My Articles Have Gotten 400k Views in 6 Months. I’m Still Broke

Sometimes you write an article so depressing, you need to set the scene before actually getting into it:

Martin Vidal sits alone on a wooden chair in a dimly lit room. A solitary overhead light reveals his silhouette but his facial features are hidden in the shadows. He swipes a match against his pant leg and lights a cigarette with it. You get a momentary glimpse of his face before the light of the flame is extinguished. He takes a hard pull from the cigarette, and lets out a long, exasperated exhale before beginning to speak.

I’m not here to kill dreams. If anything, I want to fortify them.

Being an indie writer is the best and the worst job in the world. I love writing, and I’d do it for free (obviously), and the freedom to write whatever I want is an essential part of what I enjoy about it. Yet, there’s so much else that’s just absolutely terrible.

I think very few people are being honest about those bad parts because: 1) everybody wants to seem successful, especially since success at this lets you hold yourself up like an authority and sell people advice; 2) nobody really wants to read someone else’s sob story. Luckily, this isn’t my sob story. It’s what all indie writers have to go through.

The Pay

I’ve posted 15 stories to Vocal, and I’ve made 7 cents from all of them combined. Well, at least I would have, if 7 cents was enough to meet the threshold for a payout. I’ve uploaded 36 stories to HubPages, and I’ve earned 5 cents from them. To be fair, HubPages rejected 21 of them for “lack of quality,” so that brings the published total down to par with Vocal. I’ve published 23 on Substack, and honestly, I’m not even sure how to find the earnings page on there — safe to say it is functionally $0.00 if not exactly so.

And you might say, “Okay, Martin get the quality of your work up.” The thing is that a number of these articles have individually made me hundreds of dollars on other platforms. Some of them have been shared and liked thousands of times. Some of them have gotten me comments like these:

My work is, at least in many people’s eyes, quality. I personally don’t think I’m a bad writer, and no one else seems to think so either. Heck, I’ve outperformed at least 95% of my peers by every metric out there. I’m not a failure as an indie writer. It’s just damn hard to eke out a living when you’re going at this alone.

It’s not that I don’t believe you can’t achieve success in this field. I just believe that there are tens of thousands of people vying for a couple hundred spots at the table. If you were in the 95th percentile in nearly any other career, you’d be sitting on top of the world. But here, you’re either the <1%, or you’re nothing.

For my 400,000 views across all platforms, I’ve made just over $2,500. That’s across 6 months. If you told me a couple years ago that I’d get 400,000 views in 6 months, I would’ve been elated. Frankly, I’m still pretty damn happy about it. That’s more people clicking on my articles than the population of New Orleans. But if I went out and got a job that paid $11 an hour (basically minimum wage where I live), I’d have made it in two months — and the first two months at that. It’s taken me four years of writing online to reach this point.

The Platforms

The vast majority of those views come from NewsBreak. Lately, I’ve been having some problems with the platform.

I had 6 articles taken down in a little over two weeks by the same content moderator, “Meghan” (scowls while typing her name). We had a snippy back and forth over email after she took down one of my articles that she claimed needed attributions, despite everything in it being common sense, and ever since then she’s been picking on me! And how do I know it wasn’t just that there were legitimate problems with the six articles that got taken down? After each one was taken down, I reached out to complain about it, and after a time they all got put back up without changes.

I tried reaching out to someone at Newsbreak to complain about Meghan, and every single time it just routed me back to her. If she’s not the only person working for the contributor support team over there, then I must’ve been assigned to her. For whatever reason, if I contact support, the signature on the return email is inevitably hers. It seems that if she wants to arbitrarily make it impossible for me to make any money off of my most profitable platform, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Believe it or not, my experience with NewsBreak is better than some of the others! Someone got mad at me over a discussion we were having on instagram and left a fake review on one of my books (screenshot below). I reported the review to Amazon and nothing happened. I later called in to them directly. Well, to be exact, they don’t even have a number for authors, so I called in as a customer and got rerouted, but as “directly” as possible. After telling me they couldn’t verify that my books were actually mine while I was on the phone, they gave me an email to contact. I contacted it and a week later I’ve still heard nothing back! That’s how it is with half of these platforms; they just won’t respond at all.

The Audience

Don’t get me started. I’ve been told “f*ck you” more times on NewsBreak this year than I’ve been told that in the rest of my life combined — the price of fame?

I’ve been yelled at for being a right-winger:

I’ve been yelled at for being a left-winger:

Under an article about determining compatibility in relationships:

Under an article about societal power structures:

Under an article about reparations:

Under an article about love languages:

I could supply these by the hundreds. All in all, it’s a lot of “bullsh*t” to wade through to make less than if I did literally any other job.

And if I don’t check my comments, they come in via email:

It’s not that serious, Heather. You’ll be alright.

Conclusion

I love what I do, and I’m sticking to it until I’m mentally unable to. I love writing with all my heart. If instead of getting scraps, I had to pay for the right to do it, I would. I’m not going anywhere. But if you don’t feel that way, and you’re here for some other reason — maybe because you heard you can make a quick buck online — let me save you the trouble. If you’re not ready to be treated like garbage, talked to like you’re nothing, and paid like you’re worthless, then this isn’t for you.

To everyone else who’s sticking it out with me on the heart-over-head, passion-over-paychecks, and grind-over-giving-up side of the aisle, welcome to the club. It’s nice to have you here.

Enjoy this article? Checkout my new book: “On Authorship: Essays on the Emotional Realities of Being a Professional Writer.”