I have been working as a writer for many years and one thing I have noticed that happens several times is that I don’t always know where my income will come from. Sometimes I can write something and get paid once, or write a book and the royalties keep coming from it for years, or sometimes I write something and it can make me money in ways I never thought of.

To show you what I mean, I’m going to tell you about a series of three articles I wrote that have made me money for over 10 years.

And this is how it happened:

Several years ago I wrote to a writing magazine and proposed a three-article series on how to make money pitching ideas for movies, TV shows, and reality TV shows. The magazine accepted and asked me to send them the articles.

At the time, I was working as a freelance writer and had outlined the articles but hadn’t written them, which isn’t unusual, because, for nonfiction articles for magazines, they just want to see a short speech first, whereas, for fiction , they usually want to see the full story.

So, once I received the request, I set about writing the articles, which were less than 1,500 words each, and it all took me just one morning to write, edit, and proofread. And then I sent the articles.

The publisher accepted them and offered me £100 ($200) for each article, payable at the time of publication (the magazine was published monthly) at which I accepted, knowing I would receive 3 monthly payments totaling $600.

The articles were published as agreed and a few months later I looked at the copies on my computer and decided to republish them online. I added some PPC ads to the webpages and some affiliate links to appropriate screenwriting and presentation products and left it at that.

In the years that followed, those three articles began to receive more visits than the other pages on my website. I also had to update them a couple of times to make sure the content was still relevant and all the links were working, but doing so was just a small job.

So while those articles were on my website, the ads and affiliate links made me quite a bit of money.

And then one day a publisher contacted me because one of their authors wanted to use part of one of the articles in a book they were publishing and wanted written permission.

So I sold them the permit for $300 which they accepted and paid for.

And when I thought about it, those three articles that only took me a few hours to write must have earned me over $1,000 since I wrote them.

Not bad for a half day of work.

But that’s the thing about being a writer; if he wants to earn a decent income, he must keep writing, posting and publishing, because he never knows where the money will come from next, or how much.