Types of non-fiction writers

RookieWriter

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My hope is to make a living writing non-fiction someday. However it seems like this will be unlikely unless I work as a ghostwriter or a journalist. Am I missing something? What other types of non-fiction writers can make a living by writing alone?
 

veinglory

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Technical writing, textbooks, content (sales, online, blogging etc), communications (press releases etc), regulatory/policy (whitepapers etc), amongst others. Also combinations thereof. I have done 4 of the 5 listed above.
 

WeaselFire

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Technical books can earn you a living, but you have to be immersed in the technology. Cookbooks will never earn you a living but they provide great exposure to your restaurants and other businesses. There are thousands of people writing catalogs, manuals for refrigerators and other such things that are earning a living.

The person I know who makes the most money writing (any category) writes aircraft maintenance manuals. Those thick software/tech books you see on the shelves pay $10,000 advances routinely. More if you're established. Editing the documentation written by the developers of software is decent money.

So, where's your expertise?

Jeff
 

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Technical books can earn you a living, but you have to be immersed in the technology. Cookbooks will never earn you a living but they provide great exposure to your restaurants and other businesses. \

Actually, you can earn a living writing cookbooks; the catch is, as with writing documentation or consumer technical books, you have to have proven expertise.

Cookbook writing/recipe editing are very specific fields of technical writing.
 

johnrobison

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You can make a living writing mainstream nonfiction if the public buys enough of your work to support you. That's been my experience through eight years and four books
 

Sunnyside

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What John said. My particular niche is biography -- I've had two published, and just started a third one. But not everyone is cut out to be a biographer -- or a memoirist, or a white paper writer, or whatever. You'll have to figure out what your particular super power might be.
 

jackda

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What John said. My particular niche is biography -- I've had two published, and just started a third one. But not everyone is cut out to be a biographer -- or a memoirist, or a white paper writer, or whatever. You'll have to figure out what your particular super power might be.

Interesting. Can you survive just on the money from your biographies? Day job? :)
 

Batspan

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Ways I've made money from writing and related activities: teaching creative writing classes at a university, speaking gigs, book reviewing for a newspaper, writing articles for online educational and newspaper sites, articles for private clients, creating website content for businesses, ad revenue from my niche sites, royalties from my eBook.

It's a lot of work. Having degrees, certifications and specialized work experiences count when it comes to getting gigs. Master writing killer letters about what you know and what you can do.
 

WeaselFire

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Interesting. Can you survive just on the money from your biographies? Day job? :)
This is one of those question nobody can answer. For some, survival is a Mercedes to drive while the Lamborghini is in the shop. For others, survival means being able to pay for the nails used to shoe your plow horse.

You can survive by writing. You can likely survive better by doing something else. :)

Jeff
 

dantefrizzoli

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Anything is possible for sure, you dont need to be a journalist- you can definitely keep your eyes peeled for different jobs and positions available where you can write though. It will come!
 

milkweed

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My hope is to make a living writing non-fiction someday. However it seems like this will be unlikely unless I work as a ghostwriter or a journalist. Am I missing something? What other types of non-fiction writers can make a living by writing alone?

It all depends, what are you interested in gardening, hiking, woodworking, hunting, spelunking, etc.?

I've written four how-to books on the topic of surface design with natural dyes which is a no brainer for me since I've been dyeing fabric, fibers, yarn, etc., for the past 20+ years with natural dyes.

The best writers on a non-fiction topic are the ones that actually know what they are talking about! Then you start by submitting articles to the magazines/journals in that field, and then write your book.
 

milkweed

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Interesting. Can you survive just on the money from your biographies? Day job? :)

Multiple streams of income is the surest way to survive, I have about eight income streams not including hubs paycheck and now that I'm licensing my designs I'm on my way to an even more secure income stream.
 

plumone

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i just finished my first how-to book and found it to be really fun to write. It's not the most technical thing, it's written for summer camp counselors, but is useful none the less.

I found a great book called Writing Successful Self-Help & How-To Books by Jean Marie Stine that had some good ideas on how to frame the content of my book. You might want to look into it. It's not for technical books per se but could help. I got a used copy on Amazon for like $4.
 

JimmyBurgess

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Writing how-to books that lead to training programs, speaking engagements, etc. can be effective. As mentioned in the other posts there are ways to make money writing. If you will write about what you love consistently, then the money will come.
 

plumone

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Also another category I dont think others mentioned is writing things like reference and dictionary- type books. Writing for these types of books would be much less about your actual writing skills and much more about your research/collection skills.
 

gingerwoman

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My sister has been making a full time living freelance coyrighting for whoever will pay her for over 20 years, she seems to have money to travel a lot too. I think she had a lot of contacts. I know she's writing content for some government websites in Australia at the moment.
 

