At what point are you considered a professional writer? I’ve been thinking about this since last night in conjunction with a request someone sent me to submit an article (about editing, as it happens) as a professional writer. The sender (whom I’m guessing found me by my blog) clearly considered me a professional. In my excitement, I shared the news with my husband who said, “But you’re not a professional writer.”
To which I replied, “I don’t pay the bills with writing. That doesn’t mean I’m not a professional.”
But the notion has been kicking around in my head. What makes a professional writer?
I think unarguably, the general public would consider any author who has been published via traditional means to be professional. You can walk into Barnes and Noble or another brick and mortar store and lay your hands on their book. There’s a tangible mark of their success (such as it is).
What about those people who’ve got a book deal but their book isn’t on shelves yet. This would include people like the awesome Myra McEntire, whose first book Hourglass comes out from Egmont in 2011. It’s not her fault the publishing machine moves at a snail’s pace and we have to WAIT. :grumbles in dissatisfied impatience: I’d absolutely say she and others like her are professionals.
How about those folks who have representation but their work hasn’t found a home yet? They’ve taken a huge step toward publication and signed with an agent (who hopefully believes in their book as much as they do). I can think of many writers who fit in this category. I’d consider them professionals too.
There are some who would consider any writer whose work you can buy on Amazon to be a professional. This would encompass a lot of indie authors who have chosen to deal directly with the megalith bookseller (and its like) in epub and POD. My friend Zoe Winters has her first book Blood Lust scheduled to release later this year via these means. Her novella Kept has risen over the past year into the top 1,000 in the Kindle store (#822 at the time of this writing). Same with Kerry Allen and her novella Beyond The Darkening. Knowing them as I do, I have to consider them professionals because they treat writing like what it is, a job. An eminently cool job, but a job.
And that brings us to the next group. The one that actually includes me. Those who are as yet unpublished via traditional or independent means (though I hope to have Forsaken By Shadow ready for epub in March), who remain unrepresented, but who treat writing like a job. We show up each day. We do the work. We type the type, walk the walk, talk the talk. We keep up with the industry. We work on building relationships with other writers and potential readers. We build our platform. We try to increase our name recognition. And we write. Maybe we’re not as fast as others because we’re juggling other jobs and family obligations. But the attitude is there. We define ourselves as writers no matter what our evil day jobs happen to be. We approach the job as professionals, and that, I think, sets us apart from the dabblers. The every other Joe who thinks he can and should write a novel or the every third Jane who doesn’t make writing a priority and therefore doesn’t finish.
So are people like me professional writers? You decide.
“Professional” is an entirely subjective classification. Approaching your writing with a career-minded focus will do it for some, but there will always be someone who says you’re a hobbyist until you quit your day job and have a NYT bestseller. The only thing that really matters is how YOU feel about it, and you have that pretty well defined.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t consider myself to be “professional.” In fact, I take a certain amount of juvenile glee in going out of my way to be UNprofessional in defiance of the guidelines of professionalism set forth by some individuals and organizations. I am a dangerous rebel. Fear me. Rawr.)
That particular defiance is part of your vast appeal for me.
I consider myself a professional as well. I’m schlepping around trying to make my novels a paying job, but in this economy when you’re a bit outside the stringent lines of genre…well then. Not such an easy task. But I try to write the cleanest prose I can, an entertaining story, memorable characters. I’m not a financial aid advisor who writes; I’m a writer who works as a financial aid advisor to pay the bills. Therein lies the most important distinction, I think.
Good post, Kait, as always.
I think it’s really important to remember that distinction for ourselves. Particularly in today’s challenging economy where you’re lucky to HAVE a job. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with how flipping LONG it takes to build any kind of success and feel like we’re going to be stuck in whatever our particular dead end, uber creativity sucking job happens to be.
I don’t consider myself a professional writer. I approach this like a job, scheduling rare and specific days off, showing up in front of my computer for long hours *nearly* every day, working hard to create the best and brightest work I can. But no, I am not a professional. I have never been paid for any of my writing. I think that is where the line is crossed. If you have ever been paid for your work, you are a professional. Otherwise, you are an amateur, working towards becoming a professional.
In my book, there is a big distance between amateur and dabbler, though. I would never call myself a dabbler, as you obviously wouldn’t either.
I agree with Eliza that the definition of “professional” is tied to payment. Maybe you don’t pay your bills with your writing gigs, but if you get paid for your writing, you are acting as a professional writer. But there are definitely far more categories that professional and dabbler or hobbyist. For example, I used to write for the state legislator. I was paid for this work. At that time, I was a professional writer. Now I’ve moved on to other things and have reverted back to dabbling. You are definitely far more serious than I — even when I *was* a professional writer. I’d say you are a very serious writer who is not yet a professional. Maybe you are an Olympian.
All of this is to say that, in my opinion, a professional is paid for their work, but the seriousness (wow, can’t think of another word – there’s that mommy brain paralyzing me in the dabbling stage!) of one’s writing is not necessarily defined by their status as a professional.
I think it’s all about how you approach your writing as to whether or not you’re a professional. I believe there are traditionally published writers with books on shelves who are hobbyists, merely because some of them do not treat their writing as a job or business.
And I think definitely indie authors should be considered professional writers “if” they aren’t indie authors as a hobby, because if someone opens a flower shop, they’re still a professional florist. I find it interesting that writing is the only profession in which starting your own business is considered somehow “less business-y” lol
As for writers without something out in the world, Rome wasn’t built in a day. So I think it’s all about your attitude toward your writing. I certainly don’t see you in any way as “lesser” than me, just because you don’t have anything out quite yet. I’ve seen your writing and the proof that you’re a professional, is in the pudding.