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I am an abdominal surgeon. My days are dictated by operating room schedules, emergency consults, and ward rounds. When people learn I also maintain a steady income as a freelance writer—adding a consistent stream of paid invoices to my bank account every month—they always ask: Where do you find the time? The truth is, I do not find time. I extract it. Many writers wait for a quiet Sunday and three uninterrupted hours to work. If I waited for that, my freelance income would be zero. To succeed as a part-time freelancer, you must realize that you do not need empty hours to make money; you need ruthless focus. The 15-Minute Micro-Sprint My freelance business is built entirely in the margins of my day, and those margins pay well. I recently wrote a feature for WineMaker entirely in ten-minute intervals while waiting for my meals or sitting on the sofa. These micro-sprints are truly profitable, provided you eliminate friction. Keep a cloud-based note app, synced across your devices. I use Google Keep because it syncs seamlessly across all my devices and has a clean interface, devoid of unnecessary and over-complicated options. When a window opens, execute a specific, revenue-generating task. More

Many writers want to write about themselves. “I experienced (fill in the blank) and I believe the world needs to learn from my experience.” The problem is, unless you can write it like a novel, or write it cinematically, it’s just words on a page. Converting real emotion into words on a page is not as easy as it sounds. The truth is everybody has a story. Everybody. Nobody wants to read it, though, unless it is written beautifully. It doesn’t matter how incredible it is. It doesn’t matter the hurdles you overcame. If you cannot create a wonderfully written tale with marvelous prose, it isn’t a story worth reading. Have a story? Great. Do you know how to write well? Are you sure? That’s where you start. Not how to publish. Not how to sell it. Thoughts on paper are one thing. The right words in the right order is something altogether different. Work hard learning how to write wonderfully. Very hard. Writing isn’t a race. And it isn’t about you and what you endured. It’s about pleasing the reader.

So you land an exciting new writing commission or a contract that will cover all your bills for a couple of months. You put your head down and get on with delivering the goods. Six weeks later, however, you come up for air and realise you’ve got nothing else in terms of income coming in. You’ve been so focused on getting the work done on this gig that you haven’t had time to pitch ideas or network with contacts. As writers we could probably learn from Aaron Ross, a former Salesforce executive famous for reinventing sales for the software age. One of his key ideas, and the title of his multimillion bestselling book titled Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine, was ‘predictable revenue’. It became the template for how tech companies sell to this day, and several of his ideas translate surprisingly well to our world. They can help us think smarter about finding work, keeping clients and deciding what’s worth our time. Regular work beats glamorous work Have you noticed everyone wants to get you on a subscription these days, from your Ring doorbell to your word-processing provider to your food delivery app? That’s because, as Ross understood, More

I am an abdominal surgeon based in Italy. I am also a self-taught developer. Yet, despite my demanding primary career, I maintain a steady, predictable stream of freelance writing income. How? Not by pitching major consumer magazines, but by turning my hyper-specific, off-the-clock hobbies into recurring assignments in niche markets. Early in my writing journey, I assumed I needed to present a generalized “freelance business writer” persona to succeed. I was wrong. My greatest assets were not broad observations, but my eclectic, deeply technical interests. By leaning into those niches, I transitioned from exhausting one-off pitches to securing reliable, repeat income from specialized publications. Here is how you can mine your own diverse hobbies for predictable freelance paychecks. Audit Your “Sunday Afternoon” Hobbies Generalist markets are flooded with pitches, resulting in low acceptance rates. However, niche markets are starving for writers who genuinely understand their jargon and culture. Take a hard look at your hobbies. I am fascinated by diverse topics including open-source software, traditional Italian dishes and beverages, and stock market technical analysis. Instead of pitching a generic technology or finance article to a mainstream site, I targeted the micro-niches. I leveraged my self-taught coding skills to write for Linux More

Okay, so you’re a novelist by trade, but you’ve got a story idea you feel is just as well suited for a Hollywood film as a paperback. However, before you put ink to paper, you wonder whether it would be wiser to write the novel first and then sell the IP (Intellectual Property), or just go directly to the screenplay. Might one format be an easier sell in Hollywood? Could the benefits of one route outweigh the other? Are there pitfalls that make one less desirable? Like so many choices, the answer often rests with you, the writer. What’s the Same In both circumstances, the process usually starts with a concept that lends itself well to the medium of film through strong visuals and a clear genre for easy audience targeting. If you manage to draw the attention of a producer, the next step usually involves optioning your material to him. This entails giving him an exclusive period of time with which to develop, package, finance and ultimately purchase the rights to your intellectual property. In either case, be prepared for changes to creative direction, including being adapted or rewritten by others. Producers will often want latitude to modify story More

