by Joseph T. Sin­clair

Any­one who is an inde­pen­dent busi­ness per­son pro­vid­ing ser­vices to oth­ers knows that you spend about half your time mar­ket­ing your ser­vices. Thus, only half of your time is actu­al­ly spent pro­vid­ing ser­vices, and from that half-time, you have to earn your entire income. This is true for writ­ers too. The ques­tion is, how are you going to han­dle it?

A mid­dle­man can pro­vide a valu­able ser­vice by doing some of the mar­ket­ing for you. A lit­er­ary agent will get a book pub­lished for you that you would oth­er­wise have to spend an exor­bi­tant amount of time get­ting pub­lished your­self. Many writ­ers who are employ­ees are well-qual­i­fied but not very well-paid. In such cas­es, the employ­er is a mid­dle­man (who gets the busi­ness), in effect.

With the advent of the inter­net and web, mar­ket­ing has become much less cap­i­tal-inten­sive and more effec­tive with less effort than it was before. If you’re web savvy, you can carve your­self out a lucra­tive career as a writer. If you choose not to be web-savvy, how­ev­er, and want to just write and do noth­ing else, there are mid­dle­men on the web who will accom­mo­date you.

The prob­lem for writ­ers is that now any­body who wants to become a pro­fes­sion­al writer can do so eas­i­ly. And many peo­ple are writ­ing just pick up extra income on a part-time basis. That has sup­pressed the earn­ings for peo­ple who just want to write full time and do noth­ing else; that is, do no mar­ket­ing.

Thus, you can sign up to be a writer for HireWriters.com. On HireWriters.com the pay­ment to expert writ­ers (the high­est cat­e­go­ry) is from 1.5 to 2.75 cents per word. You can write short arti­cles or hefty ebooks. That’s pret­ty inex­pen­sive writ­ing for employ­ers and is not exact­ly life-sus­tain­ing for writ­ers.

How do you avoid being rel­e­gat­ed to this low­er tier of writer’s income and still do no mar­ket­ing?

One way is to spe­cial­ize. The web sup­ports spe­cial­iza­tion as no media ever has before in the his­to­ry of the world. Instead of hav­ing local or even region­al access to would-be clients (non-con­sumer buy­ers for your writ­ing), you have inter­na­tion­al access to them. That means even small nich­es can have sig­nif­i­cant buy­er pop­u­la­tions. Of course, reach­ing the buy­ers in such nich­es will require some mar­ket­ing.

Anoth­er strat­e­gy might be to embrace the web­sites such as HireWriters.com that bring you buy­ers for your writ­ing and make that your entire mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. You can become a par­tic­i­pant in all such web­sites that sell your genre, and work the ones that pro­vid­ed the most income to you. You may not make much mon­ey, but you won’t have to do any mar­ket­ing.

Per­haps the best strat­e­gy of all would be to use the writ­ers avail­able through the web writ­ing ser­vices such as HireWriters.com. At 1.5 to 2.75 cents per word, you can have some­one else write for you. Then you can research, add, and edit. A lot of the research will be done for you and will pro­vide you with sol­id leads to fur­ther research that’s need­ed. And a lot of the writ­ing will be done for you; and you will be able to cre­ate a good prod­uct by adding only a mod­est amount of writ­ing. Final­ly, the con­glom­er­a­tion you have cre­at­ed will prob­a­bly require edit­ing. Even so, this can be a very effi­cient way to write and lever­age some­one else’s writ­ing to increase your income. This assumes you can make a lot more mon­ey with your writ­ings than 2.75 cents per word.

I dis­cov­ered HireWriters.com. So I tried it. I ordered a 1,000 to 2,000-word arti­cle on a pedes­tri­an top­ic for a HireWrit­ers required min­i­mum cost of $14.20. I gave min­i­mal guide­lines for the project. HireWrit­ers has a default writ­ing project peri­od of one day, but I spec­i­fied three days instead because I was­n’t in a hur­ry. Nev­er­the­less, I received the arti­cle in one day with a total of 1,327 words. The writer did a good job. So I tipped $5. My total cost came to about 1.4 cents per word. I could have used the arti­cle with­out any changes on my web­site, but I beefed it up a lit­tle instead and edit­ed it. All in all, it was a sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence. The next time I use HireWrit­ers I can request the same writer.

What’s the point of this blog post? Clear­ly, it’s that things have changed and will change more. As a writer, you can be a vic­tim of the new real­i­ties, or you can devel­op a strat­e­gy to take advan­tage. The employ-oth­er-writ­ers strat­e­gy cov­ered here is one of the hun­dreds of new strate­gies a writer can con­sid­er in the new cyber world in order to make a liv­ing. But accept­ing the real­i­ty that you have to learn some dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy and do some mar­ket­ing will pro­vide you with the most lucra­tive advan­tage.

For instance, you can become web-savvy, do a lot of your own pub­lish­ing tasks (to save mon­ey) such as learn HTML5 and CSS, and do a lot of your own mar­ket­ing tasks to pro­mote your writ­ing cost-effi­cient­ly such as email mar­ket­ing and social media.

The advent of the World Wide Web has turned pub­lish­ing upside down. But it has also turned the pro­fes­sion of writ­ing upside down. It’s easy to see the Neo-Lud­dites danc­ing around as you look across the land­scape of writ­ing and pub­lish­ing today. As much as you might empathize with them, do not delude your­self that they have any sus­tain­able com­plaints. Writ­ing and pub­lish­ing are up for grabs in the new com­mu­ni­ca­tion envi­ron­ment world­wide, and you have to do what­ev­er it takes (with­in eth­i­cal guide­lines) to make a rea­son­able liv­ing. Or you can lament the fact that the lit­er­ary world is going to hell and spend your time writ­ing for HireWriters.com.

Writ­ers and pub­lish­ers have enjoyed a 550-year tra­di­tion in which not much has changed. But like Mr. Berra said, the future ain’t what it used to be.