%% ID: 13204954 Updated: 2022-01-28 %% ![](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article3.5c705a01b476.png) # About Title: [[Other/Obsidian Starter Vault(Second Brain)/Readwise/Articles/Why So Many Writers Fail to Make Money]] Author: [[Nicolas Cole]] Category: #articles Number of Highlights: ==15== Last Highlighted: *2021-11-28* Readwise URL: https://readwise.io/bookreview/13204954 Source URL: https://nicolascole77.medium.com/why-so-many-writers-fail-to-make-money-ed19110ac619 # Highlights Just because you took the time to write it, doesn’t mean anyone owes you their attention ^278320092 --- I interact with a lot of writers. I help them. I teach them. I mentor them. And I’m also quite active in both the writing communities here on Medium and on Quora. It’s a small world, believe it or not, and most of us “top writers” all know each other (or know of each other). ^278320093 --- It’s an itch that won’t go away. And it’s a problem many writers are more than willing to spend money with the hopes of instantly solving it. ^278320094 --- “I wrote something. Now why isn’t the world applauding? Why aren’t I making any money?” ^278320095 --- Writers think writing is about writing. It’s not ^278320096 --- And what separates “good” writers from GREAT writers isn’t anything tangible, nothing you can point to with conviction. It’s just a feeling. An innate gift, and you either have it or you don’t.This is what we’re taught. And it’s oh-so-wrong. ^278320097 --- Writing is a game of thinking. ^278320098 --- summarize a famous person’s life story, shine a spotlight on the morale, then tell the reader how the lesson applies to their own life ^278320099 --- All of these books changed the world in some way.All of these books made millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars.And none of these books are going to go down in history on the same bookshelf as Hemingway, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, or Woolf. ^278320100 --- If you want to make money as a writer, you are not in the writing game.You are in the thinking game. ^278320101 --- If your writing repeats the same ideas, thoughts, and conclusions the reader already knows, guess what? They aren’t going to pay you to tell them more of what they already know ^278320102 --- the amount you can influence the reader’s thinking. ^278320103 --- But if your writing instills radically new ideas, changes their existing thoughts and transforms them into powerful new conclusions (leading them to make fundamentally different decisions in their life), now you’re in business. ^278320104 --- Your writing could be so grammatically incorrect it’s borderline unreadable and indecipherable. But if the information is valuable enough, if the reader understands how their thoughts will be different after consuming your new thinking, they will force themselves to get through it ^278320105 --- And most writers fail because they’re too focused on the words, and completely unaware of how undifferentiated their thoughts are. ^278320106