Hi Harry,

I make a living writing thriller novels. (three books a year make me between 50-100k).

It took years for that to happen. I dfidn't go to school for creative writing, but I put in my "10,000 hours" or a million words -- no hyperbole. I wrote six or seven novels before one was published.

I think today a fair number of peope suffer from a kind of gig economy entitlement. Just because it's possible to make money writing online, it should be a snap.

It's not.

Same thing with novelists. As you point out, a lot of self-published books aren't very good. Just because the technology exists, doesn't mean someone should expect big earnings.

I agree that the Medium metrics aren't great. You really need to write an article a day in order to make a living on here. And that can lead to some repetitious writing, and/or the typical moral-outrage writing. Which is part of the larger problem of our attention economy: we're incentivized to write sensational, tribal, polarizing things. And we're incentivized just to put out "content" so we can get paid. And that's a race to the bottom.

In the end, as Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) would say, it's probably best to write for its own sake. Write for the writing to be good. Write because you have something meaningful to say.

Thanks for your article.

--TJ