Writing
Ankh, thank you, I really appreciate it.
For a while now it seems I've been mostly keeping my diary at Kuro5hin. It's not simply that my diaries here are hardly ever on the topic of free or open source software. I kind of prefer the format of k5 diaries, in particular I can write long entries but only the intro shows up on k5's recent diaries page, so I don't annoy everyone with such rambling as the following.
Recent diaries of interest are Time Management (I'm trying to get better at it) and Piss and Vinegar (Bonita says I'm full of it). You can vote in my poll in this last diary: If you knew you only had six months to live, would you still hang out at kuro5hin?
nymia, I was very interested to read
your diary entry regarding the second internet revolution. What the article discusses, that anyone can get published on the net and have a real opportunity for success, is just what is making me consider taking my writing really seriously, not as a pastime anymore but as a way to make my living.
I am hoping that by this time next year, I will make my way in the world through my writing, rather than as a computer programmer. This feels me with hope, not simply because I'm quite weary of programming, but because I have the sense I could be far more successful as a writer than I ever have been as a programmer.
My wife Bonita hesitantly supports my goal of becoming a professional writer. Hesitant because I tend to become quite unbalanced when I write, tossing all my responsibilities to the wind, becoming completely obsessed with whatever article or essay I'm working on. I'm trying to address that concern by limiting my writing to a certain schedule, to try to become more disciplined about it.
Bonita asked me a couple days ago, "Why are you so Hell-bent on publishing all your writing on the Internet?" She felt I ought to get published in dead-tree magazines. I think part her motivation in asking is that she's concerned I won't get any respect as a serious writer unless I'm published in print. I expect I will submit to print publications eventually, but for now I don't plan even to try.
This is the age of the Internet. I don't simply write articles and essays. I write web pages. I just work harder at it than the typical web page writer. I like coding HTML, I find it suits my writing style very naturally, so much so that I find myself entering <p> tags when using conventional word processors. In particular, when writing an article I use the search engines to research other pages to link to, so my article doesn't simply stand alone but becomes an integral part of the World Wide Web. Making these connections is a substantial source of the enjoyment I experience when writing articles, and I think they are also what makes my articles valuable to their readers.
Some of my articles could just as well have been published in print, but one reason I prefer the web is the instant gratification. Print publications have lead times of months, and you have to get the article approved by an editor who might require several revisions. But a web page is published the instant I upload it, and people start to read it as soon as I post links around in places like this one. If an article needs revisions, I can simply upload a new draft later.
Publishing on my own website contributes to my own fortunes, not some magazine publisher's. I have always known that a modest article won't earn much pay from a magazine, but it will help build traffic to my website. Publishing articles to my own site has contributed indirectly, but significantly to my income in the past. I get a lot of people coming to read my articles, and some link to them or other pages on my site. This draws other visitors, some of whom have turned out to be paying software consulting clients. I haven't had to work to find new clients for quite some time now. Instead, the clients come to me, after finding my website.
Well, that's been great, but the problem is that I still have to work hard at programming once I get a client, and the time - sometimes substantial time - required to write an article keeps me from paying consulting work, so I haven't written as many articles as I would have liked.
So now I come to how I'm going to make a living as a writer, how I'm already being paid for my writing. In September I started publishing Google AdSense ads at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks. I didn't expect these ads to pay much, maybe enough for a nice evening out once a month or to pay for my hosting. Well, wasn't I in for a surprise!
From the very start, the ads have been earning about half of the money I need to meet all my expenses. If I could double my ad revenue somehow, I could quit programming. Possibly I could retire.
Now, I think my experience is not typical. I don't think most people make that much from advertising on a personal site. What's different for me is that I have a mature website, one that I've been tending and growing for about six years now. Lately it gets over a hundred thousand hits a month. It takes a lot of work to achieve that kind of traffic. I've spent years toiling away at my site and my articles, and crappy web design notwithstanding, I have already worked hard to achieve the pay I get from the Google ads.
It's just that up until now I felt my site was valuable to me for other reasons. If you're going to build your own website, one you hope to make money from, I would suggest trying to find other ways than banner or text ads to make it worth your time.
One final advantage to web publication: when an article is published in a print magazine, it gets read by the public for a month or so. You get your check from the publisher and that's that. Maybe if you're lucky it will get reprinted somewhere and you'll get a small royalty. But if you publish on the web, your article continues to get published as long as it's on your site.
As long as the material doesn't become dated, it will continue to have readers for years on end. It may even grow in popularity: at least one of my articles gets as many hits in one day now as it did in a month, a year ago.
Finally, readers who come for one article may stay to read others. A website is like a magazine that is continually reissued month after month, but with a few new articles each time.
So here's my plan to change careers:
I think my best bet is to encourage anyone who finds my site to keep coming back. They'll come back a few times to read some of the other articles, but then no more. I need to post new articles often enough that a reader is likely to find something new when he checks back.
My constraint is that I still have to earn a living as a programmer. I can take some time out to write, more than in the past, but not that much. My plan is to devote one full day each week to writing, and to publish one new article each month. If and when ad revenues increase, I'll devote more time to writing, and less to programming.
Now, I should say something that's at least somewhat on-topic to Advogato. So far this has all been about how I'm going to make a killing off my intellectual property, and not at all in the spirit of free software. But I do have some articles that are under the GNU Free Documentation License. My most popular article, and top money-maker, is under a Creative Commons license. There are several other copies around the web. It makes me nervous, sure, but I'm determined to keep it that way.
I expect that I'll continue to publish articles here and at Kuro5hin. I don't feel that I need to get paid for everything I write.
Thank you for your attention.
-- Mike
