Hi all,
For the past few months I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to get into freelance writing as an income stream while I work on my fiction.
The issue I'm having is, much of the advice seems to be centred around finding a particular niche that you are expert in, but I'm not entirely sure what my niche is.
Or rather, since I am a Ph.D. Politics candidate (on hold for the moment), my niche pushes me further away from freelance writing in a sense that makes money, and more toward the side of journalism, where even those working full-time for national newspapers don't get paid half of the time.
Beyond that, I'm afraid "jack of all trades" pretty much sums me up - I'm vaguely-alright-and-vaguely-knowledgeable about a lot of things, from hiking/outdoors, to beer and brewing, to cookery, to green tech and environmentalism... but I'm not convinced that I'm enough of an authority in any of these things to carve a niche out in them.
Any advice here would be useful. Is finding a niche as important as the advice makes it sound? And how might I go about decoding my vague interests into something saleable?
For the past few months I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to get into freelance writing as an income stream while I work on my fiction.
The issue I'm having is, much of the advice seems to be centred around finding a particular niche that you are expert in, but I'm not entirely sure what my niche is.
Or rather, since I am a Ph.D. Politics candidate (on hold for the moment), my niche pushes me further away from freelance writing in a sense that makes money, and more toward the side of journalism, where even those working full-time for national newspapers don't get paid half of the time.
Beyond that, I'm afraid "jack of all trades" pretty much sums me up - I'm vaguely-alright-and-vaguely-knowledgeable about a lot of things, from hiking/outdoors, to beer and brewing, to cookery, to green tech and environmentalism... but I'm not convinced that I'm enough of an authority in any of these things to carve a niche out in them.
Any advice here would be useful. Is finding a niche as important as the advice makes it sound? And how might I go about decoding my vague interests into something saleable?