Are Writers Evolving To or From the Academic Research Field?

I've been wondering about the careers of academic freelance writers / editors. Is this line of work an early or a final 'career destination' to most of them? It'd be interesting to know how many percent of 'academic writers' have started their online writing careers as an 'academic' writer/researcher versus those who evolved from a different niche (eg. content / advertising / creative).

I personally think only the most talented writers may be successful in the serious academic research field and new or inexperienced writers may be better off starting as content writers than starting as academic research writers. Too many new writers assume that the academic research field is easy (well, it may be if you copy-paste or paraphrase stuff instead of doing actual in-depth research and custom writing). What's your view on that (from experience ;)?

Truth be told, I did not even know about the academic writing field when I graduated with an English degree. I fancied myself a potential copywriter for an ad agency since I had some family connections that could have helped me enter that field. After searching for work for about a year, I ended up as a production assistant for a concert and special events producer. It was good work that found me hobnobbing with some of the notable names in the field of arts and music. The most memorable experience I had in this field was working with the Vienna Boys Choir when they performed at a Christmas concert produced by the company I was working for. Eventually, I moved on to script writing for the same company before I finally quit because the schedule was so rigorous, I was burned out physically and emotionally spent. It was during this time that I started writing short stories and novels which were picked up for publication online.

It was during this time when I began seeing targeted ads on Google about starting an "academic writing career". I found myself piqued and made a few inquiries at a few companies. A few tests and account creation procedures later, I found myself hired by the 3 companies that I applied to. I then moved from company to company, trying to find the best employer out there (easier said than done) and finally settled at one company. Eventually though, I began to feel restless again and tried to find a new career path. That is when I found myself in the academic consultancy business, which is my current career description. I find myself quite happy in this particular business. It is something that I evolved into because of my long term experience in the events production field as well as being an academic writer and researcher.

So, based upon my experience, I don't consider academic research and writing as a final career destination. It is only one of the many steps towards evolving in this particular field. After gaining ample , relevant, and important, experience, one will be qualified for more demanding and highly specialized jobs in the field of academic research and writing. This is the main reason that I am no longer interested in gaining writing clients. It is not my cup of tea because I am already beyond that field of work. I am now a specialized academic consultant. I am just at this forum whiling my time away from my current work.

Judging on your comments here, I can tell you earned your English degree with honors :) I wonder if there's money in short stories or even novels; these days it may be easy to publish (especially online), but I'd be wary about the actual number of sales without professional advertising (which would likely cost more than the profit from sales).

Academic writing is never easy, mainly because it is not just paraphrasing some content downloaded from the net neither it is just a description of a place of product. Academic writing needs the writer to look more deeply into the phenomena and understand it, measure it and analyse it, which is what makes it very challenging but interesting at the same time.

@Major thank you for the compliment. At the time when I was engaged in online publication, the field was relatively new and with few competitors. I managed to make a decent income from Kindle sales and independent releases. The sales are reliable because Amazon tracks the sales for me. Not too long ago, I also affiliated myself with PayHip for my sales and promotion. These are my aggressive promotional methods that helped to augment my cross promotion deals with other novelists who are always more than happy to help each other out in terms of keeping our promotional costs down.

While I still write with the hopes of bigger sales and recognition for my nom de plume, I've found the market has become increasingly competitive and saturated. That's why I changed my mindset regarding my novels publications from wanting to write the next bestseller (series) to simply writing for the joy of it. If I sell a few along the way then I've achieved my career goal in that field of writing at a degree acceptable to me as a novelist.

@Writer4U I meant no disrespect towards the academic writers. I understand your line of reasoning and excitement about the job. However, when you have written over a fifty thousand papers covering almost 30 years of writing experience as I have, the repetitive nature of the research work, regardless of the new information that one learns about, tends to create a sense of boredom. At least that's how it happened for me. That's why I needed to evolve within the career path. Once you find your brain beginning to stall at having to write an updated version of a paper you've written twenty times over, you'll know that it's time for a career change.

In my opinion, a career change eventually happens because one outgrows the line of work and starts to look for a new challenge. Something that takes you out of your comfort zone. When it happened to me, I found myself in a new, but related field of work. I'm not saying that this will or should happen to you. What I am saying, is that just as in any profession, it's alright to find yourself in a rut that you'd want to get out of. If you find yourself in one, don't be afraid to spread your wings and grow.

While this post is a year old, it's still relevant, especially since there are more writers moving to academic writing than ever before. I think that the economy and the need to bridge one's income plays a partial role, but another factor is that some freelance writers have recently realized how lucrative the business can be.

When I started as an academic writer over 20 years ago, I really had no idea that "academic writing" was a real business. I was an article writer for magazines and newspapers. I happened upon a posting for an academic writer by accident. It sounded like something I could do, I applied, and the rest is history.

