That is why millions of people write. Although a lot of them dream about making it big anyway. A few fools actually think they are going to make it. Like my bookie said: the race is not always to the swift, the battle is not always to the strong BUT that is the way to bet.
Sorry this whole thread seemed to devolve into a huge fight. My last post in it. Sam, I'm sorry for your loss. I really hope you find success, fulfillment and happiness. Truly, I do. I mean no disrespect or anger at you. If you have any actual advice on how to up your chances of success instead of just reasons why our attempts will fail no matter what, I'm sure the forum would appreciate your take since you worked in that sort of environment. If not, that's fine too. I am going to keep trying no matter what because no one who did make it and did well like that ever stopped because it was hard. I am working on a novel right now actually. Have the first 4 pages down actually. I have faith that it's good, and can bring me in the very least an audience and a start as an author. Call me a fool all you want, I honestly don't care. I'm going to keep pushing forward. I think I get why my friends think I'm different now. This whole thread made me realize some things about myself and what I'm capable of deep down. Thanks again to everyone who came to me earlier on in my time of need. You finally helped me find the confidence to push forward and not doubt so much. I've been feeling a lot happier overall not just as a writer and I'm not just a slave to being so self conscious and scared anymore. Hopefully other people who come here will see something and be able to take what I did out of it.
Actually it's used because the serifs make it easier to read, and especially to edit. That's why newspapers use it.
The little engine that could approach will not work. You need to learn how to actually write; and write good compelling work that sells. You need practice writing. You cannot just say you can do because you want to do it. You need to be actually able to do it not just keep saying it. Are you anywhere near the skill level to be a professional novelist full time? There are millions of others out there just like you. Why will a publisher buy your work and not somebody elses? So what education and experience do you have that says you can be a full time novelist making a living at it? What do you know about selling books? Do you know anything about how the publishing business really works? What do you know about promoting yourself so your novels will be in demand? Even if you finish your novel, what makes you think you can sell it to anyone ? How much do you think you will make if you do sell it? How many novels do you have to write AND sell every year to make enough to live on and save for retirement as well as paying for health insurance, taxes, yada yada. Did you allow time for vacations and being sick when you came up with how many novels a year you need to sell? Sorry if I am too realistic. But at my age it comes naturally just like kids have youthful optimism until the world grinds them down and teaches them what reality is.
And why microslop commissioned better fonts that were more legible. Including sans serif fonts, which are even easier to read for many people.
Suuuure, that's why newspapers and book publishers publish in san-serif fonts (!) I'd have hated to be the paste-up artist on one of those fonts back in the day... You know, after less than a day of reading you, a newbie to the Forum, I'm putting you on Ignore because I've seen you contribute nothing constructive in any way here. That's gotta be a record.
I personally find Courier easiest to work in, but I tend not to use it here because it would just draw unnecessary attention to itself and switching between several random fonts several times a page is an overall unpleasant experience for everyone. It also doesn't explain why you keep changing it every other post, there dood.
I use courier on printed documents as that is the standard for scripts and most novels. For screen use sans serif is much easier on the eyes.
Not as such. Back in the day, it used to be the standard when submitting manuscripts because it's being monospaced makes it easier to read and estimate word counts before computers could do that for you, but more frequently I've been running into submission guidelines that specify TNR. I also can't find any printed novels or plays on my shelf that use courier. I'm thinking, for the plays at least, that's because Courier is just balls for italics and since the standard is to put stage direction in italics, it would make sense to use a font that does italics well. And if you're submitting, don't use Ariel, my agent once told me is reeks of amateur.
Going back to your first post, OP, I guess I'm a bit like you with another few years tacked on (if you're 19, that's a full decade). Admittedly there came times in life where I couldn't, wouldn't, or just didn't write. I had to put it to the side while I was consumed with other parts of life. When I started having children, I thought I was done dreaming of being a "writer" for good. A few years went by with little thought about writing. Then things settled and the dream came alive again. It's obvious now to me that the desire to write won't die so easily. It won't for you either, even if there are years where you've abandoned it. You may end up giving up for a while, maybe not now but at some point. It's bound to happen with something that isn't essential, when actual essential things are pressing on you. That's okay. You're not giving up and a dream you've had for a decade won't just disappear. It goes on holiday while you take care of other shit.
Magazines might be dying but blogs are the new magazine. I managed to make okay money as a freelancer, writing blogs for businesses. I know people making pretty good money, though I can't say whether that's the norm or not but there's likely more jobs available now with the internet. Compared to magazine and newspaper in the past. Though, I agree that writers who are artists first, are likely going to have a very hard time. It seems there are more opportunities for success, but it's half (if not more) business than art. I don't think I'll write a literary masterpiece that will bring me money. That's a long shot I won't bet on.I do think I have a chance making money pumping out romance binge reads on Amazon with the right marketing approach and sacrificing art for genre. I'll still be more than happy if I can make that work and I'll worry about my coming of age masterpiece when I don't need money. Haha.
