by Ruth Belena

Created on: February 24, 2010   Last Updated: February 28, 2010

A career in writing is not what some people imagine. That is a good reason for defining and managing your writing career from the very beginning. Describing yourself as a writer could just mean that you write stories in your spare time, so it is important to differentiate between writing for pleasure and writing as a business or profession. When you define your writing career you need to be very clear about what exactly it is that you do. Then you can be more successful in developing and managing your writing career.

♦ How to define a writing career.

Start with a job description which will define your area of expertise in writing, based on whether you write mostly for print publications, business clients or for the Internet. When you are a published author you can define yourself by the genre of your published work, or as a writer of fact or fiction.

You could decide to be a journalist, or call yourself a citizen journalist. This does not necessarily indicate that you write about political issues, world events or local news stories. A journalist can also write articles on business, finance, health, nutrition, sports, entertainment, travel or about any specialist subject, when qualified to do so. You could become a journalist with a special interest in researching and reporting issues surrounding a particular topic.

It could be simpler to say you are a freelance writer and to describe your career as a writer according to your specialist knowledge, skills or qualifications. You can be a business writer getting paid for business articles, working for different companies, compiling reports or presentations. You might be a science writer, a travel writer, a food writer, or whatever it is that you choose to be the main subject of all your articles and reviews.

Being a ghost writer could cause confusion about what you write for other people. With your own ghostwriting service you could be involved in writing speeches, business documents or advertising copy. Whatever you write will be attributed to someone else, or published without your byline, when you are a ghost writer.

You can call yourself a Web writer or Internet writer, and write articles for websites, blogs, email newsletters and e-zines. You could be someone who works on freelance writing assignments or you could be writing content to earn ad revenue and affiliate income for yourself.

• How to manage a writing career.

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