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The 100 Best Websites for Writers in 2021

by Farrah Daniel | Jan 19, 2021

Now that we’re a few weeks into 2021, let’s all breathe a deep sigh of relief together for overcoming what has to be one of the hardest years we’ve experienced in modern times. 

And you made it through! That’s a victory worth celebrating, especially with the people who helped you navigate the chaos with websites filled with guides, tips and tricks, blog posts, podcasts and newsletters to help get better at the one thing you love the most: writing. 

If you wrote a novel while under lockdown, good for you! And if you didn’t? Good. For. You. 

When it comes to writing, output isn’t the only critical part of the process — it’s just as important to reset, refresh and reinvigorate your writing brain with new techniques that help you write better .  

Wherever you’ve landed in your writing journey, we have just the websites that’ll help you take your work-in-progress to the next level. 

How we organized this list of best websites for writers

Since 2014, The Write Life has celebrated the art and business of writing by releasing a list of the 100 Best Websites for Writers, and we’re excited to do so again for the eighth consecutive year.

We separated our 2021 list into 10 categories. All the categories are listed in alphabetical order. The websites within each category are not ranked, but are instead listed in alphabetical order within their categories, with numbers for ease of reading.

• Black voices

Freelancing

• Motivation and Productivity

Newsletters

• Podcasts 

Writing Communities

• Writing and Editing

Many of the websites are tried-and-true favorites featured in our previous lists, but this year we’re thrilled to include 37 newcomers you recommended, along with two new categories: Black voices and newsletters!

In light of the conversations surrounding diversity and inclusion, as well as the importance of preserving and elevating Black lives, we felt it important to highlight Black creators. Please note these websites for writers are for all writers — not just those of color; however, in support of giving everyone a platform, we wanted to uplift voices that are often overlooked. 

How we hand-pick our annual list of best websites for writers

Because we only want to bring you the best of the best, each website featured in this list meets the following criteria:

• It was recommended by readers of The Write Life — this year, we received more than 500 nominations — thank you!
• It publishes content helpful to writers.
• It has been updated recently and regularly.

We couldn’t have created this list without your helpful suggestions. And with so many great options to choose from, we wished we could have included them all! There are heaps of helpful writing websites out there beyond this list, but we could only pick 100.

If this list inspires you to start your own website or blog, here’s our step-by-step guide on how to start a blog . Your website could be next on our list!

Here’s our list of the best writing websites in 2021. (By the way, a star emoji next to a website means it’s a new addition to our list!)

Black Voices

⭐️ 1. black freelance.

Because race matters in freelancing — and most industries — writer and strategist Megan Williams created this website to show Black writers and writers of color that it’s possible to branch out on their own and successfully work outside of traditional employment. The BlackFreelance community provides freelancers of any level a place to go to learn about content marketing, ways to build better writing habits, how to run an effective freelance business and more. 

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⭐️ 2. Danielle the Writer

Danielle Wilkinson is a YA writer who uses her blog to inspire readers the way her favorite authors have inspired her. As she chips away at her goal of authorship, Danielle invites readers along her writing journey. On her site, you can learn from her writing logs, where she gives you an inside look into her writing and pitching process. Plus, in addition to the free downloads she provides, her blog is chock full of articles that break down the story structures of popular romance and superhero films.

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⭐️ 3. The Freelance Beat

Chicago-based freelance journalist Tatiana Walk-Morris has written for notorious magazines like The New York Times, Vice Magazine, Harvard University’s Nieman Reports and more — that, alone, tells you she’s an expert to learn from. Her website for writers is filled with blog posts that explore the triumphs and challenges freelance journalists experience in their early and mid-careers. If you’re taking the plunge into freelancing, there’s a lot you could learn from Tatiana’s advice and personal reflections.

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⭐️ 4. Inkwell Editorial

Yuwanda Black has earned money from her content since 2002, and she’s worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. As a successful author, content marketer and developer, Yuwanda wants writers to know they can lead rich careers as freelancers, too. That’s why Inkwell Editorial provides a wealth of information for writers who want to learn about SEO, social media, self-publishing, affiliate marketing, plus, how to make money through freelance work. 

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⭐️ 5. OnlineDrea

Although this website isn’t geared specifically toward writers, social media strategist Andréa Jones can show you how to create an impact beyond your brand with authentic social media marketing strategies that will build a community of engaged followers. As the business of writing becomes increasingly dependent on an online presence, all writers can benefit from her Savvy Social Podcast that discusses topics across marketing and social media.  

Episode you’ll like: Storytelling Marketing with Lynne Golodner

6. See Jane Write

This website for writers came highly recommended. According to a reader of The Write Life, founder Javacia Harris Bowser “ shares a lot of great and motivating information. She is caring and is your biggest supporter in you being the extraordinary writer you were born to be. … We learn! but we have fun while learning! Javacia knows her stuff! I am so happy to be a member of See Jane Write!” 

Every woman has a story worth sharing, says Javacia. Though it began as a Birmingham-based membership organization for women who write and blog, See Jane Write has become a website and community for women everywhere who want to be the authors of their own lives. Here, she helps women find the creativity, confidence and community they need to use their story to make an impact and an income.

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7. Be a Freelance Blogger

Through Sophie Lizard’s blog posts, job board and Facebook group, you’ll learn what it takes to increase your blogging income. She and her team at Be a Freelance Blogger show you how to build an expert reputation and regain your freedom by blogging for hire, all without giving up your dream of working from the beach.

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8. Copyblogger

Whatever your business goals, Copyblogger can supply the tools you need to create the kind of powerful content that will achieve them. This leading resource for blogging and digital marketing has been leveling up copywriting and content marketing skills since 2006, so it wouldn’t hurt to see what they can do for yours. Its free membership includes an online-marketing e-course, free ebooks, forums and more. 

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9. How to Blog a Book

The blogging business is booming, and today, there are dozens upon dozens of strategies you can use to be successful. Creativity is encouraged! Take author Nina Amir, for example, who developed the challenge to “write a blog post a day and a book a year” by blogging your nonfiction book from beginning to end. Check out her website to learn more about her creative approaches to blogging. 

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10. ProBlogger

What do you need help with? Founder Darren Rowse and the ProBlogger team have been delivering the latest news and tips to build a better blog since 2004. This site offers extensive resources on how to monetize your blog, in addition to a robust job board that’s always updated with new opportunities.

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11. The Blogsmith

Maddy Osman is a sales and marketing pro who gleefully shares SEO writing advice and content marketing expertise to help writers drive traffic to their websites. One visit to her blog will show you she really knows her stuff, and The Write Life readers seem to agree, with one reader saying, “I always go to The Blogsmith when I need the most up to date information on industry changes that impacts writers.”

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12. A Selfish Poet

Trish Hopkinson created A Selfish Poet for poets and creative writers seeking publication. She shares no-fee calls for submissions, writing prompts, and poetry groups and events. Articles from Hopkinson and guest bloggers share the latest opportunities for writing contests, journals and other publications that pay. They’ll also help you become a better writer and a savvier submitter.

Post you’ll like: Trish Hopkinson’s blog tour

13. Elna Cain

The path to freelancing is made simple on Elna Cain’s website, where she shares a range of action-based content to help you grow a successful business as a writer. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of writers in improving your skills with her valuable tips. 

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14. Freelance to Freedom

Freelancing is a business, after all, so it’s important to have the tools and information that will push your business ( *ahem* money ) forward. At Freelance to Freedom, you’ll have access to a newsletter, a free Freelancer’s Toolkit, and informative articles, all of which will help you wade through some of the hard stuff, like managing your taxes and securing consistent clients.

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⭐️ 15. Kat Boogaard

Among other things, writers who check out Kat Boogaard’s blog will learn how to do three crucial things: start a freelance business, find clients and writing gigs, then refine their freelance business. After six years of full-time freelancing, this website for writers is packed with resources that focus on crafting online content related to careers, productivity, entrepreneurship and self-development. Whether you want her perspective on taxes, setting rates or freelancing in general, Kat’s encouraging website is the place to be. Oh, and don’t forget her reminder: “You got this.”

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16. Make a Living Writing

Through her blog, ebooks and paid community, award-winning freelance writer Carol Tice offers solid support and resources to help you grow in your career. Writers at any level can learn how to overcome writing fears, earn money from blogging and move up from low-paying markets. Tice also founded the popular Freelance Writers Den , a 1,500-member strong community for freelancers. Check out our Freelance Writers Den review .

This website is “my only writing website choice,” shared a reader of The Write Life. “Her blogs are informative, great training, inspirational, and provide ideas to help with marketing, blogging, or writing. When she opens her Freelance Writer’s Den grab it. That group is THE BEST and provides all you need to get started, build up, learn, encourage, and support.”

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⭐️ 17. The Freelancer by Contently

Contently is a platform for creatives that lets you showcase your work through an optimized portfolio, find prospective clients, collaborate on projects with client teams and more — did you know it also provides tons of articles for freelancers by freelancers? You can access articles that share the personal experiences of writers and their businesses, or ones that can teach you how to create a newsletter, manage your money or expand your skill set.

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18. The Freelancer’s Year

Award-winning writer Lindy Alexander shares insider knowledge she’s picked up along the way of her thriving freelance writing career. Check out her website to learn the right way to follow up with editors, how to snag gigs with limited experience and why she doesn’t believe in networking for freelance writers. 

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19. The Quiet Type

Slipping into the technical and mundane aspects of managing yourself as a freelancer is easy. Freelance copy and content writer Katie Jenison shares ample tips that will bring the creativity out of your entrepreneurship with blogs that teach ways to add a thoughtful touch to your work, plus how to land high-paying clients. 

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20. Wanderful World

Lizzie Davey quit her job and moved to Spain to start a freelance business. Now, she teaches writers everything she’s learned in the process. Between the e-courses, workshops and in-depth blogs, writers will leave feeling ready to navigate the wan-derful world of freelance writing. Don’t forget to check out her free 80+ page e-book! 

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⭐️ 21. Sarah Turner

Through her website and her Sarah Turner Agency channel on YouTube, copywriter Sarah Turner wants to help you shatter the glass ceiling of your career so you can elevate your life with writing — the kind that leads to sustainable income. If you dream of escaping your 9-to-5, Sarah’s blog and YouTube videos thoroughly break down the copywriting process so you can jump right in, even if you don’t have any experience. (You’ll want to check out her free course, too!)

Here’s what one reader of The Write Life shared about Sarah: “I love Sarah not only for introducing me to a world of opportunity in freelance copywriting but also to the amazing community of writers she has created. Before Sarah, I had given up on my dream of making a living by writing, but she has reignited that for me and I’m SO grateful!”

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22. Bakerview Consulting

Barb Drozdowich is a consultant and book blogger who believes that “authors need a social media platform to succeed in today’s ever-changing world of selling books,” so she’s helping authors, one at a time. On her blog, she tutors authors in the technology they need to build a platform through social media.

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23. Build Book Buzz

You’ve written the book — how do you get people to buy it? Marketing is tricky, but the blogs and other resources available on Build Book Buzz take the mystery out of social media strategies, self-promotion and navigating relevancy in the fickle media.

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⭐️ 24. Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute website is brimming with practical, how-to guidance, insight and advice from industry experts, plus an active community of writers and marketers who discuss the latest information and advances that can push the industry forward. This website is perfect for writers who want a better grasp of content marketing and how to employ strategies to build a brand, website, social media channel, author platform and more.

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25. Ginny Carter

Writing coach and business book writer Ginny Carter has 22 years of marketing experience. Her blog features effective tips on how to bring your book to life, and though it’s mostly geared toward business books, the information is helpful for writers across all genres in need of platform amplification. 

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⭐️ 26. Nessgraphica

Alexander von Ness is a top-rated book cover designer for self-publishers, and he uses his website to teach writers about savvy marketing techniques that will have your books flying off the shelves. He shares expert tips on how to increase visibility with guest blogging, simple ways to market self-published books and a plethora of information to help you navigate book marketing successfully.

Plus, you might want to check out his Facebook group: “Alex’s Facebook group is filled with people from all walks of life who pose writing and publishing-related questions,” says a reader of The Write Life. “So many, many, many people are willing to help others in their dreams and goals to self-publish books.” 

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27. Nicole Bianchi

Nicole Bianchi’s tips help writers boost their productivity, improve their writing skills and build their online presence. An experienced writer, editor and web designer, she shares practical and personal advice about writing, copywriting and marketing strategies. 

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28. The Creative Penn

She’s a little bit of everything: a bestselling author, publisher, speaker, entrepreneur, podcaster, YouTuber. The Creative Penn, Joanna Penn’s well-known site, offers information on writing, book marketing, self-publishing, and how to make a living with your writing through articles, podcast episodes, videos, books and courses.

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29. Robyn Roste

Copywriter Robyn Roste helps agencies, entrepreneurs and small businesses connect with their audience and customers through powerful messaging and branding. Whether you’re interested in gaining followers, learning about the importance of hashtags, or getting the most out of your social platforms, Robyn can break it down for you. 

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Motivation & Productivity 

⭐️ 30. ashley gainer.

A freelance writer, digital marketer, content strategist and ghostwriter, Ashley Gainer has more than 10 years of experience working with influencers, entrepreneurs and small businesses. Her expertise? Helping writers create authentic copy that sounds great. To help you do that, Ashley shares a wide variety of productivity tips to help you master your craft through articles, writing courses and a podcast. 

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31. Books & Alchemy

Holly Ostara understands how grueling the writing process can be, and she wants to keep your flame from burning out. At the same time she helps you find the joy in your writing again, Holly’s motivational blog will also equip you with the tools needed to be a better writer. Don’t forget to peek into her online writing community on Slack! It’s free to join and open to everyone. 

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32. Leigh Shulman

Leigh Shulman wants writers to understand one thing: Chaos is part of the journey, so you might as well embrace it. Her free writing resources will be useful to writers at any given stage of the writing process, and her blog will gently nudge you to get out of your comfort zone and take the first step toward your ideal writing life. 

A reader of The Write Life says, “I first discovered Leigh on social media and since I am no longer on social media she makes it easy for me to stay in touch with her and other writers with her amazing workshop and daily/weekly motivation ‘sprints.’ She is always quick to respond to my questions no matter how lame they may be. I admire her a great deal and feel blessed to find a mentor in her.”

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33. Positive Writer

Writer Bryan Hutchinson has had his work featured in newspapers, national magazines, books, on world-famous blogs and even toilet paper. With all this experience, he knows first-hand how easy it is to get stuck in the harsh cycle of self-doubt — to help you break through the uncertainty, he created this website for writers to share articles that encourage, inspire and motivate you to do what you love: write. 

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⭐️ 34. The Novel Smithy

The writer behind The Novel Smithy, Lewis Jorstad, is a bestselling author who wants to help writing novices and soon-to-be-published authors improve their craft and write their best stories to share with the world. Beyond free ebooks, Lewis helps writers through a robust resource library that includes blogs about writing inspiration, story structure, character development and more. 

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⭐️ 35. The Write Conversation

“Find your voice, live your story,” is the foundational message behind this website for writers that’s been visited by nearly four million writers. Created and managed by speaker and author Edie Melson, The Write Conversation aims to inspire writers to reach their dreams with instructional and motivational blogs written by bestselling authors, columnists and a host of other experienced pros. Visit this website if you want to improve your craft with content that ranges from tips to present your best work to reminders about gratitude. 

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36. The Write Practice

If you struggle with transferring your thoughts to the page, spend some time at The Write Practice to learn about writing better and faster. Joe Bunting and his team will develop your writing rhythm, help you grow into your voice and identity as a writer through prompts, exercises and more.

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37. Writers in the Storm 

Weathering the storms of the writing process is absolutely necessary because, well… they’re inevitable. If you need a helping hand, the group of seasoned writers in charge of this blog are committed to using their unique perspectives and strengths to inspire you to get through the difficult stages. 

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38. Writing Forward

Need help staying focused on your writing ventures? Melissa Donovan’s blog “Writing Forward” is loaded with tips on everything from staying inspired, to grammar, to 1,000+ writing prompts designed to keep your mind fresh and your pen fresher. 

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39. FundsforWriters

This weekly newsletter that’s been published since 1999 reaches 35,000 subscribers who signed up to receive paying opportunities in the form of contests, grants, freelance opportunities, gig jobs and publishers/agents. The markets it highlights pay $200 or $0.10 per word and up. Besides helping writers find work, this newsletter also includes a freelance piece from a guest author (which you can also pitch and be paid for!) plus an editorial from editor C. Hope Clark. 

Subscribe to FundsforWriters free here

⭐️ 40. Jacob McMillen

Want to build a six-figure freelance writing business in the next 12 months? If so, this is the newsletter for you. Copywriting expert Jacob McMillen built his business from scratch, and now he uses his website and newsletter to teach writers the same strategies that elevated his success. Every month, he sends subscribers a new in-depth blog post, plus he hosts a live training on writing, marketing or freelancing. His newsletter also comes with a free copywriting crash course and his blueprint to a six-figure career.

Subscribe to Jacob McMillen for free here

⭐️ 41. Notes Newsletter

After years of experience as a writer and editor, Dana Sitar (who also contributes to The Write Life!) created a free newsletter that has one main goal: to help you become your editor’s favorite writer. Filled with a selection of pet peeves, warnings and advice, plus secrets and pro-tips for pitching, Notes will teach you how to write well, and — above all — keep editors happy. To receive exclusive content, check out Dana’s paid newsletter subscription Field Notes!

Subscribe to Notes for free here

⭐️ 42. The Ambitious Writer

Every Wednesday, writer Lorenzo Di Brino emails subscribers of this newsletter every step and struggle he’s met on the road to success (and failure). But not just his own — prior to starting the newsletter, Lorenzo spent six months studying writers on the rise to better understand what they all have in common. The answer? An entrepreneurial-like path. Because of that, this newsletter that doubles as a Substack weekly column and a Medium Publication aims to help fellow writers succeed as creatives and writers-entrepreneurs who properly promote their work.

Subscribe to The Ambitious Writer for free here

⭐️ 43. The Bookfox Club

Managed by John Matthew Fox, the 50,000 authors who subscribe to this newsletter get to learn how to write better books through exclusive advice on writing. In addition to Matthew’s backpacking stories from six continents and more than 40 countries, this newsletter also includes free email mini-courses tailored to a range of writer’s needs: book marketing, how to write better sentences, the art of writing children’s books and more. 

Subscribe for free here

⭐️ 44. Wylie’s Writing Tips

Writers who lead corporate communications, this one’s for you. Corporate communication trainer Ann Wylie has earned more than 60 communication awards in her career, plus she’s written more than a dozen learning tools to help you communicate effectively. In her corporate communications writing newsletter, you’ll receive tips, tricks and trends for writing better, easier and faster for the web and email. 

