Making Money Online: Supplementary Income for Aspiring Writers

This is another one of those posts where I have many more questions then I do answers. In fact, I pretty much have no answers as far as making money online goes.

But we have all been there, right? You don't get the book out as quickly as you'd hoped, it doesn't sell as well as you expected, and then you find out your fantastic junker of a car needs a million dollar replacement part or something like that. This is why the majority of writers that I know have day jobs. It is perfectly possible to make a fine living off of your books, but it just might take a bit of time to get there.

So what do you do in the meantime? Obviously a good answer to this question is a day job, but there are two reasons to explore the making money online option: First, even the day-job might not be earning you as much as you need, and second, wouldn't it be nice to make enough money online that a day job wasn't even necessary? I think so.

Not that making money online doesn't take work, and I don't even know where to begin. Do any of you have experience with this? The one answer I can think of is finding freelance writing jobs on sites like Freelance Writing Jobs, but I'm not sure even how to go about it, or if you can make decent money doing it in the first place.

So what are your ideas, oh people who know more then me? People say all the time that you can make a great living online, but how and where? Are there any helpful articles or tutorials that you are familiar with? I've done some research, but there is so much out there that its hard to sort through.

I hope todays post isn't too annoyingly mercenary. However, I think this is something directly applicable to almost every writer, especially the beginning ones. And to be honest, I could really use some advice about this right now. I'm getting ready to move in a couple months, and having even a small source of income would be, to put it lightly, very, very nice. I'm sure most of you feel similarly.

Thank you in advance for your advice. Keep up the writing!
Sarah Allen

p.s. For those interested in the Japanese literature that we discussed a few days ago, a wonderful list of 20 top Japanese writers has been brought to my attention that you might enjoy checking out.