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Professional writers are defined as those who write for a living and get paid for their work. This includes screenwriters, journalists, copywriters, bloggers, and more. They spend time job hunting, submitting manuscripts, and negotiating prices. Getting published can be helped by agent representation, and resources like The Writer’s Digest can assist in finding publishers and agents. Online submissions are becoming more common, and there are sites that offer writing jobs for freelancers.
The term professional writer is open to interpretation. Some exclusively define professional writers as those people who write books. Others are more inclusive in their definition and define professional writers as those people who write for a living. This would include a much larger group of people including: screenwriters, playwrights, print journalists, columnists, freelance writers of articles, short stories or poetry, sales and advertising copywriters, bloggers who earn enough money to cover their monthly expenses, article writers for encyclopedias and those who write articles for various professional journals.
The key to being a professional writer, as opposed to being a writer in the most loosely constructed definition, is that you get paid for your work. You can publish work on custom printers, on free online sites, or in exchange for some magazines, but you’re not getting paid to do so. You can be just as skilled as the professional writer, but you shift your interests elsewhere to earn the money you need to survive. You don’t “write for a living”.
It might be an oversimplification to describe what a professional writer does by saying he or she writes. However, this is one of the main ways a professional writer spends his time. Those who are self-employed and do not employ an agent also need to spend considerable time job hunting, consulting with journals or publishers, submitting manuscripts, and negotiating prices for work. Newer freelance professionals can write jobs before they get paid. Others settle down and are invited to write by companies, magazines or other media sources on designated or proposed topics.
Some professional writers, like us full-time workers at wiseGEEK, know that we get paid for our work. We take the two designated topics and suggest some of our own, and we can write anywhere from 20 to 60 articles a week. Others write for wiseGEEK, as a sideline profession, to augment their other writing endeavors or other careers. Writing for wiseGEEK or other internet sites provides a writer, depending on the number of articles he produces, with a professional fee, and we can call ourselves professional writers.
Other professional writing jobs, such as producing ad copy, writing for a newspaper, or writing a daily or monthly column, may mean working in an office, for regular 40-hour weeks. These writers may be salaried rather than piece-rate, and job security depends in part on the quality of the writing, but it can also depend on how well the writing is received. Don’t forget that a publisher rejected JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book, suggesting that even the best writing can be poorly received.
Professional writers writing screenplays or plays may need to work on location to produce rewrites. Book authors, on the other hand, when not writing material that needs to be heavily researched, often work from home. On a daily basis, writers of all types happily attack their computer (or paper and pen, typewriter) or sometimes have to drag themselves to the writing source to complete work they’ve already contracted to publish or would like to publish.
When a professional writer is lucky enough to get published, he or she gets a little extra help in the form of agent representation. This can mean that agents, when they are good, will work to find another writer and sell other works that the writer has already written. It can be a daunting task trying to get your first book published, as most manuscripts will not be read unless an agent takes them to a publisher, and most agents will not accept a client unless it has already been published.
If you want to try your hand at professional writing, there are many ways to get started. A significant help is the website and annually published book, The Writer’s Digest, which maintains a list of journals, agents, and publishers who will read original work. Writer’s Digest further helps people decide where they can turn their efforts by listing important things about when and how material is accepted, what size material is accepted, and how much the fee is.
Another benefit for the professional writer is the number of journals, agents and the like that now receive job submissions online. Some still prefer mail submissions, but this is rapidly changing as most writers now compose on computers and have access to Internet service. Many sites specialize in offering writing jobs, which helps freelancers. Avoid the ones that charge for this service.
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