it, this last function might actually appear again: agencies that manage a creator's marketing, budget, etc. and just let them focus on making stuff.
In short: I don't know if we could have the open opportunity of social media without it also being dependent on personal charisma.
It is entirely viable, there are a couple of pipelines that go something like [forum -> patreon -> widespread appeal] to pick up aspiring writers who can rise above the herd. It reminds me a bit of Charles Dickens - a man who was clearly being paid by the word - but much more accessible. Then there are the sites that just aggregate masses of amateur stories. Mostly badly written stories, but talent has a chance to be seen.
There isn't going to be any difficulty for the next great novel making it out into the world. The issue is more the living conditions of the legions of also-ran writers.
Everything ai can read or watch, it can copy. So someone showing his personality on YouTube video, Instagram or even tiktok, you get all the video, feed it into an AI and you get an enhanced clone.
2. At that point, identity systems will prevent an AI from just copying another creator’s content and passing it off as their own. YouTube, Facebook etc. have an interest in keeping real humans on their platforms and not just bots.
If YouTube could replace humans with AI, and thus reduce all that annoying overhead that comes with dealing with creators, and do so without reducing the number of ads that are watched, then I bet Google would be ok with it.
This is a sci-fi fantasy with no connection to reality. In the real world, IP matters a lot and lawyers determine what’s allowed on YouTube, not demigod AIs.
Laws are skewed through lobbying as a matter of course, and individual content creators don't have the same legal reach as AI unicorns.
I also think your comment is an example of the "just world fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy). Google/Youtube has vastly more resources, lawyers and lobbying power than individual creatives.
Not to mention the fact that the minute it becomes obvious to society writ large that YouTube is not filled with real people, and is only AI fake bots, it immediately will become blasé and uninteresting to the vast majority of people. Humans like humans, not facsimiles of humans.
Way too much sci-fi AI worship on this site sometimes, it borders on deification. “An infinitely powerful being will have no restrictions.” Human culture isn’t a math problem that can be replaced and solved with computing power.
Google can’t even seem to make search results that work anymore. Color me dubious that they can create thousands, millions of unique characters and content that out-compete real people.
GenAI is making inroads there but only as tools. Like Avid plugins that enhance productivity rather than replacing the actors themselves.
However Hollywood is a very very very different industry to the likes of YouTube. You cannot discuss the two industries like they’re equivalent. The stuff that would be banned in Hollywood would be perfect acceptable on YouTube. And visa verse too.
By the way, I wasn’t suggesting that YouTube would replace real content creators with AI copies of their originals. I was just making the point that YouTube doesn’t make its money from content creators; it makes it from advertising. So we shouldn’t assume that Google will defend the rights of those creators.
They want a human audience, but I suspect they are fine with bot creators and are probably working on that themselves.
Ever notice all those channels on YouTube and Spotify that are hours and hours of lofi music? They aren’t all human and some of them have big audiences.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
2. Social networks don't have any interest whatsoever in keeping creators humans. Creators are the cost, viewers or better yet paid subscribers, and the advertising buyers, are the revenue. IF majority of people are happy to consume generated content, social networks are happy to indulge. We on HN are assuming and hoping for some kind of human revolt, but we have historically been horrible at predicting such. Majority of people don't care a whif about stuff that HN cares about deeply (see: privacy, security,open source, etc:).
(This is not a hypothetical as far as I'm concerned - Spotify already has popular LoFi / sleep / working music channels it promotes that are generated cheaply by AI, or session musicians that are one step away from being / being replaced by AI. YouTube and Facebook are full of clips which have chatgpt generating text, AI voiceover, and short AI clips merged together - today, vs decades from now).
* Completely unrealistic fake rescue videos * Drawings and photos and paintings presented as own * Videos which are AI voices from an AI script with AI animations * And let's not get into the news/"news" aspect of it all
I fear Idiocracy is more in our future, but here's hoping you're right :)
In the future, everyone's aidoru will be famous for fifteen minutes.