Now, that is not to say that I was prepared because I was NOT! I had a college degree but very little experience in writing papers. I was arrogant enough to think that because I was a published journalist, that was enough experience. I learned by trial and error and was determined to become the best academic writer I could. Guess what? I am a darned good writer, but I am no longer arrogant. I learn something new every day, and I try to stay modest and know that I don't know everything!

Funny as it may seem, I started academic writing while I was still in college. I had a knack for essay writing and my professors often commended my writing style and dedication to research regardless of whether the paper was for my major or minor course. Then one semester, I had a dorm mate who was really struggling in his English classes since he was an ESL student who was still taking Remedial English. He asked me to help him out with his papers. I jokingly asked him what it was worth to him and he asked me to name my price. Thinking about it, I gave him a price I knew was a joke and all he said was "Done!". That got me started as the "in-house" academic writer of my dorm house. Things grew and grew from there so that even after I had left college and starting working formally, I still had schoolmates emailing me asking me to help them out. Who was I to say no? Eventually, I found myself taking more and more time off from work until eventually, I managed to quit my job and do academic writing fulltime. So basically, I never evolved because that is where I started. I evolved into other writing venues from there.

@writer4life
I couldn't have said it better. Being modest enough to keep learning and improving years later after embarking on a writing career is key for success. The thing is, the more knowledge I gain and the more skilled I become as a writer, the more I realize just how much there is to learn out there. That's rather humbling.

Agreed. In my opinion, there might be many people who can do a few of these kinds of projects now and then for some extra cash, but there are relatively few people who can actually do this well enough and at the sustained volume necessary to earn a living from it over a long term.

I never wrote for anybody else while I was a student, but I answered a classified ad a few years after graduating from law school, before there were personal computers (or an Internet). Back then, I wrote projects on a word processor and delivered them either via fax machine or in person. In fact, the guy whose ad I answered and who used to meet me in the middle of the night to pick up projects from me at the 24-hour gym where I was training back then had the same (relatively uncommon) first name as the guy who hired me about a decade later at the online essay company for which I did the most work. It occurred to me that he might be the same person, but I never asked. Other than not actually having to go to libraries to conduct the research, the work itself hasn't changed much since then; but it's obviously a lot more convenient with modern technology.

You have really earned your status and the privileges you currently enjoy. Much respect, FW

Thanks, AW. I've managed to establish a healthy client base through years of hard work, but other than having been born to middle class parents in this part of the world, the only privileges I'm aware of are (almost) never having to set an alarm clock and being able to work in my boxers. Some of my neighbors probably suspect that I don't even work, because they rarely run into me unless they're up at 3:00 AM and they definitely notice that I don't keep any kind of schedule that's consistent with any conceivable job.

Probably nobody else here remembers this horrible 1980 movie called Perfect, with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. The first scene where he broke out a laptop (MS DOS) and it became clear that he earned a living writing on his pc on his couch, I knew that's how I wanted to work for a living. And yes, that's sort of what gyms looked like here back then.

This happens to me all the time. I usually go out somewhere around 1am to get smokes and a Red Bull (if it's a really bad day), and when my neighbors see me they always give me that "look" - like you're not sure whether someone is crazy, dealing drugs, or going out to shoot somebody for money. Since I don't really talk about my work with anyone outside of my closest circle, I imagine there is a bunch of crazy theories about my work activities. The last I heard some of my neighbors think that I deal drugs. Other's probably think I'm a bum since I rarely go out in the middle of the night looking sharp.

Writers who become familiar with the academic field also become familiar with social media and self promotion styles. I have evolved from being a simple academic writer, who now hires writers of my own, to an Influencer consultant. What is an influencer consultant you might ask? I hire myself out to people who would like to heighten their social media profile based on their professional requirements. I help them create their online image, teach them how to write interesting blurbs for their photos, teach them how to use the hashtags, and alert them as to when they do something that is truly Insta or TikTok worthy. It's an avenue of writing that I never thought of going into but ended up being involved with because of friends and associates who are truly social media clueless when it comes to advertising their brands.

I wrote a few thousand dollars of copy for a veterinarian who found me on Elance a few years ago, but I never bothered to update my profile when they became Upwork. Other than that, one contract to write portions of textbooks, a few write-ups of medical conventions for a medical journal, ghostwriting for a couple of practicing lawyers, and some SAT sample tests that I used to write under contract for Princeton Review Books, I've pretty much stuck to academic writing for the last 20 years, even while I was a full-time Writer/Editor for a federal agency at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

I think that the academic writers have stopped evolving in the realm of academic writing at this point. It is impossible for an academic writer to cultivate new contacts, grow his network, and keep working in this field because AI has all but taken over the job of writing research and other types of papers for students. This is not an ideal situation since Ai does not have the capacity to evolve its writing skills in the same manner that a human can do. While human writers will continue to exist, it will be mostly as AI trainers more than anything else.