by Joelle Steele
There are several things that writers can learn to do in conjunction with their writing, that can increase their income. Most of these things will help financially when writing is not paying the bills as well as it should.
Photography. I was interested in photography as a teenager and during my 20s I never left the house without one of my cameras, and I have supplied many of my own photographs to the magazines and newspapers I write for. I often made more money from the photographs than I did from the article itself. Nowadays, everyone has a camera on their cell phone. But aside from articles published on the web, only the high-end cell phone cameras can produce the best images for periodicals and books in print. I used to use a variety of 35mm cameras, but I have a nice little digital camera that I have been using since they first became available. With photography, you can illustrate your own articles, and on some occasions when my articles were the main feature, my photographs were used on the covers.
Art/Illustrations. If you can draw or if you can use a graphic design program, you may be able to supply publishers with illustrations. I started out doing my own illustrations by drawing them by hand, photographing them, and then sending slides or prints to the publishers. When the world went digital, I hopped on that bandwagon, bought a high-end scanner, and began working in Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, and occasionally InDesign. I have made more money doing graphic design and illustration than anything else. I once spent four hours doing 120 simple line drawings in front of the TV one night, and I was paid $4,000 for them. I’ve done graphic design for individuals and for publishers and made as much as $225 per hour. If you’ve got an artistic eye and the skill to draw or paint or use a creative software program, this can be a very lucrative means of supplementing your writing income.
Editing/Proofing. If your grammar is 100% fluent, grammatical editing and proofing might be a good fit for you. The hardest thing for grammatical editors to learn is how to make changes and corrections that don’t disturb the flow of the writing or destroy the author’s voice. With proofing, you’ve got to have a great eye for the teeniest little discrepancies. Editing pays better, usually by the page, and if you decide to pursue this I highly recommend that you do only hard copy editing and that you get about ten sample pages from the writer so that you can review their writing well enough to quote them a per page or per project price.
Typesetting. Not for the faint of heart. Learning to use a typesetting program and how to export books or other documents into PDFs suitable for printing is a career in and of itself. Be prepared to spend several hours learning how to use the programs (QuarkXPress or InDesign). Start by downloading stuff from the Internet or use your own Word files to create a fake book that you can practice with. Typesetting novels is a breeze and can usually be done in the course of a day or two. Illustrated non-fiction can take waaaaaay longer.
