I received an email from a frustrated reader this week. This excerpt pretty much sums it up:

“I’m still doing medical and legal transcription (keystrokes for pennies) which leaves me unfulfilled and often angry about writing.  I think this is what prompted me to reach out – your writing prompted by anger (see last week’s newsletter). Heck, I could likely write The Art of War if I could channel the anger into writing.”

They asked me how much time I spent doing copywriting/freelancing. Instead of answering just that, I replied giving a more overall viewpoint of my income.

Basically my writing time is broken into these areas:

Novel writing (and its marketing)
Copywriting/magazines/freelancing in general (and its marketing/pitching)
Writing/researching for FundsforWriters (which generates advertising income)

Now, there’s a difference in writing time and writing income.

I know of few writers who write in one area (at least for very long). Of course, in the beginning the copywriting/freelance writing makes more income because novel/book writing has a long tail approach to making money. Having as many novels as I do now has allowed that balance to catch up. . . when it comes to money. Right now I earn a third of my income from each of the above, but that was not the balance two years ago and will probably change next year. It’s ever a moving target.

In the early years I still wrote novels. I just made no money at it. It took up half my time, but I knew I had to pay my dues. Yes, I could have just done freelance work and FundsforWriters, but I had to fill that void in me that wanted to write mysteries. That wasn’t just a year, either. It was more like ten.

You can play it safe with writing that earns immediate income. Start pitching to many publications. Establish a website. Start putting in for copywriting gigs on Indeed, Freelance.com, and Linkedin Jobs. Pitch magazines, print and online. Start studying the freelancers who do it for a living. Sign up for their newsletters and YouTube channels. It’s not hard. It’s not easy, either. Nothing worth succeeding at should be easy.

But do you have a drive to write something more creative? If so, instead of thinking you only need to be doing one thing, fill your days with a balance of what is easy, what earns you a better income, and what you enjoy. This helps keep you from getting frustrated.

In terms of time, I spend half my time on novels and half my time on everything else. In my earlier days, I wrote for income-producing venues, then once my tasks were done for the day, I would write my novels into the night. They were my reward.

Be frank and identify what your goals are. What makes you happy about writing? If the income from your creativity is your driving force, if that’s your measure for success, then go at it like gangbusters and focus on those opportunities that generate dollars. If you feel unrewarded doing that, if doing gigs makes you feel like a workhorse, then divide your time up between what you love and what you need to do.

But don’t write until you are too frustrated with it to enjoy it. You have to want to show up at that keyboard. It’s easy to be jealous of the best-seller novelists and the six-figure copywriters, but at the end of the day, you have to lie down in your bed and be glad at what you accomplished for the day.