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Why I Give Away My Work For Free
Making a living as a writer in the 21st century.
I published my first book, Heart of Stone, at the end of July 2020, and at the time I was working full time. At the end of January 2021, I went down to part-time working at my 9 to 5:30 job, and a few months later, I went to working full time doing what I’m best at: writing.
I’ve been writing since I was a child, and started pursuing it seriously as a hobby at around the age of 11; by the time I was 13 or 14, I was writing obsessively.
I wrote for hours every single day — over the past ten years, it has been rare for me to average less than five hundred thousand words published in a year, and not unheard of for me to publish closer to a million.
This, of course, was when I was primarily writing fanfiction, and for the longest time, I wasn’t sure how to make the transition to writing original work. I liked what fanfiction offered me — I liked that I could publish things as soon as they were finished, I liked that I didn’t have deadlines imposed by outside parties unless I chose to sign up for a challenge, I liked that I could bounce between projects and play with whatever ideas or themes took my fancy, I liked the social aspect.
As the years went on and I felt that I was outgrowing fanfiction a bit — not…