Media coverage from bloggers and newspapers is part of the writing journey since this is how readers discover their favorite authors and how ‘public figures’ remain relevant. Here’s what I learned about promotion working for Crossed Crow Books. Starting with Crossed Crow Author Raven Digitalis asked me to promote A Gothic Witch’s Oracle Deck (Digitalis/Santerineross). in 2023. This turned into a referral to his publisher, Crossed Crow Books and soon I was promoting some of their other titles. As an author, you could publish a fantastic book this second, but sans reviews, interviews, and coverage, you won’t do more than float copies around to friends and family. First you send hundreds of emails for a handful of great responses! Keep going. Finding People One huge chunk of authors and book promotion is research such as finding news websites, journalists, blogs, and influencers. The big question is which people are most likely to be interested in what you’ve got to sell. Crossed Crow Books publishes “occult books specializing in Witch rituals, magic, divination, spirit work, and the overall operative nature of the Witch’s craft.” Therefore, I looked for publications and people (influencers) within their specialty. Feedspot lists various Wiccan and other blogs, Reddit has discussions about witchy More

By copycatting, I’m talking about you copying someone’s style, plagiarizing their description, stealing a story concept, or using AI. The creative world is anti-AI, in case you hadn’t noticed, and regardless of what those using it are saying, readers do want to know if a human or machine wrote it. Readers are not ignorant creatures who only want a good story regardless where it comes from. To think so is being insulting and naive. What copying says about the writer -you do not respect the reader -you do not respect yourself -you feel you don’t have enough talent -you are not beyond cheating to make a buck The second that many readers hear that you used AI is when you lose face. Readers assume you don’t have the skills to do it from scratch. Readers see you as a thief and a con and lacking talent. You can argue that you learn from what AI does for you. No, you don’t, because you didn’t use that part of your brain to learn it. You let something else find an answer and you just copied it. You didn’t learn it. We can only pray that one day originality will be compensated More

For years, I’ve counselled writers to avoid religion and politics in their branding unless they are part of their brand. There are always potential readers on the other side of the fence, and with so much competition for book sales, do you really want to alienate a chunk of them? There’s another category rearing its head in this accidental culling of your own market, too, and its totally different than religion and politics. It’s AI. When some readers (more than you think) learn that you might have used AI in the creation of your work, they put you on their do-not-read list. You can call it unfair or not. You can call them troglodytes. You can call them out of touch for not keeping up with progress. But you know what? You still will not sell them a book. But what does that mean? What if you cannot afford a cover designer? What if you just used AI on the cover but not the copy, or vice versa? What if it was used for brainstorming or editing or rewriting a chapter? None of that matters. If the reader who avoids AI hears you used it in any fashion, regardless of More

I’m not a talented writer. I’m not even steeped in writing qualifications. Yet my website is splattered with published features. How? In three words – pitch, ballsiness and research. Pitch – Turtles inspired me to write. While out having coffee, I noticed a company advertising string bags as alternatives to plastic ones. Not very interesting in itself. But, paired with the emotive side that turtles suffer an untimely death by eating an upturned plastic one, I had an idea for a pitch. Ballsiness – I’d never written a pitch so bought a book on how to write a good one. ‘I can try that’ I decided. I found a UK women’s magazine aimed at seniors and read it from cover to cover three times. I’d hit on a topical issue, the editor was interested! Research – The editor guided me. She wanted more ideas for plastic bag alternatives and quotes from supermarkets on how they intended to eliminate them.  Internet searches gave me suggestions for bags. I emailed supermarkets’ media departments (found on their website) to obtain spokespeople. The article was published. Beginner’s luck? Well, yes and no – I continued to work freelance for the magazine for two years. Discovering our local More

Once upon a time not long ago I did an event where several authors appeared. It was at a library. The library didn’t advertise except in its own material to its patrons. They thought the writers would really appreciate the recognition. I asked if they had advertising prepared that I could use. No. I mentioned I would promote via my channels. They thanked me. I asked if they had asked the other authors to do the same. No. So I asked who the other authors were. (I had no idea.) Then I did ads. I sent them via all my channels. I crossed my fingers this was worth the travel and the time. I have done this multiple times over the years, learning a hard lesson each time, but apparently not learning it permanently. One would think I would have. Now, however, my rules as a whole are these: -Get paid to appear unless the sale of books will adequately compensate. -If I speak, present, or teach a class, I get paid, regardless of sales. -Avoid multiple author events. . . anywhere. The average visitor buys 1-3 books regardless how many authors are there. When there are many authors, do More