"If I say too much about the glut of writers and all those unpaid bloggers at HuffingtonPost.com, my son will shut down. So, Jane, how do I steer him in a more marketable direction?'
Readers who are parents keep contacting me with that question. Ten years ago what would have worried them was if their child was determined to try acting. Now, in their way of assessing the marketplace, writing is equally a path to unemployment and eventual heartache.
The good news is that, unlike acting, the situation isn't binary: write or not write. A writer can do all those creative gigs like blogging for Gawker or getting a piece published in NEW YORK MAGAZINE and still be producing the kinds of writing which earn decent money.
Those kinds include anything to do with financial services. The hourly for that usually starts about $60. A few years ago I earned $100 an hour from an alternate investment firm. Another lucrative field is pharmaceutical. That area is broad. You can be doing copywriting for the consumer or detail the movement of the developing drug through the regulatory process. Another solid field is IT, be it cloud computing or comparing software packets.
Since the situation isn't either/or, youth is less likely to balk when you suggest they take a few seminars on the equity markets, pharmaceutical development, and the common areas in IT. It will help if you don't rant about your children's eagerness to work for free in the more glam niches in writing. The trick is for them to do both - the freebies and building the credentials in what does pay.
Of course, we all recognize the flood of underemployed writers into an already crowded marketplace.
They range from over-50 and pushed out to the ones who will be assessed as redundant at AOL. Had most of us writers, even those of us making a good living, returned to choose a career from scratch, it's unlikely it would not be in the field of communications.
Me? I would have learned the deli trade from my Italian immigrant aunt and uncle in the Italian section of Jersey City. They retired in their early 50s - and that was decades ago.
Comments