Yes, There’s Still Money in the Writing Industry
By: Adrian Drew
Tags: Work, Freelancing, Advice, Writing Tips, Writing

Making Progress

In the meeting I mentioned earlier, my elders attempted to convince me to focus my efforts on attaining a creative writing degree. Teachers really do love university. I considered it for some time, but on reflection, it would’ve been a bad idea.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that writing degrees are pointless. I don’t have one, and therefore I don’t know. But what I do have is a long list of credentials and publications that have proven to be far more valuable than a degree would’ve been.

The truth is, in many cases, employers of creative industries don’t care about your degree. At Mind Cafe, we had forty-five applicants for an internship opportunity we opened last summer. Plenty of people attempted to sell themselves with their marketing degree, but I wasn’t particularly interested in that. I wanted to know where they’d worked, what they’d achieved, and how they would improve my company’s operations. And most employers want to know the same thing.

It’s the same in the world of freelance writing. A degree doesn’t demonstrate excellent writing abilities. It demonstrates other qualities, like organization, a strong work ethic, and the capacity to process/understand information. All valuable skills that have little to do with the written word.

How, then, should a beginner writer go about proving themselves to those they seek to receive payments from? Well, the proof is in the pudding. Or rather, the publication.

A publication is a collection of articles that are displayed to a particular audience. Different publications have different sized audiences. Mind Cafe, my own publication, receives a couple of million views each month. Others, like HuffPost and The Atlantic, have audiences several times larger than ours.

Each publication has its own set of rules. There’s a minimum bar of entry. If your writing meets a particular standard, that publication will be happy to feature your work to its vast expanse of readers.

If a writer has been featured in The Guardian, VICE, and the New York Times, that says a lot about their skills as an author. It communicates value. That makes a potential employer’s decision-making process a lot easier, since they can instantly gauge how good that individual’s writing is likely to be and therefore how much it's worth to them.

A degree doesn’t always serve this purpose. For that reason, my advice to any aspiring writer would be to forget about standardized qualifications, at least for a little while, and to focus on having their work published by reputable sources. Doing so isn’t easy, but it’ll work wonders when it comes to finding work.

The day I was published in Thrive Global was the day my rate leaped from $0.10 per word to $0.12 per word. The day Mind Cafe hit a million monthly readers and started publishing people like Nir Eyal, Brianna Wiest, and Jeff Goins was the day that rate increased to $1 per word.

What constitutes a credential will differ from industry to industry. In some spheres, a qualification is a credential. In others, gross annual turnover is a credential. In the writing industry, it’s all about where you’ve been published.