As someone who just started blogging and sharing stories, I'm reminded of how much passion and hardship influence creative work.
My weakness is also my self-doubt.
I understand that living a creative life does not require waiting for the right circumstances; rather, it requires working hard in the face of criticism, uncertainty, or lack of reward.
Thanks for sharing.
Virtually all the jobs mentioned can already be replaced with AI for a fraction of the cost.
One thing is clear from this text: she can definitely write. I wonder what her erotic stories read like even though I'm not exactly the demographic they were aiming for.
I’m not so sure. First, they are already paying pennies to the writers. Second, who’s gonna write the prompt? The bosses certainly not, so they would hire prompters. Now, you cannot simply hire a prompter with zero experience in copywriting or editing; these people would not accept less than pennies for their work. So you just go ahead and hire people with writing experience. It’s easier.
Edit: besides, assuming AI will take over, if you want an original and catchy story, you need to provide a good prompt. I cannot think someone more suitable to provide such prompts than the writers themselves. Is like saying: anyone can create their own app with LLMs. Well, I can tell you my mom or my 21 year old cousin wouldn’t be able to do so (they wouldn’t be able to be more specific than a simple “I want a spotify-like app but in red”. They wouldn’t know what to do with the LLM output, even if it comes as an executable that you just need to drop in your phone). So you need developers here as well.
I think AIs will quickly progress to the point where the boss can just tell them to do X, instead of telling the prompter to tell the AI to do X.
No magic, all dumb for loops and string formatting and a bunch of calls to LLM. Just a single prompt from the manager. Writers can now go do a roofing job to put food on the table while the retirement age always grows proving them how AI is finally freeing humanity from having to work.
There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine. They are bosses, they are not technical people; they don't like machines... machines cannot go to jail or be accountable for mistakes.
If there is a boss2 above boss1, then boss1 is accountable to boss2 for subordinates and there is almost no difference between blaming and firing an employee or blaming and firing an LLM or LLM developer. Also important to remember that an LLM doesn't snitch if you ask it to do shady stuff.
> There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine
Most bosses want to be richer and want obedient underlings.
Remember it won't be a scary mainframe. It's basically a benign looking contact in your chat. Same thing they use to message their misstreases. They will be fine.
However, writers that lean into their identity and inject their personality into the writing, use video, and generally have a public brand will probably do fine. The fact is: we live in a video world now, so unless you can latch onto the brand of a larger entity to grow your audience, you're probably going to need to be on camera.
(This is basically how many writers are successful on Substack.)
Writers will also continue to be needed in fields where there is zero tolerance for errors (say, technical writers at complex manufacturing companies.)
Yeah and in a world where Veo3 exists. Using video is not a panacea. Actually if you post the video on youtube then it is used to train Veo so that you can be replaced... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070548
When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.
What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.
What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?
From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.
I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.
Don't worry, if we keep it up, we can do this to everyone, all humanity, and finish our centuries long work of making a world that's hard on humans and good for our superorganisms -- business, capital organizations, churches and states that we started on centuries ago. Our technical creations can help us accelerate and complete the process by which we have chosen to make our only possible significance and value in how much we can scramble to control of these, crushing every other human endeavor and the suffering we create and potential joys we torch in meanwhile nothing but the meaningless price of progress.
I make a living as a writer and I don't use AI. In fact, I hate AI and I work for an AI-free writing website. There is an audience for it, and we make enough money to support ourselves as well.
* AI fulfills a prompt. "Write me a story" or "write me an article" or "write me song lyrics" will get you a story or an article or song lyrics and that in itself is pretty amazing in itself, but as someone who has tried all of these things at various levels of sophistication, it's pretty clear to me that there's often something missing from these results, and of course there is, because you have to put whatever "something" is in the prompt to have good chances "something" will show up. Do you know what that something is when you conceive the story / article / song lyrics? You might... but you might not, the art might be half in the process you work through to figure out what "something" is, hand in hand with the work of giving it form. I can see how AI can help and have already used it this way, but I've already seen how it will often fail or produce Content™ rather than something that fulfills the full profile implied in the impulse to make the thing.
