Here’s the thing about being one of the fifty million “content creators” out here, opining in the public space that is the internet: it feels like taking a stand.   I put my stories and arguments out here to give the several people who read them, friends and strangers, my honest thoughts and feelings, set out as clearly as I can set them out.  

The craft, writing clearly and, when called for, choosing the right words to move the reader, is the same for the blahgger as for the professional writer.  Standards vary, of course, but good writing is the same whether you read it in a book or here on the ‘internets’.  

The problem with reading things on the internet is that you are often in the hands of people who are, how to put this delicately, contemptible morons.   It may be easy or hard to click away, sometimes they suck you in by the sheer shock of their violence, like the tweets of our new troll-in-chief.

Writing “in public” serves another important purpose for me, someone who feels a rising urge to be paid for writing.  It holds me to a higher standard than writing emails, or keeping a notebook.   Before I hit “publish” I have to carefully consider every word I’ve set down.  I also have to comb through the words several times to make sure they are disentangled and say exactly what I mean them to.

Are they all in the right order?  Are there extra words that are not only unnecessary but distracting, or disruptive to the flow or mood? Typos?  Have I ended at exactly the right place?  Included all the detail to make the story understandable without burdening the reader with unneeded side-stories?   When I feel the piece is clean, and says clearly what I intended to say, I put it up for others to read.

The next question, and one entirely distinct from writing well and the considerations involved in doing that, is: how to build a wide enough internet audience so that I have a “platform”?   Publishers nowadays want an assurance that you are already popular enough to invest in before they publish your work.  

If your blog is read by 100,000 people a day, and you have that many “followers”, you have a robust platform and are well on your way. Having a million followers means, no matter how well or badly you may write, that you have the ability to get people to click on your words, which sounds exactly like “cah-ching!”  If your blahg is seen by a handful of people a week, a publishing corporation would be foolish to give you a large advance, no matter how intriguing or compelling your book might otherwise seem to be.

I am not writing this piece to whine about the obstacles in front of me as I try to reorganize, cut and prepare the next draft of the 750 page monster memoir of my idealistic monster dad.  There will be plenty of time for that whining when the time comes.   I am explaining some of the reasons I, and many others, write on the ‘internets’.  

There is love of writing, a good in itself.  There’s the satisfaction of having communicated something clearly, a nice feeling to have every day.  Then there is the pursuit of a livelihood from writing, also an excellent  thing– the livelihood more than the pursuit, of course.  These are three different things– love of writing, writing well and selling writing– none dependent on the others, and it is good to keep that in mind.

I heard two very clever English chaps, reading their own audiobook about how they sell a million words a year on the internet, between them, and make very good money following the principles that made them the tireless and successful self-promoters they are. Being a good writer, says this smooth-talker, is but one part of the equation; the other part, astute business sense and energetic and ingenious self-promotion, being the more crucial part for making money as a writer.  

These fellows had a solid, and perhaps indispensable, grounding in professional advertising, copy-writing, did it freelance for years, made enough money to keep them going until they cracked the lucrative fine art storytelling market they are wizards in now.  Writing ads and writing wildly popular fiction are different genres of writing of course, but the principles are the same. 

These ingenious chaps put together a solid “platform” based on catering to the demographics of their target audience– fans of a certain type of fiction.  They then built a thirsty, twelve-mouthed “funnel” to draw others into their network and soon were creating daily interest for over a million people.  Now they had something publishers were drooling for a piece of.  But not so fast!   They were able to keep virtually all the profits by monetizing their platform themselves, as well as half of their dozen voracious funnels.  $0.005 a hit on one their funnels comes out to $1,500 a day, money that comes in handy for cross-platform promotion.

You see, old boy, this is how we do it, and with a bit of verve and elan, you can do the same, no matter how well you might think you write.  We cater to the buyers in a professionally engaging way, we build the infrastructure to produce and distribute our virtual wares, we have professional designers create beautiful covers for our virtual works– and don’t skimp on this part, readers DO judge books by their covers, at least at the cash register, and we publish what we want them to devour, leave the story at a dramatic cliff-hanging spot at the end of each book to create a frenzy for the sequel, and we keep all the profits.  This is how you do it.  

Or, you can sit alone tapping out the most beautiful prose your talent allows.  You might be an amazing writer with fantastically rich stories to tell, even valuable stories, who can say?  If this is the case, and you are not devoting as much time to monetizing your talent as you are to writing every day, you are like the batter who can consistently hit a 95 mph fastball 500 feet– in a batting cage somewhere in suburbia, with nobody to jump up and cheer or offer you the million dollar bonus your rare, work-honed skill and god-given ability would otherwise command in the marketplace of sluggers.