Have ya'll tried writing with the intent to generate income?

[lovecraft68]

Yep.

It's the main reason I don't write for money anymore.

Also because the money is never worth it. Erotic fiction netted me maybe a couple hundred bucks a year, on average, and I was working with a publisher and getting advances. There were times I got more like $500 a year. Which is cool and all, but not worth selling my enjoyment for.

I learned this lesson when I owned the Comic Book store. Started reading comics in the seventies, by the late eighties I was already buying to invest and selling at shows. In 2001 my wife and I opened the store. We were open eight years and closed due to the recession, death of her sister, a myriad of reasons. But by the end, just about all the love I had for the medium was gone. I saw the business side, the greed of Marvel and DC, the BS with the one exclusive dealer we could order from (Diamond Comics) and all the headaches of a brick and mortar business and we also both worked full time while having the store. We had a kid who opened at eleven and I'd get there at 3:30 and my wife would run Saturday's to give me a day off, that I rarely took and ended up there anyway.

It took years for me to start getting back into collecting for myself, and I went back to buying to sell again as well, but only online and back issues.

That example was in my head when I decided to try to sell my writing. Not much at first because I was making a few bucks a month on a couple of titles. Then-as I always do-I went all in and started making decent money. There's been times where the headaches of content on sites changing, Amazon's endless BS, spats with publishers etc had me starting to see it as work. But this time when I caught myself getting there, I knew enough to take a breath and say, okay, this is not my main source of income, if it goes south, so be it. I have nothing financially invested(unlike the store) so just get back to having fun and it all falls as it does.

Last year I made around 15k and that is not anything to live on, just a second job that is all but pure profit, and goes into a slush fund account for vacations, toys, and anything not necessary for actual adult living. That way it helps with it being fun, I'm not paying the mortgage with this, I'm using it for childish cool stuff.

But for anyone thinking "wow, that's a lot for smut" it is, especially seeing most of it is self pubbed, I have someone for my more mainstream stuff, but I also have 225 titles and 14 years of work invested to get to that degree. For a few years I topped just over 20k until amazon really started with the witch hunts and for all I know I could find my account blocked tomorrow for no reason.

If anyone wants to try it to see what happens, and get the thrill of someone paying for your work, go for it. If you think you're earning a living? Hell no.

 

[MillieDynamite]

It appears I'll be attempting to blowup SubStack soonish. I may even toss some Dynamite into Patreon in the future.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I've just dipped my toes into this. My first story is on SmashWords and Amazon and a few other places. I've decided I'm going to spend the next few months repackaging my existing stories into something marketable. We'll see where it goes.

 

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

I sold some stuff on KDP, made a reasonable amount with two books up. Proof reading and formatting are a massive pain so I gave up adding anymore pretty quickly. In the end they took down my account because the AI covers I used had too much nudity even though everything was covered up, just. I was too lazy to fix them in time so that's that for now

 

[MillieDynamite]

Okay, I'm on Substak now. Only one free story so far on the site. I think my publisher/editor is putting up more stories there today.