Right Now, Writers Can Make Money — Lots of It

If you aren’t loading up garbage bags of cash right now, you’re doing it wrong

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

Note: Edited with updates on Covered Press. I rarely do this, but this story has a life of its own — it just keeps finding new readers and I really don’t want to mislead with outdated information.

Let’s start from the top with a quick timeline:

2019 — Writing life was great for some, not so hot for others.

2020 — Global pandemic forces every human earning a living to reevaluate how they were doing it. Bus loads turned to writing from home — initially weakening the writing market.

2021 — The bus fumes settled and a game of musical writer’s desk ensued. The pay scale for writers inched upward.

2022 — The world is sick of the pandemic, but guess what? Half the population forgot how work works. Publications and agencies of all sizes begin paying anyone who can string a few words together coherently.

Get your act together and write for real money

Let me share a glimpse of my writing life with you. Like many of you, I spent a large part of 2020 and 2021 writing here on Medium. I dabbled a bit on News Break when they threw money at writers. But late in 2021, I began to notice a shift in my available workload from well-paying freelance clients. Emails began to smell of desperation — as in there’s all this work and nobody to do the writing.

The reason I haven’t been spending my time writing on Medium is that I have all the freelance writing work I want. I turn work away. And it pays better than it has in a very long time.

So why am I telling you this? Consider me Paul Revere. Writing jobs are coming by land and by sea. Arm yourself. If you can write well (emphasis on “well”) I want you to know that there are paid gigs out there for you.

And so you don’t think it’s some fluke that I’m in high demand, I perused the “Stories Wanted” pages (all 18 of them) on my new favorite freelance site, CoveredPress (formerly PitchWhiz). I was blown away at the quality of publications that are looking for writers and backing…