How I make a good living as a writer

   

It all began innocently enough, when I got excited by the potential of selling e-books to supplement my massage therapy income, and I started moonlighting and pulling 12-hour days. That’s when the money started to flow. And the trouble.

Today, things are good: I make good money online as a writer and publisher, with my website PainScience.com. My articles and books attract well over a hundred thousand readers every week. I achieved it in about five to ten years of extreme workaholism. In January of 2010, at the age of 38, I quit my day job as a Registered Massage Therapist. Now, just barely middle aged, I no longer actually have to work much. (But I do anyway.) I am not “rich” by a long shot, but some might see it that way: my income is high, reliable, and the money keeps on flowing even when I take a week off.

UPDATE 2022: The "good money" phase of PainScience.com ended in 2015, having last only a couple years. In retrospect it seems a bit tragic that I thought I had a "success story." But it depends on how you look at it! That was very premature in some ways, but still truein others. After an SEO disaster in 2015, PainScience.com was badly damaged, but continued to generate an adequate income for a few more years. Then, in 2020, another huge SEO disaster — warnings signs of the impending doom of the web — knocked my income down to a level that is almost poor. It’s still okay and reliable by the standards of writers… but those are very low standards indeed! 😜 Anyway, the project is still a success by many measures, even just the fact that it’s still running. But the "good money" thing, sigh, is now ancient history.

This is my success story. I’ll be sharing it in a blog-to-book format right here, over the next year or so, mixed in with the all the other stuff I post about.

The quest to find the holy grail of passive income was brutal. My success story includes an extraordinary series of unfortunate events, densely packed into five nail-biting years:

And even the death of a beloved cat — hardly an unusual misfortune, but it sure felt like one tragedy too many at the time, piled on near the end. Anyone who has loved a great animal will understand that her loss hit me as hard as anything else.

Those grim events built way too much character, by which I mean that it probably gave me post-traumatic stress disorder — basket case! burnout! not kidding! But on the bright side there’s a book in it. The story of my career probably would have been worth sharing without all the drama, but it’s better this way.

This is not an autobiography — it’s just a the story of about five painfully interesting years of (finally) figuring out how to make a living as a writer. I hope it’s fun and helpful for:

  1. aspiring writers
  2. internet entrepreneurs
  3. plus a third audience not at all like the others: rational practitioners of alternative medicine frustrated with the rampant pseudoscience and self-serving nonsense that permeates that industry. (And, make no mistake, it is an industry just as much as “Big Pharma” is.)

For readers already familiar with my work — and I’m proud to say that there are really a lot of you these days — this writing will be the most most personal, candid, and militant thing you’ve ever seen from me.

Next: a writer’s dreams …