Back in 2009, with my writing career kind of stalled, or at least in a state of uncertainty, I decided to follow a path for a while of writing magazine articles. I studied the genealogy magazine market, picked a target mag, pitched an article to the editor, and had it accepted within 20 minutes. Two months later the article was written, two months after that it was in the print magazine, and four months after that I was having to send e-mails to the editor to have them send the payment they promised.
During this time I discovered Suite101.com, an on-line site, sort of a magazine, sort of a wiki, a place for authors to post their 400-800 word articles about almost any subject. Supported only by advertising, the author received a share of the revenue from ads that appeared on their article page. It all happened more or less automatically.
The “promise” made by the editors of Suite101 was that an article typically earns a dollar a month in ad revenue. So put up lots of articles, and eventually it adds up. I decided to do that rather than chase the shrinking number of print mags. As I published articles, my revenue began to trickle in. Eventually I made payout. Then I won $101 in an internal contest. I never made even close to the magical dollar per article per month, but at least revenues were going up.
I was up to 127 published articles, and at a point where I was going to evaluate my continued participation, when Google changed their search algorithms. Page views and revenue plummeted, then recovered, then Google changed again, page views and revenues again plummeted. I’ve lost track of how many times this happened. Now, three years after starting to write there and a year and a half after deciding not to add more articles, my revenues have stabilized at about $5 to $6 per month. That’s 4-5 CENTS per month, or roughly 1/20th what had been advertise.
I don’t regret my time there. Those articles are all in my areas of interest. I could still use some of them for other purposes. And I actually had fun writing them. I did push aside novel and non-fiction book writing for a time, but I don’t really feel that I was hurt by the experience. Still, I’m not planning to write more for Suite.
But I do plan to write more articles for a different on-line site, Decoded Science. Based on the same principles as Suite (writers chose topics and self-upload articles to the site and share in ad revenue), it is a more focused site, as the name implies. My first article for it was an overview of the stormwater problem facing the USA today. This comes mostly from my own experience, with a couple of references to government publications.
Having just published the article a few days ago, I have no idea how well this might pay off in terms of money. I know it has more editorial input than Suite ever did, which I like. I like that it is a focused site, which could be an intentional destination for on-line readers rather than one accessed only after a search engine result.
My plans right now are to write two other articles for DecSci, following up on the stormwater issue. One will address stormwater quantity, and one stormwater quality. This may wind up being three articles, since the issues of quality and quantity have kind of leapfrogged each other in importance over the years.
After that, I plan on writing a few articles on low impact development, which is a primary way the engineering community addresses the stormwater problem. I’m not an expert in that; I’m a learner and a studier. I’m organizing training about that in-house, learning it myself, and trying to bring our industry from treating it as art rather than as the science it should be. Seems the perfect subject for DecSci. Right now I don’t know how many articles that could be. I could easily see it being as many as twenty, though possibly that would be going too deeply into the subjects for the intents of the site. We’ll see.
After that, who knows? I’ll see how well the revenues are coming in. At Suite I seemed to under-perform compared to what other writers were earning. Either my topics didn’t excite people, or my writing didn’t. I was never unhappy with my page views, just with the revenue. And I don’t plan on setting aside other writing to concentrate on DecSci as I stupidly did for Suite. When the urge strikes to write another novel, or short story, or to work on a book-length non-fiction piece, I’ll work on that.
Hopefully I’ll carve out time for DecSci. Over the next week I’m going to plan my series as to topic, but probably not to schedule. It’s a good gig, I think, but I need to approach it more slowly than I did the last one. Stay tuned for updates.