Starting My Writing Career Was Hard!

writing career

I’ve been a writer for over a decade and I’ve been making money at it since the beginning. Honestly, I’ve made it this long because I am stubborn. I did a lot of things wrong and I didn’t necessary have an easy start. Here’s a list of all the things that I’ve found difficult about turning my love for writing into a career.

  • I only made $60 my first year and I worked pretty damn hard to make even that much.
  • My success rate for query letters wasn’t that great. After some experience, I could count on one acceptance for every thirty queries I sent.
  • Before I landed my first gig on a job posting site, I wrote around 90 bids.
  • To this day, I am not the most organized person. My files are disheveled and tax time always stresses me out.
  • At one point, I had one very successful income stream and that got taken away from me rather abruptly.
  • I got so sick of writing for clients once, I got burned out and couldn’t write for a good six months.
  • I’ve been scammed more than once. At one point, I even lost a few hundred dollars because of it. I still feel like an idiot.
  • I’ve started websites that have gone nowhere.
  • About three years ago, I got hacked. All my websites were taken down in the incident. Thankfully, my data was recovered (thank you Hostgator), but I’m still scratching my head wondering why that happened.

But you know what? I stuck with it and I figured out what I liked and disliked, what was easy and what was hard. I’ve made my living with writing this whole time, and it’s because I didn’t let those difficulties stop me.

How about you? Are there things you find difficult or frustrating about writing? I’d love to hear from you! I’m sure more bad things have happened to me through my career. Perhaps hearing of your foibles will spark my memory.

Comments (2)

  1. Jessica B Woods

    Oh, gosh, I’ve been there, done that, and have the tshirt! I started out at the content mills, so I made money from the start, but back then I was just glad to earn $20 a week. Now, I need to earn more like $300 a week to keep from falling behind with bills. Some weeks I am rolling in work, others, not so much.

    Clients burn me out, too. Though, my longest burnout so far has been about a week and a half, and I didn’t really stop writing, I just wrote stuff for my own sites.

    I JUST had a website issue, but thankfully it was a minor bit of malicious code in a file on my theme. I installed a security plugin at the suggestion of a friend, found the code, deleted the file, lost the site for a minute until I installed a new theme, and BOOM, it’s all good now. My hosting company tried to push LifeLock on me, but I can’t afford it right this minute. Maybe some day…

    I think most writers can relate to your post…I know I can!

    Reply
  2. Katherine (Post author)

    Yes I use a security plugin now, too. I haven’t had issues for several years, thankfully. I can’t believe how long my burnout was. I am so glad you fixed your site. I’ve actually crashed several sites before and have had to start over. Usually it would occur when I changed a theme without seeing if it was compatible with the new version of wordpress.

    Reply

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