Ways to Increase Income With Your Writing.

Scene generated by Chat GPT using prompt: "A painterly watercolor muted scene with a writer as the sun being orbited by symbols like magazines, books, microscope, teaching, representing different writing niches."

by Faith P. Nelson • October 2026

(Written in April 2023 and updated October 4, 2026)

Are you a beginning writer who wants to judge your skill level and create a side hustle with your writing? Books and articles are tried-and-true vehicles for building income and reputation. I remember hearing communications guru, Sam Horn, speak at an event. Her speech was so captivating that I waited in line for quite a while to tell her thanks and buy her book titled Pop! on how to create the best taglines and pitches. I was excited to meet her, and I wanted to know more. Her speech and her book were examples of persuasive nonfiction writing that gripped my attention. They became tools to help me dig more deeply into the world of persuasive messaging and also to assess my writing skills.

Audit your writing skills

Sam Horn's book was only one vehicle for me to do research. The Web and the local library were other sources. Survey article databases to help narrow down your area of interest. For example, a few articles on PubMed can help you determine if you like science writing. Compare them to articles from Cosmo, Wired, The New Yorker, Medium, and various websites to determine what attracts you. Go a little further. Do you enjoy only reading, or do you think you could write articles like those? Do the same thing with children's and adult books at the local library or thrift shop. If a writing competition offered $5,000 to write any book, would you write fiction or non-fiction?

Reading is only the first step in the discovery process. Borrow some masterworks from the library, especially stories in the public domain. Reading Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or Pride and Prejudice, then creating your own version of those stories may help you have fun and judge your level of skill and desire. Once you discover what you are curious about and produce a sample for a specific audience, get feedback from that audience and from experts. The magazines named above are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the list of publications looking for articles. Imitating the masterworks could one day lead to publishing your own book.

Training

How can you gauge the training you need? You could join a writer's group in your community. As far as formal training goes, the local community college may have a fantastic writing program. Depending on your age, you can get some courses at a discount. You could sign up for a poetry or story course. Employ the same strategy if you are doing a technical or nonfiction writing program.

Don't assume that all technical writing degrees will make your portfolio attractive and lead to paid work. Examine what the writing program teaches and how those skills connect to current client needs. Following my heart's desire in 2022, I jumped from the nursing program at one local college into a way more exciting technical writing certificate at another local college, which I haven't finished because I exceeded the student loan limits. Given a handful of cash, would I finish the program? No. At the time of writing in 2026, the curriculum appears to be the same as it was, devoting little time to AI, the proverbial elephant in the room. In the age of AI, training should include evaluating AI-assisted writing, which has proliferated. Respected writers and publishers are making use of AI. According to a 2026 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), AI-assisted writing is spreading across the scientific community. An analysis of over 5.2 million papers from 5,114 journals found a sharp rise in statistical indicators of AI-assisted writing beginning in 2023, with particularly rapid growth in the physical sciences and among researchers in non-English-speaking countries (He and Bu, 2026).

Another burgeoning skills area for some freelancers is content design and documentation processes: organizing information so people can easily consume it and creating clear explanations of products and processes. While some creative writing niches, like poetry, don't require learning content management, technical writing does. Whether in a formal technical writing program or classes given by experts, that program should teach you how to interview experts and users; how to organize and maintain information, how to test whether instructions work; and, how to review AI output and design reliable workflows.

Now that you have sharpened your writing skills, you may be ready to hunt for jobs or paid writing projects.

Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash

Types of Writing

Visit freelancing platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer. See how you can establish yourself as a vendor. Survey the gigs currently online, the gig or project fees being requested, and the portfolios currently posted. Make sure the portfolios contain clearly labeled writing samples, whether independent gigs or otherwise. In your gig, you could offer to do:

content writing, like you are seeing here on the blog–the freelance writer is responsible for defining the industry, the audience and the deliverable
copywriting you may see in advertising or promotional material
technical writing, generating reports, white papers, articles, and instruction manuals, among other documents

Platforms like Fiverr have a "Pro" or professional category where you can charge higher fees and specialize in certain niches. Fiverr Pros go through a more rigorous vetting process where they provide history and proof of work. If you can manage your time well, the freelancing platform might be just the place for you. However, platforms are only one route to attracting clients. Referrals and direct outreach are useful.

Blogging

From the early years of the Internet, people figured out how to use websites to create an impact. If you have a passion area and a topic you know a lot about, let's say crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay, then you could create a website or blog about it, working to get visibility on search engines like Google by doing search engine optimization or SEO. Some institutions like CopyBlogger and Smart Blogger offer courses on how to write for the internet and optimize your content.

You can also use the blog for sponsored content and affiliate marketing. Keep in mind that blogging takes time, increased search traffic is not a guarantee, and affiliate or sponsored content writing requires an audience. In recent years, AI has radically changed the effectiveness and earning power enabled by SEO. For example, Google Search now provides AI overviews which can satisfy a reader without sending the reader to the source website. Still, blogging demonstrates your knowledge, publishes original material, and supports a service or reader relationship.