⭐️ 45. Writers’ HQ

A website of online creative writing courses for writers with no time or money, Writers’ HQ covers everything from plotting to editing, from short story writing to publishing. Its newsletter, on the other hand, shares “all kinds of wondrous things,” including, but not limited to, writing advice, emotional support, the latest blogs and the occasional haiku. As long as you’re comfortable with swearing, this eclectic newsletter is sure to teach you new skills while making you laugh. 

⭐️ 46. AskAlli: Self-Publishing Advice Podcast

Geared towards writers looking for a consultation hub, the Alliance of Independent Authors hosts an outreach service known as the Self Publishing Advice Centre. Presented by director Orna Ross and her team, this group shares the tools necessary to become a successful independent author. Through its bi-weekly podcast that highlights the most up-to-date practices, writers will learn new ideas and techniques in the ever-changing self-publishing industry.  

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47. Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

To help you overcome hurdles and reach your writing goals, Ann Kroeker’s podcast episodes offer practical tips and motivation for writers at all stages. An added bonus is that her website is home to numerous blog posts and resources for emerging writers. 

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⭐️ 48. The Honest Authors Podcast

Bestselling authors Gillian McAllister and Holly Seddon examine the realities of life as published authors. T he Honest Authors Podcast airs every two weeks, featuring discussions between the two co-hosts about the truths of being a professional writer. In addition, they feature expert insider interviews, as well as highlight honest answers to listeners’ questions.

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49. How Do You Write

Rachael Herron is a best-selling author whose podcast guides you through the entire process of writing a book. Whether you need some motivation to get started writing or specific genre tricks to tighten your story, How Do You Write will inspire you to keep pushing.

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50. Indie Author Weekly

On her podcast, Indie Author Weekly, romance novelist and business-book author Sagan Marrow shares a behind-the-scenes look into her journey of writing and self-publishing books. It’s perfect for new or aspiring authors wanting to learn more about self-publishing or get tips for writing and editing your own work.

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⭐️ 51. Marion Roach Smith

Memoir coach Marion Roach Smith hosts a podcast that gives listeners the blueprint on nonfiction narrative writing based on her personal memories, as well as her proven tips on how to overcome writers’ block. Her no-nonsense approach derives from her years of working at The New York Times — getting it right and making it short — is exactly what writers need to complete a nonfiction work of art that flows, reads well and is properly structured.

Episode you’ll like: How to Tell The Truth in Memoir, with Gregg McBride

52. Savannah Gilbo’s Fiction Writing Made Easy

The Fiction Writing Made Easy Podcast, hosted by Savannah Gilbo, publishes weekly episodes filled with actionable and step-by-step strategies you can immediately put to use in your writing. Gilbo is a developmental editor and book coach, and she’s certified in more ways than one. Her extensive experience will go hand-in-hand with your journey as a blossoming (or seasoned!) novelist, as her tips and guidance make sense of the process along the way. If this is the right podcast for you, be sure to check out her free starter kit.

This year, a reader of The Write Life said, “I highly recommend Savannah Gilbo’s website and her podcast! She offers great writing advice, thought-provoking information, and printables to help you on your writing journey!”

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⭐️ 53. The Bestseller Experiment

The Bestseller Experiment is precisely that: Mark Stay and Mark Desvaux set out to see if they could publish a bestseller in just one year, and they did. Now the two have started a weekly podcast where they talk with chart-topping authors. With over 250 hours of interviews from authors including Michael Connelly, Joanne Harris and Bryan Cranston (plus agents, editors, lawyers, social media experts), priceless insight is just a listen away.

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⭐️ 54. Travel Writing World Podcast

In this award-winning podcast, host Jeremy Bassetti talks with the world’s most inspiring travel writers about their work as well as the business of travel writing. For those who want to focus on travel books and long-form travel literature — or if you simply want to learn about the craft of travel writing — this podcast is definitely worth a listen.

Episode you’ll like: Isolation, Connection, & Islands with Gavin Francis

55. Writing Excuses

What could you learn about writing in less than 20 minutes? On this podcast, it might be writing fight scenes, killing your darlings, side-character arcs, the hero’s journey or tips from experts who want to help you be a better writer. 

Episode you’ll like: Maintaining Passion for a Story, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

56. Anne R. Allen’s Blog… With Ruth Harris

Ruth Harris and Anne R. Allen are the publishing veterans behind this blog, which they started in 2009 to prevent writers from making the mistakes they couldn’t avoid. Dive into articles about navigating the complex industry, or read up on ways to tighten your manuscript. Whatever your publishing path, this blog has something for everyone. 

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⭐️ 57. Career Authors

From craft to publishing, to marketing, genre and life, the Career Authors website is led by a team of writers, editors and publishing industry professionals who want to inspire you, plus help you understand the business side of writing (a.k.a make money selling books!). The thorough blog posts found here will help you save time, keep you on track and get you closer to the dream writing career you imagine. To find the answers to the questions you’ve always wondered about, visit the guides to writing, promotion, business and process.

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58. Creativindie

Derek Murphy believes the purpose of our lives is to “create something unique that entertains, instructs, challenges or helps others.” On Creativindie, he shows writers how to do that without becoming starving artists. Ever the one-stop-shop, this website contains downloadable resources, videos, books and thorough how-to guides to help you achieve the bottom line: getting published. 

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59. Jane Friedman

One reader of The Write Life said Jane Friedman’s website “offers consistently great information for writers (which leads to better decisions, better book deals, better workflow and bigger advances!).” 

Between having 20 years of experience in the publishing industry and a prominent blog that shares an array of publishing and writing tips, we’re inclined to agree. 

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60. Kindlepreneur

Dave Chesson consistently offers high-quality content that helps authors make money selling Kindle books. His actionable tips range from how to choose character names to using a Facebook author page wisely to reviews of writing tools. But what sets this site apart from the rest is Dave’s knowledge about Kindle keywords and how to optimize your book on Amazon to sell more copies. 

That’s because he’s the brains behind Publisher Rocket , which helps Kindle authors choose the right keywords (think: search engine optimization for Amazon).

61. Paperback Kingdom

So you’ve finally finished writing your fiction novel, and you couldn’t be more proud! Now, how are you going to get others to read and appreciate your crowned jewel? Pagan Malcolm can help with that. Not only will her copywriting packages help promote your work to potential readers, but she also offers author career coaching to those looking to break into their profession. 

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62. Self Publishing Formula

Run by best-selling author Mark Dawson, this robust blog shares tips on writing, publishing, marketing and more. His blog features an array of topics including networking for indie authors, optimizing books for physical bookstores and more. Plus, check out the interviews with million-dollar selling indie authors on his podcast, or learn about craft, production and marketing through his blog courses. 

Post you’ll like: How to Optimise Books for Physical Bookstores

63. Well-Storied

Through workbooks, tutorials, a Facebook community group, a podcast and many other free resources, Kristen Kieffer helps writers turn the draft they’re hiding from into a completed masterpiece. Because she understands the struggle, her website is dedicated to guiding you through the pitfalls of writing so you can achieve your goals.

Post you’ll like: How to Test the Strength of Your Shiny New Story Idea

⭐️ 64. Writer Beware

Sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., this website for writers was founded in 1998 and focuses on highlighting literary scams, schemes and pitfalls of the publishing world. It also provides advice on how writers all over the world can protect themselves in any market or genre. To find writing-related articles, blog posts, industry news items and a discussion forum, check out the Writer Beware Facebook group . 

Post you’ll like: A New Home For the Writer Beware Blog

65. Writer’s Relief

Writer’s Relief has been helping writers reach their publishing goals since 1994 by providing a submission service where creatives can submit their writing to literary journals, book publishers, agents and more. Sign up to receive free publishing tips and leads in your email, peruse the enriching blog, or become a subscriber to access classifieds section lists, contests, conferences and residencies.

Post you’ll like: How To Create Must-Read Excerpts From Your Book

66. Self-Publishing School

Self-Publishing School is an online education company geared toward aspiring authors, and those that are already self-published. People save 100’s of hours in the process, save thousands of dollars on key investments for success, publish a book they’re proud of, and sell 1,000+ more copies in the first year. All while allowing you to maintain control of your book–and its royalties.

Post you’ll like: How to Publish a Book

67. Alessandra Torre Ink

Alessandra Torre is a New York Times bestselling author and teaches courses in writing and publishing. She also hosts an online community that provides a space for more than 14,000 novelists and aspiring writers to ask questions, share their works-in-progress and share helpful tips and articles. You can also visit her website to read blogs about publishing, marketing or to le arn new writing tips. 

“Alessandra Torre Ink has been a wealth of information that I couldn’t have published without,” wrote one reader of The Write Life. “She knows her stuff and is very helpful. I recommend her to anyone considering a career in writing or publishing.”

Join the community of Alessandra Torre Inkers

⭐️ 68. Ask A Book Editor

If you’re writing a book — or if you just have a question about writing one — this Facebook group formed by editors will give you access to knowledgeable answers to your writing questions from experts who know the writing process in and out. You can’t advertise your work in this group, but you and the 6,000 writers a part of this group can ask as many questions as you want. 

Join the Ask A Book Editor community 

69. Chronicles

Are you a science fiction and fantasy writer? See if Chronicles is a good fit for you. It’s a community and forum where members gather to discuss favorite books, authors and common themes within the genre.

Join the Chronicles community

70. Faith Writers

Faith Writers is the #1 website for Christian Writers. Those interested in spreading the gospel universally via the world’s largest database of Christian articles can set up shop on this platform. Once you get through the articles from more than 70,000 Christian writers, Faith Writers also offers a Christian writer critique circle, weekly writing challenges, and annual Christian writing contests. 

Join the Faith Writers community

71. Fiction Writing

Fiction Writing helps writers with all things related to writing/publishing: outlining, writing, editing, query letters, formatting, artwork, blurbs, self-publishing and marketing. With nearly 125,000 members, there’s plenty of new writing to review and writers to provide feedback on yours. This robust group has regular threads for sharing social media accounts, poetry and more, too.

Join the Fiction Writing community

⭐️ 72. Inner Circle Writers’ Group

New and established writers, how would you like to join the group ProWritingAid says is one of the best groups for writers on Facebook? Writers interested in the craft and practice of writing, plus everything in between, can join this group to meet encouraging members who’ll support your work and celebrate your progress. In addition to learning from blossoming and professional writers, you can also promote your work and/or services. According to the group, interaction levels are high, so be ready to participate in group conversations and activities. 

Join the Inner Circle Writers’ Group community

73. Insecure Writer’s Support Group

Some say artists are sensitive, and writers aren’t exempt. To curb the doubts and insecurities that always manage to creep up, join this encouraging community that aims to uplift writers at every stage of the game. The Insecure Writer’s Support Group came highly recommended, with one reader saying it’s “undoubtedly the best writer website. Everybody is so supportive, yet incisive in their feedback. It is a wonderful community.”

Join Insecure Writer’s Support Group

74. Scribophile

Need a beta reader (or a few) and some thoughtful critiques on your latest piece? Scribophile has your back. An online writing workshop and writer’s community, writers of all skill levels join this platform to help each other improve their work through actionable feedback, sharing writing experience, not to mention a writing blog of tips and advice that’ll further help you sharpen your work. Plus, you can even learn how to write a query letter and win prize money through free writing contests. 

Join the Scribophile community

75. The Masters Review

The Masters Review is a platform for emerging writers. It doubles as an online and print publication, and since 2011, it has been celebrating new writers by sharing useful resources, in addition to a submission process for undistributed works.

Join the Masters Review community

Writing & Editing 

76. abbie emmons.

Abbie’s way of teaching writers how to make their stories matter is fun and engaging, as she often uses her own stories and projects as lessons to guide you in the right direction. By exploring mental health and sharing productivity, writing and blogging tips, Abbie hopes to help writers harness the power of psychology and storytelling to turn their ideas into masterpieces. Be sure to check out her YouTube channel for additional content about story structure, creating characters and more.

Post you’ll like: How to Write The “Aha” Moment (The Most Important Part of Your Story)

77. Bang2Write

Lucy V. Hay has won the hearts of so many of you! It’s no wonder she made it to our list again this year. Bang2Write is all about script reading, submission, genre, pitching and characterization. You’ll find tons of advice on how to develop great stories and pitch your scripts, along with best practices for writing research. 

Post you’ll like: What Writers Can Learn From 5 Unusual Male Characters

⭐️ 78. Copywrite Matters

According to this website for writers, all the best copywriting advice you need to help you write copy that attracts and converts lives right here. Besides a newsletter that shares free, daily copywriting tips, Belinda Weaver provides writing courses and a thorough blog that are sure to take your skills from good to amazing. Discover shortcuts so you can write faster and learn how to write engaging video scripts — then, see which four-letter word is crushing your potential. 

One reader of The Write Life said this website is “packed to the brim with helpful writing advice that is both progressive whilst paying respect to tried and tested methods.” 

Post you’ll like: PASO: How One Letter Can Make the Most Effective Copywriting Formula Even Better

79. C.S. Lakin’s Live Write Thrive

A lover of writing, teaching and helping writers, C.S Lakin uses her professional experience to do all three on her website, Live Write Thrive. By day, she’s a novelist, copyeditor and writing coach. At night, she saves one writer at a time by sharing the secrets to proper scene structure, character development, editing and crafting a fantastic story. She also runs several reputable courses for writers, novelists and editors .

Post you’ll like: The Nuances of Deep POV – Part 1

80. DIY MFA

Higher education isn’t an option for everyone, so founder Gabriela Pereira and her team have made it possible for writers to access it without the hefty price tag. After all, DIY MFA says the typical MFA (Master of Fine Arts) just boils down to one simple formula: Writing + Reading + Community. You can definitely find that here. (Curious about the site’s corresponding course? Check out our DIY MFA 101 review .)

Post you’ll like: Five Things to Consider Before Freelancing Full Time

81. Elizabeth Spann Craig

Elizabeth Spann Craig is a bestselling mystery author who uses articles, newsletter and guest blogs contributed by experts to teach writers how to turn an idea into a story — then, into a book. She also curates links on Twitter that are later shared on the free search engine, The Writer’s Knowledge Base, which can help you find the best writings on writing. Besides Twitterific writing links, this blog is also home to articles about genre, ad campaigns, creating believable characters and more. 

Post you’ll like: What to Do When You Discover Another Writer Is Working on the Same Idea As You

82. Helping Writers Become Authors

K.M. Weiland is a writer of historical and speculative fiction, an award-winning author and your new mentor. To answer all of your writing and publishing questions, her website provides writers a range of free resources: blog posts, instructional ebooks, vlogs and a podcast. 

Post you’ll like: What Is Dreamzoning? (7 Steps to Finding New Story Ideas)

83. Horror Tree

The Horror Tree was created with the horror writer in mind. From its humble beginnings as an outlet for speculative fiction authors to connect with horror anthologies and publishers, this online resource has since broadened to cover pieces on each step of the writing process, non-fiction, poetry, non-anthology work, and audio to boot!

Post you’ll like: An Interview With Natalie Brown, the Creator of Scary Snippets and Nocturnal Sirens Publishing

⭐️ 84. Jane Austen Writing Lessons

One of the best ways to learn to write well is to learn from the examples of great writers, says “longtime Janeite” Katherine Cowley. Her website is filled with blog posts about creative writing that use Jane Austen’s novels and other related stories to share what good writing looks and sounds like. Whether you’re interested in plot structure or character development to dialogue, each Jane Austen writing lesson focuses on one principle of writing at a time. Heads up: A new writing lesson is shared every Wednesday! 

Post you’ll like: Introduce Layered Characters to Create Deeper or Changed Meaning Later

⭐️ 85. Jerry Jenkins

Jerry Jenkins is a 21-time New York Times bestselling author with 40 years of experience in publishing and editing, but also as a novelist and nonfiction author — because of this laundry list of achievements, he’s confident he can put you on the track to writing success. With the guidance of Jerry’s blogs, writing tools and courses, you’ll quickly adopt the basic skills needed to create prose that entertains, touches hearts and has the potential to impact lives all over the world. 

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86. Kathy Steinemann

Author Kathy Steinemann has an affinity for words, especially when they’re frightening, futuristic or funny. To help you keep your word bank interesting, she shares master lists of adjectives and offers tips for avoiding overused words and being more descriptive and original in your writing.  Plus, she’ll tell you which writing habits upset editors. 

According to a reader of The Write Life, “Kathy Steinemann always helps to find the elusive word that adds polish to a manuscript. … Kathy helps you to create a far more colorful compose of words to tell your story, she offers you an escapade to the boredom of a Lazarus’ story.”

Post you’ll like: 200+ Ways to Say “Hate”: A Word List for Writers

⭐️ 87. Kiingo Writing Tips

How do you create compelling cliffhangers? How are villains born? Wait, how does story structure work? These are just some of the writing techniques and story elements you’ll learn about on the Kiingo blog, which is hosted by Kiingo Writing University, the world’s premier writing and storytelling school for the stories of today and tomorrow. To access storytelling courses, writing techniques and resources to learn the tools behind the craft of engaging storytelling, support them on Patreon. 

Post you’ll like: How Are the People of Your Story World Organized?

⭐️ 88. Kingdom Pen

Are you a Christian writer who doesn’t want to write a story that’s “cliched and preachy”? This website for writers wants to help you craft authentic and beautiful stories that challenge Christians and non-Christians to rethink how they view the world. Learn how to be an unstoppable writer with tips to build a writing habit that doesn’t quit, plus peruse the blog catalog that covers topics like work building, plot, style, theme and poetry, just to name a few.

Post you’ll like: How to Worldbuild the Best Fantasy Novel in Five Minutes

89. One Stop for Writers

Two words: Thesaurus library. The art of writing stories is no walk in the park, but it might feel that way with the free resources found on One Stop for Writers. This in-depth website covers everything from organizing research to writing authentic characters to crushing your writer’s block. Try out the free trial for the subscription to see if a full access plan offers the support you need.

Browse the resources here  

⭐️ 90. Perfect English Grammar

All writers need a firm grasp of grammar to tell stories that have clarity and precision. And with the many — and often confusing — rules that make up the English language, websites like this one should be a go-to for every writer who wants to speak and write more correct, beautiful English. Start with one of the many grammar explanations available that break down verb tenses, gerunds and infinitives and more. Then, test your knowledge with grammar exercises before you pen your next creation. 

Post you’ll like: The Future Perfect Continuous Tense

91. Pitch Travel Write

Roy Stevenson is quite the travel aficionado. With over 1,000 published articles, this travel writing expert uses his site to gleefully share everything he knows about the industry: query letters and pitches that work, crafting content that sells, capturing compelling photography, and marketing yourself. To help you become a successful freelance travel writer, Stevenson offers workshops, coaching sessions, resource guides and instructive articles. 

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92. ProWritingAid

If you’re looking for a tool that will do more than just catch typos, this is it. ProWritingAid’s manuscript editing software will help you self-edit faster without compromising accuracy. The built-in style guide and contextual thesaurus are sure to come in handy, too. 

To give it a whirl, sign up with your email address and you’ll get to analyze 500 words of text for style, grammar, overused words, readability and more. Check out our ProWritingAid review .

Try the editing tool here

93. Quick and Dirty Tips 

For many of us, Mignon Fogarty (AKA Grammar Girl) is the go-to when we need to take the mystery out of the complicated English language. Her network, Quick and Dirty Tips, houses Grammar Girl’s wisdom for all things “grammar, punctuation, usage and fun developments in the English language.” She has a podcast, too!

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⭐️ 94. Script Advice

London-based Yvonne Grace is a TV drama consultant who has 25 years of experience in script editing, storylining, script development and television drama production. When you visit her website, aspiring screenwriters will find a variety of content around TV writing: how to write a TV treatment, the secret to a compelling pilot script, the story structure to follow for TV drama series and so much more. According to the glowing testimonials on her site, you can’t go wrong with this expert’s advice. 

Post you’ll like: How To Write A Treatment And Structure Series Narrative

⭐️ 95. The History Quill

Have you ever read a historical fiction novel that failed to nail the details of the era it’s set in? The History Quill is the website for writers that will help you avoid this faux pas. Its mission is to provide you with what you need to write a successful and accurate story, including specialist historical fiction editing services, group coaching and a flurry of tips and resources. Here, you’ll find fun tips like how to give your characters a historical sense of humor, plus research techniques to create an authentic story. 

Post you’ll like: Going to the Toilet in Historical Fiction

⭐ ️ 96. The Porte Port

Chris La Porte is a writer, storyteller and self-proclaimed geek whose website teaches writers how to write more immersive stories. His blog is dedicated to analyzing the storytelling techniques of the movies, books, games and shows that spark our imagination, such as “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” “The Office,” and stories by J. R. R. Tolkien. Through these lessons, you’ll learn how to tell your stories better. 

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97. Where to Pitch

You might have a phenomenal pitch that got rejected because it just didn’t land in the right inbox. In that case, it really isn’t you; it’s them. The key is to pitch smarter. That’s where Susan Shain’s Where to Pitch comes in. This loaded writer resource will help you decide where to pitch your articles, based on a topic or publication. Her site also offers a free newsletter that offers monthly freelance writing tips and resources.

Try out the tool here

98. Word Wise Tips

Kathy Widenhouse is a freelance Christian writer, but you might know her as the “Nonprofit Copywriter.” Her blog is loaded with simple, clear writing tips and shortcuts to simplify any writing process and help you make the most of your time. Heeding the advice of this accomplished copywriter means writing blogs, newsletters, webpages, social media copy and other projects will never be easier.

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99. Writer Unboxed

Founded in 2006, Writer Unboxed is dedicated to publishing empowering, positive and provocative ideas about the craft and business of fiction. Kathleen Bolton and editorial director Therese Walsh host more than 50 contributors that share meaningful insight about writing. Plus, you won’t want to miss out on the buzzing comment section, where the conversation includes the input of community members.

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100. Writers Write

At Writers Write, where the motto is “Write to communicate”’ you’re welcomed into an all-encompassing writing resource for creative writers, business writers and bloggers. Don’t hesitate to take advantage of its vast archive of more than 1,200 informational and inspirational articles that provide solid advice, inspiration and writing assistance. 

Post you’ll like: Getting Away With Murder: A 5-Point Plan On How To Kill A Character

Whew, you made it! Thank you for all the nominations that helped make this list possible, and congratulations to 2021’s 100 websites!

Which writing websites would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments below!

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Deadline: thursday, december 21st, writers associations: local and national organizations for writers.

Here’s a great list of writers associations, writers groups , and organizations for writers! Many local writers organizations have affiliations with national groups, but some writing groups stand alone within their communities. If you want to find national writing associations, look no further! If you’re interested to find local writing groups, check out this great list we’ve compiled of writing groups by state.

Writing organizations offer wonderful resources for writers. Some writers associations or organizations are free; others charge membership fees. These fantastic writers associations can help you find a literary agent, arrange meetings with editors, go to writing conferences, learn craft techniques, and keep up with changes in the publishing industry.

Before you join a writers association or organization, be sure to ask a lot of questions to make sure that the group is appropriate for you!

Enjoy our list of local and national organizations for writers!

TIP: Be sure to check out our FREE list of Writing Groups by State or Region !

We know there are more writers associations out there, but we hope this list will get you started.

Writers Associations: Organizations For Writers Of Fiction (Novels, Stories, Books)

American Christian Fiction Writers — A writers association for writers of Christian novels and stories.

Historical Novel Society — A great association of writers of historical fiction. Offers community, networking opportunities (agents, editors, publishers, booksellers), and more.

Novelists, Inc. — A professional writers organization for multi-published book authors.

Mystery Writers Of America — An organization for writers of mystery novels, as well as editors, screenwriters, and other professionals associated with the mystery genre.

Romance Writers Of America — The trade organization for writers of romantic fiction.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America — SFWA offers many resources for writers of speculative genres. A very vibrant and active writers association.

Sisters In Crime — A writers organization dedicated to the professional advancement of women who write in the crime and mystery genres.

Western Writers Of America — A writers association for authors whose work focuses on the American West.

Welcome To The NEA: Or, How To Get Money For Writing Stuff  — One of the most consistently magnanimous supporters of the arts in America is the National Endowment for the Arts, which has numerous—and generous—grants available in all areas of the arts, including literature. Learn more about the NEA.

Women’s Fiction Writers Association  — An inclusive organization of writers creating layered stories in which the plot is driven by the main character’s emotional journey.

Nonfiction Writers Associations And Organizations

American Society Of Journalists And Authors (ASJA) — For independent nonfiction writers and freelancers.

Asian American Journalists Association — A writers organization for new and veteran journalists who are Asian Pacific Americans.

National Association Of Memoir Writers — For writers of all levels who are writing memoir, personal essays, and nonfiction.

Native American Journalists Association — A writing organization for Native American journalism. Offers many opportunities for professional advancement.

Nonfiction Authors Association — Their primary focus is helping their members with educational resources and community support for marketing nonfiction books.

Poetry: Organizations For Poets

Poetry Society Of America — An association of writers who love poetry in all forms. Welcomes published and unpublished poets.

Academy Of American Poets — Regularly sponsors national poetry events and poetry publications in order to advocate poetry. Membership dues for this writing association help pay for programs.

Writers Associations: General And Specific Interests

Association of Writers And Writing Programs — For writers and teachers affiliated with college and university writing programs.

Authors Guild — A professional organization for writers, great for keeping up with the changing face of the publishing industry and issues related to copyright protection.

The Catholic Writers Guild — For writers of all kinds who share the Catholic faith.

Cat Writers Association — A community for writers who specialize in cats.

Dog Writers Association of America —A community for writers who specialize in dogs.

Erotica Readers And Writers  — An association of writers and readers of erotic writing.

Islamic Writers Alliance — Members include “published and aspiring writers, editors, artists, publishers, journalists, playwrights, Web designers, retailers, and marketing consultants.”

The National Writers Union — A freelance writers union for authors in all genres: This group is a trade organization that advocates for the rights of authors.

International Association For Journal Writing  — A writers association that focuses on journaling and creative expression.

International Women’s Writing Guild — An association of women writers developed for networking and offering mutual support.

Military Writers Society Of America — An organization for writers, poets, and artists who focus on military service. Encourages memoir writing, writing as therapy, and education about publishing.

National Association Of Independent Writers And Editors  — From the website: This writers association includes “novelists, copywriters and copyeditors, writing coaches, proofreaders, magazine writers, writing teachers, business writers and editors, academic writing evaluators, writers of literature for children, fiction editors and other specialists.”

National Writers Association — A writers association for all levels and genres that offers some professional services, such as contract review and critique.

Pacific Northwest Writers Association — A Northwest writers association “to develop the writing talent through education, accessibility to the publishing industry, and participation in an interactive, vital writer community.”

PEN America Center — An organization with global reach that defends the right to expression through the written word.

Small Publishers, Artists, And Writers Network — (SPAWN) An inclusive writers group for independent-minded writers, publishers, printers, and members of the media.

Society of Children’s Book Writers And Illustrators — An association for writers of books for children.

Texas Association Of Authors — The only organization in Texas whose focus is to promote the authors within the great state of Texas itself. Texas Authors leverages the knowledge and expertise of many different authors to help promote others within the world of reading and writing.

Women’s National Book Association — A national organization of women and men who work with and value books.

Writers Guild Of America — Two writers organizations (east and west) that represent writers in motion pictures, broadcasting, and other media.

More! Find A Local Writing Group, Association, Or Organization

Want to find a local writing group? A writers association that meets close to home? Finding the right group may be easier than you think! If you want to find more writers associations, here’s where to start:

Your local library. Librarians know a lot about local writers organizations and groups. Your neighbors may be writing and you don’t even know it. Stop by your local library’s circ desk and ask about local writing groups or clubs.

Your local bookstore. Many independent bookstores host groups of creative writers, who gather for critique, feedback, and support. Support your local bookseller and connect with like-minded writers!

Our researchers have created this list of the best Facebook groups for writers . Pick one (or a few!) to join!

Meetup.com. This website (or another like it) can help you connect with writers who share your interests. As always, take precautions when joining any new group!

If you’re going to join a writing organization, it’s important to know how to critique other writers in an honest, productive, and encouraging way. Here are 11 tips for critiquing other writers !

Nowadays you can easily connect with other writers through online writing groups . We’ve curated a list of virtual writing communities you can check out online!

Want to start a writing group yourself? Check out these tips!

You can learn more about the benefits of having a writing community here !

Closing Notes

For more great free resources, subscribe to Writer’s Relief’s weekly e-publication, Submit Write Now!

Please take a moment to like, share, email, tweet, or stumble this page! And if you’d like to repost any of our articles, you can! Just contact us for details.

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40 Writer’s Writers Whomst Readers Should Read

(but what about all the writer's writer's writer's writer's).

Earlier this week, National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas asked Twitter : “Who do you think is widely considered a writer’s writer?” The question inspired no little discussion online, as well as in the Literary Hub office, and so this list—in which I have collected quotes from respectable sources who have doled out the term—was born.

But first, just what  is  a “writer’s writer”? For me, the term suggests a writer who is doing something unusual or extra impressive with their chosen form—something another writer in particular would marvel at, because they would understand firsthand how hard it is. Often this means that said writer is obscure to to general public, but not always. Maybe it’s more mercenary than that, and a writer’s writer is just someone other writers mention to one another whenever they want to sound impressive. Or maybe it’s just as simple as it sounds: a writer that only (or mostly) other writers read. (Which begs the question: do non-writers still buy books at all? Whence the pure reader, sans intention?)

Cynthia Ozick described the phrase “a synonym for obscurity. Every writer understands exactly what that fearful possessive hints at: a modicum of professional admiration accompanied—or subverted—by dim public recognition and even dimmer sales. Yet the writer’s writer is said to write not in hope of fame but out of quiet passion, and is thereby accorded a purity not granted to the household name.”

Or, as Anna Fitzpatrick would have it , “To call someone a “writer’s writer” sounds obnoxious, as in, “This book isn’t for civilian eyes. You have to be one of  us to get it.” I know a better word for people who think this way: assholes.”

Now, fair warning that “writer’s writers”—at least as declared by critics on the internet in places where I could find them—tend to be white men. Shocking! This of course is due to the hegemonic praise structure that still exists in the literary world (though I dare say it’s getting slowly better) and the fact that—at least according to one known male in the Literary Hub office—educated white men often have a strange need to brag about being their high/obscure taste levels. Why they couldn’t brag about reading obscure books by women of color, who knows.

So now, for whatever it’s worth, and for whatever it means, I present 40 “writer’s writers” for your consideration—and a few more as a bonus from us to you at the end.

Jim Shepard

According to Boris Kachka in Vulture :

Jim Shepard is one of the best writers you’ve never heard of. . . . Yet Shepard describes himself as “semi-obscure,” a “writer’s writer,” which he takes as a sort of consolation prize: “It used to mean, ‘ writers like him, anyway.’” He is not happy with his place in literary culture; nor should he be, since his commercial timing has always been a little off.

Richard Stern

According to Christopher Borrelli in the Chicago Tribune :

Other Men’s Daughters was just reissued by New York Review of Books with an introduction by Philip Roth, who writes that the novel is a “microscope” on its place in time, illustrating “a decisive turning point in American mores . . . when the vast assault upon convention, propriety and entrenched belief began to challenge authority, high and low, and of the wreckage that caused.” He also quotes from his own 1973 review, that Stern’s book “is as if Chekhov had written ‘Lolita.’”

Yet, success didn’t take for Stern.

Despite many more novels and essay collections, a medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters (and a 1995 Heartland Prize from the Tribune ), Stern had long settled into a dreaded backhanded reputation: He became a writer’s writer. Meaning, he remained obscure to the public and didn’t sell many books but he had important admirers (among them Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Anthony Burgess) who delivered hosannas that didn’t sell books, either. His career became somewhat of a literary equivalent to that famous line about the Velvet Underground, that they sold only a few thousand records but every person who bought one started a band.

Henry Green

According to David Lodge in The New York Review of Books :

Henry Green occupies a special but somewhat puzzling place in the history of modern English fiction. That his real name was Henry Yorke is symbolic of the general elusiveness of his literary identity. He seems to stand to one side of his fictional  oeuvre , smiling enigmatically and challenging us to put a label, and a value, on it. He has been called a “writer’s writer,” and even, according to Terry Southern, “a writer’s-writer’s writer.” W. H. Auden, Eudora Welty, V. S. Pritchett, Rebecca West, and John Updike have all described him, at various times, and in various ways, as the finest novelist of his generation, yet he never enjoyed either the commercial success or the literary fame of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Christopher Isherwood.

He was neither shrewd nor lucky in the development of his literary career. After a precocious and promising debut,  Blindness  (1926), begun while he was still at school, he wrote a brilliant novel about working-class life,  Living  (1929), several years before such subject matter became fashionable, and then took ten years to write his next,  Party Going  (1939)—a work whose concern with a group of narcissistic socialites setting off on a Continental holiday seemed rather frivolous in the encroaching shadows of World War II. In the 1940s he became more productive, and more widely read ( Loving  [1945] even appeared briefly on the US best-seller lists), but just as he was beginning to attract serious critical attention, interest was diverted by a new wave of British writers, the so-called Angry Young Men, with whose coarse, iconoclastic energies he had little affinity. Whether by coincidence or cause and effect, his creativity seemed to suddenly dry up at this time. The latter part of his life, from the publication of his last novel,  Doting , in 1952, to his death in 1973, was a sad story of increasing reclusiveness, alcoholism, and melancholia. His novels went out of print, and his name virtually disappeared from the canon of modern British fiction.

Sergio Pitol

According to Daniel Saldaña París in Literary Hub :

Pitol is one of those authors whom one never leaves. There is always a corner of his work that can be read under a new lens. It is not for nothing, it seems to me, that he is held as a clear example of a “writer’s writer” in recent Latin American narrative. The fact that authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas and Mario Bellatin have turned him into a character in their own fiction only confirms what any reader senses upon reading him: that Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself.

John Williams

According to Tim Kreider in  The New Yorker :

In one of those few gratifying instances of belated artistic justice, John Williams’s “Stoner” has become an unexpected bestseller in Europe after being translated and championed by the French writer Anna Gavalda. Once every decade or so, someone like me tries to do the same service for it in the U.S., writing an essay arguing that “Stoner” is a great, chronically underappreciated American novel. (The latest of these, which also lists several previous such essays, is Morris Dickstein’s for the Times .) And yet it goes on being largely undiscovered in its own country, passed around and praised only among a bookish cognoscenti, and its author, John Williams, consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer’s writer.

According to Jonathan Franzen in an interview with PBS :

[Fox] may be more of a writer’s writer, at least in her adult novels. After getting a late start– after an utterly chaotic childhood, two early marriages, and child-rearing– she was very prolific, but much of her output was YA literature (a term she disliked, preferring “books for children”). And for most of the time she was writing, she lived in a male-dominated literary world. Contrast all this with Updike, who came out of Harvard, burst on the scene in his twenties, wrote about the melancholies and sex lives of affluent American suburbanites, and fit the pattern of a male writer having a full and long career. I don’t care for lists myself, so I won’t make a long one here, but I think in general great writing by women is more often overlooked than its male counterparts. I wonder if you’ve read Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River , or Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children , or the stories and novels and essays of Joy Williams. If you haven’t, you should!

James Salter

According to Terry McDonnell in Literary Hub :

The immense depth of that was in his descriptions of the intimacies of love and the details of disappointment and loss and regret, and it made reading him an ecstatic experience. You read to see what would happen, sure, but you read every word to savor the meaning and balance of each sentence—it was a way to look at life as it passed.

Perhaps that’s why critics called him a “writer’s writer,” a label that annoyed him and, I suspect, everyone else. Jim’s friend, Bruce Jay Friedman, told a story about a weekly writers’ lunch he was part of in the Hamptons that included Mario Puzo ( The Godfather ), Joe Heller ( Catch-22 ) and Mel Brooks ( The Producers ). The group was looking for a new member to liven things up but decided not to ask Salter because, as Puzo put it, Jim was “too good of a writer.”

If you’re an editor there is no such thing, but the implied problem with being a writer’s writer is that it goes with semi-obscurity and lack of commercial success. Not that Jim didn’t do fine; it was just so obvious that his talent outweighed his notoriety and his paydays. Of course Jim never talked about any of this. Then, in late 2012, with the novel  All That Is,  he was poised for the hit his talent had been promising for so many years.

Stephen Wright

According to Deidra McAfee in  New York :

Fully American and fully literary as few are, he is a writer’s writer—but also a reader’s writer who deserves a wider audience.

Maggie Nelson

According to The Millions :

Maggie Nelson is known best for her non-fiction. Often described as some combination of “lyrical” and “philosophical,” Nelson’s five book-length works of nonfiction have won her a steadfast following. She might be described as a “writer’s writer.” The evidence is in how often her books are named by other writers in our annual Year in Reading series. Bluets , a meditation on the color blue, won praise from David Shields (“utterly brilliant”), Stephen Elliott (“excellent”), Haley Mlotek (“I read Bluets twice in the same plane ride.”), Leslie Jamison, Jaquira Díaz, and Margaret Eby. Meaghan O’Connell wrote of Nelson, “She is one of those people for me, writers who I want to cross all boundaries with, writers from whom I ask too much. She makes me want more than, as a reader, I deserve. She already gives us more than we deserve. It isn’t fair.” Many of the above writers also praised Nelson’s more recent The Argonauts , “a genre-bending memoir,” as did Bijan Stephen, Olivia Laing (“It thinks deeply and with immense nuance and grace”), Karolina Waclawiak (“I found myself underlining on nearly every page”), and Parul Sehgal. Nelson herself appeared in our Year in Reading last year, shining light on books by Eileen Myles and Ellen Miller, among others.

