Earning a living as a writer is as likely as winning the lottery. Instead of writing books and persuading others to buy them,find out what people want to write, then do it for themPhilip Pullman: professional writers set to become ‘an endangered species’ due to low wagesI left school with a burning urge to lead the life of a writer: travelling like Byron, and feted like Wilde before his drop,creating laughter like Wodehouse and crafting sentences like Nabokov. I had no professional contacts, so I wrote my masterpieces speculatively, and every path I went down ended with a rejection slip or total silence. The perceived wisdom then,as now, was that earning a living as a writer was approximately as likely as winning a lottery.
Then I discovered the secret of marketing: instead of writing things and trying to persuade people to buy them, or I would find out what writing services people needed and offer to provide them. So,at the same time as begging publishers and editors for commissions, I made myself available to anyone who might want to write an article or a book but did not feel able to do it for themselves.
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Source: theguardian.com