Professional Writing
Professional writers, or people who are working on becoming a professional writer, want to publish their work and make money at it often wonder how they can do that.
There are many ways—write for magazines; write for corporations; use your writing to make youtube.com videos, hit 10,000 views per video and youtube.com pays you; write a book, or four books; a series of books on your expertise.
If you’re a business person you may already understand the value of writing—social media posts and marketing copy come to mind.
But you want to put your writing front and center.
You can start blogging—a blog post gives google something to feed on. It sends its spiders to index your new content so it’s available in google searches (don’t forget that keywords play a part in this). You become known, people find you and pay for your services, pay for your books, workbooks and courses. You become an internet star, or at least someone who is found easily there. What comes next may be an income.
It’s all copy, content, and words. It’s all about a thesis statement or position statement about the services and products you offer. You then go on to defend your position and demonstrate why your statement is correct and worthy. These statements, which you’ve determined after some time in the business world, became the source for your writing. You’ve been there and done that, and now you want to write about it.
Up to now, this page has been about the nuts and bolts of professional writing. Not so much the how-to, but the what and a bit of the why you write—to gain followers, to be heard, and to sell. Not bad things for your writing to do.
Professional Writing is About Creativity
What, just ask yourself, what if you were to write what you really want about your services? What if you added more creativity to your nuts and bolts?
What if you wrote a poem about your business? What if you wrote an essay–using magical, lyrical language–that gets picked up by a literary journal or an online magazine?
What if you wrote a story, or added one of your own to your blog post? That story, presented as a scene, draws in your reader. People comment on it–you load it onto Medium.com and more people clap and comment. Medium.com shares your post with their members. Maybe your post is shared across social media and you have increased your followers by 4x.
People do this. Your expertise, your experience could be the fodder for a novel. Think about that for a minute.
How hard is it to make money from creative writing? That isn’t the right question. The question should be, how hard is it for you to write a book an audience needs and wants to read and then make money from the sales of that book?
People do that all the time. Seth Godin. Brene Brown. Elizabeth Gilbert. And people who are not household names, but they sell books and those books make them an excellent income.
What’s Next?
Go ahead and blog about your passion, which I hope your business fills you with, but have a plan for that blogging. Elevate it to a professional level.
Use your writing to build an audience so when your book is being edited, people are buying it pre-publication and when it is published, you have even more people who know you and want more you—and they get more you when they purchase your book.
This is what being a professional writer is all about. I can help you develop a strategy that puts writing at the center of all you do. It will be what you sell and what you identify yourself as—a writer. An author. A person who plays with words, turns them into something worth reading, and sells it.
Let’s Make a Plan
If you’ve worked with me before, you’ve probably already defined and refined your topic and audience, but even if you have, it’s worth the time to revisit them. Who reads what you write? And wants to read more? What are they reading and what about it makes them come back?
Answer the questions above with specificity and detail. It’s from these that we will put together a master plan–books, blogging, courses and workbooks are all avenues for sharing your work.
Then we develop a strategy around what you want to share and how and make a workable plan for you to achieve.
This program is a minimum of six months simply because it takes time to develop the strategy and then implement it, especially if writing a book or developing programs are part of your vision.
“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.”
~ Oprah Winfrey
What’s Included
These are the standard items:
- Weekly sessions to measure progress, get your questions answered, and talk about process
- Unlimited emails
- Reviews and editing of your writing: blog posts, articles, or your book
But what’s more important is that we center your vision and from that create a strategy that includes all of your interests. We see what you want to do and why (why is as important as your topics and audience), and then determine how.
It could start with you building your audience and then moving onto writing a book and developing workshops or a program. These are all part of your whole and what your program looks like is based almost entirely on what you want to accomplish. Coaching and consulting is a minimum of six months in order to establish your topics and audience, writing practice and media in which you’ll be pitching and publishing your work.
From $6,000
” Paula guided me through the writing process – helping me define my audience, create a story arc, develop a consistent writing practice – and provided constructive feedback and encouragement along the way. Vastly more important, however, she demystified the world of publishing and opened my eyes to emerging opportunities available through self-publishing. I am now a published author.”
~ Janice Shade
If you need additional information, you can schedule an online meeting.