* "a fraction of the cost" is ... speculative to put it charitably. Users aren't exposed to anything remotely like the costs involved right now, the tech is only available at the moment by burning a huge amount of venture / research funding (on top the huge uncompensated labor heists that torching enlightenment copyright bargains represents). The true economics are pretty opaque before you even get deeper questions of like the implications of introducing an external dependency that may not be truly fungible and may represent unknown influences into the thought-level substrate of human culture / experience.
I have just made the leap into becoming a full-time writer. I had an early stroke of luck and sold a screenplay – which let me write full-time for the next 6 months or so. I write primarily military/espionage fiction, would love to hear what the HN crowd is hungry for on that front.
The nerd is a useful archetype.
Even if he/she was dumb enough, I'd assume the person likely has contacts with national security agencies that could spell it out for them.
Why not books about how a plumber, librarian, or widget salesmans job happens. Everyone knows when they move industries that there is a huge amount of stuff in any job (see the "Horse News" from the original article)
Stuff like business models, how profits is made spiced with the odd funny story. Easy to find a friend, uncle or to interview.
I'd point to the youtube channels about topics like this with 200,000 subscribers (and sometimes a lot more).
"Horse News makes me feel like a bad person sometimes. Racing is an odd, archaic, and often cruel sport. The more I read about it, the more convinced I become that it should not exist. I root for Horse Laws and grow sad when a state bucks them."
Part of her paycheck comes from the horse racing industry so to be honest in this way is courageous. If she were in any of the common HN industries she would've written how horses have been her life-long passion, ever since she saw a picture of one in some random children's book, and how writing about horse racing allows her to share her passion with the world. She'd also have another job as a life coach.
Because for the majority of people, McDonald's and equivalents have absolutely supplanted meals made by a parent or an adult self.
Why did this person insist on denying their handicap and status as a disabled person and pursue benefits available to provide for basic needs, if available in Canada or elsewhere?
There are other options than going to the “dark side” as I call an avenue like Horse News.
I’m sure she’s intelligent enough to admit that “reputation management” is a fucked up way of relabeling “propaganda outlet” so it’s more palatable.
Honestly I’ve got no qualms with the smut angle because that’s a long running tradition and readers very much have made it a worthwhile enterprise over hundreds of years.
I do find some odd comedy in taking a position that writing literary pornography is actually the lesser of two evils, morally speaking, in her method of making a living. I won’t be checking out her book because of the pervasive comments about her health issues. I have a far worse one and I rarely bring it up and that’s my choice, as it’s hers to wave the flag or tout overcoming it as some kind of accomplishment to celebrate. I suppose in some ways it is, but personally speaking working for “reputation management” is absolutely distasteful to me and I won’t try to rationalize it, even in the context of physical limitations.
It’s one of a handful of things in your HN bio. The pinned article on your blog is largely about its effects on your life.
That’s okay.
I think it’s admirable for people to talk frankly about their struggles with disability, and I think it’s hypocritical of you to criticize the article’s author for doing so.
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One idea I’ve had, is transformation via a system similar to corruption, but regulated. If you go to a government office, you don’t pay a bribe, but you pay some kind of tip to the representative. And that tip is listed on a “menu” and is reported to the employer, and a small tax is paid. The amounts are set at a level around the commonly known bribe paid today.
Then, year by year, those tips are reduced (or stay the same, not adjusted for inflation), while the salary is increased. This is possible due to the small tip tax.
Doing this while information campaigns are running on TV, internet, schools, and so on, continuously.
Let’s say this is a 20 year project, with a clear goal of a higher level of civilization, imprinting in people that this good and this will make life better for you, your children and grandchildren.
I hope that your country will be able to fix the problem.