Lots of late night programming, then lots of late night paid programming. It all boils down to putting the time into learning. The difference from self-taught coder and professional developer is the paycheck. Though the self-taught coder might have experience writing code, it will not have experience developing software. Two different things altogether. That is why you need to put in the time in both scenarios.
Work at one or more startups and build your skills. You'll find that at a startup you wear more than one hat(eg: You need to worry about front end, backend and database stuff), that in most cases you dont have to worry about in big organizations. Most early stage startups, since they dont have much to pay, will take anyone with experience and willing to learn. The only caveat is that, you will have to work crazy hours, at least for the initial few weeks/months. But you will find that the more you work/code, the more experienced you get and hence can finish tasks faster.<p>Thats pretty much how I started and why I still prefer startup jobs over jobs at bigger companies with more focused roles.
Find someone to pay you a professional rate.<p>You get there by working your but off. I recommend specializing and going deep in one area. Knowing a little about a lot if things with no real world experience is not a competitive position. Having experience with mongoDB and rails landed me a position over developers with significantly more general experience. At the time MongoDB was an up and coming technology with rapidly increasing demand. With out the specialty I had little chance competing against more experienced developers for general positions. Having a specialty I knew very well gave me the ability to compete.
Got a super low paid almost intern-type job at a very respected institution. Once that was on my resume, people didn't care (and I sure didn't go out of my way to tell them... I would if they asked, but they never asked) how low level the job was... they just saw the respected institution name and I was golden for the next step.<p>Also had published some software that got me the first couple jobs. Publishing some software (open source, or an app in an app store) is a great way to get the credibility you need.<p>If these are not an option, you could work for a friend, long enough to get something you can point to as yours.
Mine is more of a step by step story. Worked customer service for internet banking at a major world wide bank. While there, I got into VB 4/ 5. Left that, took a contract job at a medical company doing visual foxpro. Left that for entry sys admin job and web development job. While there, I scored side work from a Canadian designer; did that 7 years on the side while at the day job. Was at the day job for 8 years; now I'm 100% freelance.
I started out by attending meetups and getting to know people locally where I was at while continuing to work on skills. Next, I started letting people know I was interested in freelance work and started taking small jobs. That eventually led to bigger and better things :)