Lydia Davis

According to Ali Smith in The Guardian :

In the UK at least, until the 2010 publication of her Collected Stories (Penguin), it was quite hard to track down copies of her four collections: Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) and Varieties of Disturbance (2007), though a couple of these and a lone novel, The End of the Story (1995), were published in the 90s by Serpent’s Tail. She was hard to find, but held in such regard among those who read her that from the beginning she had the reputation of being a writer’s writer.

But she’s such a reader’s writer, this daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic writer who reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. It’s all about how you read and about the reflorescence of what and how things mean with Davis, who works in an understated, concentrated way and in a form that usually slips under the mainstream radar. So look again, because this is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. As a translator, she has recently produced magnificent English versions of classics by the latter two, but it’s the short-story form that she’s made her own, and even changed the potential of, over three decades of honing a style whose discipline is a perfect means of release of hilarity, myth, merciless sharpness, and, most of all, of a celebration of the thinking, vital, fertile mind.

David Markson

According to Corey Messler in Popmatters :

David Markson is a national treasure. He is championed by many, including young turks like David Foster Wallace. It is often said he is a writer’s writer. The implication is that he might be the one of the best  unread  writers in America, even though early in his career one of his books was made into a big Hollywood movie ( Dingus Magee ) and Ann Beattie said of him, “Markson is as precise and dazzling as Joyce.”

Eimear McBride

According to Gabrielle Bellot in Literary Hub :

The prose of Eimear McBride’s brilliant first novel,  A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing , recalled many a Modernist writer, from Gertrude Stein to James Joyce—so much so that she’s tired of being compared to Joyce. And her success story is also one both old and new: her novel took nearly a decade to be picked up and acknowledged, at which point it won both the Bailey’s and Goldsmiths Prizes. Her next novel,  The Lesser Bohemians , moves to London in the 1990s, featuring a tempestuous love story between a young Irish girl studying drama and an older actor. It “nearly killed” her to write, McBride told the  Guardian  in August.   McBride is the kind of writer’s writer who I’m always excited to read more from.

Barry Hannah

According to Michael Bible in Literary Hub :

Barry’s status as a writer’s writer bothered him, I think. He always wanted to have Kurt Vonnegut numbers. But I’m glad he never reached that level in his life. Fame is a disease that infects all those who encounter it. From the outside it seems like the pinnacle of a career, the end goal of creative work. But the writing world is littered with those whose fame overshadowed their work and destroyed them from the inside out. People like Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger, who are thought of as eccentric for shunning the public. But in retrospect retreat from fame looks to be the more sane route. I think often of Carson McCullers typing out the  Ballad of the Sad Cafe  with one finger after a series of strokes. She was famous at the age of 22 and died at 50.

Lucia Berlin

According to Nadja Spiegelman in  The New York Times :

The day Lucia Berlin was born, in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, an avalanche wiped out a third of the town, or so she later wrote. Mythic stories gravitated to her, and in death she acquired one more: that of a writer who died too young and went unrecognized in her lifetime. In truth, when she died, at 68 in 2004, she had published 76 stories and six collections, for which she received several prizes. And yet, just as in her writing, the myth is truer than the truth. She should have written more. She should have been more celebrated. In 2015 Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women , a 400-page volume of her re-collected tales .  It was rapturously received: Here was a writer’s writer who, at the same time, had tremendous popular appeal. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. She was canonized alongside Richard Yates and Raymond Carver, and her own heroes, William Carlos Williams and Chekhov.

Joy Williams

According to Claire Burgess in The Rumpus :

After ten long years without a new story collection from Joy Williams, we are finally rewarded this week with The Visiting Privilege , containing thirteen new stories and thirty-three stories collected from across Williams’s career. Williams is a writer’s writer, a storysmith of the highest caliber whose creations are studied and beloved by the greatest in her field. The back of Visiting Privilege bears acclaim from the likes of Raymond Carver, George Plimpton, and James Salter. A wonderful profile of Williams in the New York Times Magazine last week contains George Saunders praising her comedy, Karen Russell calling her a “visionary,” and Ann Beattie exclaiming over her use of exclamation points. A reviewer at NPR called her “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories.” And the stories in Visiting Privilege are worth every inch of the praise.

Paul Horgan

According to Beth Kephart in Literary Hub :

Horgan died within days of my mailing that letter. Cardiac arrest. He was 91 years old—“the writer’s writer, the biographer’s biographer,” in the words of David McCullough; “that rarest of birds,” said Walker Percy; the story finder and teller often compared to Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy. In memoriam, I filled my library with more Paul Horgan. I searched for others with whom I might light the Horgan flame.

Richard Yates

According to Don Lee in Electric Literature :

When I bleat into this kind of self-pitying state, though, I think about a writer who was probably the most miserable person I have ever met: Richard Yates. His work is familiar to quite a few readers now, thanks to a retrospective by Stewart O’Nan in  The Boston Review  in 1999, Blake Bailey’s biography,  A Tragic Honesty,  in 2003, and the film adaptation of Yates’s first novel,  Revolutionary Road,  in 2008, but at the time of his death in 1992, he was largely forgotten, and all his books quickly fell out of print.

Even within his lifetime, he was a writer’s writer, meaning he had a small following among literati but otherwise was almost completely unknown. I came across his work by pure chance in my early twenties. I was in Burbank, California, living in my parents’ condo, which was sitting empty at the time, working odd jobs, and waiting for grad school in Boston to begin. I spent a lot of weekends in a vast used bookstore in downtown Burbank, roaming the aisles and picking out battered paperbacks, almost at random, for fifty cents a pop. I happened to buy Yates’s first collection,  Eleven Kinds of Loneliness  (how could I resist that title?), got hooked, and read everything else I could find by him.

Elmore Leonard

According to CrimeReads :

Elmore Leonard was “the Dickens of Detroit,” “the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers,” and above all a master craftsman. Ever a writer’s writer, Leonard honed his craft meticulously over a career that spanned sixty years and nearly as many books, from westerns to era-defining crime novels like  Get Shorty  and  Out of Sight  to short story collections that still infuse the pop and mystery culture to this day. Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing,” published in the  New York Times  in 2001, has become gospel for many a writer, including such timeless gems as “[t]ry to leave out the part that readers tend to skip” and, most famously, “[i]f it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Leonard was also renowned for his opening lines. (In his “Rules,” he warns writers to skip prologues and never to start by describing the weather.) Rightly, he’s now remembered as one of the greatest lead writers in the history of crime fiction, able to engage a reader, capture a mood, and establish a world in a few brief words.

According to Gail Godwin in  The New York Times :

Ward Just is both a writer’s writer and an astute tracker of human souls under duplicity and duress. He writes incisively, with striking imagery and with deep knowledge of how people in power behave, from ambassadors coping with the world’s hot spots to Midwestern community leaders suppressing a local crime. Like many distinguished novelists, Just was a journalist first, covering Washington, London and Saigon before the release of his first novel in 1970. American Romantic , his 18th, is one of his finest. It has all the qualities Just’s regular readers look forward to, yet it’s an equally good place to be introduced to his work.

Frederick Busch

According to Mary Rourke in  Los Angeles Times :

He was often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” and his work was compared to that of such literary masters as Raymond Carver and John Cheever. Busch received a number of prestigious awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters fiction award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud prize in 1991. Busch once said his goal was to be “a really honest, minor writer of the 20th century.”

According to Hillary Kelly in Vulture :

Critics, especially those who are also novelists, have always liked her work: “If we’re lucky, [ Person of Interest ] may turn out to be a prototypical 21st-century novel,” Francine Prose wrote in the New York Times . Of her most recent novel, My Education , Meg Wolitzer wrote, “I felt like I was in an obsessive relationship with it. I wanted to read it all the time.” Jennifer Egan, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, first came to Choi’s work while reviewing American Woman . The two are now friends and neighbors in Fort Greene. “She’s really an original,” Egan says. “She’s following an internal rudder to territory that’s always fascinating.”

Which is to say, Choi is a writer’s writer: “A lot of people that I have a high opinion of have a high opinion of her,” says another friend, the author Sigrid Nunez. But the public has never quite sunk its teeth into Choi’s work, and she knows this. “By the time American Woman was getting critical accolades,” she says “it was underperforming already.”

According to Roxane Gay in  The Nation :

Paul Yoon’s slender novel  Snow Hunters  is exquisitely written—the kind of book that makes you think, this is the work of a writer’s writer.

Sigrid Nunez

According to Emily Bobrow in 1843 :

Why aren’t more people familiar with the work of Sigrid Nunez? At 66, she seems doomed to be a writer’s writer, beloved by a loyal few for her clear, incisive prose, but regrettably overlooked by almost everyone else. Perhaps The Friend – her seventh novel – will change this. The book is an intimate, beautiful thing, deceptively slight at around 200 pages, but humming with insight. After the unexpected suicide of her best friend, a woman becomes the caretaker of the hulking, melancholic Great Dane he left behind. In another writer’s hands this might seem too slim a premise, but Nunez has made her book into an artfully discursive meditation on friendship, love, death, solitude, canine companionship and the life of an aging writer in New York. Far from being heavy going, this novel, written as a letter to the late friend, is peppered with wry observations, particularly those of a writer stuck teaching undergraduates. (Why, for example, do students always describe characters by their eye and hair color, “as if a story is a piece of ID like a driver’s license”?) Like a magpie, Nunez’s heroine plucks wisdom from writers, philosophers and films to weave a story about the search for meaning in dark times.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

According to Hermione Hoby in  The Guardian :

[Zadie] Smith also wrote: “Everywhere I’ve gone this past year the talk, amongst bookish people, has been of this Norwegian.” And Knausgaard does indeed seem to have reached a “writer’s writer” status, like that of Marcel Proust, to whom he is most often compared. (Knausgaard has said: “I not only read À la recherche du temps perdu , but virtually imbibed it.”)

Janet Malcolm

According to Sarah Nicole Prickett in Bookforum :

One afternoon I was in the office of a psychoanalyst I know, scanning the alphabetical shelves for a book by Melanie Klein on envy and gratitude, when I glimpsed old copies of Janet Malcolm’s  Psychoanalysis (1981) and  In the Freud Archives (1984) and saw a chance to get some perspective. Malcolm is a magazine writer’s writer: No journalist of her stature is so frequently discussed among people I know who write “pieces” while being undiscussed by people I know who don’t.

W. G. Sebald

According to Arthur Lubow in  The New York Times :

When The Emigrants , his first book to be translated into English, came out in 1996, it won the critical esteem he already enjoyed in German and established him in the English-speaking world as a writer’s writer. Susan Sontag called it “an astonishing masterpiece” that “seems perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.” In his next book, The Rings of Saturn , he composed a phantasmagoric travelogue across southeastern England. The biographer Richard Holmes, who lives in Norwich and is the author of Footsteps , itself a hybrid of biography and travel writing, calls The Rings of Saturn “a brilliant book and very, very original, with this almost deadpan humor and these wonderful shifts—it’s rather magic.”

David Huddle

According to Rebecca Makkai in an interview with  BOMB :

He is indeed a Southern Gentleman, one of the best. And a writer’s writer. When I find another writer who loves David Huddle, we tend to embrace on the spot.

Alice Munro

According to Joyce Carol Oates in  The New Yorker :

A wonderful writer, whom I first began reading in the nineteen-sixties, when I lived in Ontario, Canada. Alice Munro has always been, among her other attributes, “a writer’s writer”—it is just a pleasure to read her work. And how encouraging to those of us who love short stories that this master of the realistic, “Chekhovian” short story is so honored. In a world so frantically politicized and partisan, the achievement of Alice Munro is truly exceptional.

Mavis Gallant

According to Chris Power in The Guardian :

No living author seems to me less deserving of the term “writer’s writer” and its implication of remote obscurity than Mavis Gallant. In Michael Ondaatje’s words, “among writers she is a shared and loved and daunting secret”, and it seems a telling detail that while she remains too little known, those who read her tend to move, as I did, from ignorance to devotion with uncommon haste.

Breece D’J Pancake

According to Jon Michaud in The New Yorker :

It’s not hard to see why Pancake has become a sort of secular saint for some writers. Writing is an act of faith. Writers face endless rejection, constant self-doubt. For many writers, practicing their art requires a vow of poverty or, at the very least, a vow of doing without. Pancake suffered through all of this and more, and yet he was delivered to the afterlife of publication and acclaim.

Nevertheless, Pancake deserves to be more than a writer’s writer. In his stories, objects are constantly being unearthed: fossils and coal from the earth, skeletons and arrowheads from Indian burial grounds. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake is a sharp, flinty object, an arrowhead left behind by a talented and tragic young author. It would be easy to allow his one collection of stories to be buried under the landslide of books published every year. But it’s worth doing a little excavating to dig it up. The past few years have seen late-in-the-day and posthumous revivals of interest in writers such as Renata Adler, Elena Ferrante, and John Williams. Get out your pickaxes. It’s high time for a Pancake revival.

Patricia Hampl

According to Jennifer Brice in  Ploughshares :

Although her work is widely read, Patricia Hampl is also a writer’s writer—lyric, cerebral, a boon companion at any stage of the writer’s journey. The arc of her career parallels the rise of personal writing in America in the past half-century. It may be that the genre most closely associated with memory—“that captivating mystery,” she calls it—chose her, not the other way around. Indeed, she uses the language of surrender to describe her writing process. “I conscripted myself to be the protagonist of these books,” she told National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm in 2007. “As memoir began gaining ground, I realized I was riding this strange tiger.”

According to Amy Hempel in an interview with Antenna :

That talk that Gary Lutz gave a couple of years ago is every bit as important as Diane said. Gary has been an extraordinary “writer’s writer” for years, and as more people read and listen to him, his influence grows. Gary Lutz sounds like nobody else. He is one of the most precise and daring writers I can think of. There are no half-measures in his stance regarding fiction. You can set a course by some of the things he said in that talk, which I think was also  published in the  Believer . He is always worth reading, and re-reading!

Robert Walser

According to Joe Winkler in Vol. 1 Brooklyn :

There’s something of the writer’s writer status in Robert Walser. Read by few since his death, but adored by the right people (Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, J.M. Coetzee and, more recently, Ben Lerner, Rivka Galchen and Benjamin Kunkel) there’s something of an in-the-know feel about reading Walser. As his writings become almost completely translated, more and more writers discover this often meek, playful, and secretive artist and feel in the presence of found genius.This status of a writer’s writer speak not only to the act of discovery, the gift of stumbling upon this unknown brilliant person, but also to the nature of the enjoyment. Walser, like other writer’s writers can do so much in one sentence as to floor anybody who values words, sentences, and the basic building blocks of literature.

Daniel Woodrell

According to Benjamin Percy in  Esquire :

Woodrell has long been considered a world class prose stylist and storyteller: a writer’s writer. Yet despite his acclaimed novels—among them, the darkly brilliant  The Death of Sweet Mister  (about a deeply troubled mother and son living in a graveyard) and the PEN West–winning  Tomato Red  (about an out-of-control criminal who tries to make right but always ends up wrong)—he has somehow remained one of American literature’s best-kept secrets. It was not until  Winter’s Bone , published in 2006, was adapted into the 2010 Oscar-nominated film about the poor, desperate, and unforgettable Ree Dolly on a mission to save her family and find her meth-cooking father that Woodrell received widespread attention.

Donald E. Westlake

According to Scott Bradfield in the Los Angeles Review of Books :

When the final volley of bullets arrives in  The Comedy is Finished , one of the kidnappers tells Koo: “It sounds like the critics found you.” And while it is likely that critics might not have found or appreciated a novel this good even had it been published back in the time it was written, Westlake clearly didn’t care too much about being taken “seriously,” continuing to produce serious-even-when-funny great books in a remarkable career that never ended until he died. Over several decades of calm, passionate literary production, he never wrote a bad sentence or a bad scene, and he produced so many good books that he needed a filing cabinet of pseudonyms just to keep up. Which, come to think of it, may qualify him as that rarest beast of all: the writer’s writer’s writer. There was always too much of him to go around—which means the rest of us have plenty of time to catch up.

According to Alexander Helmintoller in Zyzzyva :

Lerner, who is first and foremost a poet, is a writer’s writer. His first novel,  Leaving the Atocha Station , came out to great acclaim in 2011. He is constantly experimenting with form and the limits of plausibility—and breaks these literary conventions by fictionalizing nonfiction—frequently employing apostrophe to blend fiction and nonfiction and to reveal the mechanisms at the writer’s disposal. It is as if we have been invited into a space much more intimate than the writer’s studio: In  10:04 , we observe his relationships, his travel to shameful fertility appointments in which he must provide a “sample” for testing in order that his best friend Alex be able to move forward with intrauterine insemination. We are with the writer as he washes his hands again and again after worrying that his pants (which have touched the D-line train seats) and the remote used to navigate the clinic’s digital library of “visual stimuli” will contaminate his sample. We pass through his life in New York, his residency in Texas, back in time to meet his mentors, and even leap forward into multiple projected futures. So while the novel is largely defined by its lack of unity of plot, the scenes, however far removed they are from each other, stand alone, and are striking in their humor and wit.

According to Charles McGrath in the New York Times :

Thanks in large part to Charles Bukowski, who rediscovered Fante in the late ’70s and helped get him back in print, Bandini’s transparent neediness as a writer has endeared him to generations of younger authors, who turned Ask the Dust into a cult book—a writer’s writer’s novel—though it sold no more than a couple of thousand copies when it first came out.

Elizabeth Hardwick

According to Michelle Dean in  The New Republic :

it must have been very hard to actually be Elizabeth Hardwick. Her marriage to Robert Lowell in 1949 brought her both transcendent passion and abject disaster. She spent many years playing his nursemaid, as he was repeatedly committed to mental institutions, and bearing his infidelities as a function of his madness. Perhaps worse, she was in her professional life that double-edged thing, a writer’s writer. She lived in a welter of literary gossip, surrounded by people who managed, by most measures the world cared about, to do more than she did: to write more books, win more awards, attract more readers. Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag all counted as her friends, though she did not become as famous as they did. She managed, somehow, to present her secondary status as evidence of more seriousness. There is always something slightly vulgar, to intellectuals, about worldly success, and Hardwick benefited from the idea that the best fiction, the best criticism truly thrive at a slight remove from the masses.

Steven Millhauser

According to Jonathon Sturgeon in Flavorwire :

The quintessential American writer’s writer, or critic’s writer, or whatever, Steven Millhauser has long excelled at the three major forms of fiction. In 1997 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler, a chimerical 19th century study that discovers Modernist ennui under the turtle shell of the American dream. He has been praised, too, for his novellas, by Jim Shepard and others, who rightly imply that he has more or less mastered the American incarnation of the form—even if, as Millhauser wryly explains it, the novella isn’t a form but a length.

