Earn Six Figures as a Writer With This One Weird Trick | Jane Friedman

In a writers group online, my colleagues commiserated-about how hard it is to sell books, about the "memoir industrial complex" that promotes a very few big-deal successes while other authors shell out thousands for classes and editing and invest their time in "building platform" that is still statistically unlikely to get a book deal. Over and over, I see this phrase: pay the bills.

While enough to pay the bills is a perfectly valid colloquialism for "an amount of money that emotionally balances the time and effort I've put in," it's also a terrible goal. I mean, first, screw this pay the bills crap, why not aim for a life-changing amount of money? If you're aspiring, reach high. But more importantly, very few authors earn enough to pay the bills in any meaningful way.