Self-Publishing

We can't talk about self-publishing without considering the intimately connected online book distribution platforms. Although Amazon started selling books in 1995, its launch of the Kindle enabled the expansion of self-publishing in the mid to late 2000s. A 2007 Amazon press release reported that the Kindle alone started with over 90,000 books from traditional and independent authors. Marketing blog Tom's Guide estimates today that the "Kindle Store has a near-incomprehensible 15 million titles." Don't be distracted by these numbers and the crowded marketplace. Distribution platforms like Amazon still help the self-published author to gain attention and generate income. Authors can now advertise within the Amazon ecosystem or on social media to get attention for their books.

Book publishing, distribution, and retail platforms now span a range, from IngramSpark, KDP and Kobo, to Apple Books, Draft2Digital, and StreetLib. Audio platforms like ACX, Findaway Voices, and PublishDrive have diversified the audiobook market. While audio productions with real voice actors can be expensive, cost-friendly audiobook narration platforms exist. AI audio narration has improved tremendously, and some listeners don't mind listening to narrations using the less expensive AI audio as long as the author discloses the fact.

Platforms like Wattpad, Royal Road and Tapas have further revolutionized the marketplace. These are platforms for serial content. Quite a few people have made a living on these platforms and have been successfully wooed by traditional publishers. Although users appear to be much younger, nothing should stop a 60-year-old from quietly joining the revolution.

While publishing and paid advertising are not guarantees of earning money, breaking even, or becoming profitable, some writers place freedom and a sense of well-being high on the list of reasons to become independent publishers. Joanna Penn, an author and independent publisher, wanted to break her norm and experiment with shopping her book Blood Vintage to traditional publishers. However, she stopped her experiment after some months.

There were many months of waiting, and then some lovely rejections, but mostly silence. The trad pub process is incredibly slow, and that in itself was a reminder that it might not be a good fit for me, at least for this book. (Joanna Penn, TheCreativePenn.Com)

Wanting to get her book into the hands of readers and having a dependable self-publishing model with which to do it turned out to be more important. I could have shopped my poetry collections to traditional publishers, but with there being so many gatekeepers, the high chance of rejections, and an extraordinarily long production process, I chose the self-published route.

Write For Revenue or Donations

The wealthy Medici family in Italy sponsored Michelangelo in the 16th century. These days, donation sites, crowd-funding platforms, or revenue-sharing sites are a clever twist. They include Patreon, Kickstarter, Substack, Medium, and HubPages.

Patreon, a play on the word "patron," is like a fan site or sponsorship platform. People support their favorite artists, including writers, via this site by donating monthly to that creative person. Many writers use the Patreon model. Tiered donations allow the creative person to give levels of thank-you gifts back to the community. The gifts could include a monthly short story or the ability to ask questions of the writer. Patreon also serves as a place to launch special projects to your patrons as a thank you before rolling them out to the wider marketplace.

Kickstarter works a little differently. Backers pledge to support the project. The writer develops a writing project, let's say a special book package, consisting of a series of books, some art, a t-shirt, a character named after the backer, or a conference with the writer and other gifts. You can get creative with your rewards once you have done due diligence on the financial side. People then set up a campaign on Kickstarter. They set a funding goal (higher dollar requests are more difficult to attain).

The steepest hill to climb with Kickstarter is that it's an all-or-nothing platform. If you establish a funding goal of $10,000 and you receive $9,999, you don't get the money. All the pledges are returned to the backers, and the campaign dies.

Image generated by Chat GPT using prompt: "An ATM with crowd funding and revenue sharing platforms ... displayed."

Marketing and promotions are difficult without the author's or maker's email list. Yet, some people have done so well. This old but extremely thorough article on Kickstarter mistakes by Thomas Umstattd, Jr. as well as frequent visits to Kickstarter itself, will help you understand this landscape. Finally, you can get advice from experts who have run successful Kickstarter campaigns.

Do you have a following of any kind on social media and want to write longer content? If yes, then Substack may be the better medium for you. It's a newsletter platform that helps you build your own following. In the past, writing, production, and marketing were separate efforts for producing a newsletter. You had to know design or hire a designer. Then you had to strategize your marketing. All these efforts could be costly. Now, you can do all these steps on Substack. Its subscription model allows readers to subscribe directly to you. You have access to your readers' information, which is a must for building your writer platform. The plus is that your following on Substack is better than it is on social media. You have access to your readers' contact information.

Medium has some of the same benefits as Substack and can also be a satisfying way to publish your writing. However, the subscription model on Medium is a little different, as the reader pays one flat fee to the platform. Medium calculates eligible writers' earnings using reading time, reader engagement, and other factors.

