How I've doubled my income, as a writer, in a year

I think that most self-employed people in the UK start thinking about their tax return towards the end of the year, or as we head into January, knowing the deadline is now looming. So, I’m sorry to say that last week I sat down and did my tax return. 

There was a boring admin-related reason for doing it now and so I sat at the kitchen table for a few hours, ignoring my children while they helped themselves to Fondant Fancies and ice lollies - my youngest declared it the best day of my life - and got it done.

While I was at it, I did something else that might be a little hard to hear for those who are as last-minute as I usually am when it comes to tax returns, which is that I created an excel sheet of all my income and outgoings between April 2024 and today.

I thought I’d get ahead of the game so that come April 2025, I could actually submit a tax return as soon as I get that HMRC email prompting me - for the first time - to submit my tax return. A prompt that usually, I’d ignore for many, many months.

And on doing so, I discovered, quite excitingly, that in the first five months of this current tax year, I earned the same as I earned in the whole of the last tax year. Meaning that by the end of this tax year, I’ll likely have earned double.

I have a big whopping tax bill to pay for last year, and it will be bigger again, for 24/25, but I’m going all positive and actually feeling quite pleased that my self-employed earnings have been significantly hoicked up in the past year and a half.

How I earn a living

My income comes from different sources.

In the last tax year, I wrote a non-fiction book - Raise your SQ - did my first ghostwriting project and I started making some money each month from writing essays on Substack.

At first, I had a few hundred paid subscribers and now, I have nearly 500. Maybe next year, I’ll have 1000.

In this current tax year, I’ve ghostwritten another book, my Substack has grown so that it now provides a decent monthly income and I’ve run two online courses. I launched The Creative Way (to earn a living online) and nearly 100 women signed up.

I was so excited to be running online courses again. I love designing the courses, creating the material, marketing them and then seeing what happens when they go live and all these women are learning and creating, off the back of them.

It can be a very lucrative way to earn a living, too, with such low overheads.

And I love the freedom of coming up with a course idea and actioning it as soon as I’m ready. It’s an antidote to traditional book-publishing, where timelines are designed by a publishing company and everything has to be quite spaced out.

This is for good reason: to allow input from various members of the team (acquisitions, sales, editor, PR, marketing, copyeditor, proofreader, recording audio etc), and it’s wonderful to have support from a team, in that way.

But it’s also a joy to have the freedom to work at your own pace (mine pace is fast). So, I’m running The Creative Way again, starting next week (9th September). A final blowout, as this is possibly the last time I’ll run it.

For two reasons:

1. I am now home-educating one of my three children. This limits my time. I will have two ‘school days’ a week to work, so I’ll have to be very mindful about how I use this time (around 10 hours).

2. I like to move between teaching and writing.

I’m moving into a solo writing phase. Where my time is completely my own. I might experiment: try a different genre, or write on a new platform. It’s about getting inspired and gathering ideas. Working the creative way.

During courses, I’m available throughout to support my students. I really enjoy this interaction; I learn from the students while they’re learning from me; it fills me with energy. Afterwards, I like a period of quiet, introspective time.

So, once the next cohort have completed the course, I’ll be writing poetry for Instagram and essays for both of my Substacks. This one, and Raising Neurodivergence. I also have another non-fiction book idea and a novel to finish writing (at some point).

My Instagram posts don’t earn me money directly but they have become part of my creative practice: poetry and passages that help me to explore what I’m feeling, doing, seeing. What matters to me, in terms of womanhood, motherhood, neurodivergence.

With Substack, there’s a recurring monthly income that, right now, for me, seems to growing well. My income from Substack has tripled in the past year and I’m seeing less subscribers leave, as I get clearer on what I’m writing.

I feel bolder now about putting in the paywall on almost every essay I share on this Substack. I’m in my flow, and it was as simple as deciding that I would only write what I want to write, rather than writing what I thought others might want.

This means that I’m writing about topics that I really care about, in that moment. I’m not writing clickbait pieces that might get me a bunch of new subscribers who then quickly disappear. I’m writing stories and bringing poetry into it.

It’s the dreamiest way to earn a living, as a writer, and I’m grateful to this platform for showing me that there can be another way; where women are actually paid for their words rather than doing yet more unpaid work. It feels rather empowering.

I’m all geared up to teach the ways I’ve grown a subscriber list on Substack, found new paid subscribers (there’s one thing I’m doing that I don’t see anyone else doing and it’s working very well) and how to create courses and get creative on Instagram.

After this, as I said, it’s back to pure writing, at least for a while.

In time, I may return to courses - when I have more childcare - but I don’t know what it is that I’ll feel driven to teach. I like that it is always evolving, much like my writing career and the online business that I run. I learn, I practise, I teach.

So: a month of running The Creative Way course - and getting that buzz that teaching new students brings - followed by a different pace: poetry, essays, non-fiction and fiction, plus who knows what else. I’m curious to see how it unravels from here.

Annie x

If you’d like to learn The Creative Way (to earn a living online), sign up now. We start on Monday. One module a week, for four weeks, and I’m on-hand, via email, as coach and teacher. We cover Instagram, Substack, online course creation and client work.

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