So how do you make money on the internet? Well, there's porn, of course, but as an overweight man in his late '30s without unusual "endowment", that really isn't likely to happen. I'm no Ron Jeremy. I also haven't got much in the way of programming or web design skills, nor am I a talented videographer. So that means writing, which I at least know a tiny bit about. The new question is: who pays people to write online?
Well, there are a number of options, actually.
Amazon has a pretty sweet deal to publish your novel on the Kindle. If you price your work between $2.99 and $9.99, you can get as much as 70% of each sale, which is a nice ratio. Of course, you also have to find an audience, since you're not going to get much, if any, advertising for your work from Amazon. At least, not until you're blindingly successful and don't need the advertising as much anymore. Also this requires a completed work, which I don't currently have. Oh, I have ideas for novels aplenty (who doesn't?) but my actual attempts to write them down have been spotty at best. I do plan to keep plugging away, and with luck and willpower, hope to have something done sooner or later, but in the short term we can only consider selling a novel on the Kindle to be a long term project at best.
In the meantime, I have something else in mind. Yahoo's Associated Content, to be exact. Yahoo wants short articles in the 300-500 word range, and is willing to pay $1.50 for every 1,000 page views you achieve. On the face of it, that seems like an okay deal. After all, I wrote 782 words about my misgivings for the upcoming Old Republic MMORPG for fun on my LiveJournal that virtually no one reads. How hard can it be to write less than that about any number of topics that I know about? I suppose we'll find out, as I plan to give YAC a shot.
What else is there? Well, right here on Blogger I saw a little "Monetize" button. God knows I need more of that in my life, so I hit it and discovered it leads to AdSense. Considering the degree to which I've cultivated "Ad Blindness" in my own life, I might as well hit the buttons and see what comes of it. I don't have high hopes for it, since I myself rarely if ever click online ads myself, but every little bit helps.
What about traditional publishing? Doing things the old fashioned way, as it were. Typing up proposal letters or full short stories, submitting them with baited breath, then dying of suffocation because it takes weeks or months to hear anything back. How about trying some of that? I dipped my toe into that pond by offering to write, unpaid no less, for Tachyon TV. I had thought that it might be worthwhile to get an audience first before I tried to sell anything, and to get used to writing on a deadline for relatively low stakes. They seemed initially interested in my proposal but then I heard nothing after I submitted a writing sample. Their reply was that things were crazy just then and they needed to get things in order first. Fair enough, I suppose. And indeed, the site was silent for quite some time around then, though the self-conscious part of me whispers in the dark that they simply hated my writing sample. Who can say? I don't mind nothing having come of it, though, since it frees up time to write things that, in theory, pay.
(I don't hold a grudge towards Tachyon TV, by the way. Its a great site if you like classic British TV, and the Adventures with the Wife in Space feature where a longtime Who fan watches Doctor Who from the very beginning with his wife is a great read. I recommend it.)
There are a few magazines, online and paper, that still accept submissions. The Escapist, for example, has a calendar that allows you to see what issues are planned, when you have to have your pitch and your material ready by, as well as when it will be published. I plan to make a pitch to The Escapist and see what comes of it.
There's also Cracked. Of course you have to be genuinely funny to get things up on Cracked, but perhaps the humor of desperation could come in handy here.
Of course, this is Tales of a Fledgling Writer, so I don't believe I know it all. Or even a significant fraction, for that matter. I'm hoping to learn as I go, but I certainly wouldn't turn down any advice or options that I haven't found on my own yet. Feel free to drop me a line in the comments or by private message if you prefer.
As a relatively new Kindle owner, I will tell you from experience that the way to hook readers on Amazon is to offer your first story for free. I've bought several sequels by getting a taste for the characters and an author's style in a free book.
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