Are you looking to venture into writing as a profession? In recent times, electronic media has opened the world of writing for many! The publishing industry is quite huge, and you can build a meaningful career.
There are different types of writing, like
- Business Writing
- Professional Writing
- Creative Writing
- Writing a Book or Novel
- Writing Blog Posts, etc
And in this article, we will briefly see how to become a professional writer?
Table of Contents
8 Steps to becoming a professional writer:
The following are 8 steps that you need to consider before embarking on the journey towards in professional writing:
Set Scary Objectives:
The greatest blunder you can make in pursuing a career in writing (or any other career) is to set safe objectives. Objectives you’re OK with, that you know are completely attainable. But why do we consider this an enormous mistake? Because pursuing a professional writing career is not a smooth journey!
If you desire to be a professional author/writer, you’ll have to set daunting goals, goals that will challenge you to use your energy, time, and skills effectively. After that, you’ll have to go for those goals with all that you have.
This is how you can stand out amongst other aspiring writers:
- Take out a new notebook. Record the initial 1 – 3 steps you have to take to march towards a career in writing. Then, choose how soon you would like to accomplish these steps. Make a point to challenge yourself.
How do you embark upon dealing with the set scary objectives?
Also, you can try out programs like Writers Work that gives you essential training to become a professional Freelance Writer.
Come Up With a Plan Of Action:
The main purpose of having scary goals/objectives is to push yourself, test your limit, and work extremely hard. This is the best way of improving your writing skills, and composing abilities to make strides.
Even though you are seeking to pursue several set goals, you should remember to also come up with a rational, actionable plan to achieve them.
Make Writing a Priority:
If you want to join the class of professional writers, you will have to make writing a priority. Your heart should be in it 100%. Most people come up with excuses like “writing should only be about art”, or “I don’t think I could write each day”.
Here’s the thing: if your dream is to become a professional writer, you have to make the hard choice of putting aside some of life’s pleasures and putting writing first. You can indulge yourself in other hobbies once in a while (since you can’t write 24/7). However, most days of the week should be dedicated to writing, for example, you can train on writing a thesis statement. How can you go about this?
- Evaluate your daily routine schedule. At what point is time being wasted? Can you organize your life in a way that more time is spared for writing?
Begin Research:
Most of the questions asked by people with finished articles are “How do I get published?”, “How do I find an agent?”. If you are one of them, then it’s high time that you begin researching.
There are various methods you can employ to find agents and publishing firms that are great for your content. However, the following is our most favored method:
- Start by compiling a list of articles related to yours, keeping in mind your content’s age market and genre. Once you have a list of about 20 articles, conduct further research. Research these articles on the web (a basic Google hunt will do), and search particularly for information on which publishing firms published each article and which agents represented their writers.
- After compiling your list, start to look up every agent and publishing firm and remove any poor matches off your list until you find the ideal subjects to question.
Start Building Your Author Platform:
If you want to become a professional writer, you have to start building your author platform immediately.
An author platform is simply your association with an engaged audience. This is however not represented in the number of social media followers you have or the number of page views on your site. It’s about the quality of that audience and page views, it’s about discovering readers who admire you and your work and afterward, building a relationship with them.
Building your platform will be a continuous process. It may seem overwhelming, but we guarantee that it’s a worthwhile task.
Reset Your Mindset:
In this field of writing, there are several categories of writers: those writers who think they’ll be good enough to get their work published; those who can’t comprehend why they’re not yet published, and those who are confident that their work will eventually be published. If you are in the 3rd category of confident writers, keep up the spirit.
However, if you are battling with self-doubt or you think that you’ve learned all there is about writing, there’s one thing you should be familiar with: both of these attitudes aren’t beneficial. They will end you before you even start. Why? Because there’s always room for further improvement.
Be Serious:
Each occupation has its ups and downs. However, once in a while, you’ll see your beloved authors retweeting love messages from their fans and think their life is rosy. That’s always not the situation, and you have to know this before you choose to embark on the journey towards becoming a professional writer.
Get Your Work Out There:
The best thing you can do that will benefit your writing career is getting your work out there.
So start it down right today, and get your work published.
If you are looking for good websites to publish your content,
Conclusion:
The writers whose debut articles receiving huge attention are the exceptions in this field. However, in almost every other case, writers need to publish several articles, articles that are loved by their readers, before their work starts to get recognized.
This is why the best thing to do for your writing career is to complete your most recent work. The sooner it’s published, the sooner you can embark on building a bigger audience and also the sooner you’ll draw nearer to the professional writing career you so desire.
Making it in this business of professional writing isn’t an impossible task. All you need to do is to put in that extra effort, and you’ll be able to realize your dream.
Note: This is a guest post by Christina Battons. You can also contribute good blog posts to OnlineRockersHub after checking these guidelines.
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Thank you so much for the tips Christina. These tips are motivating me to become a professional writer. I hope many writers would find this useful. Keep it up.
Your welcome, Kelly 🙂
There are so many freelance opportunities available for writers nowadays. So, it is a good platform if you are looking for a self-employed profession online.
That’s true. With more and more freelance platforms available nowadays, we have the opportunity to choose freelance writing as a profession.
Starting a professional writing career is easy. But, if you want to suceed it is so hard. One should not take it granted with the success that they might find in the initial stage. The initial stage will be enthusiatic, but as days go by you might even start to feel the frustration. You will start to overlook your writing, and your skills may be drop.
The challenge remains throughout career. Only if you have a real desire you will succeed out of this professional writing.
That’s true Rishita. Everyone will feel frustrated at their career at some point in time. You might even think of quitting. But, you need to know that there are many people who never know how close they were to success. They lost their opportunities because of their ignorance.
So, I would suggest you take a small break and continue with your best focus.
Everything you have shared so far is very useful and informative Christina. Thanks.
Your welcome, Matthew 🙂
What are the best places one get Freelance opportunities as a Writer? Do we have to pay anything to registration? Please share more info.
Hey Siya,
You can refer to this article:
https://www.thewriterfinder.com/post/freelance-websites
Initially, it has been a tough journey for me in writing so far. Somehow I have sailed through that. Now, I have enough got enough experience and came through all these struggles and I am proud of myself.
Sorry to hear that Abdul. But tough lessons at the beginning will teach you more. Keep learning! 🙂
I have a fear of publishing this content. I think what others would feel. Do professional writers feel it? How do they overcome such fears? I wanna hear from professionals their experience in writing.
Hey Mary,
Professional writers do have that fear while publishing content. But they believe in their writing and continuously keep improving it. That’s how they overcome this fear.