I'm not sure what you're all on about; making a living from writing is easier than ever right now. I'll share my personal methods of choice here. If you want to make a living off working for specific companies, though, you're going to need to take the time to build a smashing portfolio, a great website, and to start applying; there's nothing holding you back there, m8. But making a portfolio in the first place is the hard part. Unless you want to freelance for a while, you're going to have to work for yourself (for free) to get enough content to fill it. Write anything and everything that could be relevant. Throw out anything that isn't a 10/10. Keep your best work (11+/10) on the first and last page, etc. Good luck if you decide to go that route.
If you're willing to work for yourself, here are my own experiences/goals to maybe educate and inspire some other writers out there like OP.
I've made a good living from my writing last year by freelancing through Elance. I would write short e-books (both fiction and educational), write up press releases, do copywriting (product descriptions, ad pages, inventor pitches, etc), post on private forums, review products, or whatever else I was asked to do. Once you get your foot in the door, it's easy to jump right into making $80+ an hour (and that's at competitive bidding rates; you get a lot more negotiating room once you have experience and references).
However, you're going to have to be prepared to put up with a lot of stupid clients. I mean that like 90% of your clientele will seem like they walked off the short bus (or rather, tripped off it and damaged their brains even worse). What do you expect from people who can't even write their own damn brochures? But the few clients who are nice will make it so worth it. I had a great client from India who was a brilliant man but struggled with English, so I did all his copywriting for these amazing inventions of his. It was a ton of fun. I wish I could shout his ideas to the world but, ya know... Non-Disclosure Agreements and all that jazz haha
[As for why I stopped: Even though it was lucrative, I realized quickly that freelancing just wasn't my personal cup of tea. I have too much pride in my ideas and not enough patience for others' to write exactly how the clients wanted.]
I personally never did it, but article writing is also another great freelancing option. I dislike it because it pays less money per word than most other freelance positions, but you're almost always guaranteed a steady, long-term gig once you find a good client for it. The only thing that limits you there is the number of articles you're willing to write every day and how much you're willing to research (research intensive articles usually pay way more because you have to put time into educating yourself about it).
As for now, I've moved on to writing my own e-books with stories of my preference. Whether or not this will work for you depends on the route you take. The two most proven and successful routes to go would be: 1) Write one or two long e-books a year and market the ******** out of them with a high price point ($10) and hope they'll succeed, or 2) Write a bunch of little books in a long series with low price points ($1) and repeat it if that batch doesn't take off. The little books method works best with romance and informative works (recipe books, hunting guides, plant identifiers, etc.) while the the big books method works best for sprawling fantasies and general novels.
I tend to work on several pieces at once, so I'm personally going to take a risk trying out the little books route with long fiction. I'm breaking my books and series down into bite sized portions (10k-15k) where each book has a part released weekly (the first one being free and the price gradually increasing). However, sales show that longer books at higher price points sell better, so I'm also offering complete editions once the stories are tied up to get sales from those who look at the page count first.
Both methods have their Pros and Cons, though. In traditional publishing, short/frequent releases would be madness. You'd supersaturate the market before the year was up unless it was tucked away in a magazine. However, the e-book market is already so saturated that releasing as many pieces as possible in as many genres as you can is the best way to get recognition without social media/marketing and ad purchases. But if you are willing to do that marketing, the word of mouth about the one or two books you released is going to be much greater than if they were broken down, driving up both popularity and sales.
That's the reason short books also work better for non-fiction; people are usually looking up those topics specifically, so they'll see it in the search results where popularity doesn't matter. In the case of fiction, people are usually just scanning through the genres without knowing what they're looking for, so familiar titles hold a lot more power (as do eye-catching covers, which a lot of self-published authors seemed to have missed the memo about). Familiar authors can also catch eyes, though, which is more likely to happen when you have more pieces released, etc. There are great arguments for both sides.
I haven't published those yet, but I know it's a lucrative business if you know what you're doing. I always wondered why clients would pay me $100 for a short story or article converted to an e-book format, and it took a while for it to click that they made more money than that on it in return. There's nothing stopping freelancers from doing the same other than wanting the safety of a client and an escrow service lmao. Or they're scared because of all the misinformation and stereotypes flying around about it. Reality is, most unbiased studies show that self-published e-books have skyrocketed in success these past few years and are selling more than ever.
So, yeah there definitely is hope one way or another. The market for self-published writers is increasing drastically, and freelance writing has become easier to get into than ever with websites like Elance and oDesk that connect you directly to clients. Even setting up your portfolio and resume for big businesses to find you is as simple as a few clicks on a web builder and resume site. You've got all the opportunities in the world to do well as a writer right now, but everyone else is catching onto this, too; you're gonna lose your chance if you don't get in quick.
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