Ideas about starting an ACADEMIC FREELANCE WRITING career

Hey my name is LOCO,
i am an academic writer looking for academic writing opportunities especially on line could somebody help with any ideas or sites please. Is it hard to find a job as an academic editor, writer, or researcher? My English is not great, I know, but some students may require ESL level too.

First, learn how to use commas. Then ask again.

Hey pheelyks, why don't you lend or sell him your Uvo account now that you don't sound like taking $5-$7 a page anymore.

I pissed off UVO something awful when I left, and my account is no longer valid. I also fail to see how this is any business of yours.

It is definitely none of my business that you had a UVO account or that you could be willing to lend or sell it. I just thought I could hustle on behalf of a needy brother, who comes across as a genuine freelancer in need of an account. Anyway, I also had an account with them a while back but gave up on them because of their sweatshop wage rates.

during the last busy season, academia-research.com had many orders go past their due dates, because of the sheer quantity of orders vs. supply of skilled writers. which, if you are not, they will still hire you.

for more freelance companies you can use the search engine

I NEED AN ACCOUNT IS IT STILL ACTIVE ?

[Moved from]: Tips for a New Start of an academic writing business

I would like to academic writing business, is there any ready site, software or developer please advice me.

I "advice" you to leave, incompetent.

I think there are too many of them already out there for you to make a living from this

WB, why do you always feel that this industry belongs to a few people? I must say that the industry will never negotiate with you when turning against you. Get civilized and let us see your being EFL turn into TFL (Thinking First Learner) because it is worse to be a TSL than an ESL.

English, please.

In all honesty, I have to agree that it's not worth starting a new essay company now.

I used to work for one such company (Yes, as an employee, no, not as a writer, and no, I'm not going to mention which one) and I'm still in contact with some of the guys who are still there, and it's clear that the recent growth in competition is making it more and more difficult to claim market share.

IMO, this is bad all round - more competition means it's hard for students to tell the scams and the legits apart, more competition means more discounts/lower prices - bad for writers, and lower profit margins, which are bad for the companies...

So yeah, my advice would be to find a new line of work....

[Moved from]: Writing for a company but I feel it's time to move on and try freelance...

I have been writing under a company for two years now but i really feel its time to move on and try freelance, can anyone please share any insights on freelancing especially how to land clients? Thanks

Try a free ad on essaychat. It seems to work very well. If the clients are happy with your work, they always seem to come back for a repeat performance.

Thanks 99Essays for the insight will sure try that. Regards

I know there is a lot of work out there for freelance writers, especially by college students like myself. If paired with a company that is successful at landing jobs for you, there should be plenty of work out there!

I agree with u "Advanced" the best way to search is on google. I was lucky to find one :P..be sure that u search through 3-4 pages of google as mny first pagers r through deliberate marketing....

hpe this helps....

lucy

@Writer2012 You can also try networking with other independent writers so that you can get referrals from them when they are swamped with orders. the independent writers here are the kind who do that when the situation requires it.

To be clear, I am not one of the writers that can be contacted for such a referral because I am not a freelance writer.

Neither do I endorse any writer in particular. I'm just here to offer my thoughts on how else you can promote yourself and get jobs in the process. Don't forget the power of social media. These days, independent writers find themselves having to do multiple social media work in order to gain visibility and grow their networks. It isn't uncommon to see an independent writer with a Twitter handle and an FB or Instagram profile, linked up to other writer websites, blogs, and social media accounts as a part of self and cross promotion. While there is no guarantee that you will gain clients this way, it is a method of keeping yourself visible and letting people know you are available to work.

But be cautious - now is not the best time to start your own academic writing business. The market is more than saturated with legitimate and illegitimate academic outsourcing cites, independent writers of the legal and scam kind proliferate the social media world, and there just isn't any way to accurately tell them apart at this point. The students are jittery and not really trusting of the writing sites and independent writers because they have been burned a number of times by the scam operations. It would be best for you to not start an academic business that requires a storefront. Rather, you should just work on getting into one of the academic outsourcing companies or, kicking off an independent writing career as the others here have done.

That would be the safest way to start your career. You get to write, face some payment problems but still manage to get paid over time, and you won't be putting your own money out into the investment. If you are just looking to get your feet wet in the business, there are other ways to do it than immediately putting a huge investment into a website for your writing company.

If your English is not great, then you have no business being in the academic writing business. Even ESL students require ENL writers because they want to get the best grades possible for their papers. Hiring an ESL writer will not help them achieve that. I don't care that you think an ESL student may require your services. That is insulting to the ESL student. It is tantamount to saying that ESL students don't deserve the best quality of work from their writers. With an attitude like that, I doubt that you could work for any company. You are obviously just out for the money. You are not dedicated to providing quality service at an affordable cost. Don't ambition to work in this field just because you think it is easy and you can pass your work off to unsuspecting clients. The seemingly unsuspecting ones are actually the ones who demand the most out of their writer and will never settle for an ESL writer.

