Comments on: What’s Your Specialty?

By: Tameka

Tameka — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:55:01 +0000

James,

Thanks once again for the wonderful information and advice. I will take a longer look at what my area of expertise is and promote that to the fullest! And yes I will be versatile as well because I don’t want to become ‘typecast’ like an actor would in the movie world!

By: Freelance Your Speciality… or Diversify? : Business Tips for Writers

Freelance Your Speciality… or Diversify? : Business Tips for Writers — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:03:03 +0000

[...] recently asked readers about their writer specialty. Do you have one? What is it? Is it special enough? With all the competition in the freelance [...]

By: Pat

Pat — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:28:38 +0000

I’ll have to agree with Phil on this. While being a specialist is great for that field, it’s also important to be able to cover a multitude of areas. Knowing everything of gardening is great as a gardening writer, but it means squat if no one is looking for that kind of writer. Saying that you’re excellent in gardening and knowledgeable in some other areas looks good and will keep you employed when no one is looking for a gardening writer.

By: Samantha

Samantha — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:11:16 +0000

Great post James! This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and your post has given me more angles to consider.

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:07:18 +0000

I have a different point of view.

Specialization is important, but so is versatility. I spent the first seven years of my career as a sportswriter and was being pigeonholed as someone who could do nothing else, so I started taking real estate and accounting classes to prove I could do more than walk and chew gum at the same time. (To be honest, I’m still working on those “skills”).

I was moved to education because the paper thought I would fail there, and figured they could help me fail by assigning me to the spelling bee, which the paper sponsored and last two writers had basically ignored. I had a couple of articles a week on the bee during all levels of it, with different angles. It was never written about so much before or since.

After three years in education, paper moved me to transportation more so they could move other people around than due to something I did or didn’t do.

Six months later, they recognized that I was educating myself in various aspects of business, including part-time work at a tax prep company, so they moved me to business.

After the paper, I moved on to cover financial services for a magazine, and a year later that job moved to DC. I did ok in freelancing, but didn’t do well until I developed an expertise in writing about technology. More recently, I’ve added some background in PR writing.

Specialities can serve well, but I stress diverisity when appropriate in a pitch (recently landed me a gig with an Asian fuels pub).

Every time I diversify, I expand the horizons of my business. But I am still basically a journalist, so the nuances of advertising are not a skill set of mine, nor do I plan to pursue it.

So I believe expertise/specialty is good, but too much focus in an area can hurt (I’ve seen a lot of financial services writers struggle since the downturn in the economy).