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.