For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By Genghis the Engineer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906405
The world has a massive market for freelance writing, which is something I've done in various publications for over 30 years (including Flyer, although not recently). With the Internet the upside is you can work anywhere, the downside is that everybody else in the world can compete against you in the same market! You can certainly be absolutely anywhere - many of the magazine editors I've written for I've never actually met, nor any of the current author-facing staff at my book publisher.

For myself it's mainly been magazine articles, with a few books. There is a massive market now for blogs, writing online content, etc - I don't claim to understand that aspect of the writing world, but plenty of people do.

Don't get too sidetracked by the appeal of trying to write a bestselling novel - that really is the way to starve slowly, unless you get really lucky. The real work is outside of longform fiction.

I write about aviation and engineering, and have in the past have have written on some sport topics. Presumably what you understand is farming, and presumably you know the magazines and websites you read on farming - all that content somebody was paid to write, but in a global market you can sell to magazines globally. There are many other topics out there of course, and you doubtless have other interests (one person many of us know here made an excellent living writing starting with consumer / shopping topics, then helicopter flying, and more recently writes a lot on cats!).

Getting into writing is a slow business, you need to learn the craft, probably do some unpaid writing for society magazines, learn the practices and your own strengths and weaknesses. Getting paid can be even slower sometimes, so you need to build up momentum.

But this is certainly something you can do involving no early starts and heavy lifting, total investment is time and a laptop with a decent keyboard (there are free word processors such as Libre Office, although most people pay for an MS Office Licence, and people who write books use a specialist book writing package such as Scrivener). And, I'd recommend, a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook, which has been my bible for my writing activities for a lot of decades. There are also various books and articles out there by successful writers about the craft of writing, many very good - whilst longform fiction isn't really my thing (I've been working on a novel for the last couple of years, but only really for my own enjoyment), I recently read and was very impressed by Stephen King's "On Writing, a memoir of the craft".

G
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By TheFarmer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906492
Bill McCarthy wrote:You could make a fair bit as an arms dealer the way things are shaping up :D


Watch out Bill - you’ll get the man-bun brigade waving their Satchels at you, and threatening to run you down in their Prius!
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By TheFarmer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1906494
shortstripper

Being blunt, you can put all your effort into something to make a few thousand pounds (after hours and hours of work), but if you want my advice, buy as much as you can of anything to do with Elon Musk right now. The man seems to be Midas.

I bought a decent chunk of Tesla shares 12 months ago. They’ve gone bonkers, and he’s making anything he touches instantly more valuable.

Just saying.






:viking: TheFarmer :viking:
Challenging woke snowflakes and their man-buns since 2022 :cyclopsani: