The Making of a Writer

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Who do I write for? “You write for yourse–” Blahblahblah yeah whatever. Writing for myself is a journal. Writing for myself won’t put food on the table, at least not until I’m famous enough that people want to read my journals. Then I’ll probably be dead. Too late!

I’m talking about writing for paying markets. I walk into Barnes and Noble and think two things: “I sure miss the Tattered Cover,” and “Wow, there’s a whole lotta books and magazines in here. My ultimate chances of getting published can’t be that bad.” But then reports with lots of statistics come out about declining book sales, adults reading less and less, etc… and … well, all that. It can get discouraging.

But it also seems lots of folks are out there doing okay with writing, just of a different kind…

Some folks seem to be doing very well writing blogs and for online markets.

While researching an article I came across a blog of a quilter from the Midwest. She posts about quilts. Her blog looks simple and unpolished. She has a few Adsense ads. AND–here’s the kicker–she has a pretty high pagerank. That means she gets a lot of traffic, her views are respected (high pagerank => lots of links from other web sites), and those ads are probably serving her pretty well. Plus, the increased traffic probably helps her sell quilts. (I didn’t ask; this stuff wasn’t the focus of my article. But you can bet what my next article will be about.)

So what did she do?

I read a few of her entries. It’s clear she knows a lot about quilting, and she loves it. She’s managed to turn one of her passions into something she can share with the world, and maybe make a little on the side for her efforts. AND she’s targeted a very narrow niche.

Hm…

That niche thing, I’ve heard that before. A common recommendation to geting started in the copywriting business is to look for assignments for trade magazines and newsletters. This advice is meant to steer new writers towards underserved markets for their services. But this advice also steers writers into niche markets. (Write for a few trades in the same industry and before long you’re an Expert! A specialist! You get to charge more! Cool.)

So it’s time to diversify. I have a few passions I could blog fairly regularly about, I think, so I believe I will. I’ll get to keep flexing my writing muscles and develop some writing samples I can use to build business or use as clips.

And maybe make a little money on the side.

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