You Ask, I Answer: Different Types of Writing Careers?

In today's episode, Alana asks, let's say you have a job that is making you pretty unhappy unhappy, marketing manager supervising one other person, and you are realizing that you hate Google analytics and content calendars and pixels, and you really just ended up here because you like to write and it got out of hand. What would you do? What kind of job would you look for? Okay. Um it depends.

Uh it depends on what you want to write and how good you are at it. Um there is still plenty of room in the overall marketplace for actual writers, uh, people who write things uh nonfiction or fiction. Uh I have uh some friends who make living as as professional authors, professional fictional authors. That's what they do, they crank out terrific books, a lot of them. Um, and that is something that is in more demand than ever, actually.

The number of people who are looking for in the uh in these uncertain times, uh stuff that'll go on your Kindle, you know. And not just writing either. Writing, art, any kind of creativity is stuff that there's room in the marketplace for. And I will also say that as much as I love artificial intelligence and what it can do, it's not gonna replace uh fiction writing anytime soon. Unlike things that well, I it's not gonna replace writing in general anytime soon, or writers in general, because every act of writing, as long as you're not literally copying and pasting and you're good at it, offers a unique point of view that has not been created before.

Machine learning and AI are really good at creating things from things they've already seen. But when you go and write something for the first time that is brand new, no machine has seen that before. And it's very difficult for machines to come up with stuff that is genuinely uniquely new because uh they're trained on things that already exist. So there is plenty of room in the marketplace for actual writers as long as you're good, as long as you're good at it, and you create stuff that people want to read. On the sort of the paid nonfiction side, there's a ton of jobs.

Technical writers, for example, people who make documentation, um, all those manuals, all those you know, bug reports and things, and there's room for even for tremendous amounts of creativity in that. If you look, if you open up your smartphone and you go into uh your app updates, and you read the app update notices, there are some that are like you know, bug fixes and improvements, you know, very boring stuff, and then there's others that are written with a sense of humor, written uh with uh some fun, light heartedness because the writers there can. Um there are plenty of jobs in the creative field writing things like scripts, uh, especially now in a world where anybody with a smartphone can make a film that doesn't look bad. Again, on the nonfiction side, there's content creators, people who write blog posts, for example, uh, white papers, uh, research, tons of writing. There, there are grant writers, uh, particularly for uh educational institutions and nonprofits writing grants to to win um money from governments and nonprofit other nonprofit organizations.

There are copywriters, people who just write copy that will then be used in white papers and webinars and and such. There are editors, tons of different kinds of editors. So it all comes down to what you're really good at. And if you enjoy writing and you're really good at it, there's a market for you. There's a market for there's actually a tremendous market for ghostwriting and for clean transcription.

So one of the things that I know friends of mine have have done is they wanted to write a book, but they themselves knew they were not great writers. But they could sit down and you know, in an interview, get out a little audio voice recorder like this, right? And talk for hours and hours on end and turn that into and and have a proficient, talented writer turn that into a book that you'd want to read that still captured that the essence of that person's voice, but didn't require them to sit down at a keyboard and and and write things out. There are a lot of people right now in the space where they want to build their personal brands, they want to do all these these things, and having a book for good or ill still is one of the heuristics that people have in mind that says this person must know what they're doing. They've written a book, right?

It speaks well to the authority of books in our culture that it still has that much sway that you know, having a book with your name on it of some kind uh means something. But again, a lot of people are not great writers. A lot of people do not have the time or the are not willing to commit to the discipline it takes to write a book. I've written at this point I think twenty-two of them uh and I just badly hammered out my first piece of fiction you know at sixty some odd thousand words it takes a lot to do that just to sit down for 30, 60, 90 days for a couple hours each day just at the keyboard banging it out and then realizing the last two thousand words you just wrote were absolute garbage you have to select all hit delete and try over uh my book AI for marketers at second edition I took the first edition select all delete and and start it over and I'll probably have to do the same thing with the third edition because it the field changes so fast. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity out there.

What I would say is if you're thinking about uh making the change into a a creative writing career a go and do your homework join there are so many uh writing groups uh on Facebook and other places that you can join and figure out what it is you want to do while you're doing the the job you're doing because this is not the time to quit a job without something lined up while you're doing the job you're currently doing do some I don't like the word networking but do some networking. Do some informational networking where you you just want to talk to people in those positions and hear what it is that they do. Have virtual coffee with them right we're all uh still attached to our webcams have an espresso have a gin and tonic, depending on the time of the day, with somebody at uh a in a career that you might want to just ask them what their work is like. How much of it is actual writing, how much of it's project management, how much is of it is this or that, and see what's out there. You may find, for example, hearing people's experiences that you may not want to be a technical writer or a grant writer.

Those are there's not a lot of room for creativity, particularly in grant writing. Uh you have very, very stringent requirements, but it is writing. On the other hand, things like ghostwriting, uh, and and marketing copy. There's a lot more latitude, uh, depending on uh how well you market yourself. Now there's the catch.

A lot of folks who work in in the writing industry, I guess, are freelancers. They are uh they are individuals, sole proprietors going out there and doing the thing. And that's very much a feast or famine business as well. Agencies in particular need really good writers. Uh public relations, advertising, marketing.

So again, do some informational networking. Ask people what their work is like. I know when I worked in an agency, one of the frustrations people had was that they were they had so much to do that their writing quality suffered and made them really unhappy because they couldn't they knew they couldn't do their best because they didn't have the time to do it. So again, go out, talk to people, figure out what it is like for them, see if it's for you, maybe do try some freelancing on the side. If your your current conditions allow you to moonlight, maybe give that a shot and see if it's for you, if you can make a go of it, if you're if you're talented enough.

But there is a lot of opportunity out there for folks who love to write. Uh if you have follow-up questions, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit Trust Insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.