I have worked as a writer for many years and one thing that I have noticed happening multiple times is that I don’t always know where my income will come from. Sometimes I can write something and get paid once, or write a book and the royalties keep coming from it for years, or sometimes I write something and it can earn me money in ways I never thought of.

To show you what I mean, I’ll tell you about a series of three articles that I wrote that have been making me money for over 10 years.

And so it happened:

Several years ago I wrote to a copywriting magazine and proposed a series of three articles on how to make money by pitching ideas for movies, TV shows, and reality shows. The magazine accepted and asked me to submit the articles.

At the time I was working as a freelance writer and had outlined the articles but had not written them, which is not unusual, because in the case of non-fiction articles for magazines, they just want to see a short speech first. whereas, in the case of fiction, they usually want to see the whole story.

So once I got the application, I got down to writing the articles that were under 1,500 words each and it all took me just one morning of writing, editing, and proofreading. And then I sent the items.

The publisher accepted them and offered me 100 British pounds ($ 200) for each article, payable at the time of publication (the magazine was published monthly), to which I accepted, knowing that I would receive 3 monthly payments totaling $ 600.

The articles were published as agreed and a few months later I looked at the copies of them on my computer and decided to republish them online. I added some PPC ads to web pages and some affiliate links to appropriate products on screenwriting and presentation and left it at that.

Over the next several years, those three articles started getting more hits than the other pages on my website. I also had to update them a couple of times to make sure the content was still relevant and all the links were working, but doing it was only a small job.

So while those articles were on my website, the ads and affiliate links made me quite a bit of money.

And then one day a publisher contacted me because one of their authors wanted to use part of one of the articles in a book they were publishing and wanted written permission.

So I sold them the permit for $ 300 which they accepted and paid for.

And when I thought about it, those three articles that only took me a few hours to write must have made me over $ 1,000 since I wrote them.

Not bad for half a day’s work.

But that’s the thing about being a writer; If you want to make a decent income, you have to keep writing, sending, and posting, because you never know where the money will come from next, or how much.