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What Kind of Freelance Writer Do You Want To Be?There are lots of choices in freelance writing When most people think about becoming a freelance writer, they have either novels or magazine writing in mind. And there's nothing wrong with either - each is a worthy goal. But there's much more to freelance writing than just novels or magazine
articles. There are freelancers, working from home doing all sorts of writing. Freelance writers are ghostwriting autobiographies and books on all sorts of subjects for individual clients and for organizations. Freelance writers are writing web copy for companies and for entrepreneurs. Freelance writers are writing greeting card copy and essays about everything from politics to film. Freelance writers are writing grants and plays and screen plays... the list goes on and on. Anything you see in print or on the web might have been written by a freelance writer. Write For Yourself or Clients?In many ways the career of freelance writing breaks into two parts - writing for publication or writing for clients. Writing for publication includes books, booklets and articles that are actually published by someone other than you, unless you go for self-publishing, which is also a viable option. Writing for clients means others hire you to write for them. The most obvious example of this is ghostwriting, marketing writing and corporate writing. Each has its advantage and it's quite possible to do both. If you're going to seek out clients, your marketing needs to be focused in that direction. When you're writing for publication, your marketing, by and large, consists of submitting either completed manuscripts or queries. Do Freelance Writers Need to Specialize?Obviously a successful freelance writing career requires some sort of specialization - no one can do it all. I think, however, it's a mistake, at least in the beginning, to worry too much about specialization. You already know, at least in a general way, what you want to write. You know, for example, if you want to write fiction or non-fiction. That's where you start, with your passion. As you build your career, your specializations, and there's often more than one, will develop more or less automatically Write well and often,
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