Spilled Ink by Alexandra Grant

Spilled Ink by Alexandra Grant

Goose and the Golden Egg

Incidentally, There Is No Magic Bean

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Alexandra Grant
Jun 09, 2026
∙ Paid
a basket filled with gold colored eggs on top of a table
Photo by COARSE + FINE on Unsplash

We have all seen them. The magical emails draw in the hopeful writer, desperate to make something, anything, from their work. The lure and promise of $50-$100 per piece accepted for publication. The hopeful possibilities of making a couple of grand a month from their writing. Anything from data entry to essay submissions is needed by many entities, and you are in a prime position to earn that income, after all, the writer just did. In fact, the writer makes a couple of thousand a month, maybe more, even while they sleep. What they don’t tell you is how long it took them to reach that income. They don’t cite their own stories or poetry in those publications either, so you can’t verify those claims.

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