Writing is a career where you traditionally get paid only for your time. Even if you bill by the project, it’s still based on an hourly rate that, if you’re experienced (or lucky), you’ve bid correctly. But there are ways for writers to increase profits without extending your schedule to a 20-hour work day or making every vacation a working vacation. Here are three of them:

Royalties

If you’ve written a book that you did not self-publish, you understand the concept of royalties: you get paid a percentage of every sale made. This arrangement often looks more appealing on paper than it is in reality, with a slow trickle of dollars and cents adding little to your savings account. However, there are other ways to attract royalties—large ones. It is common practice for direct mail copywriters to include royalty arrangements in their contracts. For example, in addition to charging a flat fee for his copywriting services, direct mail writer Dick Sanders charges his clients a fee for each package mailed. Since direct mail publishers send out high volume mailings, it’s not uncommon for Dick to receive a $30,000 check on a mailing of one million packages at just 3 cents per piece mailed. If you think direct mail is dead, think again –just look at all the direct promotions that land in your own mailbox.

Direct Sales

Every year self publishing becomes easier, more affordable and profitable. While you’re waiting for that big publisher to appreciate your work and offer you a contract, write a simple yet informative eBook, format it directly in your word processing software, convert it to a PDF and sell it from your website or through the many eBook sales portals that populate the Internet. True, you’ll have to promote it, but an eBook on the right topic to the right audience at the right time could bring in a very tidy and consistent profit. Write it once—profit from it (nearly) forever.

Mark-ups

If you are a writer who often serves as the creative project manager, it’s likely you have several opportunities to make money with mark ups. For example, if you are writing a corporate brochure and subcontracting graphic design services along with supervising the printing, you can take on responsibility for the billing for these services and mark up actual costs by 20 percent. Let’s say the graphic design costs are $5,000 and printing is $15,000. Your markup on $20,000 is $4,000 so you charge the client $24,000 (plus your writing fees). The additional tasks and responsibilities of managing a project are worth something so don’t cheat yourself out of being compensated for them.

Caution: Despite deserving additional fees for the additional work, taking on the billing responsibility is not without risk. What happens when the corporate client declares bankruptcy (we’re in an unpredictable economy, after all) and you are stuck owing a bill for thousands of dollars for design and printing? Here’s an option: allow the designer and printing company to directly bill the client and negotiate a fee for your project management—separate from your writing fees.