How to Actually Become a Millionaire Through Writing
Recently, this article on Medium went viral for showing how the Medium Partner Program was enabling writers to make dollars. I, like many others, found the article to be humorous, but have done a lot of research into how to make writing a viable career and thought I would contribute to the discussion by actually listing a few ways writers make hundreds of thousands of dollars through their work.
The Medium Partner Program
Brandt Amelia was making a bit of a joke when she wrote her article, but at the end of the day, content does pay. I looked into her account, and her previous articles (prior to going viral) were short, 2–3 minute reads garnering dozens to hundreds of claps (meaning they were likely getting low-thousands of views). If you scale that up, articles that are well-researched and longer will provide even more value to their readers, and Medium will reward it accordingly — so it’s easy to see how writers can go from making dollars to hundreds per week.
On top of Medium itself, you can also publish Medium content through your own website which enables you to ‘double-dip’ and benefit from Medium’s partner programs as well as advertisement money. With AdSense integrations, you’d be bringing in just under $4,000 annually with 50,000 page views and $34,000 annually with 500,000 page views.
If you’re writing consistent and good content — whether it’s articles, short stories, poetry, or anything else — 500,000 monthly page views isn’t impossible, especially with the help of the virality algorithms that Tik Tok, Medium, and other content platforms are focusing on now.
For my own WordPress website, AdSense was incredibly simple to install — there was a plugin, I had to install it, connect my Google account, and choose the areas in my website (I chose the margins, as well as breaks between content) that I wanted to enable ads for. The whole process took me about 15 minutes while following this YouTube tutorial, and the approval process from Google took about 2 hours on a weekday.
In Writing and Digital Assets
Poems, articles, books, and short stories have been around for millennia. However, one thing I’ve noticed is that single articles, poems, or short stories are difficult to monetize. If you’re just starting out as a writer, your articles (or whatever your medium is) will take a long time to write and edit individual pieces, and you won’t have an established following yet. As a result, you might not be able to monetize on the Medium Partner program or Google AdSense in a way that’s cost-effective. Additionally, poems and short stories are usually published in collections, meaning that it can be difficult to sustain your career during the months or even years that you spend writing individual pieces for such a collection.
A platform I’ve seen gain some traction recently and also had some personal success on is In Writing. They’re a text NFT marketplace (I know, I know, but hear me out) enabling writers to “enter the Web3 space”, and I’ve had personal success with listing and selling poems that I’ve written for over $500 USD despite having less than 1,000 monthly views/reads at the time.
I like In Writing because its value is two-fold:
- They have a lot of daily visitors, ranging from casual readers and writers to serious ‘NFT investors’, and as a result publishing your work on In Writing gives your work a lot of instant exposure. This can be compounded by linking your Medium, Twitter, or even Amazon profiles for cross-platform growth as a writer.
2. You’re able to monetize individual pieces of work. I personally prefer writing poems and articles, and I’ve seen both sell for pretty crazy prices on In Writing. I like that I’m able to sell my individual pieces. FYI, I looked into the regulations of publishing and it’s totally legal to publish and sell individual poems as NFTs and also later publish entire collections of poems (as NFTs or otherwise). The only thing you can’t do is mint a set amount of ‘first edition limited editions’ and then, in the future, mint more of those first editions (but second editions, etc. are all fine!)
The other thing I like about In Writing is that they do seem to be more community-oriented than other platforms. You can mint one piece of writing on their platform for free, and I’ve seen them give out crypto to new members to help them get started on their Discord. Furthermore, they’ve implemented verification and anti-plagiarism measures that larger marketplaces like OpenSea are still failing to build, and I know they have a 20% royalty fee which means that if your poem/article gets bought and resold for $10,000, you (as the author) will get $2,000 from that sale — every time.
Similar to Google AdSense, the process for getting set up on In Writing was also really easy. I just had to download a crypto wallet (‘MetaMask’), and find something I wanted to publish! I had tried to get into NFTs last year on OpenSea, but was put off by their $100 ‘account opening’ fees, and luckily In Writing has nothing of the sort. I initially used their free mint feature, but was luckily able to have my first mint be bought and was able to publish several more pieces afterwards. Even if your first mint is not bought, however, I’m sure the In Writing moderators would be happy to give you some crypto to get you started in their Discord as minting a piece on In Writing costs only 1 MATIC (just over 1 U.S. Dollar at the time of writing).
There’s a tutorial for getting set up on their website here under ‘How to Mint’, but it took me only a couple minutes — if you’re a poet, article writer, or otherwise new to the writing scene, I’d definitely recommend checking out In Writing and as you get larger, exploring Google AdSense as well! Being able to instantly get a couple thousand views on your writing is really fulfilling and motivating, and I’ll keep you guys updated as I continue looking for ways to really become a millionaire through the art of writing!
