Writer's Insight: 13 years of industry changes, challenges, and what's next

Robbie Westacott on his 13 years as a professional writer.

For paid subscribers: I have just shared a new thread on the Substack chat with a load of extra pitch calls, freelance & remote writing opportunities from the latter half of this week.

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About Robbie

Robbie Westacott is a life-long writer from London, with 13 years of professional experience. He currently writes fiction and runs a B2B content marketing consultancy for conference, media, and tech companies. He’s also working hard to build a fast-growing online community to support, connect, and encourage writers, called The Writer’s Journey.

If you'd like to become a better writer and improve your storytelling skills, subscribe to his Substack publication, Sunsets and Storytelling, for plenty of helpful tips and guidance.

What kind of freelance writer are you?

I started doing some part-time freelance writing in 2016 for extra income, while I was working as a content marketing manager. I then became a full-time self-employed freelancer in 2018.

Between 2016 and late-2022, I was a generalist freelance writer and content marketing strategist, primarily writing marketing content and web copy for B2B companies in the tech and finance sectors. I delivered a few projects occasionally across other industries like events, healthcare, HR, and even B2C as well.

I’ve also done plenty of freelance business journalism over the years, as journalism was how my career as a writer first started back in 2012.

I’ve recently turned my freelance business into more of a strategic marketing and growth consultancy for conference and media companies, so the writing I’m doing for clients at the moment is part of those projects. As an example, one of our current projects is a really exciting sales enablement content asset for one of the biggest news and media publications in the world.

How have you seen the world of professional writing evolve over your 13-year career?

Freelance writing has become a lot more popular, and the demand has grown, as more of business (and our lives) has become increasingly digital. Now, with such reliance on content to build a brand and earn the trust of customers online, so many more businesses today understand the value of writers than when I started back in 2012.

But I think the biggest evolution I’ve seen in professional writing took place between 2020 and 2022, when a few things happened simultaneously:

1 - The pandemic drove a lot of unemployed people into freelance work, and/or gave people the time to reflect and reconsider their careers.

2 - A lot of “experts” started peeling back the curtain and providing detailed advice on social media about how to break into freelance writing, as a way to sell their online coaching services and courses.

3 - Generative AI drastically lowered the barrier to entry for freelance writing, allowing people with very little experience (and, in some cases, very little skill) to start doing it for a living.

This caused a noticeable explosion of new freelance writers into the market around this time. Sadly, along with other factors, that’s made it exponentially harder to find freelance writing work for most people.

But I think it’s also had a positive effect, as extra competition in the market means everyone had to raise their standards.

What was the catalyst that made you want to freelance full-time?

In 2017, I’d been in a traditional nine-to-five career for five years.

But I’d been desperate to write a novel since I was at university, and I was finding it too difficult to make any significant progress on that while working a full-time job in my mid-twenties.

So, I decided to put my career on hold for a while to do a one-year, full-time MA in creative writing. That degree was specifically focused on teaching the process of writing your first novel.

While doing my MA and writing my novel, I was fortunate enough to have freelance writing and content marketing work for some part-time income.

When I finished the degree, I decided to continue freelancing instead of going back into a traditional full-time job.

Did you find your MA in creative writing was valuable for your career, seven years on?

Being completely honest, at the time I didn’t really think it was.

Back then, I was adamant to keep my fiction writing separate from my B2B writing career.

On reflection, I think that was probably because my first novel felt so important and sacred to me while drafting it, so I didn’t want to detract from that by admitting there were similarities between the two types of work.

However, as more time has passed and I’ve worked on lots of other fiction projects, I’ve been able to recognise just how much the storytelling techniques and skills we learned on the MA do apply to B2B writing. I’ve also been able to use that to enhance the services I offer and the work I deliver for clients.

Having worked with a huge variety of clients, how do you adapt your writing style and approach to meet the needs of such a diverse range of clients?

I think two things are important to mention here, mainly to help newer freelance writers:

Firstly, for a B2B writer in a marketing capacity, you must understand that resonating with your client’s target audience is your priority.

That means you need develop empathy and self-awareness, to understand how to speak the language of the people you’re writing for (the audience). If you don’t do that, your marketing content/copy won’t be effective.

