Starting Monday I am going post a five-part series about the potential for writers to self-generate income online – how it might be done, what it might mean for writers and publishing, and ways in which it just might never work.

Some things you might not know about me: my day job is in ‘new media’ (not so new anymore), in particular web content development. It’s a field I’ve worked in since the relatively early days: 2003. That is, well before the days when everyone was a social media expert, back when the general public didn’t know what a forum or blog was, back when web editors were riding the rather lucrative wave of seeing businesses realise that their websites needed to be more than static ads or fancy flash bullshit – that what web-users wanted was, in fact, content. I don’t consider myself an ‘expert’ at this kind of stuff, but as a net user since 95, and because of my job, and as someone who has watched and participated in the development of blogs over the past six so years, I thought it was time to coalesce some of that knowledge with my experiences and hopes as a writer and publisher.

Initially I had one post planned, but it kept growing out of control, so I thought it best to split them up into a more manageable series. The result is not a tutorial on how to monetise a blog, but an exploration of the ways writers may be able to create income streams via self-publishing online; the posts are discussion-starters rather than end-points (I hope). I don’t have all the answers. But I do have a lot of ideas.