IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, my wife and I moved to her hometown to be closer to her family. This involved walking away from my career in publishing as well as the network I’d built over the previous twelve years. It was scary, but not as scary as paying for daycare in Brooklyn. (See: Appendix, “Um, Can You Afford to Work Here?”)
I surveyed what was available and transitioned into branding, largely because the other options in my new hometown amounted to working in health care, working in trucking logistics, or sleeping beneath an overpass.
And although I find branding Twilight Zone ridiculous every damn day, the eight years I’ve spent muddling along in that industry have provided a better understanding of what’s happening to our discourse on a macro level.
Not all writers want to—or get the chance to—deliver TED talks and churn out how-to books. As a result, many of them, as I did, turned to the writing work they could get, which involved selling something.
Many of these somethings don’t need to exist. Many of them are outright dumb ideas. I don’t say this to throw shade at those who take the risk of building a business, but rather to acknowledge a more universal principle that most things these days are completely unnecessary and end up existing only because of the imperative for growth.
For instance, ninety percent of the writing I produce deserves to rot on the cutting-room floor. Beyond my own shortcomings, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 34.7 percent of businesses launched in 2013 continued to operate in 2023. And the failure rate for start-ups is even higher, especially if they’re unable to secure enough venture capital to become too big to fail. (See: Appendix, “How ‘Too Big to Fail’ Became a Strategy Instead of an Outrage.”)
The abundant pointlessness of many products and services turns copywriting into an exercise in pedaling the highest-bidder’s garbage, wherein copywriters have to pretend to be excited about these bad ideas and politely smile when growth managers claim the reason they’re not selling more is because the writing isn’t “punchy” enough.
It can be brutal. Not, of course, working-in-mines brutal. But modern-day, existential-despair brutal. As a result, many copywriters develop an odd camaraderie rooted in a kind of professional gallows humor.
This is all context for how, sometime in 2019, a copywriter friend was like, “Yo, you have to check out Laura Belgray. She’s a writer making a million dollars a year.”
That statement raised an immediate red flag: As we’ve seen with Medium bloggers and YouTube prophets, whenever money is used to justify why someone you’ve never heard of is worth paying attention to, there’s often a con being pulled. And whenever a dollar figure is attributed as recurring—“a million dollars a year”—it almost never is. Nothing, especially income, is perpetual.
This lead-with-money tactic now dominates our attention-economy discourse. Outlets like CNBC and Forbes and Inc. post dozens of articles a day with headlines like, “This Millennial Makes $10,000 a Month with Her Side Hustle.” When you read these articles, however, you learn the millennial started her business, like, a year ago, floundered for a while, and then built it to the point when she recently made $10,000. Unless the reporter has statements going back for years, what we’re talking about is just a moment in which several clients all paid their invoices at the same time. And often what started as a “side hustle” became a full-time endeavor in the process.
The CNBC writer has no incentive to scrutinize, though, because there’s an absurd quota of articles to produce each day and because no one would click on a headline that read, “Millennial Managed to Make $10,000 at Some Point.” The writer knows that what’s appealing is the idea that someone has discovered a way to guarantee a substantial income forever, especially if it’s through a pursuit that can be achieved with a minimal investment of time.
And so we see how, in the fight for clicks, traditional outlets have turned their attention to the shortcuts and tricks of bloggers rather than maintain any kind of integrity.
Loaded down with all this skepticism, I checked out Laura Belgray’s website and discovered that she’s a capable writer who has…a voice. A short-form voice, with lots of alliteration and vitality, false promise and name-dropping. A marketing voice. A voice that’s great for a landing page or email or social-media post but gets tedious to read and, I imagine, to write.
Attempting to make a million dollars a year serving up that voice all day, every day, is not feasible. So it should come as no surprise that Belgray’s website promotes coaching, consulting, and courses. (There are many links to articles that begin with “How to...”)
Further research led to an article Belgray wrote for Business Insider titled, “I made $1 million last year by creating online copywriting courses. Here’s my advice on how to monetize your talents.” (Again, leading with money. Always leading with money.) In the article, she explains how she has “retired her services” as a copywriter and now earns income solely from selling courses. The key to making a million dollars as a writer, apparently, requires no longer being a writer.
If there’s a pattern worth recognizing, it’s that just as book authors have felt forced out of their primary pursuit into the picks & shovels of the how-to genre, copywriters, an inherently more promotional bunch, have discovered there’s more upside to selling their own picks & shovels than someone else’s.
Right now, the people producing the product or delivering the service tend to make the least money, receive the least respect, and have their performance subjected to the greatest amount of criticism. This is perhaps why Belgray mentioned in her Business Insider article that after leading a “productivity workshop,” she had to admit that she no longer wanted to take on client work but rather “sell my products instead of someone else’s.”
Belgray, I’m guessing, recognized that as long as she was the one writing, every client would be her boss and she would be stuck getting notes as if they were the experts. By flipping the script and becoming a self-described expert, she became the authority judging her clients’ work. Fewer headaches, more money.
It was a nice move, and it worked out for Belgray because she likes selling and because, given her writing style, there would be few other ways to break into that income level.