The Versatility of a Writer

“Should I generalize or specialize?”. This is a common question businesspeople ask themselves when they are selling a product or service. This is also true when you provide writing products and services. The obvious answer is to “first generalize until you organically specialize”.

Your Experience is Just Too Limited

Why is the recommendation generalize first then specialize true? It is because at the early stages of your writing career you are still feeling your way into the business. Most often you do not have clients yet and your experience is very limited during the initial stages that you do not know what your clients want to buy from you.

Unless you have established a good list of clients together with the information of what they usually purchase then you would be locked in a situation where you are not able to adjust your strategy to better make money from the specific clients who buy a lot from you and do more of the products and services they purchase.

The Content Mill Cycle

For example if you are just starting out and writes for an online content mill usually what happens is you write about any subject so as long as it pays money. This is not a slight against you and other such writers. On the contrary many writers are just happy being paid just to be able to write. The amount of compensation is secondary to them.

The bad part is that many writers get used to this situation and a vicious cycle of writing content for low pay (usually 0.01 cent) per word happens. The situation can be so bad that there are even content mills and content mill customers that are driving the payment price to as low as 0.001 cent per word.

The main critique about content mills is that they are dominated by job hunters from developing countries who make good money from even the small amounts paid by the job posters who are mainly from developed countries. This is not true at all. I have experience in the living standards of developing countries and I know the reality.

The reality is that 0.01 cent per word is way too low even for developing nation standards. Doubling it to 0.02 cent per word is what I consider a starter for writers living in developing nations. But as I have said the trend is the “Race to the Bottom” which means unless a writer escapes the content mills they would most often do varied work for small pay.

The Niches You Enjoy

One thing good however about doing varied writing jobs for content mills is that if you analyze your work you would find your writing niches. Your Writing Niches are characterized by the ease and quality you are able to do a writing job. You would notice this soon enough as you begin to notice that there are types of writing jobs that are more satisfying than others.

By now you could be thinking that this means “Writing What You Like About”. For example if you like cars then it means that you would enjoy writing about cars and your writing will be less of a chore but more of a delight. For the most part this is true but do not forget that your clients play an important part in your niche.

For example the romance niche is arguably the most popular and profitable writing niche in novels. There are many writers who write romance novels themselves or ghostwrite them. They may be doing romance ghostwriting themselves. There are also many sub-niches in romance like the historic and contemporary genre.

This means that if you are writing a romance novel you may be writing it for romance readers or to another romance author you ghostwrite for. Either way you are writing romance. So establish your niche. Do you want to be a well-known writer yourself or become a professional and well paid ghostwriter? The choice is yours and each requires a different strategy.

The Job Boards

Speaking of ghostwriting let us now go to jobs in Job Boards. In case you are not able to differentiate a job from a Content Mill from a job in a Job Board the main difference is that jobs in job boards are more specific and longer lasting. Companies usually advertise long-term positions in their companies in job boards instead of content mills.

For example if you look at the job board in ProBlogger (It is a popular website for bloggers) you would notice that most of the job advertisements are from companies who want mostly long term employees. FYI: Content Mill companies also advertise but on a much lesser degree.

Assuming that you have already have sufficient experience and knowledge of your skillset then you can start to apply for specific long term jobs that would ideally fit your writing niches. With job boards you can start to specialize and build a brand image of your writing where customers would know you of or you would like customers to know you because of.

For example there is a company with specific products like audio speakers. If you write for this company your job would be to write in all sorts of writing medium like blogs, advertisements, white papers, instruction manuals and so on. This would have the effect of making you well known in the audio speaker writing spectrum.

This is not at all possible if you are writing mostly for content mills where the authorship of the materials you have written would belong to the person who commissioned you the writing work. If you work for a company on an official basis which means you have a job title with that company your name could be known to the readers of your work in the company.

That is why with an official job for a company you become known as a writing expert in one subject area under different writing mediums. You can even specialize in a particular writing medium. For example going back to our audio speaker example you can specialize in writing blogs only for audio speakers or you can specialize only in writing advertisements and so on.

Your Versatility Must Have a Certain Range Only

By a certain point in your writing career you would have determined a certain range in the products and services you offer. No one can be a specialist in everything. Many people specialize in one or a few skills and market themselves as such. If you are still marketing yourself that you can write everything then based from my research on writers better than me you are not getting paid well.