I don't understand why people here are throwing so much criticism on ESL writers. I, for one, am an ESL writer. Although, I have met people who would say that I'm not because I'm naturally bilingual (we've always used English in school, but we speak our native tongue almost all the time - with a few exceptions). The point is, it's not because he's an ESL writer that he can't be an academic writer - it's because of a lot of practice. I've met ENL writers who are not as good as some ESL writers. If an ESL writer perseveres and works hard, it is definitely possible for him to compete at an ENL level. However, mentioning that, I think that you should consider working on fundamentals of the language before mentioning doing academic work. This is a very competitive field. If you're competing against natives, you might as well sharpen your skills.

Nobody criticizes ESL writers who admit to being ESL writers; the criticism is reserved for those who try to conceal that fact, arguing that it "doesn't matter" and that customers don't have a legitimate right to know in advance. Your writing isn't bad, but there are plenty of mistakes in most of your posts, most of which relate to your being ESL. For example, just in this one post:


We would say throwing at, never throwing "on," unless you're talking about water or a blanket, and the intention is to benefit the person..


We don't start sentences with although followed by a comma; we say however or nevertheless.


This may not necessarily relate to ESL, but what you mean here is that the person could use more practice. You'd never say that someone isn't good at something "because of a lot of practice."


This is not a construction that NES would use for at least 2 reasons.


The word you want here is considering, or contemplating, not "mentioning"; and if the point is that someone shouldn't be saying that he is an academic writer, the phrase you want is either claiming, or representing himself, or holding himself out as, or calling himself. One of the hallmarks of (even good) ESL writing is that you tend to latch onto a single word or phrase (such as mention) and then overuse it in places where it's understandable as a very loose synonym, but definitely not the right word for what you mean. "Thus" and "thusly" are also frequently misused and overused in this way by even pretty good ESL writers.

Your English writing is good, but it definitely illustrates why even pretty good ESL writing is almost always still recognizable as ESL writing. Your other posts on this forum contain some much less subtle and much worse mistakes than these, but I'm not in the habit of criticizing other people's English grammar unless the topic they're commenting on actually is grammar or unless they are ESL and arguing that there's no reason anybody should care about whether his writer is ESL or NES. I can point some of them out if you're interested in learning, but I'm not going to do it just to embarrass you maliciously.

Please share your opinion

Hello, I am an experienced academic writer and I am new in this portal. I have started my career as an academic writer in an agency in my country. Now I am willing to start my career as a freelance academic writer. Can anyone help me how can I proceed???

There's really no blanket advice that anyone on this forum can give you in order to assist you in setting up your own agency. I would only recommend that you research prior if this is truly the industry that you wish to take a part of. Because of the influx of scam-based companies that have infiltrated this platform, I would heavily recommend that you dive into how you can legitimize and set yourself apart. Aside from this, have you already built an audience that would assist you for your first orders? If not yet, I suggest doing so immediately.

I came here to meet and share my experience with fellow academic writers. Academic writing is something I do full-time and I treasure every minute of it. While I have had a consistent flow of orders in the past one year, I'm now getting worried because my main client is completing her studies on September and it might take me a while before finding other clients. I was considering signing up for an essay company and I would like your suggestions on the one's I should try. Thank you!

If you're that dependent on a single client and that worried about being able to find others, consider offering that client some kind of reward for referring friends to you.

I still ponder on how these referrals truly work. Oftentimes, clients are afraid of being found out that they are utilizing these sites because of how closeted the industry is. If people referred you as an academic writer, it already proclaims that they've availed of the services. This can be a sticky situation for most people.

I just received one two days ago. Someone emailed me saying that I'd provided several projects to a friend of hers last year. I asked who the friend was and she responded with a name I recognized. She paid for a few MBA application essays that night and I wrote and delivered them yesterday. Initially, she waited three days before responding to my question about who her friend is and I'd already figured it was another example of an entirely different curiosity: Namely, people sometimes contact me saying that they've been referred by a friend who already used me.

Only because they mention it, I usually respond by asking who the friend was. Much more often than not, they never respond at all and I never hear from them again. This has always puzzled me, because it's not like I'm running some club that only accepts members by referral; I only ask because they mention it and, sometimes, it's helpful to me to review my correspondence with the friend, because I've learned that appreciative easy clients tend to refer friends who are somewhat like themselves in that regard while unappreciative difficult clients tend to refer friends who are also pains in the ass. But they have no way of knowing that and, unlike the referring friend, the referred friend really has no incentive to maintain anonymity with respect to the referrer since the referrer has (obviously) already disclosed having used me to the new client. So, that little bit of weirdness around new prospective referred clients who often disappear after I simply ask who referred them has always seemed somewhat strange to me.

ESL students do not take kindly to being looked down upon. They are actually some of the most critical clients a freelance writer can have. They would rather hire ENL writers than ESL writers. They want to come across as intelligent and able to clearly explain themselves in written English, even if their spoken English tells the teacher otherwise. The ESL students know that they can draft, edit, revise, and finalize a written paper to have near perfect English grammar or perfect English grammar. The teacher will think that they are at least capable of writing coherently in English. An ESL writer cannot portray himself as such, which means an "acceptable" ESL writer may find that he will not be hired as often nor be able to charge as highly as an ENL writer.