Learn to build a Career or Business based on Writing

The more you learn about the writing industry, the more opportunities you become aware of and the better prepared you are to take up those opportunities.

• There are plenty of aspiring, yet unemployed writers in the world - You Don't need to be One of them though.  
• There is a lot of work available for writers who are prepared to do it - often not what they aspired to do, but for those who grasp the opportunities, a very good pathway to achieving their ultimate ambitions. 

Some of the most successful writers today will have started out writing reports, boring bureaucratic documentation or advertising content for brochures. They honed their skills through that experience, and developed a strong reputation as a professional writer. For those who stayed the course, the opportunity to write books, magazine articles or screenplays may have grown from those humble beginnings.

If you want a career as a professional writer, start out small. Accept any job that pays (web site content, marketing materials or anything else). Earn income, and develop your craft. 

This course can help you onto that pathway, and boost your skills so as to improve your chances to move forward, and move faster.

If you have the potential to become a professional and commercially successful writer; this is an excellent place to begin.

Course Content

You must complete the following modules:

• Freelance Writing BWR102
• Creative Writing BWR103
• Technical Writing BWR301
• Editing I BWR106
• Editing Practice BWR305
• Research Project I BGN102
• Industry Project or Workshop I BGN103

You should also choose two from the following modules:

• Dramatic Writing BWR110
• Poetry BWR109
• Writing Fiction BWR105
• Editing II BWR302
• Publishing I BWR107  
• Business Studies BBS101
• Marketing Foundations VBS109
• Information Security Management VIT203
• Children’s Writing BWR104
• Advanced Freelance Writing BWR201 (Applied Writing) or Script Writing
• Advertising and Promoting BBS202
• Graphic Design or Introduction to Photography BPH100

Success Depends as Much on What is Written
as it Does on How Well it is Written

Fashions and fads come and go as time moves forward. Things that are popular one year can diminish in popularity in other years. Garden writers may for instance find a lot of opportunity to write about certain types of plants or gardens at one point in time, this may change as garden fashion changes, and a few years later they will be writing about totally different plants and gardens; or the demand for this type of writing may just decrease entirely. 

Travel, cooking, sporting and other types of writers similarly find the type of work available to them will increase and decrease at different points in time. As a cookery writer the style of cooking and emphasis is constantly changing. The ingredients and the combinations too are ever changing as well as the processes and procedures. The type of family or entertaining meals promoted as fashionable in the 1950’s as well as the ingredients have changed immensely. The change is not only related to fashions and fads, but also to the cultural makeup of a country and the traditional meals and methods of cooking those cultures bring when they come to live in a new country. 

The more diverse the culture, the more diverse the ingredients, meals and cooking styles. Cooking is one subject area for freelance writers which recently merged with other subject areas. Now we see numerous cooking shows where the compère or experts combine cooking and recipes with their travels to exotic countries or vice versa.  Suddenly the garden writer on fruits and vegetables becomes and expert at cooking the crops too; or in the case of Jamie Oliver the other way around. 

A good writer will watch the things that people are interested in, and monitor the trends in society.  They will be flexible enough to change what they write about, according to what is ‘hot’ from week to week and month to month.  You will also find this trend in article writing, column writing, travel writing and novels. Novels that are popular and sell well at a certain time may suddenly slump in sales and loose popularity.  Look at forensic writing. Forensic crime novels would not have existed at all prior to the advent of forensic science, so this is a market for books that has emerged; as the world changes so does literature change.

Successful Writers are Creative.

They want to write.  They have ideas. They may also want their work to be published, so it is about finding the right idea at the right time and judging who the best publisher for your writing is. 

The most successful writer is not always the one who produces the best work. Success can also have a lot to do with producing the right work, in the right format, and at the best point in time.

Creativity may Sometimes Count more than Writing Expertise

Some of the most successful writers are not necessarily the best writers. They may be high profile personalities; or someone with a good sense of what might sell and the connections to convince others to support their writing. With a high profile already established in the media in their speciality area, they are automatically given wide ranging opportunities to write for various publications. Then hopefully their writing promotes more sales for the magazines or online media they are writing for, which alternatively helps to further promote their profile on TV. Some presenters take the opportunity when they are in a high profile position in the media to launch into a writing career themselves using the publicity wheel/ exposure already there for them to build on. If you already have a career in the media then launching yourself as a freelance writer could be a possibility too.