I'm not really sure what's happening here. I'm aware that you're new to the forum, and I want to say welcome to it. But I'm not sure why you're here, based on what you've been saying on this thread. I know forum exchanges can escalate and get off-topic, but it's coming across as if you think writing is a waste of time, and want to discourage people like the OP for even trying to write at all. Because they don't have their lives mapped out yet? Because their chances of success are virtually nil? Is that really what a new writer needs to hear? If that's not what you're trying to say, could we start again, maybe? What kinds of things do you write, or want to write yourself? I notice you mentioned non-fiction. What are your ambitions as a writer? Is publishing success always what drives you, or is there something else that will keep you writing, no matter what? Have you got any words of encouragement for the OP? After all, without a finished piece of writing to sell, her chances of success as a writer ARE completely nil. And welcome to the forum!
I was a professional writer. Dabbled at being a small publisher. Helped a couple of friends get their books published. Been around the writing biz for way too many years even if mostly indirectly. Things have changed a lot since I started in the 60s. I am saying be realistic. Most of us never got the job we dreamed of as kids even if the economy had not changed so drastically as now. I am not saying that anyone should not write. I am saying that you should not be expecting to make a living at it. The odds of hitting the lottery are better. Digital and the internet has seriously disrupted writers along with photographers and musicians and other careers but did not fully eliminate them like autos did to buggy whips. Well maybe exactly like that as there are a couple of buggy whip makers somewhere still supplying the Amish who need them. Do keep writing. And if you get a following and are lucky then maybe you might be able to make a living by writing novels. But expecting that to be a career when you are still very young is just youthful optimism running amok. I wrote non fiction for a company as my full time job. I did write some non fiction in technical areas for other jobs. I have been paid and published from the washpost to writers digest and a dozen of other lesser magazines with national circulation. But that was a sideline. I could never see that as being a full time job that paid enough to support a family. If the OPer is serious then she needs to stop using so many social media sites as shown on her profile and concentrate on her writing. If that is to be a full time job someday then she should treat it as a job that is full time. But first learn how to write. Get an education and learn the basics of both writing and the writing business. The chances of the first novel selling are very low. Learn from that and make the next novel better. Repeat until you succeed or realise that you reached your potential and it was not good enough andor you were not lucky enough to get the big break to make it. I think the post you referenced was accurate. I gave solid advice for being able to write well enough to get paid for it. But there is more than just writing. One must know the business and be a self promoter to get a following. There are millions of novelists these days. Many of them are publishing ebooks on some aamazing site. They are not all making a living with their books.
There are jobs for sure, but they do not pay nearly as well as writing jobs used to. Magazines and newspapers are dying and the internet pays far less than those other print jobs did. There are way too many places who will give you 'exposure' but not money. There are way too many new writers who will do that and also compete for the low pay jobs on the internet. There are way too many writers in other countries competing against us , who think the pay is wonderful while we could not afford to live on such small amounts.
Not knowing what used to be made I can't say one way or another. There are certainly a lot of crap freelance jobs, aimed more towards Indians. It all gets mushed together, but there are better jobs too. I fluctuated between $15 and $30 an hour after getting my foot in the door. If I had had more time I could have made an income. I had a friend averaging $5000 a month doing it full time.
<<Doing what? DOING WHAT exactly?>> <<Y'know thirty dollars an hour sitting here typing menus in straight lines, meh.>> <<Impossible. I put it to you YOU you were font polishers en l'emploie de le the notorious Monsieur @Samuel Mieuxfont!>>
I have seen payment go down slowly over 50 years. And with inflation the real payment has gone way down. There are fewer jobs now. And there are a lot more people competing to get them. Fiverr is an example of how bidding cheapens the jobs while being good for the buyer. When somebody in Kyrgyzstan will do it for chicken feed you will not be able to get it for a living wage.
I suspect we're in the process of major change right now, as regards our reading habits and the way writing gets published. Lots of old methods are no longer applicable, and many new ones do seem to need a lot of work. It's great that people can self-publish, but, as you explain, the pitfalls are many. How to get people to notice your work, if you're a writer? How to ensure that the production quality is high? How to ensure that you, the writer, gets paid at all, never mind enough to live on? How to ensure that you, the indie writer, doesn't fall for some scam? These are all problems that are relatively new. I suspect, like lots of other new things, the publishing situation will level off at some point. I think real writers will always continue to write and look for ways to improve their writing, no matter what. As I said before, the marketing thing is important, but first of all you have to have something to market. So the writing comes first. What happens after that? Well, nothing is guaranteed, is it?
I mean..with no experience and almost immediately I was making decent money for what is essentially a non skilled job. I find it hard to believe there aren't plenty of good jobs when an average person such as myself is immediately doing good. In the end I was writing YouTube scripts for $30/hour on video game news. It's not a good way to get rich, but you'll make money.The biggest downfall is the time spent finding clients, long term and otherwise. It can be tedious and is unpaid time. Though sometimes that isn't part of the job, if you collect long term contracts. I could get a gig writing 40k romance novellas for $750 at the moment. Which isn't so bad if you write 2k an hour. I find it hard to believe magazine article writers back in the sixties were making much better, inflation included. If you still don't agree with that I guess we will have to agree to disagree because I don't know the numbers from the 1960s. I never looked for jobs on Fiverr. Don't know anything about it, but the things I've heard aren't good. I think the waters get muddy when you've got all the writing jobs on the internet bundled together. You'll see a lot of crap work intended for Indians, and then there are the entitled beggars hoping people new to the field don't realize they're worth more.
