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You are receiving Jane Friedman’s self-study class, How to Earn a Living as a Writer. New lessons release every Friday through April 18, 2025. Browse the archive.
Week 13: Scalable work is golden
The difference between a profitable writer and an unprofitable writer is often about scalability.
The concept is simple: Can you earn more money from the same work as your audience grows, without having to multiply your effort accordingly?
The majority of freelance writers and editors are doing non-scalable work. Each additional client or each additional writing project requires dedicated time for the same or similar earnings. Eventually you run out of time for clients or projects, which limits your earnings potential. When all of your time is accounted for, raising prices is the only way to increase your wages.
But what if you’re an author who consistently takes 100 hours to write and publish a book? I’m not saying that’s a realistic average, but for the sake of an easy example, what if the following happened?
- Book 1: sells 2,000 copies, earning $2 per copy sold: $4,000 or $40/hour
- Book 2: sells 4,000 copies, earning $2 per copy sold: $8,000 or $80/hour
- Book 3: sells 15,000 copies, earning $2 per copy sold: $30,000 or $300/hour
- Book 4: sells 80,000 copies, earning $2 per copy sold: $160,000 or $1,600/hour
I admit this is an overly neat and optimistic trajectory for an author. But it mimics what some authors experience if they can stay in the game and write work that enjoys success in the market. Over time, such authors build a bigger readership, so each book earns more money for a similar amount of effort. Along the way, passive income is generated from the older work if it’s still selling. Book 1 may sell 2,000 copies in its first year, but then continue to sell for years and years, generating additional income that raises the effective hourly rate.
Unfortunately, book sales are highly unpredictable, especially for traditionally published authors who are focused not so much on market demand, but on what they themselves prefer to write. Book sales become more predictable for self-published authors with some experience under their belt, who have seen the ebb and flow of sales over many books. They can make accurate projections about how much a particular book will earn. And they avoid spending more time on writing and publishing a book than will make a difference to their earnings. Anyone who gets stuck in years-long revision on every single book is cratering their profitability as a writer. Professional authors who treat their work as a business avoid that.
Focusing on scalable work is not for everyone, but it’s essential for those who want to earn a living off book sales alone. Authors who can’t realistically increase sales and/or production—often true of poets, literary fiction writers, memoirists, and others doing less commercial work—will seek other forms of earnings, via speaking, teaching, or selling products and services related to their expertise.
Exercise
Another form of scalability is thinking about how to make your existing work go farther. Have you gotten the most mileage and growth from what you’ve already created or published? Look at a piece you recently put into the world: it could be a personal essay, a newsletter, a short story, a poem, anything that holds value and might attract readers or opportunity.
- Repurpose the work for a specific social media outlet. If you recently had a poem published, what if you read it on Instagram Reels? (This assumes you have permission to do so—always check your contracts for rights you retain.)
- Can you write a behind-the-scenes newsletter about what you learned in writing or publishing the piece, or write about readers’ reactions to it?
- Can you repurpose the material so it’s for a different readership? Maybe you published a personal essay about a traumatic experience you had with a healthcare provider. There might be lessons in it for those who provide healthcare if you adjust the voice, angle, and approach.
- Can you create a workshop or a class from the work, especially if it’s something that garnered significant, enthusiastic response? After my key publishing paths chart took off in the early 2010s, I developed a special class based on it that I still teach to this day.
One warning: Don’t invest more time on a piece of work that you don’t truly want to be known for. Focus your energies on work you want to continue and attract a readership for.
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The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (releasing April 2025)
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