Denis Johnson

According to Christian Lorentzen (sort of) in Vulture :

A tempting answer to the question of what happened to Fuckhead is that he became his author, who died on May 24, 2017, at age 67, of liver cancer. Sometimes the biographical fallacy isn’t a fallacy, and we know that Johnson spent a lot of his 20s in a haze of alcohol, heroin, and whatever else came his way. He quit drinking in 1978, at age 29, and his first novel,  Angels , appeared in 1983. By the time of his death, he was the author of 19 books of fiction, plays, poetry, and reportage—one of which, the Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke , won the National Book Award in 2007. He’s called a writer’s writer, but his audience is in fact legion. There are people walking around who know his books by heart. You probably know somebody like that.

And since, as we’ve established, the definition of “writer’s writer” is subjective at best, here are still more suggestions from Lucas’s Twitter thread and the writers and readers of the Literary Hub office:

Clarice Lispector, Bruno Schulz, Marie NDaiye, Rachel Cusk, John Keene, Penelope Fitzgerald, Annie Dillard, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Yourcenar, Violette Leduc, Roberto Bolaño, Carole Maso, William Maxwell, Angela Carter, Oakley Hall, Chester Himes, Elizabeth Tallent, Mary Robison, Tom McCarthy, Lidia Yuknavitch, Vasily Grossman, Sara Gran, Ryu Murakami, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Joseph Roth, James Lasdun, Alexander Chee, Toni Cade Bambara, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Gayl Jones, Anna Kavan, Kathryn Davis, Kiese Laymon, Amy Hempel, Donald Antrim, Renee Gladman, Anne Carson, Helen DeWitt, James Alan McPherson, George Saunders, Gene Wolfe, Stephen Dixon, Geoff Dyer, Eileen Chang, Muriel Spark, etc. etc. etc.

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73 Professional Associations and Organizations for Writers

Want more freelance writing clients? Better clients? Or to network with your fellow writers and learn more about your niche? Writer’s associations and organizations are your secret weapon.

Professional writers’ associations and organizations offer several benefits to any freelance writer, whether they’re brand new to freelance writing or if they’ve been doing it for years

7 Reasons Why Professionals Organizations and Associations for Writers Can Help You

• They give you a community. Writing is solitary work, and while that can be great for some of us, even introverts benefit from being able to connect with other writers – especially other writers in their industry or specialty.
• They can be a *great* source for freelance writing gigs. Some of the best-paying clients want writers with subject expertise, and being part of professional organization is a easy way to get a credential that will impress.
• They will often give you a link to your website, or give you a full profile page. Not every organization will do this, but most will. So if you haven’t quite got your website up yet, or if you’d like to improve how your writer’s website ranks in the search engines, either a profile or an inbound like can be valuable assets.
• They sometimes offer training. Want help organizing the business side of your freelance writing? Want to connect with experts in your field you can become stellar sources or quotes or background research? Writers’ organizations can give you those things.
• Want discounts, or even health insurance? Yes – some organizations offer terrific benefits to their members.
• Want a want to boost your confidence? Being able to add “Member of The International Association of [Your Industry] Writers” makes you look like a pro. It’s a great thing to add to your email signature, your LinkedIn profile, or to your website.
• There are dozens of writers’ organizations. This list is big, but it’s not exhaustive (if you know of a writer’s org or association I haven’t included in this list or in the expanded ebook, please contact me ). My favorites include the Dog Writer’s Association, The Outdoor Writers Association of America, and GardenComm.

Want even more writers associations? Get the ebook, 107 Writers’ Organizations and Associations

ALLIANCE OF INDEPENDENT AUTHORS The Alliance of Independent Authors is a non-profit professional association for authors who self-publish. Our mission is ethics and excellence in self-publishing. Website: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Associate - $89 Author - $119 Authorpreneur - $149 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2012 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/members/join/ Member benefits page: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/member-benefits/ https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/membership-faq

AMERICAN GRANT WRITERS ASSOCIATION American Grant Writers' Association℠ is the national professional organization for grant researchers, grant writers, grant evaluators, grant administrators and grant managers. Website: h ttp://www.agwa.us/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Individual: One-Year Membership $119 when purchased online by credit/debit card $139 when purchased by paper check Two-Year Membership $200 when purchased online by credit/debit card $220 when purchased by paper check Business: One-Year Membership $179 when purchased online by credit/debit card $199 when purchased by paper check Two -Year Membership $358 when purchased online by credit/debit card $378 when purchased by paper check Listing included? Yes # of members: 501 Founded in 2001 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: http://www.agwa.us/membership http://www.agwa.us/grantwritertraits

AMERICAN MEDICAL WRITERS ASSOCIATION Promotes excellence in medical communication. Website: https://www.amwa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $199 Professional and Freelance - $275 Student - $80 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1940 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.amwa.org/page/Join Member benefits page: https://info.amwa.org/american-medical-writers-association-membership

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INDEXING National association promoting excellence in indexing. Website: https://www.asindexing.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $199 Listing included? Yes # of members: 101-500 Founded in 1968 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.asindexing.org/join-renew/ Member benefits page: https://www.asindexing.org/benefits/ https://www.asindexing.org/about-indexing/frequently-asked-questions/

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF BUSINESS PRESS EDITORS Professional association for full-time and freelance editors, writers, art directors and designers. https://asbpe.org/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: $0 - but US only Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1964 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://asbpe.org/join-asbpe/ Member benefits page: https://asbpe.org/ https://asbpe.site-ym.com/page/Register

ASBPE (American Society of Business Publication Editors) ASBPE is the professional association for full-time and freelance editors, writers, art directors, and designers employed in the business, trade, and specialty press. Website: https://asbpe.org/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: $0 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1964 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://asbpe.org/join-asbpe/ https://asbpe.org/about-us/asbpe-frequently-asked-questions-faq/

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF JOURNALISTS AND AUTHORS Professional Organization of Independent Nonfiction Writers. Website: https://asja.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: One time initiation fee - $50 Application fee - $25 Membership dues - $235 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1948 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://asja.org/Join-or-Renew/Dues-Fees Member benefits page: https://asja.org/Join-or-Renew/Member-Benefits https://asja.org/Join-or-Renew/FAQ

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL COPYWRITERS Professional association devoted exclusively to copywriters. Website: https://www.thecopypros.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $99 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2017 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.thecopypros.org/product-page/the-american-society-of-professional-copywriters-membership Member benefits page: https://www.thecopypros.org/faq

ASIAN-AMERICAN JOURNALISTS ASSOCIATION Nonprofit educational and professional organization. Website: https://www.aaja.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Full - $65 Associate - $65 Gold Full - $100 Gold Associate - $100 Student - $25 Retired - $25 Platinum - $750 Corporate - $1,500 Financial Hardship - $35 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.aaja.org/join

THE ASSOCIATION FOR BUSINESS JOURNALISTS Society for advancing business editing and writing. Website: https://sabew.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Journalist - $70 Associate - $90 Student - $25 Institutional memberships available Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://sabew.org/membership/join-2/ Member benefits page: https://sabew.org/membership/member-benefits/

ASSOCIATION OF FOOD JOURNALISTS AFJ is a professional organization dedicated to preserving and perpetuating responsible food journalism across media platforms. Website: https://www.afjonline.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $100 Retired - $50 Student - $50 Media Organization – 2 or 3 applicants - $160 Media Organization – 4 or more - $245 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don’t Know Founded in 1974 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://fs3.formsite.com/afjforms/ngykxtoxfd/index.html Member benefits page: https://www.afjonline.com/membership-information

ASSOCIATION OF HEALTHCARE JOURNALISTS Improve the quality, accuracy & visibility of healthcare issue reporting, writing & editing. Website: https://healthjournalism.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $60, 2 year $108, 3 year $153 Associate - $60, 2 year $108, 3 year $153 Student/Retired - $30, 2 year $54, 3 year $76 Allied: Foundational - $90, 2 year $162, 3 year $230 Healthcare Providers - $60, 2 year $108, 3 year $153 International - $30 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1997 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://healthjournalism.org/membership-categories.php Member benefits page: https://healthjournalism.org/membership-jump.php https://healthjournalism.org/blog/category/member-news/

ASSOCIATION OF WRITERS AND WRITING PROGRAMS Writers community supporting diversity and academic excellence in creative writing. Website: https://www.awpwriter.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: US Residents: $75; 2 years $120; students $49 International Residents: $85 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1967 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.awpwriter.org/about/individual_membership

THE AUTHORS GUILD Supports working writers and their ability to earn a living through authorship. Website: https://www.authorsguild.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $135 (or $12 monthly) Emerging Writer - $100 (or $9 monthly) Student - $35 At-Large - $135 (or $12 monthly) Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1912 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.authorsguild.org/join/ Member benefits page: https://www.authorsguild.org/member-services/

AUTHORS LICENSING AND COLLECTING SOCIETY British collecting society for all writers. Website: https://www.alcs.co.uk/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Lifetime – 36 (UK) Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1977 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits: https://www.alcs.co.uk/how-to-join

BIOGRAPHERS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION Promotes the art and craft of biography. Website: https://biographersinternational.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Active 1 (less than $25k in writing income) - $45 Active 2 (between $25,001 and $50k) - $75 Active 3 (between $50,001 and $100k) - $90 Active 4 (over $100k) - $150 Affiliate - $250 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2009 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://biographersinternational.org/member/signup Member benefits page: https://biographersinternational.org/join/ https://biographersinternational.org/resources/

BOXING WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA The object, goal and purpose of the Boxing Writers Association of America is to foster the highest professional and ethical standards in boxing journalism. Website: https://www.bwaa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $40 Listing included? Yes # of members: 101-500 Founded in 1926 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.bwaa.org/members

BROADLEAF WRITERS ASSOCIATION To enrich and advance the craft of writing for all writers through education, inspiration and community. Website: http://broadleafwriters.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $40 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: http://broadleafwriters.com/become-a-member/

CAT WRITERS ASSOCIATION Professional organization dedicated to persons who write about cats. Website: https://catwriters.com/wp_meow/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $30 membership plus $10 non-refundable processing fee Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1992 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://catwriters.com/wp_meow/join-us/cat-writers-association-membership/ Member benefits page: Password protected

THE CATHOLIC WRITERS GUILD Supports writers dedicated to Catholic literary and artistic culture. Website: https://catholicwritersguild.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $40.00 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2007 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://catholicwritersguild.org/user/register Member benefits page: https://catholicwritersguild.org/joining-guild

DOG WRITERS ASSOCIATION Professional writing association devoted to dogs. Website: https://dogwriters.org Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $85 - includes a $35 application fee Renewal - $50 Retired Membership - $25 Listing included? Yes # of members: 101-500 Founded in 1935 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://dogwriters.org/membership-account/membership-checkout/?level=1 Member benefits page: https://dogwriters.org/membership/

Editorial Freelancers Association Largest and oldest national professional organization of editorial freelancers. Website: https://www.the-efa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $145 plus $35 sign-up fee 2 years - $260 plus $35 sign-up fee Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1970 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.the-efa.org/signup/ Member benefits page: https://www.the-efa.org/potential-members/ https://www.the-efa.org/faq/

Education Writers Association Organization of journalists and others writers who cover education. Website: https://www.ewa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Journalist - $50 Supporting Community - $125 Community - $50 Student - free Listing included? No # of members: 501+ Founded in 1947 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.ewa.org/join-ewa

Financial Writers Society Financial Writers Society aims to improve industry standards and provide members with opportunities to network, collaborate and support each other. Website: https://www.financialwriterssociety.org/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: $0 Listing included? No # of members: Less than 100 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.financialwriterssociety.org/membership-application.html Member benefits page: https://www.financialwriterssociety.org/mentorship-program.html

Funds for Writers Online resource for writers. Emphasize finding money to make writing a realistic career. Website: https://fundsforwriters.com/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: Free subscription to Newsletter with markets paying Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2000 Job board? Yes Training? No Requirements to join: https://fundsforwriters.com/newsletters/ Member benefits page: https://fundsforwriters.com/markets/

GardenComm GardenComm provides opportunities for education, recognition, career development and a forum for wide-ranging interactions and collaborations for professionals in the field of gardening communication. Website: https://gardencomm.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $125 Student - $25 Allied (companies/organizations) - $295 - $5,000 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://gardencomm.org/join Member benefits page: https://gardencomm.org/Benfits https://gardencomm.org/Maximizing-Your-Membership

Golf Writers Association of America The only American organization dedicated to the promotion and continued improvement of golf journalism. Website: https://www.gwaa.com/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: Writers applying for membership must meet a specific set of criteria, which includes writing for GWAA recognized publications/websites. Listing included? No # of members: 501+ Founded in 1946 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.gwaa.com/membership/

Gulf Coast Writers Association The Gulf Coast Writers Association is proud to provide a forum for fellowship, education, and information for writers in our community. https://gulfwriters.org/home-new/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $40 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1995 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://gulfwriters.org/join-us-2/

Heartland Writers Guild, Inc The purpose of the Heartland Writers guild is to promote and to support the concept of professionalism in published and unpublished writers and to aid all members toward the goal of successfully marketing what they write. Website: http://heartlandwriters.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $24 Couple - $30 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1988 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: http://heartlandwriters.org/join_hwg Member benefits page: http://heartlandwriters.org/newsevents

Historical Writers of America HWA is a non-profit organization whose mission is to celebrate, support and connect ALL historical writers: fiction or non-fiction, whether they are writing books or writing for the screen (movies or tv), the stage, magazines, or online blogs. Website: https://hwa.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=0&club_id=735549 Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Member - $75 Associate - $75 Student - $25 US Veteran - $65 Affiliate Member - $10 Organizational Member - $125 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://hwa.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=9&club_id=735549

International Association of Business Communicators Promotes excellence in business communications. Website: https://www.iabc.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: https://www.iabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IABC_Membership_Dues_Chart_June2020.pdf Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1970 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://my.iabc.com/joinapi__membershiplist?id=a27f2000004ZLxgAAG&order=1 Member benefits page: https://www.iabc.com/membership/ https://www.iabc.com/about-us/faq/

International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association Strives to be the organization of choice for food, wine & travel writers. Website: https://www.ifwtwa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Regular - $220 ($170 plus $50 initiation fee) Associate - $305 ($255 plus $50 initiation fee) Student - $155 ($105 plus $50 initiation fee) Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.ifwtwa.org/ifwtwa-membership-requirements Member benefits page: https://www.ifwtwa.org/top-eight-reasons-for-writers-to-join-ifwtwa

International Golf Travel Writers Association The International Golf Travel Writers Association (IGTWA) was established in 2000 in order to bring together the world's leading journalists specialising in writing quality golf travel articles, Golf Photographers and Golf TV journalists. Website: http://www.igtwa.org/Igtwa/Default.aspx Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: 1st yr - 150 (UK) Renew - 100 (UK) Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2000 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: http://www.igtwa.org/Public/Media/JoinIGTWA.aspx?type=1

International Motor Press Association Open to qualified automotive journalists, photographers and public relations persons. Website: https://www.impa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $75 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1950 Job board? No Requirements to join: see attachment Member benefits page: https://www.impa.org/joining-impa/AutoMembershipRequirements.rtf ( https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/4fa124ebbe75f87fbbc8e911543c351a/37dd1ea3/AutoMembershipRequirements.rtf )

The International Travel Writers Alliance The International Travel Writers Alliance is the world's largest association of professional travel journalists. Website: https://www.itwalliance.com/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: $0 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://www.itwalliance.com/index.php/members/member-area-main/register Member benefits page: https://www.itwalliance.com/index.php/services-main

Investigative Reporters & Editors Dedicated to improving the quality of investigative journalism. Website: https://www.ire.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $70 2 years - $130 3 years - $190 4 years - $250 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1975 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.ire.org/join-ire/register/ Member benefits page: https://www.ire.org/join-ire/member-benefits/

Islamic Writers Alliance, Inc Promotes literacy world-wide and supports its membership. Website: https://islamicwritersalliance.wordpress.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $25 Listing included? Yes # of members: 101-500 Founded in 2005 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://islamicwritersalliance.wordpress.com/members-arena/join-us/

Media and Content Marketing Association Helping members achieve success in media and content marketing. Website: https://www.the-mcma.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Digital - $45 Individual - $75 Corporate - $250 - up to 20 members Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1970 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.the-mcma.org/join-or-renew-here Member benefits page: https://www.the-mcma.org/benefits https://www.the-mcma.org/inourmemberswords

Military Writers Society of America Writing community for active duty, retirees, or military veterans. Website: http://www.mwsadispatches.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $50.00 (USD) 2-year - $90.00 (USD) 3-year - $120.00 (USD) Associate member - Free Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1998 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: http://www.mwsadispatches.com/membership-new#benefits http://www.mwsadispatches.com/membership-faqs

National Association of Black Journalists Provides quality programming and services to journalist members Website: https://nabjonline.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $100 Professional 2 year - $180 Professional 5 year - $450 Premium Professional - $150 Lifetime - $3,000 Emerging Professional - $85 Alumni - $79 Academic - $75 Media-related Professional - $75 Student - $40 Listing included? Yes Founded in 1975 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.nabj.org/general/register_member_type.asp Member benefits page: https://nabjonline.org/members/prospective-members/

National Association of Hispanic Journalists The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) is dedicated to the recognition and professional advancement of Hispanics in the news industry. Website: http://nahj.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Regular - $35 Academic - $35 Associate - $35 Student - $25 Lifetime - $1,500 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1984 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://nahj.org/membership-info/ Member benefits page: https://nahj.memberclicks.net/nahj-membership-categories https://nahj.memberclicks.net/

National Association of Independent Writers and Editors Professional Association for Writers and Editors. Website: https://naiwe.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $99; Lifetime - $999 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2007 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://naiwe.com/amember/signup Member benefits page: https://naiwe.com/member-benefits/

National Association of Memoir Writers Connecting memoir writers from all over the world. Website: https://namw.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $149: Lifetime - $725 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2008 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://namw.org/become-a-member/ Member benefits page: https://namw.org/become-a-member/namw-benefits/ https://namw.org/become-a-member/frequently-asked-questions/

National Association of Real Estate Editors Helps members advance their careers as staffers and freelancers for independent digital, print, and broadcast news outlets. Website: https://www.naree.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Active - $75 Associate - $195 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1929 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.naree.org/join-or-renew-membership Member benefits page: https://www.naree.org/why-join-naree

National Association of Science Writers For those who writer about science, health, engineering & technology. Website: https://www.nasw.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: US - $55 Canada - $55 International - $60 Student - $20 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1934 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.nasw.org/join Member benefits page: https://www.nasw.org/membership-information

National Federation of Press Women To promote professionalism and ethical activities in journalism and communications by providing valuable networking, peer recognition and mentoring opportunities. Website: https://www.nfpw.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $85 plus individual state fees Student- $25 plus individual state fees Retired - $30 plus individual state fees Premium Pro - $143 plus individual state fees Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1937 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.nfpw.org/assets/docs/NFPW%20Membership%20Dues%20Chart%202021.pdf Member benefits page: https://www.nfpw.org/join-nfpw

