Hey everyone,
The writing industry doesn’t dictate the level of my success. I do.
That’s the attitude I have had since the very first day of my career and it is, I suspect, why most of you continue to follow my work. Why many of you found me in the first place.
There are a lot of things that people will still tell you are “impossible.”
You can’t make it as a writer from India in the US journalism industry, especially now. (They’ve been saying “especially now” for the last fifteen years, by the way.)
You can’t have a successful business selling to writers because they don’t like to pay for things.
You can’t be a foreign correspondent because that’s something that’s reserved for white people.
It’s very hard to get US and UK-based agents for novels set abroad because they don’t sell as much (I had several agents interested both times I went looking for an agent).
I could go on and on. But I’ve done all of those things I’ve mentioned above regardless of how “impossible” they were and will continue to do more of the same.
Because all of what is possible and impossible for other people doesn’t matter to me. I’m only interested in what is possible for me.
And what is possible for me is everything I decide is possible for me.
A few years ago, after my son was born, I started to get disillusioned with journalism. I needed new challenges and I needed to learn new skills. I also wanted to be more in control of the work I did, where I published it, and how much I made from it.
I wrote back then that my solution to this was to build my own audience and go to them directly, whether that was for any books I wrote, any courses I launched, or any projects I wanted to fund. If you have your own audience, I said then, you have choices.
How?
Consider this. You have 10,000 people signed up to your mailing list, as I do. You finish a book. Now, as a result of having those 10,000 followers, you have more choices than the average writer. Because you already have 10,000 people who are interested in your work, you could release your book to them directly and ask them to buy, as I did with my book Shut Up and Write: The No-Nonsense, No BS Guide to Getting Words on the Page, which became an Amazon bestseller.
Or, you could approach agents, as I have done for my novel. When I tell agents that I already have a following for my work that I am actively engaging with and growing, do you not think they are more likely to represent me or get me bigger deals because I have a better chance of selling books?
So the choices are now mine and I take full advantage of them. I choose to self publish ebooks. I choose to be represented by a top NYC literary agent for my fiction. I choose to teach courses online to my own audience rather than at universities or through workshops. I decide the format for my work, the pricing of my work, and the design of my work.
I also decide what I actually want to create on a day-to-day basis that serves my audience but also serves my creativity. On top of that, I make a fantastic income— $15k a month on average and growing.
The caveat here is that it took me fifteen years to get to this point. I learned every lesson the hard way and suffered financial problems, stress, and far more heartache than I should have.
There is no need for you to recreate the wheel.
Look around you. Content is the biggest thing on the Internet right now. Everywhere you look, every person you talk to is interested in creating content.
You and I? We’re content experts.
So why are bloggers making multiple six and seven-figure incomes and the content experts— writers like you and I— not earning anywhere close to those incomes?
It’s because we’ve focused too much on the experiences of the writers who went before us, writers who did not have or did not recognize the opportunities that we do, writers who had to work in a certain way in a certain industry because that was the only way to make it as a writer.
That is no longer the only way. There are a thousand different ways to be a writer today. And those who recognize that are not only succeeding financially, but have more creative satisfaction as well. I’m certainly far happier now, even though I still pitch articles, even though I still write novels, and even though I still treat my writing like an art.
But here’s the thing: I now have the luxury of treating my writing like art. Because I first learned how to see it as a business.
Creative entrepreneurship certainly isn’t for everybody, but could it be for you?
Something to think about.
Cheers,
Natasha