And that will be different for each client. So, every freelance writer should work hard to develop that ability to adapt your style and voice to different target audiences.

I suppose that’s an area where writing so much fiction has helped me, as I’m used to writing in a vast range of different perspectives, voices, and styles when writing different fictional characters.

Secondly, I think you need to be a great interviewer, and a great person-to-person communicator, if you want to be a great freelance content writer.

I’ve delivered hundreds of successful content projects for some of the biggest technology brands in the world, but I’m not an expert in technology. What I am is an expert in extracting a business leader’s raw ideas and insights, understanding them, then using storytelling and creative writing skills to translate them into clear, engaging, audience-centric content.

Gaining those insights from an interview also helps to find the right voice and language for each specific client.

But a similar process will often apply to other types of freelance writing as well, like journalism or ghost-writing a memoir.

What's a piece of advice you wish you’d known before you began freelancing?

There are a few tips I can offer here which should hopefully help newer freelancers:

1. Set up systems and habits to market yourself extensively and consistently, because having a deep pipeline of prospects is crucial. Even when you’ve got plenty of work on, you still need to be generating plenty of new leads, as freelance projects can fall through unexpectedly at any time.

2. Get an expert accountant straight away who can help you take full advantage of your self-employed situation financially and tax-wise.

3. Don’t ever think or act like a new client is confirmed until the contract is signed and the deposit has been paid. And if you don’t already collect a deposit before you begin working on a new project, start doing that immediately.

4. Be proactive in building connections and friendships, or even partnerships, with other freelancers who do similar things to you (but not exactly the same). Clients who use freelancers for one thing often use them for many things, and a lot of freelance business is done via recommendations or referrals.

How do you balance building your own businesses with freelance work, and what are your long-term goals for them?

Honestly, my two businesses are my main focus right now (as well as my fiction projects). They both involve a lot of writing, so there isn’t much old fashioned “freelancing” going on right now, but I’m still doing a tonne of writing for my clients every day.

However, I am currently speaking to a few agencies about some freelance work to ghost-write a couple of business books, and maybe a memoir or two.

Anyway, as mentioned earlier, I run a small marketing and growth consultancy for conference and media companies. That obviously involves producing a lot of written content. We also have capacity to work with certain types of businesses in the tech and finance sectors as well.

Alongside that, I’m also building an online community / platform for writers that provides support, networking, advice, encouragement, and more. It’s called The Writer’s Journey, and it consists of a Substack newsletter, an Instagram page, and will soon include a podcast and YouTube channel.

If any writers out there are looking for a welcoming, supportive community full of bright, like-minded people, please do check it out.

And I’ll admit that’s not technically a “business” just yet, but it’s a passion project that’s gaining good momentum and getting great feedback from lots of writers. I do think there’s scope to combine both businesses sometime in future, which may involve launching a series of events for writers and the wider publishing industry.

What changes or trends do you notice or expect to see soon in the world of writing, and how do you plan to deal with them?

From a marketing perspective, I think the vast wave of generic, low-quality, AI-generated content that’s been flooding the Internet for the past two years will put more emphasis on authentic writing with human personality and nuance.

For brands to gain the attention and earn the trust of their target audiences, they’ll need to raise the bar for their content and prioritise quality over quantity.

At least I hope that’s how the trend will develop. It’s so difficult to predict the future right now with so much change and unpredictability coming from AI developments, and new tools we probably don’t even know about yet. The Internet as we know it today could be a distant memory in five years.

But looking more immediately, I think video content will continue to become more popular and prominent online, so writers will need to adapt their skills to embrace that format as well. Of course, producing video content is a very efficient way to produce multi-channel, multi-format marketing campaigns, as you can now transcribe videos so easily and quickly turn them into a range of written content as well. That’s just one of the ways we’re helping clients adapt and get ahead at the moment.

In terms of fiction writing, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a big shift towards more self-publishing, and a lot more support for those kind of books.

Platforms like Substack and TikTok have given emerging writers a lot more power, so it feels like more first-time authors are now favouring the benefits of publishing their own work without having to go through the gruelling process of trying to get published traditionally.