ELMS MONEY TREE:
FREELANCE WRITING

I see many blog posts about how easy it is to make money as a freelance writer.

Hogwash.

I'm a pro writer. It's how I make my living. I've done freelance, contract & employment gigs for decades. NONE of it is easy money. #personalfinance 1/n

Pro tip that blog writers rarely mention: YOU MUST HAVE GOOD WRITING SKILLS TO GET PAID.

Yes, you can post to Twitter or your own blog for free. These are conversational venues & writing like you speak is perfectly acceptable, even preferred. This much isn't hard. #writing 2/

But pro writing is not speech. And the easier it is to read, odds are the harder it was to write. There is craft involved in structuring written communication for easy understanding & stickiness in memory. 3/

Another requirement for pay-worthy writing is CONTENT EXPERTISE.

This is especially crucial for non-fiction writers. Non-fiction venues get paid by their readers for the CONTENT, not how well written it is. It just happens that bad writing can make content incomprehensible. 4/

Even worse, good writing applied to bad content can make that content seem obvious & correct & easy to understand - but it can well be WRONG because the original source of the content forgot to mention a few crucial assumptions that "everyone knows". 5/

You need enough subject matter expertise to know WHAT KINDS OF CONTENT SHOULD BE THERE. You need a mental model of what's needed so you can detect what's missing. 6/

For the rest of this thread, I'm going to be talking about FACTUAL content delivered thru some mix of text & graphics/video.

Fiction & screenplays are entirely different domains from nonfiction text-based content. Everything about producing & marketing these is different. 7/