How a Failed Story Earned Over $400
Understanding the value of your body of work
Becoming a writer is a lot like training to win an Olympic medal. When you start out with writing you work long hours, staying hopeful it will pay off. You train and refine your skills, rub aching muscles and cry through your failures. You remind yourself regularly of that Olympic dream: you standing on a writer’s podium. The gold medal of “successful writer” around your neck.
One thing that Olympic athletes know is that the medal doesn’t come instantly. A place on the podium isn’t a result of one great day’s training. It’s a result of years and years of turning up, logging those hours, and building their bodies.
For writers, our body of work is the collection of stories we create. If you write even 3 stories a week for a year, that’s a library of 156 stories. That’s 156 stories to sell, resell, use for a book, ebook, or course, and — most importantly — learn from. As your body of work grows, so does the income from it.
Let’s look at an example of this with one of my “failed” articles which ended up bring in over $400USD:
The Slow Build Up to Success
Back in October 2019 I pushed publish on a story called “The 4 Friends You Don’t Need.”
