Anybody who has been accessing the internet over five minutes has seen at least one crazy money-making scheme. They all sound so simple don't you think? All you have to do is sit there clicking advertisements till you grow roots and you'll pay the mortage in no time.
Nonetheless, there is one way to make a a bit of extra cash that is tried and tested and even interesting to do sell your true story!
Everyone has read those readers' true stories, haven't they? You know the kind:
• My Partner is a Cheat
• I Won a Million and Spent the Lot
• My Boss is the Devil!
Sometimes the stories are desperately sad; real stories of love lost or loss. Sometimes the stories describe events in which the protagonist showed amazing courage or endurance and sometimes they are tales of healing or victory, but they all have one thing in common - true life stories touch the reader in ways that fiction cannot.
What On Earth Would I Write About?
Many people reading this will scoff and say 'But nothing exciting ever happens to me! What would I write about?', and yet everybody has their own unique experiences to share.
Were you pushed around at school? Have you lost a ton of weight? Did you have to deal with a stressful /romantic/scary situation at work? You have experienced several events in your life that have moved you deeply or changed you in some way.
And that is really the secret of a successful true life story. It is the tale of an ordinary person who has experienced something extraordinary and lived to write about it.
Publications each have their own policy for accepting reader-submitted content. Some offer a fee to anyone who has a half-way decent tale to tell irrespective of the importance or uniqueness of the situation. For example a story about surviving a catastrophic event might be paid the same as a story about a holiday romance.
However entertaining the romantic tale is, it could not match the story of survival for excitement factor and suspense. It does not seem fair that both tales should be offered the same payment.
Other magazines have a representative who is responsible for finding real life tales. The disadvantage is that these individuals have a spending budget and their job is as much about getting your story for as little amount of money as possible as it is sourcing new material.
So what to do?
Your best bet, whether you have a featured article to sell is to get in touch with a content agency. With years of experience in the media industry, the content agencies have friends and contacts in the editorial division of hundreds of publications. They know precisely what type of story sells and who will pay the most for it. As their agency fee is commission based, it is in the agency's best interests to get you the best possible deal for your unique tale and what is more, they will have professional writers on staff to help you get your story down.