Unless you’re in the lucky position that you don’t have to work a day job, either with a large pile of money from the .com boom under your mattress, or you’ve been dealt one of life’s favourable hands, we authors have to earn money. Most of us have a nine to five. Most of us are writing in our spare time and it’s very unlikely that most of us are going to be in that very small percentage of authors who make enough money from book sales for it to be your only source of income.

Today we look at how authors can use alternative sources of income, i.e. income not directly related to shifting copies of your book, in order to supplement your day job income. For me it would be nice to at least put something extra towards the cost of independent publishing like cover design and editing services.

As always, I write this post from a non-expert point of view. It is merely a summary of my thoughts and research as I investigate the various ways I’ve come across for writers to generate income in the hope I can give some of you out there ideas, plus I’d love to draw on the vast experience of the community. With that in mind, please let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments. I have no connection or commercial interest to any of these services.

With Patreon, subscribers pay a monthly amount to support the creative. Described as the best place for creators to establish ongoing and predictable monthly revenue, the service is very similar to the crowd funding model. Subscribers typically provide $1/£1 per month and in return receive Patreon-only content, such as short stories or information released earlier than to the general public or wider fan base.

I personally make two donations per month. One is to a writing club. For $1 a month I get discounted access to a range of editorial services plus insightful blog posts and libraries of information only available to the supporting members. The second I support is Gareth L. Powell, a science fiction author. He is a full time author with a successful list of books but still be can’t quite support his full time writing from book sales along. This is a hard game guys! Gareth offers early cover releases and written content to those who support. The higher your subscription, the more content you get. If you subscribe over $50 or more per month you get a autographed copy of every one of his books and every future book, plus every now and again you can Skype chat with him and talk about any subject you want! I subscribe with a $1.

For this service to work for the author you have to first of all have a large enough fan base and then generate enough content to draw people in to the service. You have to be a real fan to pay money over and above the cost of the books. For me this one is defiantly something I can’t consider until way further down the line.

There are several other similar services which include Liberapay, Bandcamp and Flattr to mention a few.

Buy Me A Coffee www.buymeacoffee.com and the common alternative, Ko-Fi.com are one off donation services, a tip jar for the virtual world. Payments are typically around $3-5, enough to buy the creative a coffee. You get nothing in return for the payment other than that warm fuzzy feeling inside that you’ve helped someone a little along the way.

The WordPress advertising services, WordAds, is the service I am most familiar with and I’m guessing this will be the same for most of you because of those seemingly random double image adverts you see on some WordPress blog posts, either in the email of someone you are following or at the bottom of the blog post themselves. Here’s a few facts about the service.

• You have to have a premium or business account to be automatically accepted in to the programme, otherwise you have to make an application for consideration.
• The more visits you get, the more revenue you earn.
• A thousand page views per month earn you a meaningful income, but based on my research I work out I would be earning around $20 a month. For me that’s not meaningful!

On average I have around 1,500 page views per month when I’m producing a lot of content or I can double that when I’m heavily promoting the site, but that takes a lot of work. The big downside for me is the perception of the adverts. I’ve spent loads of time trying to make sure my site and my posts look remotely stylish. I would have no control as to what the adverts for cable TV hacks appearing at the bottom of the page and along the side will do to the format of my pages. I’m really be interested in people’s opinion here, both those who use WordAds and those who see them in peoples’s posts. Do they put you off the main content of the site, or do you barely notice them?

Affiliate Marketing is where you mention products in your articles and provide links to purchase. For example in my Bug Out Bag posts I mention products which I’ve tested. If I joined an affiliate marketing programme through Amazon (called Amazon Associates) I could provide links to the products and get a commission if a viewer went on to make a purchase. It is always best to tell people what they’re ready contains affiliate links and some people may perceive this as introducing a bias to your content. If I were to do this I would have to work very hard to make sure I only promote the product I would already have promoted in the post.

Turn you blog archive into an e-book.

If you think your old content still has value to the reader then why not archive it and turn it into an ebook for sale on Amazon. Sure you will need to fresh the information and perhaps reformat and redress the content to make sense in a book format, but you’ve already done the hard work in writing the key content in the first place. Add links to your site and refer to it in relevant future posts and you may get some additional income and if you don’t there was very little work in publishing in the new format.

I think it’s unlikely I’ll be using any of these streams, but if I wasn’t working a full time job I would probably need to use all of these services and still I don’t think it would amount to any meaningful income. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences of using any of these services or any other ideas you have for income streams. Please don’t be shy!