PinkUnicorn

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My hope is to make a living writing non-fiction someday. However it seems like this will be unlikely unless I work as a ghostwriter or a journalist. Am I missing something? What other types of non-fiction writers can make a living by writing alone?

I write both fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction I write because I'm obsessed with the characters and can't stop writing about them. Non-fiction pays the bills.

I'm not making huge amounts of money, but I make more then minimum wage. I don't promote my books. I just self-publish them to Amazon and then move on to write the next one. I think if I did some heavy duty promoting and marketing, I could make and up swing from a part-time equivalent income, to a full-time equivalent income from my non-fiction.

What do I write?

All sorts of stuff.

In the older days (1970s - 1990s) I did a lot of short articles (magazines, newspapers, etc), mostly under 2,000 words each. (Pay used to be good; but I've not done it in a while so, not sure what the current forecast is on it.)

I write stage plays for local theatre. (pay is next to nothing)

I've done a few cookbooks. (pay is next to nothing)

I've done a few sewing books (costume making, embroidery, cloth doll pattern book, and crazy quilting) (pay is hit and miss, but fairly low)

I've done a few travel items, but lost interest (this could equal substantial income if I put more effort into it)

MOST of my income comes from three sets/series of books.

They are a combination of autobiographical-like essay/opinion/how-to books, on three topics that I know realy, realy, realy well. (Survival skills; writing short fiction, and my culture/family heritage/traditions)

Here's what I do:


I was homeless for 9 years. Unlike most homeless folks I opted to stay on my land, even though it was a very rural area with no near by cities and the nearest shelter was a 2 hour drive away. I did not have access to dumpsters or business or a shanty community. I became a boondocker living off the wild, building lean-tos and eating local plants growing in local forests. As a result I started a blog to keep a record of things that happened to me. I went into a lot of step-by-step detail on various things, like building shelters and cooking food and finding places to bathe, etc. That blog went viral a few months after I started it, because as I soon learned, there were some 20million homeless families in America and not one single solitary how-to guide website on how to survive being homeless. I modernized the blog with Google ads and made about $90 a month from it.

One thing lead to another and I started writing website content on homelessness. I was making about $200 a month from that.

Then I wrote a book (print; now out of print; never had an ebook edition) and gained a following from that.

While the book didn't make much and went out of print a year later, word of the book got out a few years later and I started getting requests for a follow up part 2 of it.

In 2013 my blog host sold and in the move, erased all the info off one of the servers, including my blog. FORTUNATELY, I had a copy of the entire thing save on 3 separate spare hard-drives...and suddenly I found myself needing a way to get all that how-to info back up.

By this time, I had save up enough money from writing, to buy a motorhome and was now, in addition to writing about homelessness, was also writing about full-time RVing, boondocking, and homestead. Basically, I was writing stuff that appealed to preppers. So now I have developed a multiple following: homeless folks, vandwellers, vacation campers looking to rough it, fulltimers, boondockers, homesteaders, and preppers.

I talk to these people on various forums and yahoo groups, and so I asked them: How do you suggest I get this info back online?

They had a lot of suggests, but the thing that kept popping up over and over again was: "It'd be easiest for me to access it on my Kindle?" or "It'd be nice to have it on an ebook I could keep on my smart phone."

So, I spent about a year sifting through the blog (which had 6,000+ posts at the time it went offline.) and sorting the posts together by topic, rearranging them, rewriting them, and compiling them into a set of, what eventually became a series of 30 books.

Each books starts out with a notation that reads along the lines of:

This book is just one author's opinion (mine) and is more of an insider's look at how I did things and what did and did not work for me. It in no way guarantees that your results will be the same as mine. Everything in this book is all based of what I've personally done and experienced, so take or leave it. Your results may vary. I'm just telling you what I've done, what worked for me, what didn't work for me, what I liked or didn't like, how I did things, how I solved various problems, etc and you can decide if any of it applies to you and your situation or not. Some of it might, some of it may not. It is in no way advice on what you "should" or "should not" do, just advice on what I recommend based on my own experiences and you can choose to consider all, any, or some of those recommendations, or you can throw them all to the wind and do completely the opposite.

In each book I strive to focus on a narrow topic, within a broader topic. I'll write, re-write and expand the book, adding more information and details until the book is 100 to 250 pages long.



So I end up with one book on how to survive being homeless during blizzards and hurricanes; one on how to build a shelter out of found items and how to maintain it for several years of homelessness; one on how to upgrade from a shanty tent to vandwelling; one on how to find safe access to food and water; one on the dangers you'll face while homeless and how to protect yourself; one on how to outfit a motorhome into a full time boondocking bugout machine; etc.


