The Business of Writing

I would try to find a way to make money from my writing. It’s an incredibly difficult field to get noticed in and I feel like I could make a go of it if only I could work out where the niche is. That said, I like the freedom of writing what I want to write and if I was trying to make money I would need to write what other people wanted me to.

Up to about a century ago, literacy was a very marketable skill. You could be paid for reading or writing for the illiterate, not much of course as your customer base was generally very poor. Going back further than that, say the Middle Ages, only a few people could read and it was very much the exception rather than the norm.

Nowadays, illiteracy is very rare in the UK I’m glad to say. However, there are still many people who can’t express exactly what they want to say about a person or a situation. At the weekend I wrote a tribute to John Dudgeon, a fantastic cricketer and an even more amazing person. I put a link on the Medway Cricket Memories page on Facebook and almost 200 people have read it already and some have said how much they appreciated it. I think that like anything else you have to have the right opportunity and the right inspiration, like I had with John, to write effectively so it’s not something that I could necessarily do for everyone. It would be nice to be able to write tributes to express someone’s feelings about a life but I don’t think I could make it a business. On balance I think it’s for the best.

When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease