Another Milestone Moment
By: William, Dollar Bill
Tags: Writing, Life Lessons, Prison, Sex, Freelancing

Another Milestone Moment

Anthony Roberts

Let the big time writers laugh. Who cares? This is for all us struggling serfs. Ya know…the 99% who barely earn coffee money pouring out our souls.

Today, I achieved the ultimate: Two more stories reached $10 in earnings. Actually, that’s a slight exaggeration. One is at $9.96. But I just checked and it has 4 minutes of member reading time today. So tomorrow, it will scale Everest into the earnings stratosphere.

Before y’all get envious of this incredible accomplishment, be apprised that in the past two months, I have published in the neighborhood of 170 stories. They’ve been on all sorts of subjects. Sex, politics, prison, escorts, lawyers, music, travel? They’re all in there. Whatever moves me at the moment I’ll write about.

Many of these are published into cyberspace with no backing. Some go in my embryonic publications (one actually has 23 followers). And some have been published in smaller Medium pubs with under 10,000 followers.

Here are the three stories that have made it to $10 in earnings. Maybe there’s a lesson in here somewhere:

The first is a sex story about Savannah, the peg queen. It was published in Sex and Satire, a small outfit run by an irreverent sex fiend/size queen who calls herself Mspartimewino. She’s actually one of my favorite writers on Medium. Savannah and her subject struck a chord with readers. Maybe it was the image. Hard to say. Still, months later, it earns pennies a day. Judge for yourself:

Number 2 is a long 24-minute read titled “Hangin’ Up,” a story about working suicide watch at MCC federal prison, where while earning 40 cents an hour, I happened to spend a lot of time alone watching Jeffrey Epstein before he killed himself.

This article was initially on its own (so to speak) without a publication. Eventually, I started “Doing Time” where it lives now. But “Hangin’” did most of the ascent on its own. I believe the subject matter and length of the piece might have had something to do with it. There were days with just one read but 24 minutes of member reading time.

A couple of lessons here: You can publish an article without a publication and still make a few dollars. And if it’s a long article — and it reads well — it will earn more just by virtue of it taking the reader so long to finish it.

The third “winner” is yet another sex story published in (once again) Sex and Satire. It’s all about a woman’s first orgasm. But not just any woman — a woman who’d been with a thousand men professionally without ever reaching orgasm. Then one day out of nowhere — she climaxed with a customer, who ironically, refused to believe he’d just given her an orgasm.

The lesson? Sex sells, apparently. My guess is this appealed to women who have difficulty achieving orgasm — or have in the past. It’s kind of a fun story — though not terribly well-written. Here it is:

I’d like to tell you that every story I write is a masterpiece. And that these three stood out as the best of the best. But the truth is that not everything I write is all that wonderful. And these three do not stand out as my best work. They simply made it to $10.

Sometimes I’ll read back on some of what I’ve published to see if they’re any good. Here’s one that got a grand total of 23 reads — even though it might be in that best of the best category:

Why nobody noticed? Hard to say. Robert’s just a jailbird-for-life. Epstein? He was something very different.