6 Big Mistakes to Avoid When You Write for a Living

You’ve always wanted to write full-time and make a living from it, all because you love to write. And, at long last, you’ve made it happen. But you’re also asking questions and wondering how to get it right, to quickly become a success story.

Well, the first thing you need to understand is that your writing is no longer a hobby. Instead, you’re now a professional writer and you need to treat your writing as a business, since you write for a living.

And the second thing you need to do is identify and stay away from mistakes that are big enough to limit or even prevent your success as a professional writer. These mistakes are too expensive for someone who writes for a living, so it’s better to avoid them.

Ready to find out the kinds of mistakes we’re talking about?

Let’s take a closer look at six big writing and business mistakes to avoid when you write for a living.

Our Favorite Content in 2018

As a collective of freelancers who literally live and breathe content, we always have recommendations to give. While we always have our year-end roundup of books, this year, with the relaunch of Writers’ Rough Drafts, we decided to add podcasts to the mix.

As is CYC roundup tradition, we’ve each chosen our top two pieces of content that we consumed this year and written a bit about it. Of course, we have those honorable mentions that we all slip in at the end.

So, if you’re looking to expand your mind or expand your content intake in 2019, definitely take a look at some of the stuff we’ve pre-screened.

How to Write For Your Business if You Are Not a Writer

You’ve heard every piece of advice about how to make your business more visible. And yet, you keep stalling over the cheapest and easiest way to build that visibility: keeping your website updated with regular blog posts.

What’s holding you back? I can hear you now: “I am not a writer! I am a doer!” Guess what? You don’t have to be a writer to keep a blog for your business.

Moreover, you also won’t have to hire anyone to do it for you. No one knows your business and your customers better than you do, so you’re the best person to write for your business.

I can assure you, if you have all that knowledge in your head, you can make this knowledge flow through your fingers and keyboard onto the screen and onto the World Wide Web, which is the right place for it to be, as people look for everything online.

Even if you are a small local business owner, you must be searchable to attract new customers, engage with the existing ones, and build trust for your brand.

When You Should Listen to Your Inner Critic (and When You Shouldn’t)

There are some days when I open up an older rough draft of a story I worked on several months ago, assuming it will be terrible, only to see that it isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

When I was studying creative writing, some days I would take what I thought was a perfectly written piece to a workshop session, only for it to be torn apart by my tutor and fellow students. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine whether my inner critic is right or wrong.

The “inner critic” is the nagging voice inside our heads that judges our own work. If it becomes too loud, it can drown out all other thoughts and drain a writer’s self-confidence. In the worst cases it discourages people from ever writing again or trying to get their work published.