by Rena Sherwood

Created on: December 20, 2009

Many people – even many writers – assume that the Holy Grail of a writing career is to get a book published.  Nonsense.  Anyone can get a book published (if you have enough money).  The Holy Grail of a writing career is getting paid to write.  In this way, there are far more advantages of writing non-fiction articles to just about any other form of writing.

Money

Let's not be coy here.  It can take a lifetime in order to get one book published.  Even if the book is accepted by a publisher, it needs to be re-written and re-re-written until the publisher is satisfied.  Even when it hits the shelves, modern publishers expect the author to do the bulk of promotion.  In order to sell a book, you'll need a blog about it, a Twitter account about it and have to hire a publicity agent.

Who has time for all of that crap?

If you have bills due now and not twenty years from now, then concentrate on article writing articles are always in demand.  They are also short (or comparatively short) so you can churn out many a year (or day) and make a steady income doing what you love as opposed to being at the mercy of a merciless publishing house.

Exposure

Since a writer can produce numerous articles a year, their name goes in front of many eyeballs repeatedly.  For example, web content writers are usually not restricted as to how many clients they can have.  Writing for numerous web content brokers or aggregators as well as blogs can make your work pop up on many, many websites.  Eventually, people will recognise your name because they've seen it so many times (depending on what websites they read, of course).  But name recognition open doors.

Narrowing Your Focus

If you're a smart and/or hungry writer, you will write about any topic that promises a decent wage.  But as your career progresses, you'll have more of a knack for writing about some topics more than others.  As you do research for these articles, you begin to realize what sources are considered to be more respected than others.  You also can invest some of your earnings into buying books in your chosen field to build up your personal reference library.  (Don’t worry – you can usually write these books off as a business expense.)

As you narrow your focus on what topics you prefer to write about and learn more and more about them, you eventually become an expert on a topic.  This expertise not only helps you write faster, but also opens doors to other publication opportunities.  This also helps catch a publisher's attention if you do eventually decide to write a book.  Mentioning in your query letter that you write for a blog that gets a hundred thousand hits a month may be the deal-breaker.

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