The National Resume Writers Association Nonprofit trade association for professional resume writers. Website: https://thenrwa.com/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: $0 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1997 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://thenrwa.com/New-Member-Kit Member benefits page: https://thenrwa.com/membership https://thenrwa.com/Becoming-a-Resume-Writer

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists We heartily encourage membership from online and multimedia columnists, bloggers and similar Web reporters, commentators, analysts, humorists and essayists. Website: https://www.columnists.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $75 3 years - $200 Students - $35 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1977 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.columnists.com/join-or-renew-membership/

National Sports Media Association The National Sports Media Association & Hall of Fame is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which seeks to develop educational opportunities for those who are interested in pursuing a career in sports media, through networking, interning, mentoring and scholarship programs. Website: https://nationalsportsmedia.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Lifetime - $750 Premier - $9.59 per month plus $50 initiation fee AIPS (International Sports Press Association) - $180 Student - $45 Friends of NSMA - $40 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1959 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://nationalsportsmedia.org/join-today Member benefits page: https://nationalsportsmedia.org/join-today/member-benefits

National Writers Association Helping writers produce great work. Website: https://www.nationalwriters.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Student - $35 Regular - $65 Professional - $85 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1937 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.nationalwriters.com/page/page/3576079.htm Member benefits page: https://www.nationalwriters.com/page/page/2734940.htm https://www.nationalwriters.com/page/page/2732829.htm

National Writers Union Promotes and protects the rights of members and seeks to improve professional working conditions. Website: https://nwu.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Based on annual writing income Under $5,000 (monthly recurring) - $ 12.50 $5,001 - 15,000 (monthly recurring) - $ 18.75 $15,001 - 30,000 (monthly recurring) - $ 25.00 $30,001 - 50,000 (monthly recurring) - $ 29.16 Over $50,000 (monthly recurring) - $ 33.33 Under $5,000 (6 mo) - $ 75.00 Under $5,000 (annual) - $ 150.00 $5,001-15,000 (6 mo) - $ 112.50 $5,001-15,000 (annual) - $ 225.00 $15,001-30,000 (6 mo) - $ 150.00 $15,001-30,000 (annual) - $ 300.00 $30,001-50,000 (6 mo) - $ 175.00 $30,001-50,000 (annual) - $ 350.00 Over $50,000 (6 mo) - $ 200.00 Over $50,000 (annual) - $ 400.00 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1981 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://nwu.org/join-now/ Member benefits page: https://nwu.org/member-benefits/

Native American Journalists Association Serving Native journalists with programs and activities to improve journalism and promote Native cultures. Website: https://najanewsroom.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: High School Student - $10 College Student - $20 Associate (non-indigenous) - $55 Professional (indigenous) - $55 Tribal Media - $250 Non-profit - $300 Corporate - $500 Lifetime - $1,000 Sustaining Institutional - $2,000 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1983 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://najanewsroom.com/join-naja/

Nonfiction Authors Association Educational community for experienced and aspiring nonfiction writers. Website: https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: Basic - Free Authority - $290 VIP - $690 Group Membership Packages Available Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 2013 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/join/ https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/authority-member-testimonials/

North American Agricultural Journalists North American Agricultural Journalists a professional, international group of agricultural editors and writers with a membership spanning the United States and Canada. Website: https://www.naaj.net/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Active - $75 Associate - $75 Student - $15 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1952 Job board? Yes Training? No Requirements to join: https://www.naaj.net/membership

North American Snow Sports Journalists Association The North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA) is a professional group of over 200 press and corporate members. Website: https://nasja.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $200 Listing included? Yes # of members: 101-500 Founded in 1963 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://nasja.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CorporateMembershipApplication20_21.pdf Member benefits page: https://nasja.org/explore-nasja/member-benefits/ https://nasja.org/minimum-credentials/

North American Travel Journalists Association Founded in 1991 by a group of sixteen travel writers, the North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) is one of the largest professional associations of travel writers, photographers, editors, bloggers and tourism professionals dedicated to the highest quality of journalism excellence in promoting travel and leisure activities to the general public. Website: https://natja.memberclicks.net/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $150 plus $25 application fee, renewal $150 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1991 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://natja.memberclicks.net/media-membership

Northwest Editors Guild The Northwest Editors Guild connects clients with professional editors of the written word in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Website: https://www.edsguild.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $65 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1997 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.edsguild.org/membership-application Member benefits page: https://www.edsguild.org/about-us/join-the-guild

Outdoor Writers Association of America Professional communicators dedicated to sharing the outdoor experience. Website: https://owaa.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Active - $150 Associate - $150 Senior - $150 Student - $25 Supporting Group - $375 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1927 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://owaa.org/apply-now/ Member benefits page: https://owaa.org/individual/ https://owaa.org/join/faq/

Pro Football Writer's Association Website: https://www.profootballwriters.org/ Free or Paid: Paid. Apply to find out cost of dues. Listing included? No Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://ww w.profootballwriters.org/about-the-pfwa/join-the-pfwa/

Public Relations Society of America Nation’s leading professional organization serving the communications community. Website: https://www.prsa.org/home Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Member - more than 3 years experience - $260 plus $65 initiation fee Associate Member 1 - less than 1 year experience - $115 Associate Member 2 - 1-2 years experience - $155 Associate Member 3 - 2-3 years experience - $200 Associate Member, PRSSA Graduate - $60 Associate Member, Graduate Student - $60 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1950 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://apps.prsa.org/JoinUs/membershipApplication Member benefits page: https://www.prsa.org/membership/member-benefits

Public Safety Writers Association Open to members of a public safety organization or who write about crime, mystery and public safety. Website: https://policewriter.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $55 2 year - $100 3 year - $135 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1995 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://policewriter.com/join/

Scribes - The American Society of Legal Writers We seek to create an interest in writing about the law and to promote a clear, succinct, and forceful style in legal writing. Website: https://www.scribes.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Regular or Associate - $65 Sustaining Member - $100 Institutional Member - $650 Institutional Member (less than 10) - $350 Life Member - $1,000 Student - $15 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1951 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.scribes.org/join

Society of American Travel Writers Inspire ravel through responsible journalism. Website: https://satw.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Freelance/Digital Publisher - $100 application fee, $175 dues Editor - $100 application fee, $175 dues Associate - $125 application fee, $340 dues Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1955 Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://satw.org/join-us/

Society of Environmental Journalists Credible and robust journalism that informs and engages society on environmental issues. Website: https://www.sej.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Standard - $40 first yr, 1 yr renew - $70, 2 yr - $120, 3 yr - $180 Student - $25 first yr, 1 yr renew - $40, 2 yr - $65, 3 yr - $90 Retired - $40 first yr, 1 yr renew - $40, 2 yr - $55, 3 yr - $75 Low and Middle Income Countries - $15 first yr, 1 yr renew - $20, 2 yr - $35, 3 yr - $45 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1990 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join and member benefits page: https://www.sej.org/how-to-join-sej

The Society of Professional Journalists Encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior. Website: https://www.spj.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $75 Retired - $37.50 Lifetime - $1,000 Household - $37.50 Post Grad - $37.50 College Student - $37.50 Associate - $20 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1909 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.spj.org/join.asp Member benefits page: https://www.spj.org/whyjoin-benefits.asp

The Society of Southwestern Authors Nonprofit association of writers and other publishing professionals. Website: http://ssa-az.org/index.htm Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Professional - $30 plus initial membership fee of $30 Associate - $30 plus initial membership fee of $30 Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 1972 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: http://ssa-az.org/membership.htm Member benefits page: http://ssa-az.org/activities.html

Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing Promotes high standards in economic journalism and press freedom Website: https://sabew.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Journalist - $70 Student - $25 Associate - $90 Institutional Memberships Available Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1964 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://sabew.org/membership/join-2/ Member benefits page: https://sabew.org/membership/member-benefits/

Society for Technical Communication Oldest and Largest professional association dedicated to the advancement of technical communication Website: https://www.stc.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Gold - $395 - Best Value! Professional & Academic - $295 New Professional - $180 Student - $75 Retired - $145 Listing included? Yes # of members: 501+ Founded in 1953 Job board? Yes Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://www.stc.org/membership/ https://www.stc.org/membership/benefits/

Textbook and Academic Authors Association Support and resources for the academic writer Website: https://taaa.memberclicks.net/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: Graduate student - $25 Emeritus - $35 Untenured faculty or textbook author with royalties under $5k yr - $50 Tenured faculty or textbook author with royalties above $5k yr - $100 Contributing member - $200 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://taaa.memberclicks.net/index.php?option=com_mcform&view=ngforms&id=2068476#/ Member benefits page: https://www.taaonline.net/member-benefits

Western Writers of America Promotes and recognizes those who write about the American West Website: https://westernwriters.org/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $75.00 Listing included? No # of members: 501+ Founded in 1953 Job board? No Training? No Requirements to join: https://westernwriters.org/join/ Member benefits page: https://westernwriters.org/membership/benefits/ https://westernwriters.org/membership/

Writers and Publishers Network Provides information, resources and opportunities for anyone interested in publishing Website: https://writersandpublishersnetwork.com/ Free or Paid: Paid Cost per year: $75 Renewal - $65 Students - $35 Listing included? Yes # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Job board? No Training? Yes Requirements to join: https://writersandpublishersnetwork.com/about/ Member benefits page: https://writersandpublishersnetwork.com/wpn-member-benefits/

The Writers Workout The Writer's Workout formed from a love of competition and encouragement. We are writers of different backgrounds, ideas, influences, and skill levels. Website: https://www.writersworkout.net/ Free or Paid: Free Cost per year: Basic - free Achievement Tracker - $20 Better Writer Standard - $7 monthly Listing included? No # of members: Unclear / Don't Know Founded in 2014 Job board? Yes Training? No Requirements to join: https://www.writersworkout.net/subscribe Member benefits page: https://www.writersworkout.net/about

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Types of Professional Writing: From Fiction to Memos

By outranking.

Types of Professional Writing From Fiction to Memos

Table of Contents

What is professional writing?

Professional writing is the process of creating an informative, persuasive, and error-free piece of text as a job or service. The type of content that professional writers are typically engaged in ranges from academic texts like research papers to newspaper articles, websites, and social media posts. Professional writing often refers to writing within the context of a workplace but can mean any type of writing as a profession.

The purpose of professional writing is not only to entertain but also to educate.

To ensure their content is taken seriously, writers often follow set guidelines when they write for business purposes. These standards are globally accepted and established by organizations such as Forbes Magazine and Harvard Business Review, which will disregard work that does not meet professional standards.

All professional writers follow these guidelines when creating content, and in the case of ignorance on their part, they may have to re-write their work or risk having it rejected as unprofessional.

Professional writing is a type of creative work that’s often done by expert copywriters . Writing often needs to be carefully crafted with facts on the subject because clients can’t afford any mistakes or anything that would render the content ineffective. Without professional writing services, companies have to do their own research and spend countless hours trying to find the information they need for their projects.

The motive behind this type of work may be for personal entrepreneurial use or business environments when you have something specific that your company wants to convey.

Professional writers offer their services in an array of different forms, including web pages, social media posts, and newsletters.

Through content, you can define your authority on the subject matter to attract more business opportunities. This type of writing also influences buyers by providing them with consistent engagement between you and your audience through customer-centric messaging that provides true value for the buyer’s time.

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Empowering writers, not replacing them.

Why consider professional writing?

The purpose of professional writing is often to influence consumers’ buying decisions. Professional writing helps a business attract its target customers and engage them in the sales process through content that is relevant, valuable, and attention-grabbing – a key aspect of marketing copywriting .

Professional writers observe these set guidelines: use standard grammar, avoid using slang or jargon, provide context for unfamiliar words, stick to your topic, and include specific information about who you are targeting (the consumer) with your message.

As an individual, it’s important to consider professional writing when you’re in need of content. It may not be necessary to hire a pro writer for every project because sometimes fiction can be just as effective at advancing your agenda or making buyers want what you have. But if your specific goal is getting people excited about something and buying into it, hiring a professional will help achieve that for your target audience with ease through quality content creation without any worries about plagiarism or copyright infringement.

What are different types of professional writing?

Here are the most common types of professional writing documents that are used in almost all businesses.

1. Business letters

Business letters fall under the category of instructional text. Informational documents and minutes are both types of professional writing that can be used in business settings. They consist of different documents, such as user manuals and meeting minutes.

Writing a business letter can be formal and professional. The length of the letter depends on the purpose, the writer’s objective, and the message that needs to be conveyed. A good way to begin writing a business letter is by outlining what you want to say in your introduction paragraph before diving into your body paragraphs.

A business letter can be as short or long as the writer needs. The recipient’s address must always be included in a business letter, and it should also include who is writing the letter. Finally, the body of a business letter is where you write your main message.

A business letter is typically used to convey company information. A standard format for a brief paragraph should be followed, including the date and name of the sender, recipient, and salutation (“Dear Mr. Smith” or “Greetings!”) with an opening line that briefly states what you want to discuss. The body of your message follows this introductory line, followed by closing lines asking for feedback on your message if needed or thanking the recipient for their time.

Email writing is the most common type of business communication. Emails can be used to communicate with employees or customers, share information, provide instructions on how to use a product or service, or serve as an informational marketing tool. 

Reports are documents that archive and communicate information, record incidents, or finalize projects and recommendations.

A report can be a formal written document for internal business purposes. One example is the findings and analysis for a marketing study that includes an introduction, executive summary, and information on the findings.

There are many different types of reports that can be created to provide information on a specific topic. Knowing how your audience is going to read the report will help you determine which type of report would be most beneficial for them.

The purpose of each section is important for readers, as they need to find the information they want. The quality of organization of your report will help them find what they are looking for.

Know what the audience is looking for in your report. Then, provide that information with each section of your document. Organizing reports can help readers find important information easily and quickly.

4. Newsletters

Business newsletters can be brief, punchy, and simple. You should maintain interest by keeping it brief, but you must also keep it interesting.

To maintain a strong audience, newsletters should be informative and include an interesting angle. This will keep your customers engaged with the company’s content as they learn about what is happening in their world.

Research shows that the perfect length for a newsletter is about 20 lines of text or 200 words. This helps you connect with more customers and boosts your content marketing strategy.

Newsletters are a powerful tool that can be used to improve your business’s credibility and authority. Newsletters boost content marketing strategies, which in turn increase engagement with customers. You can customize them for stronger engagement by providing unique messages tailored to readers’ needs.

Memo writing is an art form. It differs from other types of professional writing because it’s used within organizations to communicate information. In contrast, letters are typically written for people outside of an organization. The style should be brief and easy to navigate while maintaining a professional tone throughout the document.

Memo writing is an art form that requires a good structure. Brief, easy-to-read, and fast memos are more likely to be effective in bringing attention to problems and solving them with suggestions on how the problem can be solved or handled better.

Memos are short and to the point, which is what makes them effective. The goal of a memo should be clear and concise; it shouldn’t take more than one paragraph for the audience to understand what’s going on. When writing memos, keep your last paragraph actionable so that readers will take appropriate actions after reading your message (such as signing up for an internal email list or an event).

Include a brief closing statement with a summary of the key information from the memo. This can be a point-form summary or a short paragraph.

6. Press releases

Press releases are a great way of communicating your company, products, events, or policies to the public. They can be used to get people’s attention and share information about yourself with a broad audience. A press release is also an effective tool for marketing and PR purposes. Press releases often notify the media of an upcoming event in hopes that they will spread the word.

Press releases are short and to the point. PR professionals send press releases to propose news story ideas, which can then be published online or in print media.

Press releases are a tool used by PR professionals. The goal of a press release is to pique the interest of journalists or publications, which leads to increased traffic for websites and potential SEO opportunities . This can be done through various methods such as emailing reporters directly or sending out a mass email with a link that points back to your website. You can also post this on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

While press releases are important to your business’s media relations, they don’t guarantee you exposure in the media.

7. Meeting agendas

A meeting agenda is a list of items and the timing for a meeting. The goal is to identify the meeting’s goals and discuss topics. A clear, well-written agenda can help you stay on track at meetings.

When a meeting starts, participants should already have an agenda. The purpose of the agenda is to set clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting.

The purpose of the agenda is to create a clear set of topics, objectives, and time frames for attendees. It sets expectations about what needs to occur before and during a meeting.

The agenda is a list of activities that participants hope to accomplish during their meeting. It saves time for all the involved parties since they can plan ahead with an agenda in hand.

8. Resumes and cover letters

A cover letter is your introduction to your resume, and it can be up to 400 words long. A good way to tie experience in with the job description is by mentioning the skills that you have specifically listed in the job description. It should also include a mention of how you meet the qualifications for the position.

The type of writing is formal and professional, so a similar style is perfect for any level of employment.

A professional resume writer’s job is to craft a compelling marketing document for a candidate. An ideal resume writer has experience in hiring, has industry-specialized knowledge or education, and often has formal training.

9. Handbooks

Handbooks are a great way for employers to outline strategies for thinking, writing, and acting. They can be valuable to both the employer and employee because they set out rules that should be followed. Handbooks protect employers against claims, but they also help managers build an ethical framework in which employees work.

Handbooks are a document typically available to employees and customers. They are an easily accessible guide to a company’s policies and practices, as well as an overview of management expectations.

Handbooks are also often legal documents that must be reviewed by a lawyer to ensure compliance with guidelines. Handbooks should adhere to consistent style rules for headers, lists, notices, and graphics.

Handbooks should also use tables and documentation to make it easier for the reader to understand.

10. Responses to customer complaint letters

One type of professional writing is creating memos and letters that respond to customer complaints or inquiries.

There are a few things you can do to handle customer complaints. First, clearly outline your plan for remedying the situation, and distribute it internally as well. Second, it’s easy to become defensive or write off responding to complaints as not worth the effort; however, those mistakes cost time and money in terms of lost business.

Responses to customer complaint letters often do not get communicated within a business. It is now more likely for customers to share feedback moving forward. Allowing customers to leave feedback can make it easier for them to continue doing business with a company in the future if they are satisfied by the interactions and feel like the response is adequate and do not fear retaliation from staff.

Depending on the field, most complaints might come via social media.

How to find a professional writing job

Upwork is a well-known site for finding writing work. There are many different types of freelance jobs available on Upwork, including blogging for companies or posting content online. You may also be able to find freelance work through other sites like Freelancer and Guru.

There are multiple ways to get started if you’re looking for professional writing opportunities. One way that beginners can start is by applying for small jobs or advertising on their blog or website with the help of an editor or content manager. The second way is to find a job on Upwork that suits your skill set and apply for it. If you’re having trouble finding work, try posting an ad on Craigslist.

Another alternative for budding writers is to take up freelancing as a hobby while unemployed or doing another job.

To find a professional writing job, you can join groups such as Freelance Content Writers . They are all relatively easy to join, and most clients will be willing or happy to work with fresh talent. In addition, flexible scheduling options and the chance for self-determination in your occupation is an important motivator for many people who choose this career path.

If you’re interested in pursuing a career as a professional writer, it’s important to know what types of writing jobs exist and how to find them.

