Writing services sales are down, any positive prospects?

We are in the economic recession (or "depression" which is more appropriate term). If you are a freelance writer or an essay service owner - how is your essay business doing (both from the company owners' and essay writers' perspective)?

I'm pretty sure sales are down as they are down everywhere. How much less do you make compared to the previous year/month? Do you see any signs of improvement in the near future? Maybe you think of changing your career path?

No comments....?

Nope. One of the things people tend to do when things are bad economically and unemployment looms is return to school. Many of them haven't done any formal writing in a very long time and dread writing academic papers now even more than when they were in school fulltime. No complaints here.

While the number of orders available is still quite low, I think the phenomenon can be better attributed to the fact that it is still the slow season rather than to America's economic problems. The orders that I still get to work on quite regularly despite it being the slow season are resume/CV writing orders. However, I only get like two to three of them a day. Overall, I'm happy to be able to take it slow during these times and concentrate more on my day job.

none of your business! But on a positive note, most professional services online have taken a downturn. Academic writing is not an exception, but I hope it will recover slowly.

Recession makes people less likely to take risks. Would you hand in a CV written by some anonymous person who might not even hold qualifications beyond GCSE level or would you write it yourself?

According to my friends, the business is starting to pick up these days, but it is still slower than they are used to and they are earning less on a year to year comparison.

One thing that they are attributing it to is that students are becoming more research savvy these days owing to far easier access to electronic and physical research materials.

Added to that is that the professors are also becoming more and more technically proficient so they are starting to spot the plagiarized papers and "paid" papers being submitted to them.

Since they are facing some financial difficulties because of these scenarios, they have already diversified to some related fields such as editing and ghost writing.

None of them are willing to be retrained for a new skill since they are far more comfortable doing writing related jobs.

So their only option, due to the changing student landscape, is to try to catch a student for the semester at the very start and then hope that the student keeps coming back. In the meantime, blogging, editing, and other non-academic related jobs keep their finances as balanced as they possibly can keep it.

I have not really experienced a writing slump in the business. Mostly because I have managed to spin off my business from purely academic writing to other venues that require proficient writers just the same. It is important for academic writers to realize that the work that they do is seasonal and as such, they need to make sure that they have other work types lined up when the sales are down. Positive prospects for the down time rely heavily on the network that the writer has created outside of the academic writing business. Having friends who work in the advertising field can come a long way in helping an academic writer find jobs to do when the students are off on vacation. My company has managed to diversify thanks to my other business contacts and I continue to find creative ways of keeping my writers employed because of it.

I agree with the prior comment that this is all the more reason for the writer to make sure that they're not solely relying on just one type of writing. Any freelancer writer will tell you that, regardless of how good you are in your niche/subject, it is still critical that you are able to partake in other forms of writing to create a steadier source of income. While I don't believe that there are huge dips in the number of orders as there are others who avail of essay writing services even during off-peak seasons, there certainly can still be indubitable differences in the maximum amount of income that you can possibly gather during this period. Writers should know better than to put all their eggs in one basket.

Academic writers rely on a steady stream of regular clients during the academic year to keep their income going. A regular set of clients ensures that the writer will have enough income to tide him over during the slow season. This applies only to academic writers who are directly hired by clients. Any writer employed by a company may be out of luck. The company could prevent him from earning during the slow seasons because "there aren't enough orders to go around". Writing company owners that this is a load of unmentionables as they still charge their regular rates, even higher sometimes. They just refuse to share it with the writers. That's why it is important for writers to know how to do other work in between hot seasons. Others take on contractual writing jobs. Others write for online magazines and paid blog services. The positive prospects for freelance writers during the slow season are endless. The writer just needs to be good enough to get hired for the other available gigs.