Questions

I want to make a living out of publishing online. I have what it takes -- passion, talent, and content. I'm just not familiar with the ins and outs of the trade: - How do I market successfully? -Which platforms should I post on? -Where do I go to promote my books? My books will mainly deal with a wide variety of non-fiction topics, revolving around the humanities and arts. In general, if I'm interested in something, I write about it.

Hi there,
A good question to consider is this: are people willing to pay to read what you want to write? Do your interests represent a big enough "market" to create and sustain a livelihood? People who make a living out of publishing online seem to have one thing in common: they figure out where their interests intersect with other people's interests. I'm not talking about generating a ton of link bait. I'm talking about finding a hungry crowd. You can sell a world-class hamburger in a vegetarian neighborhood and still go out of business. You can publish excellent articles and blog posts on the arts and humanities, and still make no money. Here's some practical advice for finding your hungry crowd(s): Go to Medium.com. Do some research. Identify the writers who are already publishing on the subjects that interest you. What kind of following have they built up? How many recommends do their stories get on average? Which stories are their most popular? What's their strategy? Do their stories route readers to an external blog or website? Can you figure out how they are making money? If you do "competitive analysis" on two to three dozen arts & humanities writers, then you'll notice some patterns. You'll notice that some topics sell better than others. Or some stylistic elements or flourishes have enabled certain writers to build an audience quickly. Use your analysis to reverse engineer your audience. You can't make a living publishing online until you have an audience. Lastly, watch this video, and pay attention to the part at the end about left-handed vampire movies: https://kicktastic.com/video/convince-convert-jay-baer/.

Hope this helps,
Austin


Answered 9 years ago

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