Image generated in Canva

Tutor Online

Don't forget the age-old ways of earning money: teaching and tutoring, which have elements of writing. Despite the advances in education and the rigorous certification demanded of teachers, reading and writing tutors are still a support system for families and schools. Retired teachers can offer their skills online, helping K-12 students improve their writing, prepare for exams, or offer editing skills. Teachers can also teach editing skills as part of their courses.

Teachers can offer their services to train people in certain languages. For example, people can teach English as a second language in their own city or even in a foreign country. Some teaching services can be scaled. A teacher can teach one student or many in a physical location. That teacher can also offer the training packages online with multiple students downloading material, practicing, and doing homework. In another example, equipment has now been developed to facilitate teaching live in an online setting. Amazon and other retailers now offer a plethora of document viewers that connect to the teacher's computers to share screens and information with the student's computer.

Despite having access to AI, some clients and parents prefer tutors as they can observe and provide feedback in real time, provide accountability, and adapt instructions to the learner.

Social Media Management

Some potential freelancers, including retired adults who are social media savvy, can offer to manage other people's social media accounts. It involves understanding the organization, planning communications, responding appropriately, and assessing results for small businesses and individuals, non-profit organizations, even independent authors. Retired professionals could easily join those virtual assistants who sometimes specialize in social media management. One thing to keep in mind is the time difference from region to region and country to country. The working day in the US may mean 3:00 a.m. conversations in Eastern Europe or India and could be a deterrent for some. A survey of sites like Fiverr and Upwork reveals that freelancers have flexibility in positioning themselves and accepting gigs.

Ghostwriting

Experienced writers can become ghostwriters. Many individuals are looking for people to help them write their memoirs and other non-fiction and career material. Experts need them to establish a stronger presence and get more fans in their community. Speakers may need them to get conference invitations and to sell in the back of the room after their presentations. Writers can build a simple yet professional ghostwriting website and offer their services. Key skills for a ghostwriter include not just writing great prose, but interviewing, preserving the client's voice, organizing memories or expertise, and handling sensitive material. A ghostwriter, although not a trained lawyer, should be able to recognize copyright issues and other liabilities like defamation before and during the writing process and seek appropriate advice.

Grant Writing

Grant writers fall under the technical writing group and help secure funding for non-profit organizations, colleges, universities, state governments and municipalities, and some small businesses. Writers in this niche need to understand eligibility and funder requirements, prepare and interpret budgets, and help the organization provide supporting evidence. Grant writers may move into grant compliance roles with additional training and who monitor spending and help the grantee adhere to grant conditions. Skilled retirees may not need to get technical writing certification if they are familiar with these industries and sectors. Experience can provide a foundation for segueing into this niche.

Writing Courses

Many authors make a living by providing writing instruction courses and books. Joanna Penn's non-fiction books include How to Write a Novel, Your Author Business Plan, and How to Make a Living with Your Writing. Her history of podcasting and fiction writing is evidence of her expertise and makes her a successful course builder. But this doesn't mean others need the same level of expertise or success. Start where you are. Several options are available to market writing courses and books. They include setting up a course on platforms like Teachable or teaching in a library or church. Some restaurants have opened their dining and event rooms for morning classes and writers' events.

Explore your writing; choose one of the above-mentioned ways that resonates with you and test it using good research and smart work. Leverage all your skills. Once you have evidence of demand, you can expand your offering and build a satisfying writing side hustle.

Sources

Amazon News. November 19, 2007. Introducing Amazon Kindle. https://press.aboutamazon.com/2007/11/introducing-amazon-kindle (Retrieved October 4, 2026)

Bashford, Erin. June 19, 2026. I tested the brand-new Kindle Colorsoft 2026—and it's still the King of e-readers. Tom'sGuide.com. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/e-readers/kindle-colorsoft-2026-review?utm_source=chatgpt.com (Retrieved October 4, 2026)

Devery, Kate. June 21, 2019. How to Become a Fiverr Pro. Fiverr.Com. <https://blog.fiverr.com/post/how-to-become-a-fiverr-pro>(Retrieved May 1, 2023).

Penn, Joanna. September 18, 2025. Lessons Learned from 14 years as a full time author entrepreneur. TheCreativePenn.com. https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2025/09/18/lessons-learned-from-14-years-as-a-full-time-author-entrepreneur/ (Retrieved January 15, 2026.)

Umstattd Jr., Thomas. May 21, 2014. Seven Kickstarter Mistakes We Made On MyBookTable. AuthorMedia.Com. < https://www.authormedia.com/how-to-use-kickstarter-to-fund-your-next-book-project/> (Retrieved on April 30, 2023)

Y. He, & Y. Bu, Academic journals' AI policies fail to curb the surge in AI-assisted academic writing, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (9) e2526734123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2526734123 (2026). (Retrieved on September 30, 2026)

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