Road to making $36,000 in a year through Poetry

At the end of August, I set a goal for myself: generate $36,000 from my poetry by August 2025. Attainable? Definitely. Have I done it before? No. But who doesn’t love a success story?

How to make money as a poet?

Luckily, the world of making money through poetry isn’t too hard—it’s just a matter of learning to market, grow community, and make genuine connections with people through your work. This last part about connection is where you can earn a living, because you can offer valuable content or services to people, and those people will purchase what you offer so long as you are providing actual value and not just trying to make quick cash. The quick cash route might make you some money, but it’s not sustainable, and your community will catch on to it pretty quickly.

Of course, when I say making money as a poet is not hard, I don’t mean that it’s easy. It does take tangible, concrete, consistent work. But I also specifically say that it’s not too hard because I don’t want anyone who really craves to do this to be deterred. Well, now that I think about it, if difficulty is a deterrent for someone, then maybe they didn’t really crave it as much as they thought they did? I don’t know for sure. I’m still figuring things out myself.

A little about me so far…

So far in my artist career, I’ve mostly been creating with my head in the sand, waiting for some kind of institutional approval—whether that’s approval from a university, or magazine, or publisher, or established writer, or whomever—to put my work where it needs to be. While waiting for institutional approval is definitely one route to take, it can sometimes take a long time, require you to make compromises that you wouldn’t have taken otherwise, and, more generally, it can reinforce systems of hierarchy and validate harmful notions like individual exceptionalism. None of these can be good for your health.

So I’m getting older now, and it’s already autumn again, and I’ve decided that while institutional approval would be nice (and might get me into the hands of certain groups of people), I can’t be doing all of my work and submitting and applying to things and just keep waiting for that institutional approval when I have so many additional tools available to me to share my work and allow me to create make more of a living.

And maybe along the way, I can help encourage or provide insight to some other poets, artists, writers, and creators out there who also want to make some money from their work.

Marketing: Pick Your Platforms

When it comes to marketing, consistency and dedication are crucial, so decide what you have capacity to keep up with in addition to the other things in your life. Pick out a few ways of marketing that you know you will enjoy and be able to keep up with.

For instance, I work a full time job that often consumes my life force outside of working hours (I write will all the love and affection in the world, because I am doing work that I care about and believe in!), so I don’t have the capacity or ability to be marketing during the week day or after work. Because of this, I do most of my marketing work on the weekends, and then on the weekdays, I have time designated for marketing work before I have to leave my house at 7:30AM to get to work, which means I wake up at 4AM to have time to get everything that I want done.

I felt most comfortable on Instagram, so I started off there, but my partner (an artist also) was doing a lot of work and research with TikTok, so, with his insight and guidance, I ended up doing some testing on TikTok too. I’ll going into more detail about those experiences below. Still, I’ve actually found a lot more success so far with Threads.

Ultimately, Threads is a lot more intuitive and easily translatable for me as a writer, so I’ve been posting and interacting more on there, and finding so much more engagement and encouragement than I have on the other platforms so far.

Some Numbers (as of 9/9/24):

Threads: I started my journey on Threads 6 days ago, Monday morning, September 2, 2024, with 0 followers and a vague understanding of how it worked. Today, Sunday afternoon, September 8, 2024, less than a week later, I have 24 followers. One of my recent poem replies got 717 views, 6 likes, and 1 repost. Another poem reply that I wrote on my first day, Monday, got 235 views and 8 likes.

TikTok: Maybe my Threads stuff doesn’t seem like much, but when I compare this to how I was doing on TikTok, I feel generally more encouraged by Threads. I started posting on TikTok on August 20th, though really started marketing one specific poem on 8/26, and posted pretty consistently for about 2 weeks. In that whole time, I was getting views and engagement (highest views on one video was 650 and the most engagement was 10 likes on another video), but only 1 follower (someone who came from Threads), and the content took a bit of time for me to make. I love the creativity and audio-visual combination of TikTok, but I wasn’t finding exactly what I was looking for. Plus, a lot of the poets on TikTok are marketing books; since I don’t have a book, it’s hard to follow to same visual formulas that are going viral.

Instagram: I started a new account and posted consistently for about a week, but the content I wanted to make took me a lot of time to make, so it was hard for me to stay consistent. I was also only getting 0, 1, or 2 likes on each post, and most of the time the likes were from people I know who’d followed me after I posted about my new account on my personal account (something I wondered later whether it messed with my algorithm). So I stopped posting when I got more into TikTok. But I want to start posting again and make it a place for sharing more personal, day-to-day things that don’t really have a place on TikTok or Threads but are still valuable.

Website and Blog: I’ve been fiddling with the idea of having a website and a blog for a few years now. I’ve done intermittent research and taken small steps in all that time, but I’ve never been consistent. Here I am, posting now, in an effort to invest more into my blog and website. I hope to be able to build up my newsletter subscribers and contacts more generally.

Community and Connection

If you’re here for research, then you probably already know this: use the social medias to be social with purpose. When you do that, you build online community. And when you build online community, you have people who are looking to connect with you through your work. This is where the making-a-living part of being a creative and a poet comes in. With a community that you built yourself, you have people who are interested in you and your work and ready to spend money with you because they know the value that your work provides far outweighs the cost.

Right now, I am cultivating a community on Threads centered around poetry, writing, and creativity. I plan to also do so on Instagram and through my blog/newsletter. At the same time, I am working on a chapbook. Once it is complete, I will be able to offer my chapbook to the communities I’ve fostered. I can also expand to other platforms, like TikTok and YouTube. With my offering, I can also provide high quality, highly valuable related goods and services, like a companion art book, poetry broadsides, general merch, and even offer consultations with other poets, writers, and artist, who want guidance, insight, and support, or who want to collaborate. The possibilities are endless!!

Don’t be discouraged!

All in all, it is hard work. But for those of you who believe in the power of language and are ready to be able to live in this world as the creative, poetic eternal beings that you are, you can do it! We can do it!!

I aim to create a transparent space where we can share insight and build this world into a better place. Everyone’s idea of better is different, but I’m specifically thinking of the poets, writers, and artists here. I want to be part of a world where we don’t have to rely on institutional gatekeepers to feel valued and to make a living doing the work that we do.

I hope this blogpost was helpful. If you’d like to read more from me, you can sign up for my Newsletter in the footer of this website.