What it's like being a ghostwriter
and how I got my first gig. Also, what I get paid.
As a professional writer, there are two important considerations:
What do I want to write?
How will I make it pay?
I originally trained as a journalist, thinking that was a clever way to be able to write for a living.
But when you’re starting out, you often end up doing a lot of writing for free.
And for most of us, that’s not sustainable.
So unless you’re one of lucky few who manage to get a job on a national newspaper without a nepotistic advantage, you have to find other sources of income.
I sold ads on an arts magazine. Until it folded.
Did PR for an art gallery. Until the owner stopped paying us and we had to take legal action.
And then, at last, I got a well-paid job as a corporate copywriter.
But sadly, in that male-heavy tech company, women and pregnancy were not welcome and they ended my contract when I gave birth to my first baby.
Back to the laptop.
I worked a few days a week on a digital magazine. And then, when it closed down, I started my own.
That led to me getting amazing journalism commissions from the Guardian, Red Mag and others, as well as a book deal.
I was off.
Except I wasn’t. Because while I knew I was capable of writing at least two books a year, that’s not generally how the publishing industry works.
They want space between each book they publish, to give it the energy it needs to sell well, before moving onto the next one.
What this has meant for me is that I’ve had three non-fiction books published - one every two years - with the paperback coming out in the years between.
And I haven’t earned enough from that to live off non-fiction book-writing (yet).
I decided to create online courses, as a way to monetise my writing, and that went very well, in financial terms. But soon, I was focused on sales and marketing, not writing.
After that, I had a period of self-publishing my poetry books - and doing fairly well - before realising that again, once I’d done the writing, it was all about selling.
I wrote a piece for Emma Gannon’s Substack about a one-year period when I decided to focus solely on poetry, and see what happened. You can read it here.
But after my third non-fiction book came out, and I was feeling a bit lost in terms of work, I said to my agent: how can I earn a full-time living as a writer?