How To Become A Successful Writer
Making a living in the writing industry in 2025
I’m becoming less naive in my old age, believe it or not (says the 39-year-old me …)
It’s utterly fascinating, isn’t it?
The journey we take on the ride of life. The twists, the milestones, the things we achieve and also, many times, fail at.
I for one, never thought I’d be a writer. It never even crossed my mind, not once. I was too busy working as a radiographer sonographer, having studied for over 5 years to get to where I was! And I enjoyed it.
But then I fell pregnant with our first born, and as a form of journaling, I wrote down my thoughts. It was a lot.
My thoughts became a blog, believe it or not, and I loved sharing what I was experiencing.
Needless to say, that blog now still continues, and generates over 20k reads per month! And hundreds of pounds in ad revenue to boot.
That blog led me to being headhunted by a PR agency who wanted me to write briefs and bio’s and press releases and other sorts of necessary publications.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Though copywriting?
I did some extra training for that, and that’s now my bread and butter day to day work. I drop my children at school, head home, open my laptop, and write. For a solid 6-8 hours, mixed in with a bit of design work and content production.
A Writing World
“Everyone thinks they can write!” says one of my clients recently.
“The reality is, they can’t!” she continues. “What is happening to the marketing industry? Everyone calls themselves an expert, yet all they do ask ChatGPT or watch a few YouTube videos.”
I pause for a second before responding, calculating my thoughts carefully.
“I guess, maybe, you can learn the technical aspects of writing? But writing stories, creative writing, expressionism, cadence, rhythm etc; I can’t see how everyone who calls themselves a writer can do those things?”
Was my response PC enough?
Who knows. I skirted round the topic big time, but in truth, I did partly agree with her.
The reality of the writing life is this: there’s a shedload of people online calling themselves ‘writers’
But they’re not.
In my view, writing is something you get into simply for the love of it (like I did) or because you write something online and get lucky, a few gazillion views let’s say, then some big shot publisher finds your work, and wants more of it (kind of what happened to me actually.)
How To Be A Successful Writer
The honest truth for all writers is this:
“You need to be something special to get paid to write these days”
Therefore, these points below are tips from me to help you get there.
You cannot afford silly grammar errors, typos, or mistakes, so edit your work properly before hitting ‘publish’
You cannot rely on AI (it’s honestly so noticeable if you’ve used AI - it’s laughable) so please for the love of God edit whatever it gives you. Add your own tone, cadence, the whole shebang.
You need a distinct style and voice off the cuff. It needs to ‘be’ you!
You need to offer something far bigger and better to your clients than the competition does in order to get hired.
You must be enjoyable to read. And captivating. And engaging!
You must practise writing DAILY. Once a week isn’t enough. It needs to be something you do a lot of.
You need to enjoy writing! Else you’ll go mad.
You need to test different writing niches. Some I recommend are: medical writing (if you have a medical background) professional blogging, ghostwriting and copywriting.
These are purely my thoughts; of course, you’ll have your own opinion, and I value that, so feel free to pop a comment below.
But one thing’s for sure.
If everyone starts calling themselves ‘writers’, then what actually happens to the prestige of the profession?
Does it degrade it? I hope not, but who knows.
What I do know is, you make your own success.
So if you want to ‘be a writer’ make sure you blinkin’ well develop you’re own style, and start publishing your words everywhere you can!
You can never write too much, so go on, get to it!