Financial success for writers

The write way newsletter returns to the topic of money...

In a recent article, I told the story of an older member of our church’s comment one Sunday:

Some months ago, an older member of our congregation stopped me in the aisle after the service. “I was reading The Olney Hymnbook this week, and it made me think of you,” he said. I was feeling rather flattered until he added, “It struck me that most of Newton’s hymns weren’t very good.”

Ouch. Thankfully, it wasn’t the poor quality of the hymns that reminded him of mine. He only meant to encourage me to keep writing, because although many of Newton’s hymns were written for a specific occasion and rightfully passed into obscurity, in the process he penned some truly great ones.

As with Newton, so with almost all writers.

One-hit wonders are rare.

What is far more common are writers who plug away in relative obscurity for years, before hitting publish one day and blowing up to bestseller status.

Creative growth is not a simple steady state.

Sometimes it comes in fits and spurts, building up a body of work over years. Sometimes it looks more like banging your head against the wall for months and years until it falls down and progress is rapid.

(The classic “overnight success” story that took seven years.)

But one thing it never is: Predictable.

Many of your projects will wither and die - but some will grow into trees that yield forth fruit in their season, year after year after year.

WWN65 : Play the odds

Which takes us to the thorny question of...

...money.

Because until you break big, you gotta stay alive. While perhaps you may have to eat your words once in a while, your kids can’t live by words alone. They need bread, and bread needs dough.

Alas, most money advice online is from idiot artists with no sense telling you to just go all in on your dreams with no plan, or from crowing CAW-CAWs and gurus boasting in their big numbers.

A sample from ten seconds searching on X...

I could take ANY local service business to $100k/month in 90 days using just Claude Cowork. Here’s exactly how I’d do it:

(Note, he has not done it.)

This research paper explains how to print $10k/mo on Polymarket without risking.

(Note, she did not print anything)

People build £10k/mo coaching businesses in 2 hrs/day.

(Note, other people.)

And the usual nonsense signaling that ten large ones every month is not enough.

$10k/mo is nothing.

$10k/mo is broke

$10K/mo is the start, not end goal.

Yadda yadda.

For craftsmen like me, it’s all so obnoxiously annoying, and I’m sure it is to most ordinary folks as well.

Why?

We have a fundamental mismatch in financial philosophy.

Gurus think that money is all about keeping score when really money is all about killing stress. And that changes everything.

If you think money is about keeping score, you’ll constantly be chasing more more more more more. No matter how much you earn you’ll never have enough, because there’s always going to be a corrupt politician or a renegade billionaire or an OnlyFans whore or a successful sportsman who has a higher score.

But when you realise revenue is a stress reduction tool…

…everything changes.

You can actually sit down and ask what number you need to kill stress. You can break it down into this bill and that bill and make plans to meet them. You can shift your strategy to stop gambling on big wins and instant success. Instead, you can build the sustainable strategy that Nassim Taleb calls:

“floor and upside”

Floor is the base.

You and I have expenses we have to meet every month.

The mortgage or rent, the utility bills, feeding our kids. In other words all the boring stuff that the “quit-your-job” gurus avoid mentioning. It’s not sexy, but it needs dealt with.

So make sure you have a floor of income that covers all that stuff.

In our household that’s been made up over the years of my own day job (long gone now), my wife’s day job that she still enjoys, our options trading income, ghostwriting, freelancing projects and paid subscriptions like the Write Way etc.

Floor income is predictable and steady.

I know I’ll have it coming in each month and I can plan for it.

It keep us alive and lets us save and invest for the future. As Rory Sutherland said, you need to stay in the game long enough to get lucky.

“Getting lucky” is the upside part of the strategy.

These are the long-term moonshots.

These are the side bets. Upside is the income that might never materialise, or it might make you millions (or anything in between).

In my case that looks like hymns, fiction, and kids’ books. I would write all those even if they never made a penny. But over time they grow, and there’s always the potential for a bestseller, a film option, a hit hymn etc. Courses fall into this category too.

Trying to pay the bills with one-off projects like that is a recipe for increased stress.

But with a steady floor in place, you can swing for the fences without falling over.

So long as your expenses are under that floor, you keep putting a portfolio of work out there and see where it leads. You can make decisions that maximise long-term growth over short-term gains.

When I published The King and the Dragon the publisher offered me a small advance, but my bills were met by my boring accounting job and my ghostwriting...

...so instead I asked what they could do on the royalties if I took $0 in advance payments.

They ended up bumping the royalties by 33%.

10,000+ copies later and I’ve earned a couple thousand more than I would have and it’s still selling strong, with every single copy earning more than it would have. But that’s a decision I could only make because I didn’t need the money then. I had a floor, I could focus on upside.

But let’s take it down to brass tactics.

How do we build a floor and upside strategy?

It’s no surprise to anyone paying attention that I think building a ghostletter business is the best way to build a strong floor if you don’t already have one. (Or to act as a secondary source if you have a strong 9-5 already. One income is dangerous.)

It’s not the only way, we won’t ever pretend that.

But the ghostletter model requires no long runway of years building a brand, no “lucky breaks” and minimal inbuilt writing ability. We start tomorrow and by the end of February you could realistically be signing your first client.

I won’t belabour the point because you can read more below about the three “ghostletter seminars” I’ve teamed up with Wade on, where I teach you my wily writing ways, and Wade teaches you his brilliant business bonanzas.

To build yourself a floor, real or metaphorical, read more here:

But do it asap because that link stops working at midnight EST tonight and this is the last time we’ll ever run them.

Once you’ve built that basic floor, I would raise it a little higher than you need (a ghostletter side income helps here too) and start funneling money into a more passive income stream like options trading, either the Low Stress Trading methodology I use, or learn from former ghostletter student and Write Way Supporter Ricky Ketchum.

That lets you reduce your hours on ghostletter type work over time while maintaining a floor on your income.

As for the upside?

That’s not something I can outline for you, because you done gotta figure out for yourself what you want to chase.

Novels, kids’ books, infoproducts, social media brands, personal newsletters, buy-and-hold investments, crypto etc. all those are upside plays. They can all pay off big...

...but you need to survive long enough to get lucky.

That’s the core message of this here newsletter.

Build a plan that keeps you alive until you break through.

Yours,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

P.s. I modeled this newsletter on Wade’s ghostletter framework. It’s still in my voice and style, so it’s a lot more intense than any you would write for clients, but it follows the framework perfectly. Incidentally, so does this sales page.

P.p.s. I am still coughing everywhere so I’ll wait for the Write Way Radio version until I’m recovered…