Many different types of freelance writing can be pursued, such as fiction or nonfiction articles. It is also possible for writers to bag some quite lucrative freelance work by cold pitching employers who might need their services. Cold pitching involves drafting an email describing your skills and aligning it with the company goals before any other correspondence takes place.

Creative writing is a great way to make money and build your portfolio, but it can be difficult for new writers. Networking sites like Instagram are a good place to connect with others who may know of potential jobs in the industry or people looking for creative work. LinkedIn is full of businesses looking to hire an SEO copywriter , so it is also worth investing time into finding connections on this site.

On top of these networking tools, having an eye-catching LinkedIn summary that conveys what you do can help you get your foot in the door. It is also a search engine like Google, so potential clients will be able to find writers on this site too.

To find a professional writing job, you need to have an established body of work. One way you can accomplish this is by doing guest blogging on other blogs and sites that pay for posts. The best part about building your portfolio through these opportunities is that they help build trust with potential clients because you’ve already shown the ability to consistently produce quality content in different formats and scenarios.

What is professional writing and how is it different from other types of writing?

Professional writing is a type of writing that is designed to influence business and buying decisions. Writing for the consumer market is primarily entertaining or amusing. Professional writers are not limited to any one genre , but most professional writers write fiction, non-fiction, journalism, opinion pieces , and personal narratives.

How is professional writing different from other types of writing?

Professional writing is different from other types of writing because it revolves around business needs and targeting the consumer. It is also often structured and formatted for a target audience.

Professional writing is different from other types of written content because it focuses on the brand and value being communicated to the target audience. Professional writers write for business marketing campaigns, not personal blogs. Other forms of written work may be created by people without any experience in professional writing, which lack the stricter scrutiny of a business audience.

What’s the difference between professional and technical writing?

Professional writing targets business needs and the buying decisions of consumers. Technical writing is more specialized and is used in fields such as engineering, science, or technology.

Specifications are one type of technical document that provides an outline for construction or reconstruction by an unfamiliar but knowledgeable user, enabling effective distribution of requirements.

Technical writing is used to produce informational materials to provide instruction or guidance. User manuals are considered part of instructional business writing and must specify what needs to be completed and in what order so that the reader knows exactly what they need to do next.

Professional and technical writing are two very different types of writing. Technical writers need to specialize in a certain subject or business, while professional writers typically do not have such requirements and are more flexible when it comes to their position. They’re both skilled in communicating information clearly and concisely with the intended audience; however, professional writers add value by doing so through broader experience that they’ve gained over time as well as education from institutions like universities.

What is the difference between academic and professional writing?

The type of writing that is typically found in books, newspapers, magazines, and websites is referred to as professional. In contrast, technical writing is used for purposes such as instruction manuals, software tutorials, reports on technical projects, or commercial materials. Content-focused websites may offer news or other information that can be read by the general public.

Academic writing is usually written for academics who are conducting research in a certain field. In academic writing, the focus is on research results instead of business communications or consumers. In many cases, academic writing does not concern corporate activities and is not directly motivated by economics.

What are examples of professional writing?

Professional writing generally includes texts written for business purposes. A professional writer’s job entails composing and editing documents, such as letters and memos, to be effective in the workplace. An important distinction between a professional writer and an amateur is that professional writers often have more training than amateurs do and receive a salary or fee for their service.

Common examples of professional writing include internal corporate communications, legal documents, business reports, government policies, and scripts in the entertainment industry. Much of the writing conducted in a workplace falls into this category.

What is professional media writing?

Professional media writing is when one writes, produces, and publishes a piece of content that can be used in the professional sphere, such as in public relations, journalism, or advertising. The end goal for this type of writing is to get published by an official company or organization.

The required core skills are organized thought, good communication, excellent grammar, language skills, clarity, and conciseness . Professional media writers often take core classes such as copy editing, technical writing, journalism, or creative writing before they even begin their career in professional media writing.

Professional media writing is the act of communicating ideas to a broad audience. It involves technical, journalistic, or creative skills that are applied in various formats for print and digital media. Students who complete relevant training can communicate effectively with professional audiences through written content and design expertise across a variety of platforms.

What is the salary range of professional writers?

According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a professional writer in the US is $39k per year, generally ranging from $21k to $71k based on the position and industry. Freelance writers may receive an hourly wage or fee per project. Many organizations hire writers, including large corporations, universities, and law firms.

We’ve reviewed the main categories in the broad field of professional writing. You can use Outranking’s SEO content software to structure and write many types of professional documents using AI-powered tools.

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12. Giovanni Boccaccio

Writer | The Little Hours

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in June 1313 in Certaldo, Florence, Tuscany, Italy. He was a writer, known for The Little Hours (2017), The Decameron (1971) and Decameron Nights (1953). He died on December 21, 1375 in Certaldo, Florence, Tuscany, Italy.

13. Alexander Pushkin

Soundtrack | Florence Foster Jenkins

Born to noble parents (his father Sergei was a retired major, and his mother, Nadezhda, was the granddaughter of an ennobled Ethiopian general) on the 26th of May, 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin became involved with a liberal underground revolutionary group that saw him exiled to the ...

14. Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi

Writer | Rumi: Poet of the Heart

Jalaluddin Rumi, Scholar in Religious Sciences and famed Sufi Mystic Poet, was born on September 29th 1207 A.D. in Balkh (modern day Afghanistan). Escaping Mongol invasions he travelled extensively to Muslim lands, Bagdad, Mecca, Damascus, Malatia (Turkey). Married Gevher Khatun of Samarquand and ...

15. Franz Kafka

Writer | Le procès

Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke ...

16. Anton Chekhov

Writer | Kis Uykusu

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov...

17. Gabriel García Márquez

Writer | El año de la peste

Major Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magical realism movement in Latin American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, ...

18. Umberto Eco

Writer | Der Name der Rose

He is a professor of semiotics, the study of communication through signs and symbols, at the University of Bologna. Also a philiosopher, a historian, literary critic, and an aesthetician. He is an avid book collector and owns more than 30,000 volumes. The subjects of his scholarly investigations ...

19. J.R.R. Tolkien

Writer | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

English writer, scholar and philologist, Tolkien's father was a bank manager in South Africa. Shortly before his father died (1896) his mother took him and his younger brother to his father's native village of Sarehole, near Birmingham, England. The landscapes and Nordic mythology of the Midlands ...

20. William Faulkner

Writer | To Have and Have Not

William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom...

Writer | Abel Classics

Greek slave. Many of the 200+ fables attributed to him may not have been his own, but since his name is synonymous with fables they were credited to him anyway. Sentenced to death for heresy. Was thrown from the edge of a cliff, c. 560 BC. The excepted dates of his birth and death would mean that ...

22. Arthur Rimbaud

Writer | Ein großer graublauer Vogel

Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854 in Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes, France. He was a writer, known for A Big Grey-Blue Bird (1970), Ardiente paciencia (1983) and Criminal Lovers (1999). He died on November 10, 1891 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France.

23. Aristophanes

Writer | Frogs: World's First Film in Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek poet and comic dramatist Aristophanes was the son of Philippus of Athens. A leading exponent of the Athenian "Old Comedy," Aristophanes lived most of his life during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta (431-404). Some of his works include "Acharnians" (425), "Knights" (424), "In the ...

24. Ivan Turgenev

Writer | Theatre Macabre

Ivan Turgenev was born into a wealthy landowning family with many serfs, in the city of Oryol in Southern Russia. His father, a cavalry colonel, died when he was 15, and he was raised by his abusive mother, who ruled her 5000 serfs ruthlessly with a whip. He never married, but fathered a daughter ...

25. Sophocles

Writer | Atlantis

Versatile Greek poet and tragic dramatist. He was the son of Sophilus, a wealthy arms manufacturer. Sophocles studied tragedy under Aeschylus, whom he subsequently defeated in the dramatic festival of 468 BC, thus gaining his first victory at these competitions. He became a general under Nicias and...

26. Molière

Writer | Le bourgeois gentilhomme

Born between January 13 and January 15 of the year 1622, from a 25yo tapestry-maker, Jean Poguelin (who worked for the King of France from 1631), and a 20yo woman, Marie Cresé, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin lost his mother when he was 10. From 1638 to 1640, he studied in the Jesuit college of ...

27. Charles Dickens

Writer | Scrooged

Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start ...

28. Maxim Gorky

Writer | Famine

Maksim Gorky is a pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, who was born into a poor Russian family in Nizhnii Novgorod on Volga river. Gorky lost his father at an early age, he was beaten by his stepfather and became an orphan at age 9, when his mother died. He was brought up by his grandmother, ...

29. George Orwell

Writer | Nineteen Eighty-Four

Born the son of an Opium Agent in Bengal, Eric Blair was educated in England (Eton 1921). The joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, serving until 1927. He then travelled around England and Europe, doing various odd jobs to support his writing. By 1935 he had adopted the 'pen-name' of 'George...

30. Edgar Allan Poe

Writer | Eliza Graves

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco ...

31. Publius Vergilius Maro

Writer | Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas

Publius Vergilius Maro was born on October 15, 70 in Andes, Italy. Publius Vergilius was a writer, known for Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas (2018), Great Performances (1971) and Dido & Aeneas (1995). Publius Vergilius died on September 21, 19 in Brundisium [now Brindisi, Italy].

32. Julio Cortázar

Writer | Blow-Up

One of the most important Argentinian writers of all time, Julio Cortazar was born in Belgium. When he was a child he went with his parents to Argentina. She stayed in Buenos Aires until 1951, when he went to Paris and he stayed in France until his death. His first book of short stories was "...

33. Nazim Hikmet

Soundtrack | Der Himmel über Berlin

Nazim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902 in Salonica, Ottoman Empire [now Thessaloniki, Greece]. He was a writer and director, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Günese dogru (1937) and Dügün gecesi (1933). He was married to Wera Tuljakowa, Münevver and Piraye. He died on June 3, ...

34. Oscar Wilde

Writer | The Picture of Dorian Gray

A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness. Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before ...

35. Jean de La Fontaine

Writer | La cicala e la formica

Born in July 8, 1621, in Château-Thierry (Champagne, France), where his father was in charge of Water, Forests and Hunting, Jean de la Fontaine spent his whole childhood and adolescence in the countryside, where he mainly studied Latin language. In 1641, he moved to Paris to continue his study at ...

36. Rainer Maria Rilke

Writer | René

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague on the 4th of December 1878 as the son of a military man working with railroads. After he visited a military Upper School he tried to avoid the army and did the preparations for the final exams and the final exams in private. He went to university to study ...

37. Lord Byron

Writer | Don Juan DeMarco

Lord Byron seemed destined from birth to tragedy. His father was the handsome but feckless Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his mother the Scottish heiress Catherine Gordon, the only child of the Laird of Gight. Captain Byron abandoned his wife and child leaving Catherine to bring up young Byron on...

38. Hans Christian Andersen

Writer | Frozen

Andersen experienced an unhappy childhood marked by deep poverty. When he was 14 years old, he left his parents' home and fled alone to Copenhagen. Here the director of the Royal Theater, Jonas Collin, took care of the child and gave him shelter and work. With his help, the young Hans Christian ...

39. Thomas Mann

Writer | Morte a Venezia

Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "...

40. Alexandre Dumas

Writer | The Count of Monte Cristo

His paternal grandparents were Marie Cessete Dumas (a Haitian slave) and Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie. Antoine disapproved of their son, Thomas-Alexandre, joining the French army under the "Davy de la Pailleterie" name, so Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's surname instead. He became a ...

41. James Joyce

Writer | The Dead

Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, on 2 February 1882. His father invested unwisely, and the family's fortunes declined steadily. Joyce graduated from University College Dublin (UCD), in 1902. He briefly studied medicine in Paris but his mother's impending death from cancer ...

42. Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Writer | Die Nacht

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born on May 27, 1894 in Courbevoie, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. He was a writer and actor, known for Die Nacht (1985), Contes modernes (1979) and Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985). He was married to Lucette Almanzor and Edith Follet. He died on July 1, ...

43. Boris Pasternak

Writer | Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890 into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak, who converted to Christianity, and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. Their home was open to family friends...

44. Federico García Lorca

Soundtrack | Take This Waltz

Federíco Garcia Lorca was born in the south of Spain (Andalusia) in 1898 and soon became the region's most famous artist. A poet, playwright, artist, musician and lecturer, he wrote groundbreaking plays such as 'Blood Wedding' and 'Yerma'. His support of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s led to his...

45. Pablo Neruda

Writer | TV teatar

Pablo Neruda was the pseudonym of Chilean poet Ricardo Neftali Reyes Basualto. He was born in Parral, a little town in central Chile, but his family moved to Temuco City when he was just a few months old. It was there he showed interest in poetry and made his early works, and where he picked "Pablo...

Actor | Mil Adultérios

Borges is known for Mil Adultérios (1910).

47. Beaumarchais

Writer | La règle du jeu

Beaumarchais was born on January 24, 1732 in Paris, France. Beaumarchais was a writer, known for The Rules of the Game (1939), The Barber of Seville (1938) and The Marriage of Figaro (1949). Beaumarchais was married to Marie-Thérèse Willermawlaz, Geneviève Wattebled Lévêque and Madeleine Aubertin. ...

48. Naguib Mahfouz

Writer | El Fetewa

Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11, 1911 in Cairo, Egypt. He was a writer, known for The Tough (1957), The Monster (1954) and Between Heaven and Earth (1959). He was married to Atiyyatallah Ibrahim. He died on August 30, 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.

49. Ursula K. Le Guin

Writer | Gedo senki

Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929 in Berkeley, California, USA. She was a writer, known for Tales from Earthsea (2006), The Lathe of Heaven (1980) and The Telling . She was married to Charles A. Le Guin. She died on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

50. Nikolay Gogol

Writer | Burnt Hickory

Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He...

51. Honoré de Balzac

Writer | The Conquering Power

Honoré de Balzac was a French writer whose works have been made into films, such as, Cousin Bette (1998) starring Jessica Lange , and television serials, such as, _Cousin Bette (1971 TV mini-series)_, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren . He was born on March 20, 1799, in Tours, France. His ...

52. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958). He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six ...

53. Neil Gaiman

Writer | Good Omens

Neil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. As a child and a teenager, Gaiman read the works of C. S. ...

54. Jean Racine

Jean-Baptiste Racine (22 December 1639 - 21 April 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, ...

55. Albert Camus

Writer | The Misunderstanding

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His parents were Spanish-French-Algerian (pied noir) colonists. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne (1914) during WWI. His mother, named Catherine Helene Sintes was of Spanish origin, she was a deaf mute due to a stroke, ...

56. Jean-Paul Sartre

Writer | Les orgueilleux

Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer in the French Navy. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was the cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer . Sartre was one year old when his father died. He was ...

57. Chingiz Aitmatov

Writer | Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalim

Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman known for such films as The First Teacher (1965), The Girl with the Red Scarf (1977) and Jamila (1995). He was born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in Kirgizia, Soviet Union. His family was bilingual, Russian-Kyrgyz. His ...

58. John Steinbeck

Writer | Lifeboat

John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 ...

59. Milan Kundera

Writer | The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera was born on April 1st 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He wrote his first poems during his high school years. After World War II he worked as a jazz musician before going to college. He studied music, film and literature at university in Prague. He moved on to become a professor at the ...

60. Jules Verne

Writer | Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most famous French novelists of all time. His major work is the "Extraordinary Journeys", a series of more than sixty adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "20.000 Leagues under the Seas" and "...

61. Mark Twain

Writer | Lionizing Murderers

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri in 1835, grew up in Hannibal. He was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Throughout his career, Twain served as a writer, lecturer, reporter, editor, printer, and prospector. Twain took his pen name from an alert cry used on his...

62. Francois Rabelais

Writer | Kraft Television Theatre

François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs. Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and considered by some as a free thinker, a doctor and ...

63. Yasar Kemal

Writer | Alageyik

Yasar Kemal was born on October 6, 1923 in Osmaniye, Adana, Turkey. He was a writer, known for The Fallow Deer (1958), Tus (1955) and The Enemy of Chastity (1957). He was married to Ayse Semiha Baban and Thilda Serrero. He died on February 28, 2015 in Istanbul, Turkey.

64. George Bernard Shaw

Writer | Pygmalion

The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs. ...

65. Arthur Conan Doyle

Writer | Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer of Irish descent, considered a major figure in crime fiction. His most famous series of works consisted of the "Sherlock Holmes" stories (1887-1927), consisting of four novels and 56 short stories. His other notable series were the "Professor Challenger" ...

66. Jane Austen

Writer | Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the local rector, Rev. George Austen (1731-1805), and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). She was the seventh of eight children. She had one older sister, Cassandra. In 1783 she went to Southampton to be taught by a relative, Mrs. Cawley, but was brought ...

67. Geoffrey Chaucer

Writer | The Ribald Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in 1343 in London, England, UK. He was a writer. He was married to Philippa Roet. He died on October 25, 1400 in London, England.

68. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Writer | Le Petit Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into a family of old provincial nobility. Failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and sent to Strasbourg for pilot training. The...

69. Erich Maria Remarque

Writer | A Time to Love and a Time to Die

The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. His first novel, the famous anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), was written based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and published in 1929. He moved to Switzerland until 1939 and later emigrated to the US....

70. J.D. Salinger

Writer | My Foolish Heart

U.S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-...

71. Virginia Woolf

Writer | Orlando

London-born Virginia Woolf came from a wealthy family and, unlike her brothers, received her education at home, an unusual step for the times. Her parents had both had children from previous marriages, so she grew up with a variety of siblings, stepbrothers and stepsisters. Her father was a ...

72. Louis Aragon

Soundtrack | 8 femmes

Louis Aragon was born on October 3, 1897, in Paris, France. He graduated from Lycée Carnot, then studied medicine in Sorbonne and befriended a fellow medical student André Breton . In 1917 he was drafted in the First World War and served in a military hospital. There he met Guillaume Apollinaire and...

73. Herman Melville

Writer | The Enigma of Benito Cereno

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his ...

74. Alphonse Daudet

Writer | Sapho

Alphonse Daudet was born on May 13, 1840 in Nîmes, France. He was a writer, known for Sapho (1934), Sapho (1917) and Sapho (1913). He was married to Julia Allard. He died on December 16, 1897 in Paris, France.

75. Mikhail Sholokhov

Writer | Podnyataya tselina

Mikhail Sholokhov was a Russian writer who received a Nobel prize for his epic novel 'Tikhiy Don'. He was born in 1905 into a Cossack family of farmers in Kruzhilin, Veshenskaya, Rostov province in Southern Russia. His high school studies were interrupted by the Russian revolution and the Civil War, ...

76. Stefan Zweig

Writer | The Grand Budapest Hotel

Here he grew up in the educated Jewish middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his high school diploma at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. Zweig wrote his first poems here. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and ...

77. José Saramago

Writer | Enemy

José Saramago was born on November 16, 1922 in Azinhaga, Golega, Portugal. He was a writer, known for Enemy (2013), Blindness (2008) and O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo . He was married to Pilar del Río and Ilda Reis. He died on June 18, 2010 in Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.