I make my goal to have all my non-fiction books at least 100 pages and more then 100 pages if I have enough to say on the topic and usually I can get a book well over 150 pages.


I brand them as a series, with matching covers, then put them up on Kindle. Books 100+ pages I sell for $2.99; and under 100 pages I sell for .99c; the few over 300 pages I list for $4.99.

In most cases, shortly after one volume sells, with in the next day or two, one of each of all the rest (30 volumes) sells as well. It is very common for someone to buy 1 volume then come back and buy the whole set a few days later. Well, most of them are $2.99, earning $2.09x30 volumes. That's $60 income in one day.


And then I have another series, done the same way, on writing short fiction. I've been writing short stories since the 1970s. I've got hundreds of them up on Kindle. There are 3 volumes out now and the set will have 25 volumes when finished. Again, each volume is 100+ pages and sells for $2.99, and when someone buys one, they often come back and buy the rest a few days later.

Then I have a third series, again, done the same way, this time on the history of my clan and it's traditions. I am the keeper of the records in my clan, I know the family history inside out. So far it is as 7 volumes published and 30 planned, again, each volume is 100+ pages and sells for $2.99, and when someone buys one, they usually come back and buy the rest a few days later.

I'm selling several a day now and once the full set of each set is up, these 3 sets of books alone will be bringing in about $500 a week.

In each case, it is me, taking some that I know really well and am on some level and expert on, and writing about it, to share my knowledge of it with others.

Everybody has something they are good at or know well enough to write about. It's just a matter of figuring out what it is you are interested in and writing about it.

And it may surprise you what you are an expert in. 10 years ago, I lived in a house and if you had told me that a major disaster was going to wash through my yard and take my house with it, and result in websites all over the world listing me as the top expert in homeless survival skills, I would have told you, you was crazy. But that's what happened. a flood took my house, and I did what I had to o to survive, and out of frustration I started a blog to vent about it and one thing led to another and next thing I know, I've got people coming from all over the world to meet me and see my camp set up in person. I didn't plan on this. I never intended to become a writer of survival books, but here I am, writing books on how to survive when nature attacks you from behind.

Somewhere in your life, you have something that has really impacted your life. It could be war, illness, natural disaster, a hobby, your job, your culture, your car, a pet, something, that you can write about and turn into a non-fiction writing career. And it may be the last thing you expect you'd ever write about too.

And I'm sure there's more ways I could spin my survival skills writing. Maybe I could write a newspaper column? Do lectures? I don't know.

You want to know something funny? As a result of my writing those survival skills books, I have since started featuring homeless, vandwelling, and/or RV full timers as main characters in my fiction writing. and guess what: my top selling fiction novel right now, is the one about a guy who became homeless, lost his home and his family to a major disaster event, and just started walking all over the world, being homeless and trying to survive. a lot of that book, even though it's fiction, was based off actual events in my life. A lot of the stuff that happens to him, are things that happened to me. So, you can even take your non-fiction and write fiction based off of it.

So, yeah, that's how I took writing non-fiction and turned it into a steady income.
 

Fruitbat

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Great post, Pink Unicorn. Thank you. :)
 

rolandogomez

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Pink Unicorn, that's a great post/story and it goes with the old saying, "In order to write about life you have to experience it." While I've only written seven books, though I have more on the way, it is life and past life that can motivate the writer in a person. While we all want to earn a living writing, I say write and let it play out, don't worry about the pay out in the end. If you write well enough, it will sell. Thanks for sharing your story, Rolando
 

WeaselFire

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Pink Unicorn, that's a great post/story and it goes with the old saying, "In order to write about life you have to experience it."

Well, sort of. I used to make money by becoming an "instant expert" in a topic, writing it and moving on. You don't have to live life directly, experiencing it vicariously works well too. Though my current non-fiction work has me getting far more involved than I thought I would. :)

I have (had, she passed away last year) a good friend who made her living writing the "Seven Ways" article. You see these all the time, "Seven ways to lose ten pounds fast," "Seven facts you didn't know about Cleveland," "Seven things you should always check when buying a car." The formula was easy, find a subject and write seven things about doing/getting/surviving/enjoying that subject. Magazines bought these one-page fillers by the boat load and blogs and web sites are buying them now. It took her a day or two to write each one, mostly using research from the library (or now, internet) as well as interviews. Never leaving her writing office and never experiencing 95% of the things personally.

Jeff
 

blacbird

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Best-selling non-fiction in recent years has generally been "creative" non-fiction books on history, scientific topics, politics, investigative journalism. Some examples would include:

Longitude, by Dava Sobel
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard
Destiny of the Republic, by Candice Millard
wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Map that Changed the World, by Simon Winchester

It helps a hell of a lot if you have credentials in the field you wish to write about.

caw