As I have previously mentioned before the writing profession is extremely competitive as almost anyone who could read and write could call themselves a writer and advertise their services online on content mills and job boards. Those that has built a reputation could command higher prices just like those found in content creation job sites like Reedsy.

We are now getting to the book writing and similar writing jobs at this stage. This is a stage in a writer’s career where they go for the “Big One” which are in the long read written mediums which could easily be in the range of 10,000 words and higher. If you have not built a specialty by this stage then it is highly likely that you could not create these kinds of written mediums.

Let us have a look at a few examples:

John Grisham
Best known for his many legal thriller books of which many have been turned to movies. One of the earliest and probably most famous was “The Firm” which starred Hollywood star Tom Cruise. He mainly concentrated his range in legal thrillers but this does not mean that he stuck to courtroom dramas and legal proceedings only.

His diversified work involves stories about organized crime, big corporations, corruption in high places as well as tackling environmental issues among others. He knows where he is good at and he also knows what his readers want from him. This has been his winning approach to becoming one of the richest authors in America.

He has been trying his hand at writing thrillers for a much younger audience. This might be his move to explore new and fresh ideas in writing he is still firmly holding his ground on his winning formula. He continuous to read about new developments in the legal system as well as court cases that capture public attention.

Rick Riordan
Best known for his Percy Jackson series of which two movies have been made. He specializes in mythologies and of blending them to the current world. In his books ancient gods and creatures live on in the present day intermingling with human civilization and society. He specializes not only in Greek mythologies but in other mythologies as well like Egyptian.

His writing range which is mythological creatures in the present world and specialization which is writing books with young protagonists is also a winning formula. He is also a millionaire author. We have to take note that many authors also write about mythology creatures in present day settings but not all have young protagonists or even have the same success as he has.

George R. R. Martin
His complete name is George Raymond Richard Martin. He is of course well known as he is the author of Game of Thrones which is in the fantasy genre. He however has written other books in other genres such as horror and science fiction and has even written books combining the two which is horror science fiction.

He is also an accomplished writer for movies, television and video games. As can be seen He has a wide range which is fantasy, science fiction and horror. However these three (3) have a lot of similarities and as he has done even can be combined. Again he never deviates from his range and is also one of the richest millionaire authors around.

Stephen King
No need for introductions here but who has not heard of Stephen King the world’s greatest known horror writer. Just like George R. R. Martin he wrote fantasy, science fiction, horror and anything in between. Would you believe that he has written “The Running Man” which was loosely adapted in a movie starring action star Arnold Schwarzenegger?>

He also wrote The Shawshank Redemption (Prison Drama), The Green Mile (Fantasy), The Dark Tower (Fantasy), Carrie (Horror), Salem’s Lot (Horror), Cujo (Horror), The Shining (Horror), Dr. Sleep (Horror) and many others. The previously mentioned books were all turned into movies. There are still other books and other movies. As of 2020 he is worth approximately $500 million.

As can be seen he has a very wide range but specializes in fiction for the fantasy, science fiction and horror genre. He would not make the mistake of writing an all-out romance book because this is not what his readers want. Take note that romance books have always been a good seller even though during the time Stephen King is just starting out writing.

There was not even a profitable niche for his science fiction writing way back then but he knows what story niches he wants to specialize and be known for. In fact during his early years he used a pen name because he thought his readers would not like variety in the books he was selling. He was wrong. His readers easily identified his style of writing and bought his books anyway.

What They All Have
Each of these successful writers have a certain writing range of which they did not deviate from. Even J. K. Rowling the author of the successful Harry Potter series and its allied books have a certain range which they followed. A lot of this range is dictated by their readers. However before they found their successful range they also have to write without knowing if their readers would buy their writings.

Conclusion

When you are first starting out in your writing career and also with other careers you are a generalist who have not much skills and experience. Once you built up the experience and knowledge you begin to dictate the terms of what kind of writing you would like to work on. If you are lucky you would get well-known for your specialty.

If you do not create an image or a brand of specialty of which you would be known for then chances are you would be stuck in low paying writing jobs where the terms are not in your favor. One of these days you might get into a stage where you decide to write a book and a lot of its success will be dependent on how your readers see your brand writing image.

It is suggested that you establish your brand image and product range as early as you can.