Hmm… well, if anyone knows the answer, please get back to me!
I’m currently ‘unemployed’, or rather self-employed again due to circumstances beyond my control, but I’m having two problems. First, my age is against me in almost all jobs, and second, I’m just worn out with it all. The government thinks people like me should be working at whatever dead-end job is available to us (still not very many!), and they use the stick of cutting benefits to try and keep us in line. Except a lot of us are not on benefits so they can’t control us.
I grew up thinking I’d be retiring at 60. I also grew up thinking I’d be dead by 30! My health was pretty fragile and of course 30 seemed a long way off when I was a teenager. Anyway, here I still am with two years left until that glorious retirement age when I’ll be awarded a pittance from the government and probably still need to earn money to keep a roof over my head. It’s not a happy scenario, and to be honest, given the state of the country and the world, I’m struggling to think of a reason to go on. If my elderly mum didn’t still need me I probably wouldn’t bother. There should be something good out there, something worth living for, and I don’t see it.
For now at least, I’m trying to carry on, but once again I’m hoping to make money from self-employment. Back in 2015-17 I did in fact succeed with this when my books took off on Amazon and I was selling hundreds a month. It was a very pleasant period and silly me thought it would just carry on, but now I’m lucky if I sell 5 books a month. The good sales period coincided with a writing ‘dry spell’ for me, and I didn’t get any work out to capitalise on the popularity my books were enjoying. It’s taken until this past year for me to regain my writing ‘mojo’. However, if I’m working at a wage-slave job I can’t write. This has always been the case unless I’m working a tiny number of hours. I wrote The Legacy mostly in 2008 when I was only doing 2 days a week, and I completed it in 2009 when I was not working due to my mum’s stroke. I managed to write The Dream and Angelica Died while I was helping my mum and living on a company pension I took out early.
With the pension entirely gone now, I’ve been working at jobs for which I’m not well-suited, but are all that’s available. Now that I’ve just lost the latest of those jobs I am trying again to make money from my writing, etc. Last year, when I was between jobs, I wrote Christmas at Killanara and tried to get started on a web resource for kids about nature and stories, but marketing and selling myself are absolutely not among my talents! I had so many great ideas and was hugely enthused but then…everything fell apart for me when Christmas at Killanara failed to sell more than a few copies. Once again I couldn’t write, and what was the point of the Auntie Acacia stuff, it was too amateur, too silly (although it was meant to be for kids so I had thought silly was OK), and what was I even thinking? I’m sure plenty of people reading this will know that feeling. Auntie Acacia was shelved and I got another soul-destroying day job. And it really was soul-destroying. And when it ended I was scared, horrified, and relieved at the same time.
So now I’m casting about for other ways to earn online. I started a Ko-Fi page last year for Auntie Acacia, now changed to just Jill Rowan, and now I’m going to try Substack – probably for serialising my new stories in concert with podcasts. It really does seem that these days, just getting books published is not enough. If you’re lucky, as I was in 2015-17, it’s great, but otherwise it is an uphill struggle. Unrelated to writing, I’ve also, in desperation, gone in for things like online surveys…they are a lot of boring effort for very little reward I’m sorry to say. If anyone else out there wants to try those, bear in mind that you’ll probably be disqualified for 9 out of 10 of the surveys you try to undertake, or they’ll be ‘overquota’ and it’ll just drop you out anyway. Definitely not a big earner!
Spring at Killanara is still pending and I hope I’ll have it finished by Christmas, when I plan to make Christmas at Killanara free (unless it’s selling hugely and making big bucks!) but I’ve mainly been working on the SF story I’ve had in progress for several years. I have mentioned what I’ve been getting up to on my Ko-Fi page recently.
If anyone out there has any feasible suggestions on earning money online, let me know!
Jill Rowan 