The Low Barrier To Entry For Writers
Nearly everyone who has considered being a writer has heard some variation on the phrase, “Everyone wants to be a writer.” It could come in a thousand different forms. Here are a few I’ve personally heard:
- “If making money writing were that easy, everyone would do it!”
- “Everyone wants to be a writer.”
- “Why would a company pay you to write when they could do it themselves?”
- “Your job is going to get stolen by Indian Freelancers or the Robot Rebellion!”
- “What makes you think your writing is good enough?”
- “Most writers only earn five-thousand dollars a year.”
I had to stop myself, because I realise that I’ve come a lot more of these variations than I thought.
At some point, I’ll go into this in more detail (I know this, because I’ve spent the day writing about this subject for another project,) but this topic will quickly address the “Everyone is a writer” idea and hopefully make very short work of it.
Let’s Talk About “Everyone Can Write”
Not everyone is a writer. A lot of people simply don’t have the language skills nor the psychological awareness needed to craft copy that does the job it needs to. Whilst someone could have spoken English every day of their lives, it doesn’t mean they can pick up the phone and cold call someone to sell them a solar panel. The same is true of copywriting.
Of course, then there are the competition who haven’t spoken English every day of their lives. I’ve already written an article about outsourcers from elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself. Check the article out by following this link.
Furthermore, even if everyone could write, which they can’t, not everyone would write, and they wouldn’t write everything. I mean, everyone can buy their own food but restaurants still exist. Let’s talk about that.
Writing Is About Providing A Service With A Return On Investment
There are countless restaurants, artists and decorators. There are countless accountants and lawyers and salespeople. None of them need a writer to help them. To be honest, nobody needs any of these services either. Yet these services both exist and also hire writers.
Any of those businesses could hypothetically do their own copywriting. But they’ll hire a writer because a good copywriter is going to make them more than they spend, whilst saving the time and effort needed to do the job themselves. Essentially, when a writer acts like a business person, (here’s a mind-blowing surprise,) their business works exactly like any other business does.
If a copywriter charges £1000 for a landing page that makes £10000, then that’s a victory for any business person. It also means that it’s highly unlikely the aforementioned copywriter will ever be out of work for very long.
But technically, anybody can guarantee a massive return on investment, right?
Low Barrier To Entry… But Not Much Competition
I know somebody who is in the process of training to become a lawyer. Said person originally did a non-law degree, and then a conversion course. After that, they had to do a Legal Practice Course. Then they got a training contract which will take them two years to complete. Then they’ll have to work their way up in a reasonably decent paying job (assuming they get one) and do the corporate ladder jumping thing.
(Sorry if I’ve got that wrong. I was paying attention, honestly.)
This is probably worth it, because as we all know, lawyers get paid pretty well and their salary is enough to pay back the time they’ve lost training and the student loans they’ve accrued. However, there’s a spanner in the works: What if the job market contracts and those positions are no longer guaranteed?
There’s a lot of possible bottlenecks at each training stage, and no job is ever really guaranteed.
Now, you might wonder why I’m talking about this.
The reason I’m talking about this is that law is a very, very competitive field. Whilst people will say “anyone can write” and use that argument to state the competitiveness of the field, the two aren’t correlated for a few reasons.
Law = high barrier to entry. (You have to get good grades, do all the extra-curriculars and you probably can’t have dreadlocks and wear Hawaiian shirts to work.)
Writing = low barrier to entry. (You can wear whatever you want… or nothing, if that’s what you choose.)
Law = Competitive in the sense that there are massive bottlenecks and you can’t earn any money without qualification and when times get tough you’re competing with more people for fewer places that are finite.
Writing = Competitive (?!) but there aren’t any bottlenecks, you can earn money pretty much immediately without any qualifications and when times get tough, you can apply your writing skills in pretty much any other industry or for any other word-based application.
Most importantly, when we’re talking about barrier to entry, the low barrier for writing is helpful due to this comparison:
Law: When times get tough, you’re going to be competing for the fewer jobs available against people who are at least as smart, driven and qualified as you, and this is true of every stage in the career path, from would-be undergraduate to summer-internships to partnerships when you’re an old person.
Writing: Your competition will probably drop out after six months even if you don’t do anything. Most of your competition won’t have both writing skills and business skills in the first place, and a large amount of your competitors probably aren’t literate in English either. If you concentrate on other projects and build other writing based businesses, none of that will matter anyway because you can enter and exit the copywriting “industry” when you want/need to.
Final Thoughts
Apologies to all the lawyers here, and sorry for any inaccuracies.
(P.S. If you’re a law student, don’t just drop out of law school after reading this; I’m just a stupid writer who probably has dreadlocks and thinks Hawaiian shirts are cool.)
That said, I’d like to think that this side-by-side diatribe has illustrated why, as a writer or potential writer, you don’t have to worry about the fact that everyone is going to try and be a writer. Ultimately, there’s a low barrier to entry when it comes to writing, but that doesn’t mean that freelance writing is a particularly competitive field. Even when it is competitive, the level of competition isn’t necessarily high, nor is that as much a problem as it is in industries with tighter regulation or qualification/experience requirements.