Alternative jobs for a writer?

July 2, 2021 7:50 AM

I have been a writer/journalist for the last five years and now want a "real" job. But what?

I have been a successful freelance writer and author for the last five years. I sold and wrote a nonfiction book that did really well with a major house, foreign translations, NYT review, NPR, the works. I've also written for a lot of major outlets (NYTimes, Atlantic, etc.) I also frequently teach nonfiction workshops for adults.

I say this not to brag but to tell you where I am! Now that my book is done, I am totally stuck. Freelance writing pays so little, and yet it's hard to get pitches accepted even with my time in the field. I don't have another book idea to get another deal. And royalties/advances are so small anyway, you really need to do another job.

For various reasons, this lifestyle worked well for me for a few years, even with the low pay. But now I want to move in another direction -- but what? If I were doing it all again, I would have been an academic (I know the caveats -- it's too late for me now anyway). I do like teaching in universities, but can't imagine teaching in high schools but maybe I could be convinced? In my ideal world, I would have some kind of staff position with a magazine, but that seems so far away right now.

I have no interest in working in publishing, unfortunately.

Are there any jobs that would really suit this skillset? Preferably with a salary? I also have a great undergrad degree and an MFA. I'll leave location out as I am really flexible.

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (12 answers total)

Technical writing and in-house editing. My current job is to edit an intranet for a tech company and I am very happy. I got it because I had some tech writing in my freelance portfolio, had taught workshops and had managed a basic intranet once. I'm planning to move into tech writing and knowledge management next. I rewrite tech people's writing and organise information to make it accessible and clear.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:56 AM on July 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

I work for a tech company that has Marketing Communications Managers who work on blog posts, press releases, and long-form content such as white papers and customer case studies. The work is a mix of writing original text, repurposing/remixing text from other sources, and editing text written by subject matter experts in the company.
posted by neushoorn at 8:10 AM on July 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

Since it appeals to you: It isn't necessarily too late for you to have an academic career with your impressive CV and an MFA, plus some teaching experience under your belt. You're not going to be hired as a scholar of literature but as a successful writer. Many large English depts. with creative writing programs as a subset, or journalism programs within media depts etc., just don't require a PhD for their creative writing/ journalism / creative nonfiction faculty. Look into becoming a professor of practice, if not a tenure track regular faculty member at a major university. You'd have insurance and regular (if modest) income. And community. Also: teaching writing on the high school level is, indeed, really rewarding. I taught in a high school before getting a PhD and becoming an academic and I sometimes miss it.
posted by nantucket at 8:15 AM on July 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

Copywriter for a marketing agency? I'm not sure of what you consider low pay, but a range of $50-100 per hour for freelance writing is typical and realistic.
posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 8:58 AM on July 2, 2021

Press office/PR/media for an organisation you believe in. More commercial operations might want more of a typical PR background and want you to be doing tedious things like media strategies and forward plans, but if you're lucky you can find somewhere that's more focused on quality content, and your ability to spot a news line and write well will be valuable to them.

I left journalism about 10 years ago and have a job like this, which includes producing a quarterly members' magazine where I'm the only person involved (plus a freelance designer) so kind of feels almost like a staff magazine job with none of the stress. The mag is only a small part of it, it's mostly social media, website stories etc. I love it, it uses my skills well, I learn a lot about the area I work in, and have none of the stress of being a newspaper reporter.
posted by penguin pie at 9:00 AM on July 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

I run a research center for a major professional services firm, and have a number of writers who work for me who have very similar backgrounds to yours. They're fulltime positions, paying well over $100K plus retirement, benefits, etc.

I'm not currently hiring, but I know McKinsey and Accenture both are (saw postings for their roles yesterday).
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 9:06 AM on July 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Any kind of admin job that isn’t financial. Often writing skills are important in these roles, but they won’t drain your writing energy if you want to keep a couple of projects going on the side.
posted by Phanx at 9:24 AM on July 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Universities typically have news & media folks on staff--an alumni magazine, press releases / press kits for announcing neat research findings, etc.

If your work has even lightly touched on tech stuff (or could, as a way of getting into a particular domain), product management is a role that involves a ton of communication--understanding customer needs, reading up on industry trends, writing up a business case, writing requirements, getting ready for a launch by working with marketing and tech writers, etc. It does usually involve some domain knowledge (e.g. what are the features of X products that basically do the same thing), but the actual job can be a lot of things, often based on the strengths of the person in the role.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:29 AM on July 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Internal communications is an option, in addition to marketing/external/combined comms roles. I'm in that industry myself as a writer (of fiction) on the side, and I increasingly see job ads looking for some variation on "corporate storytelling" and roles that want people who can specifically mine the organisation for relevant insights that can be turned into internal or external content - I suspect those kinds of roles would be very relevant for someone with your journalism & non-fiction experience.

Personally I prefer internal to external comms because I find it a lot easier to be motivated to write for & support an audience I already know pretty intimately, rather than a wider external audience that I can't hope to know as well, but with a journalism background I suspect you may not find that an issue.
posted by terretu at 10:11 AM on July 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

I work in healthcare/pharma marketing/advertising, and I’ve heard it said that good writers in this industry are worth their weight in gold. You’s have to learn the specifics of the legal and regulatory issues surrounding pharma, but that shouldn’t take long.
posted by ejs at 11:46 AM on July 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Design/technical fields involving writing include content strategy and UX writing. You might enjoy those if you like putting yourself in other people's shoes and thinking about what words they'd use to search for something or what an error message should say so they understand what went wrong.

Book suggestions:
The Elements of Content Strategy (free online version of the book)
Writing is Designing

You can also look at the conference websites for Confab and Button. If any of their topics grab you, then you might like this area of work.
posted by cadge at 12:15 PM on July 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Consider hitting up think tanks and research centers like national labs, or universities. They all have news departments and need writer-type writers to translate the academese and technical stuff into interesting widely readable news pieces. It can be interesting work too. I almost took a job at Fred Hutch, a cancer research center where they were building a whole in-house news team to cover lots of topics and also do internal communications and so on.

I'm happy in my job (also a writer) but have thought about this when things seemed less stable than they are now! So I'll be mining this thread for ideas for when the gravy train comes to a halt.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:45 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]