Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
byrnehobart.medium.com
Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#2My partner is a freelance copywriter / editor. Despite all the talk about how AI is going to take her job, she’s more in demand than ever. She has companies begging her to come on full time, but makes good coin freelancing and gets to set her own schedule that way. One of the challenges I observe is that a lot of people get hired into marketing roles because they are high-energy project managers - but they don’t know how to write, ironically. So there is an opportunity to be the grunt behind the scenes cranking out all the different types of content needed in corporate America. Also - in many industries there are rules and regulations about what you can say, how and when you can say it. Knowing those nuances also adds to your value.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#3(2018). By someone who wrote clickbait for a living. Crushed when search engine companies figured out how to filter clickbait better.
All this is pre-GPT, too.
"So, tech bloggers can become venture capitalists. But what do politics and entertainment bloggers become? Mostly alcoholics."
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#4My partner is a freelance copywriter / editor. Despite all the talk about how AI is going to take her job, she’s more in demand than ever. She has companies begging her to come on full time, but makes good coin freelancing and gets to set her own schedule that way. One of the challenges I observe is that a lot of people get hired into marketing roles because they are high-energy project managers - but they don’t know…
My wife's employer has experimented with ChatGPT writing. Their experience has been it's way slower to use it in any but very limited ways, and having non-writers/editors try to use it to do the job of writers it is a disaster.
I think you need just the right combo of task and worker to actually see a notable speed improvement from it... unless the job is "write huge amounts of bullshit", which some jobs truly are (astroturfing, certain kinds of advertising or marketing, scams).
[EDIT] I should add that this isn't preventing them from hyping the effects externally. I'd be wary of companies' claims re: the effectiveness of AI. They're all afraid of being seen as having missed the train, even if the train's not really going where they need to go.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#5For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books.
[By one year after publishing my first book](https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme...), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, because my audience has only grown since then and the book is more general purpose.
I might be an outlier in that I have already built up a large audience from blogging about math. But the benefit of self-publishing, aiming your work at folks with disposable income, and having a niche all seem to make a full-time writing job quite straightforward.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#6For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books. [By one year after publishing my first book]( https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme... ), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, b…
Another option is to write documentation for opensource projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#7For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books. [By one year after publishing my first book]( https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme... ), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, b…
Another option is to write documentation for opensource projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.
I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from doing this. But there's some cachet to having your name on a book cover compared to being an unsung writer of docs. (Self-published vs. through a publisher is another more complicated discussion with both pros and cons on both sides.)
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#8My partner is a freelance copywriter / editor. Despite all the talk about how AI is going to take her job, she’s more in demand than ever. She has companies begging her to come on full time, but makes good coin freelancing and gets to set her own schedule that way. One of the challenges I observe is that a lot of people get hired into marketing roles because they are high-energy project managers - but they don’t know…
My wife's employer has experimented with ChatGPT writing. Their experience has been it's way slower to use it in any but very limited ways, and having non-writers/editors try to use it to do the job of writers it is a disaster. I think you need just the right combo of task and worker to actually see a notable speed improvement from it... unless the job is "write huge amounts of bullshit", which some jobs truly are (a…
I've experimented myself and it's been vaguely helpful to create some stubs and to provide some boilerplate a bit faster than I could have generated myself. But I can't say I've found it genuinely useful for anything I want to be even workmanlike product on the other end.
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#9For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books. [By one year after publishing my first book]( https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme... ), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, b…
Just a general question, how do you know the topic is even worth writing a book about? Like spending a year working on it then watch the book fail. That would really suck. I guess in general, how do you know you have something interesting and captivating to say.
Edit:for the weird auto completes
Re: Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
#10Unfortunately he saves the best bits for the very end.
- There's definitely a conflict between being entertainment/provocative/etc. and "Just the facts maam."
- For most people writing is most valuable in support of something else. Don't write a tech book for the royalty checks. But because of some combination of learning about a topic/you want to/it will enhance your career.