Enjoy what you do when you write and post your offerings on websites such as this one. Do it for your entertainment and as a way of sharing your thoughts with others. If you have a need to vent, get that out through the written word as well. However, do not do it if you are looking to make a living. If you need to make a living, find a job that pays the bills. Remember, the likelihood of this paying your bills is slightly less than the likelihood that you will be elected President in the next Presidential election.
The only ones making a living are the website owners and they have worked to set up contracts with publications and to sell advertising. This site is one of the better ones of its type, due to the fact that there is no membership fee, such as with gofeelance.com. The fee is only $2.95 per month, but there is a fee and for the fee one would think that they have a lock on the market. Not so! They just smile all the way to the bank with your money. As with all sites like this one you will be very lucky to make the price of a cup of coffee each month. I did on one site for one month and was elated. It was not enough for Starbucks coffee, but I did have a cup from the local convenience store.
This site and others are great venues for honing your skills and keeping the cobwebs from forming on your creative writing mind. I try to write more that one thing everyday. Any column that is not picked up by a newspaper from my own syndicated website, I post here and continue to write. You have to throw it all against the wall and hope something sticks. This site allows me to put all of my writings in the mix, even if the audience is only a handful of people.
My daytime job is that of an accountant and I have never been able to give up that job, but I've been writing enough that my income from writing does pay for nice extras in life and allowed me to take a few very nice vacations. It also keeps my name out there as a columnist, which opens the door to my other sidelines of motivational speaking and sales of my mystery/romance novels. Keep in mind with all those sidelines I still have my day job. Few make it on writing alone and I am not one of the few..
Would Erma Bombeck, Ann Landers, Dear Abby or even Dave Barry make it in today's world, if they were just starting out? There is no way they would. They came through an era that did not have the competition of the internet. People stopped every morning to pick up a newspaper on the way to work, or had it delivered to their homes. These days everyone gets their news online, from CNN, Fox News, Yahoo, Google or some other online venue.
Yes, you can Google and find all of those people I named in the previous paragraph, but you would not Google to find any of them if they had not made names for themselves before Al Gore invented the internet. Sorry Al, I had to write that.
Here is the astonishing thing. You can Google and find me. If you have been writing long I can probably Google and find you too. Guess what, you will not make a dime just because someone Googles your name. In my case there are many other people with the same name as me. One of them is another fiction writer and he has written about twenty more books than me. Of course that also means when people Google for him they find me. Actually, that is a winning situation for me, so I'm not complaining. Now I wonder if I should have taken the pen name of Sydney Sheldon, John Grisham or even Stephen King. More people would Google my name.
Pen names can get messy, so I suppose it is best if I just stay with the name my mother gave me. There is less confusion that way and at my age I need less confusion. It would be embarrassing to hear someone paging John Grisham and while craning my neck to get a glimpse of him, I realize they are paging me.
Anyway, continue to write if you aspire to be a well known columnist or novelist. The chances of you making it are slim to none. In fact you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery(note to self; buy a lottery ticket today) but writing keeps your mind working and it can give you a great deal of enjoyment. I've also met some wonderful people through my writing.
