by Ruth Belena

Created on: July 22, 2010

When writing is a pleasure and a passion, it makes a great hobby, and creative writing a wonderful way of spending spare time. By writing regularly you keep improving and developing your own writing style, and this should give you more confidence in your ability to write. Then it is time for you to take your hobby of writing a step further, to get your writing published and start making money.

• Getting published

When you start writing for publication you need to know what market will suit your style of writing best. There are opportunities for writers of short stories or poetry, and you can find details of magazines which accept unsolicited work if you look in a library for a writers' guide or directory of small press publications. You can search online for magazine publishers' websites.

Be sure to choose publications that suit your writing style or genre. You will need to adapt your writing to meet publishing guidelines and to create the type of stories or poems that will be acceptable.

For non-fiction there is a much wider range of options for getting published. The Internet provides writers of all abilities with the chance to publish articles, how-to guides, product reviews and opinion pieces. You can start by creating your own blog, or submit to article directories and user-generated content websites.

• Getting paid

To begin with you can earn small amounts of money for writing and publishing articles online. Create content for your own blog or submit to a website where members publish their own pages. Income can then be earned from ads or affiliate links, but you do need to write many articles before you can expect to earn regular income or make large amounts of money.

You may receive upfront payments when you decide to sell your articles or to share publishing rights online. You can submit articles to online marketplaces where publishers select content and pay for publishing rights. 

By writing for Helium you can gain writing stars to qualify for upfront payments, with bigger payments per article for writers with more stars.

You can start earning freelance income when you find clients to pay you for writing e-books, series of articles or regular blog posts. You can make money ghost writing for businesses and for individuals requiring reports, manuals, instructions, advertising slogans, listings, press releases or publicity leaflets. Writing work can be found

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