Unless your name is Grisham or Steele or Rollings, you may not be making much, if any, money writing books. Authors must be prolific, and have excellent marketing skills or someone to do that for them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make money as a writer. Freelance writers who write newspaper and magazine articles can develop a nice income by treating their writing as a full-time job. You must constantly be putting out queries, doing interviews, and writing articles. I have been a freelance writer, and although I didn’t work at it full-time, I managed to bring in extra money to contribute to the household income. My money-making “job” now is mainly freelance editing. Again, I’m not working at it full-time, as I’m still trying to be an author as well. Editing takes knowledge and experience and a certain skill. Not everyone can jump into this field. It also takes time to build a clientele. I worked at acquiring clients for several years before they started coming to me. I love this...

When asked what other jobs they’ve had, novelists usually have an oddball list. They may dream of job security and a health plan by night, but by day they are seduced by interesting experiences, diverse characters, a bit of income, and the flexibility to write. Most of my jobs have had to do with writing, though. Shame inspired me. My first husband, Ron, a bar manager with a keen sense of what his time was worth in cash, called my writing my “volunteer work.” This maddened me because I was a newspaper dance critic and always paid—although at the peak of this career, writing some 50 articles per year, I managed to pull in no more than $2,500. My husband could make the bulk of that tending bar on New Year’s Eve alone. To preserve my self-respect as much as to show Ron I could do it, I had to find a way to use my writing skills to bring in more respectable money. So I started a desktop publishing business, producing newsletters, custom-designed written communications, and resumes ...

It’s really a little too early to tell if the release of my first three books in the Sidra Smart mystery series makes any money or not, but when you change publishers mid-series, it seemed like a wise thing to do.   Philip Martin, at Crickhollow Books , published my national award-winning historical novel, A War Of Her Own , and did such a fabulous job, I asked him to publish the fourth book (The Swamp Whisperer) in my Sidra Smart Mystery Series. To do that, he and I agreed for him to pick up the whole series, re-release the first three, building new interest and energy for them, then release the fourth with a splash. In our decision-making process, as to what stays and what goes, we decided to not change the titles of the books, or the series, since Sidra Smart already has a strong following. Rather we decided to focus on tighter, cleaner edits, and fresh new covers. Also, we corrected any errors in plot, setting, and location that might have been overlooked in the first r...

It’s usually the first question I am asked: “How much do you charge?” It is also the hardest question for a ghostwriter to answer.That’s because ghostwriting fees can have an extensive range, depending on a host of factors. Costs are unique to each project. Some of the factors which may determine the price are: the probable length of the manuscript what kind of book it is (memoir, business or financial, technical, scholarly, how-to, children, fiction, and so on) how much, if any, research needs to be done, and what kind of research it is how much, if any, material already exists (such as articles, blog posts, speeches or speaker notes, class notes or scripts, audios and videos, diaries, napkin jottings, etc.) how many interviews with how many people will be needed if there is travel involved if there are tables, graphs, or unusual formatting when the book needs to be finished and many more The next most popular question I am asked is whether I will ghostwrite a book in exchan...