Writers Are Lying To You About Their Earnings
These are five ways they do it.
Lately, I’ve felt like I’m drowning in a flood of articles about how much money writers make. You know the type: “How I make $500 an hour blogging,” “How I made $100,000 from my first novel,” and “How I quadrupled my writing income in one month.”
In principle, I don’t mind these earnings reports. When they’re done well, they can provide a very useful peek into my fellow writers’ marketing strategies. Some of these articles helped me a lot when I was first starting as a blogger.
The trouble, however, is that most of these articles don’t have good advice. In fact, many of the writers are simply lying about how much they make, and therefore, don’t have anything useful to share at all.
If there’s one thing that does impress me about these articles, it’s the wide variety of methods that writers have discovered to exaggerate, twist, and stretch their supposed earnings. I think sometimes these can be subtle, so I’d like to share some of the most common to watch out for:
Unrepresentative Samples
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