With the era of blogs, podcasts, and social media dominating the fast-paced world of Internet content, the professional writer has never been more in demand. If you’re interested in pursuing this type of career, this post will outline five very different writing careers you can start with today.
Despite having one person per family go into a profession when it used to be common for all three children to take on a trade or profession, more and more people are now looking for a change from their day job or going back to school. They’re looking for something they can do from home, with a flexible schedule and less pressure than their day job. And one of the most common choices is to become a writer.
So let’s look at five writing careers you can start with today:
1. Academic Writing
While a lot of people do this for fun or as a hobby, you can make it into a career if you become an academic writer. You’ll be writing about topics that relate to your area of study — for example, if you’re studying English, you might write about literature and classic works. You’ll usually write for academic journals and magazines (though not always), and readers are likely to have some degree of specialization in the field. What you’ll do is research, draft a proposal, and send it out for peer review before submitting it. You also might have to get your work published in books or journals that only print material within a certain field.
2. Technical Writing
We’re all familiar with this one — writing technical publications for technical audiences. If you’re not already exposed to this, you might be surprised to learn that you can make a career of it. Many technical writers also have engineering degrees or tech-related degrees. While they may not make a lot of money per hour, their employment opportunities have been growing steadily in the past decade.
3. Content Writing (Web Content)
Some content writers make $100 per hour or more. The reason for this is content writing is often outsourced — to people in countries with low labor costs. But don’t be discouraged; you can still make a career out of it if you’re an American writer looking for work.
To do so, you’ll need to have some experience and training, but you can get this with a college degree or an online course. You may also need to be good at marketing yourself — to get jobs as an in-demand writer.
4. Business Writing
If you want to get into business writing, you should first consider any areas where you have relevant experience. If you’ve worked in a particular industry, it’s likely there are trade journals or other publications out there that will pay for related material.
While the Internet has some free resources to help with business writing (for example, LinkedIn’s Quick Reference Guides), you can also use a professional business writing service like ours to improve your business writing skills.
5. Creative Writing
If you want to pursue creative writing, you need to know the different kinds of writing this entails — short stories, novels, poetry, nonfiction…and then choose which one best suits your writing style and interests. Network with other writers and read as many books as possible.
You can also discuss your work with peers and get critiques from other writers. Once you have a book or two under your belt (or five or ten), you can also write for a magazine or online publication.
The great thing about all of these writing careers is they allow you to be your own boss. You can do the work from home, planning your schedule around family and other obligations. You can also set your pay rate, meaning you can make as much or as little as you want. However, the flip side is you do have to deal with clients or managers, and some projects (like technical writing) might need to be completed by a certain deadline.
Conclusion
So that’s it — five very different writing careers you can start with today. Now remember, these are only examples, and you might have a completely different (maybe even unique) idea for your writing career. Most people who decide to become a writer do so because they have an idea and need to learn how to put that idea into words.
To a career as a professional writer!