A Fool's Errand

Since when has writing ever been a good get-rich-quick scheme?

Yesterday I came across this article by Daniel Lyons, warning that you're unlikely to get rich by blogging.

Lyons wrote The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog. I looked at it a few times and thought it was well done, though I didn't read it regularly, as I'm not one of those babies who worship Apple (a cult as annoying as Scientology, and sadly more ubiquitous). The initial appeal was its anonymous, WTF nature--not terribly dissimilar, I must note, from the Irate Savant blog I began in 2004, though because of the subject matter, Lyons' blog was better suited to finding a wider audience. But the idea, as I learned, is also something of a one-trick pony, especially once your secret's out.

As a senior editor of Forbes and a published author, Lyons surely understands better than most how hard it is for most people to make money writing, much less get rich doing it. You can't expect to just press a few buttons, start posting, and watch the money flow in, any more than you can expect to just crank out a manuscript, ship it off to a few editors, and wait for your Pulitzer money to arrive in the mail.

It's still a wonder to me that anyone needs to be told that.

It's one thing to write for money. Everyone knows the Samuel Johnson quote, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," but there's a big difference between writing for money and writing to get rich. For one thing, the former is actually possible. Much better to get an MBA or go to law school. Or play the lottery. The lottery's easy. You buy a ticket, you win or you don't. With writing, you work hard for countless hours, and your odds are no better. Yes, yes, Stephen King, blah, blah, blah. But one could probably count on one's hands the number of people alive who are rich from writing, and the number of people who ever lived who got rich--really rich--from writing would probably not fill a medium-sized sports arena. And yet scores of people set out every day to be writers, of blogs or books or screenplays or whatever, and many of them do so with the goal of becoming some cross between Ernest Hemingway and the Great Gatsby (sans their unfortunate demises). Since I like to eat and be able to clothe my family, I'm not a fan of the suffering artist archetype, but frankly, if you set out to get rich by writing, you are more than likely a damn fool. Making a living writing is possible, though improbable (which is why so many writers end up teaching in university writing programs, which are at least in part state-sponsored patronage systems). There are better, quicker, easier ways to make money.

So it is on that note that I begin Shoryland, a blog virtually guaranteed to generate no revenue, for it has no real purpose other than to provide me a platform from which to bloviate about whatever comes to mind. That's one of the things I missed the most about the Irate Savant blog; I've spent the last several years turning that material into a novel, a terribly lonely enterprise, and I was itching to get back to blogging the entire time.

Yes, I've got Google Adsense on the site, and I'm going to add Amazon Marketplace widgets, and maybe even a PayPal donate button. I've been thinking about opening my own CafePress store, not because I think I can make money, but because the thought of selling Shoryland products amuses me. And if these next rounds of agent and editor queries go nowhere, I'm going the print-on-demand route with The Irate Savant, and I'll make it available for purchase here. If I pull in a buck or two, great, but I'm not planning on it.