Writer. I write about discipline, craft, and building an honest business in public.
One honest letter, Sundays →
Joined February 2024
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I posted 16,000 times.
I paid for Premium every month.
I made $0.
So I blamed the algorithm.
Then I looked at my own strategy.
100 copy-paste replies a day.
Image posts with no captions.
No system. No review.
The algorithm didn't fail me.
I failed the algorithm.
Now I'm rebuilding in public.
2 posts a day. Real comments. One system.
I'll post my numbers every month, even the embarrassing ones.
I started a newsletter.
The Quiet Work. One honest letter every Sunday on discipline, writing, and building a business in public.
The first letter is the full story: 16,000 posts, $0, and the system I follow now.
Read it here: samcarterwrites.substack.com
Sam Carter retweeted
The trap keeping freelance writers on the financial hamster wheel:
Charge per ASSET, not per hour.
Writers who charge per hour (or worse, per WORD) are killing themselves.
Your value is not the hours you spend. It's the result you deliver.
Master 1 type of writing. And charge for the outcome.
When you charge for the asset, getting faster makes you richer. When you charge per hour, getting faster gives you a pay cut.
Day 38.
Some nights the blocks end early.
Some nights they run past midnight.
The count changes.
The streak doesn't.
Three lines I delete from every draft:
The throat-clearing opener.
The sentence that repeats the last one.
The ending that explains the point twice.
Freedom is not free time:
It is time nobody else owns.
Work nobody assigns.
Days nobody schedules for you.
Day 36.
Last night the blocks finished past 2 AM.
Not glamorous. Just late.
The streak does not care about the hour.
Neither do I.
Vague writing sounds smart.
Specific writing actually works.
Name the exact thing.
Name the exact number.
Name the moment it happened.
Readers trust concrete details.
They forget pretty adjectives.
I posted 16,000 times and made $0.
Then I stopped posting more.
I started posting with a system.
Here is the exact system I run every day:
5. Comment more than you post.
2 posts a day.
8 real comments a day.
The comments bring the people.
The posts give them a reason to stay.