78. Bertolt Brecht

Writer | Die Dreigroschenoper

Bertolt Brecht was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany and one of the country's most influential poets, playwrights and screenwriters. His most famous work was the musical "The Threepenny Opera" (with Kurt Weill ), but his dramas such as "Mother Courage and Her Children" or "The Good ...

79. Mario Vargas Llosa

Writer | Pantaleón y las visitadoras

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He is a writer and director, known for Pantaleon (1976), Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999) and Tune in Tomorrow... (1990). He has been married to Patricia Llosa since 1965. He was previously married to Julia Urquidi.

80. T.S. Eliot

Writer | Cats

T.S. Eliot ranks with William Butler Yeats as the greatest English language poet of the 20th Century and was certainly the most influential. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot into the bosom of a respectable middle class family on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. The family had roots in New...

81. Guy de Maupassant

Writer | La criada de la granja

Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 in Château de Miromesnil, France. He was a writer, known for La criada de la granja (1953) and Masculine Feminine (1966). He died on July 6, 1893 in Paris, France.

82. John Keats

Writer | La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

John Keats (31 October 1795 - 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, although his poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently ...

83. Sabahattin Ali

Sabahattin Ali was born in Komotini, Greece, 1917; and assassinated in Kirklareli, Turkey, 1948. He worked as a teacher in Yozgat, Aydin, Konya and Ankara for couple of years. In 1945, Ali started to publish humorous and opposing magazine Marko Pasa. He arrested in 1948 for an article and sentenced...

84. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Soundtrack | Neredesin Firuze

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar was born on June 23, 1901 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]. He was a writer, known for Where's Firuze? (2004), A Passing Summer's Rain (1994) and Geçmis Zaman Elbiseleri (1975). He died on January 24, 1962 in Istanbul, Turkey.

85. John Fante

Writer | Full of Life

John Fante was born on April 8, 1909 in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He was a writer, known for Full of Life (1956), The Golden Fleecing (1940) and My Man and I (1952). He was married to Joyce H. Smart. He died on May 8, 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

86. Henri-Frédéric Blanc

Writer | Combat de fauves

Henri-Frédéric Blanc is known for Wild Games (1997), Le Dernier Survivant (2001) and Jeu de massacre ou le blues des fadas (1996).

87. Isaac Asimov

Writer | I, Robot

Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Judah Ozimov, on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi shtetl, near Smolensk, Russia. He was the oldest of three children. His father, named Judah Ozimov, and his mother, named Anna Rachel Ozimov (nee Berman), were Orthodox Jews. Ozimov family were millers (the name Ozimov ...

88. Fitzgerald Scott

Writer | Young Cesar

Fitzgerald Scott is known for Young Cesar (2007) and Charlotte Church: Crazy Chick (2005).

89. J.M. Coetzee

Writer | Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee was born on February 9, 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a writer, known for Waiting for the Barbarians (2019), Dust (1985) and Disgrace (2008).

90. Kazuo Ishiguro

Writer | Living

Kazuo Ishiguro was born on November 8, 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He is a writer and producer, known for Living (2022), Never Let Me Go (2010) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He has been married to Lorna Anne MacDougall since 1986. They have one child.

91. Hermann Hesse

Soundtrack | The Hours

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was a writer, known for The Hours (2002), Siddhartha (1972) and Steppenwolf (1974). He was married to Ninon Ausländer, Ruth Wenger and Maria Bernoulli. He died on August 9, 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland.

92. Robert Louis Stevenson

Writer | Muppet Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr ...

93. Salman Rushdie

Actor | Bridget Jones's Diary

He married the actress Padma Lakshmi , the hostess of "Padma's Passport," and dedicatee of his eighth novel, "Fury" (2001), on 17th April 2004. The late Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him for the novel "The Satanic Verses" on 14th February 1989. He is currently completing a ninth novel....

94. Mario Vargas Llosa

95. aldous huxley.

Writer | A Woman's Vengeance

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Laleham in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third of four children. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist known for his theories of evolution. His grandfather, named Thomas Henry Huxley, was a naturalist known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His ...

96. Paul Valéry

Writer | Auf der Lesebühne der Literarischen Illustrierten

Paul Valéry was born on October 30, 1871 in Cette [now Sète], Herault, France. He was a writer, known for Auf der Lesebühne der Literarischen Illustrierten (1965), L'ippogrifo (1974) and Paul Valéry (1960). He was married to Jeannie Gobillard. He died on July 20, 1945 in Paris, France.

97. Thomas Pynchon

Writer | Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for Inherent Vice (2014), Prüfstand VII (2002) and Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P. (2002). He has been married to Melanie Jackson since 1991. They have one child.

98. H.P. Lovecraft

Writer | Color Out of Space

Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine, among others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most ...

99. Haruki Murakami

Writer | Doraibu mai kâ

Haruki Murakami graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1975. Widely considered one of Japan's most important 20th-century novelists. His often solitary, withdrawn, and world-weary protagonists are generally stripped of Japanese tradition. Frequently called postmodern, his fiction, which often ...

100. Nikos Kazantzakis

Writer | The Last Temptation of Christ

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion, Crete (Greece). He studied Law in Athens and in Paris, but soon he studied philosophy and literature. He travelled almost everywhere; he learnt many foreign languages and left his scientific research for Nitsche. At philosophy: "Ascetics" (Salvatores Dei, ...

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Home » Slogans » Catchy Company Names » 101 Catchy Freelance Writing Business Names

101 Catchy Freelance Writing Business Names

Freelance writing is something that anyone who has a knack for writing can be successful with. There is unlimited possibilities and the work you do is all up to you. Establishing a credible reputation is key to building a customer base for your writing business. Here are some different ways to name your business to draw in the customers.

(Name) Writing Services A Hundred Monkeys A Professional Touch A Writer Affordable Papers Awareness Unlimited Best Custom Writing Beyer Editorial Services Black Knight Writing Services Bookworm Lab Boston Cover Letter Brand Storyteller Campus Circle Clear Voice Compass Rose Conscious Copywriter Content Creator Content Rockstar Contently Copywriting that Works Creative Writing Professional Cup & Quill Services Custom Writing Pros Custom Writings E Writing Service editEON Editorial Freelancers Enlighten Writing Evolution Writers Expert Writing Expert Writing for Your Success Express Writers Fine Point Writing Fission N Fusion Freelance Now Freelance Writing Suite Full Spectrum Writing Services Agency Garden Wall Publications Ghost Strategies Handmade Writings Heavy Pen Helping You Succeed ideaLaunch IG Writing and Translation Services Inkshed Institute for Writers Intuitive Enterprise Solutions Language Audit Lorish Copywriting Midas Media MPP Freelance Writer & Design National Writers Union Norton Writing Services Paper Coach Paper Masters Paperial Pearl Creations Pen Slingers Pencil Writing and Editing Presence & Company Rapid Turn Around Time Research and Writing Pro Scribe on Demand Scripted Scrivenry Smart Custom Writing Smart Writing Service Speakwel Speech Capital State of Writing Services Storytelling for Better Selling Sweetland Freelance Tell Your Brand Story The Art of Words The Content Interpreter The Long Beach Writing Company The Los Angeles Writing Group The Pen The Press Gang The Type Writers The Writers For Hire The Zen of Writing Thrive Hive Top Quality Writing Ultius Unemployed Professors Vicentaneous Editing and Writing Services Wandering Wordsmith Winning Readers Words and Cappuccinos Write 4 You Write for Life Write in Time Write Kraft Writers Per Hour Writes for You Writing Assist Writing Coach Writing Done Right Writing Elites Writing Services Unlimited

This informative video is all about how to be successful in the world of free lance writing. She gives amazing advice on important topics that are involved in the freelance writing world.

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75+ Unique, Creative & Catchy Freelance Writer Business Names Business Names Ideas

Writing is a creative outlet that lets you express yourself in unique and interesting ways. For those looking to start their own freelance writing business, it is important to choose a name that is both catchy and creative. Here are 75+ unique and creative freelance writer business names to help you create the perfect name for your business.

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Table of contents:, 25 catchy freelance writer business names business names:.

• Worded Wonders
• Write Right
• Pen & Paper Pros
• The Wordsmiths
• Content Creators
• Copy Crafters
• The Creative Pen
• The Writing Studio
• Written Word
• Storytellers
• Project Writers
• The Writing Room
• The Copy Company
• StoryMakers
• Content Kings
• Wordsmiths Inc
• The Word Factory
• Pen Masters
• The Writing Team
• Word Wizards
• Creative Writers
• Check out our entire small business plan directory

25 Creative Freelance Writer Business Names Business Names:

• Global Writing Solutions
• Ready Writer Services
• Writer's Express
• Spectacular Scripts
• Expert Penmanship
• Powerful Prose
• Wordsmiths Unlimited
• Creative Content Company
• Word Warriors
• Scripted Success
• Essay Express
• Scripted Solutions
• Write Place
• Writer's Blockbusters
• Write This Way
• Penmanship Express
• Perfect Penmanship
• Storyteller Services
• Express Writers
• The Writing Center
• Check out our entire small business ideas directory

25 Unique Freelance Writer Business Names Business Names:

• CopyVenture Writing
• PenKnights Writing Services
• Wordsmithery
• Write My Story
• The Word Wizard
• The Pen Pal
• TextStar Writing Services
• ContentCrafters
• Writer Deluxe
• The Creative Penman
• Storyteller Solutions
• Write It Now
• WordMasters
• Write-a-Rama
• Write It Right
• The Word Wagon
• Writer Plus
• The Content Engineer
• The Writing Hub
• The Writing Genie
• CopyKrafters
• Check out how to start an llc in different states

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I'm Nick, co-founder of newfoundr.com, dedicated to helping aspiring entrepreneurs succeed. As a small business owner with over five years of experience, I have garnered valuable knowledge and insights across a diverse range of industries. My passion for entrepreneurship drives me to share my expertise with aspiring entrepreneurs, empowering them to turn their business dreams into reality.

Through meticulous research and firsthand experience, I uncover the essential steps, software, tools, and costs associated with launching and maintaining a successful business. By demystifying the complexities of entrepreneurship, I provide the guidance and support needed for others to embark on their journey with confidence.

From assessing market viability and formulating business plans to selecting the right technology and navigating the financial landscape, I am dedicated to helping fellow entrepreneurs overcome challenges and unlock their full potential. As a steadfast advocate for small business success, my mission is to pave the way for a new generation of innovative and driven entrepreneurs who are ready to make their mark on the world.

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• David Leonhardt – Biography

The mega list of careers for writers in 2023 – writing jobs or freelance work

Who knew there were so many career paths for a writer to take? Here are 37 jobs for professional writers, either as employees or as freelancers.

(Updated for 2023)

What image comes to mind when you hear the word “writer”?

Some people immediately think of a novelist , perhaps locked away in solitude working on their masterpiece, like Hemingway or like “Alex Rover” in Nim’s Island.

Some people think right away of bloggers coming up with some new angle in their chosen niche each day.

Others might picture an intrepid journalist , writing news or sports or entertainment stories for the masses.

Still others might picture a biographer , carefully researching and then revealing the shocking truths behind famous public figures.

The fact is that there is no such career as “writer”. There are dozens of professional writing careers and countless freelance writing jobs. There are so many opportunities for someone who loves to play with words and sculpt ideas.

Writers work in every field and in every language.

Writers work as freelancers and as employees.

There are writing careers for every personality and every interest.

• 8 tips for a successful freelance writer career

Keep in mind that most writing careers can be played out as employees for large corporations, governments and other organizations. Or they can be taken on as freelancers from your home office in Tahiti, if you prefer.  Most can be done under your own name or as a ghostwriter .

Here are just a few interesting careers for writers.

Speechwriter, scriptwriter, video game writer, comic book writer, lyricist or songwriter, greeting card writer, technical writer, proofreader, article writer, executive assistant, virtual assistant, social media manager.

• media relations specialist

Essay writer

• Grant writer

Resume writer

Business plan writer, travel writer, writing coach, literary agent.

• Acquisitions editor

Copy editor

How-to book writer, ghostwriter.

Let’s start with the most obvious and the most glamorous writing career. Novelists get the most fame and the most glory. Well, some do. Actually, very few do. There are your Hemingways and your Rowlings and your Tolkiens, of course.

And then there are the likes of the Beatles’ Paperback Writer .

As famous as some of these writers have become, they are the few who have risen to fame. Most novelists struggle in the shadows, writing their stories with a nod from the occasional fan (Hi Mom!). More often than not, they require a day job to keep the landlord from entering with a backhoe.

But many novelists who will never be “famous” still make money, many as extra income and some even make enough to turn it into a full time profession.

You don’t write novels for the money. You do it to appease the characters in your head, so they’ll stop banging on your skull demanding to be set free.  You do it for your own sanity. If you make enough money to call it a career, that is just a bonus. If not, at least you save the cost of therapy.

Probably the second-best known writing career, at least for people reading this blog, is that of professional blogger . There are thousands of bloggers in the world, many of them making money. A few of them are also good marketers and have learned how to monetize their blogs; they actually make enough money to quit their day jobs. But most bloggers don’t earn enough to make a career out of blogging, so if you plan to be a blogger, you had better make it enjoyable. In fact, ghostwriting blogs for small and medium-sized companies might just be the most profitable way to blog for a living.

Journalism is a special skill, or set of skills. It involves research and writing, judgment and detachment. You are writing with a purpose and making sure to appear neutral (In theory, you should actually be neutral, unless you are writing an opinion piece, but in theory the moon is made of cheese , right?). 

Journalists take themselves very seriously, and you will not be allowed to free the characters in your head. So best budget for therapy.

A columnist is not quite the same as a journalist. Typically a columnist has a field of expertise and offers a viewpoint.

Like a journalist, a columnist has to do solid research and write based on facts.

Unlike a journalist, a columnist is not expected to be balanced and neutral in your reporting. You are supposed to be opinionated to some degree, and are permitted to occasionally stick out your tongue. Just keep in mind that it is still professional writing

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A speechwriter has to be able to pick up on the speaker’s voice and style, and at the same time visualize the audience and their reactions. You have to understand cadence and how the words roll off the tongue. A speechwriter is almost always a ghostwriter, otherwise you would be called a “speaker”.

Most politicians, diplomats and business leaders have dedicated specialists on their team to write their speeches. Oftentimes people receiving awards or presenting awards hire a freelance speechwriter.

Wedding speeches are sometimes written by professionals. I have written best man speeches, father of the bride speeches, father of the groom speeches and maid of honor speeches .

It very much helps if you have been a speaker yourself. I spent several years in Toastmasters learning all about what goes into delivering the speech, and that makes me much better a speechwriter.

Also known as a screenplay writer , you get to write scripts for movies, cartoons and TV shows. Like a speechwriter, you need to be keenly aware of how the words will sound when spoken. Tougher still than a speechwriter, you have to be able to write in the narration, the action and the sound effects. Like a novelist, you need to know how to spin a story. This is a pretty tough set of skills to learn, and it certainly helps if you’ve had prior experience working on movie sets.

Not many plays are written these days, so there are not many careers available in this field. However, it easier than being a scriptwriter, as there is much less of the action and the sound effects to script. Plays depend more heavily on dialogue. This is definitely a freelance career, but don’t quit your day job.

Did you notice that there are portions of some video games that include narration or dialogue? Well, they don’t just write themselves. This is another form of script writing that might interest you.

Comic books and graphic novels combine visuals with text in much the same way that films and stage plays do. In this case, you need to be able to coordinate with an illustrator and synchronize your work so that sparse images and sparse words combine to deliver the story. This really is an art form, and not as easy as it looks. While it can be done remotely, being able to work together in the same room can be an advantage.

Oops, how did that one get there? That’s not really a career. (EDIT: some people do manage to make a career out of poetry – way to go!)

Songs, songs and more songs. Everybody is singing these days, so there is actually a demand for poets, after all. A lyricist is a poet who writes for the melodies of popular songs. It sure helps if you can also write the music, but many songs are co-written between a lyricist and a composer. This is typically a freelance career. I love writing lyrics, because the characters in my head are usually singing rather than screaming. Yes, that calls for a special type of therapy.

This might seem like the easiest field for a new writer to break into, and perhaps it is. But after getting your third rejection letter, you will realize that it has to be taken seriously. There is a lot of competition for the hearts of consumers in this field, and just because you write something you think is clever doesn’t mean a greeting card company will buy it.

There is a huge demand for technical writers who can explain complex directions and explanations for users, in words that users can actually understand. Consider that every computer, every gadget, every measuring device, every software program or application, every industrial machine and every appliance needs a manual.

If you have ever tried assembling something as simple as furniture or a child’s toy and realized how confusing the instructions are, that’s a clear indication of how desperately the world needs more and better technical writers. This can be done as an employee or as a freelancer.

A copywriter is someone who writes sales material such as advertising, direct marketing letters and emails, pamphlets, packaging (All those words on cereal boxes and dog food bags don’t just write themselves!), newsletters, catalogue descriptions and website copy. It’s not glamorous, but if you do it well, it sure pays the bills. It helps to learn about a few niches, so that you can write with authority on those topics. There are copywriting jobs, and this can also be done freelance.

Speaking of not glamorous, the proofreader works deep in the shadows, although he plays a very important role. As long as there is writing, there is a need for proofreading. If you have a strong attention to detail, this can be a steady paying job, freelance or as an employee. If you don’t have strong attention to detail, you’ll just be a “poofreader”. And who wants more of those ?

When you read The Readers Digest , where do the articles come from? From freelance article writers, for the most part. The same is true for most magazines. They might have some staff writers, but they get a much better variety of articles and can better control the flow of work and personnel by relying on freelancers. There is a huge market for article writers who can write creatively and informatively, at the same time thinking in terms of target audience.

You might think this is just a fancy name for “secretary”, but an executive assistant is often called upon to draft letters and proofread them, as well. A particularly skilled executive assistant might even be asked to help with writing articles and speeches for an executive. This is very much a jack-of-all-trades position, and if you have attention to detail, can keep organized and don’t mind being at someone else’s service, it could be the career for you.

A virtual assistant is typically a remote freelancer who helps small companies and consultants with some of the more routine tasks. There is no job description for this position, so if you can write well, you might find yourself writing letters, copy, blog posts, press releases or even proofreading and editing material. There is a lot of offshore competition that drives the pay for this career down. English language skills are critical for anyone who wants their virtual assistant to help with writing or proofreading, so if you have those skills, you can command a decent fee.

If you have any innovative career experiences, I invite you to share them in the comments below.

In this role, you will be writing for social media, including responding on the fly to social media interactions, as well as scheduling social media broadcasts. You will also be focused on building an audience, so what you write is critical not just for engagement with readers, but also for attracting new readers.

If you are really fluent in two or more languages, you can make really good money doing translation. Typically, you would translate from your second or third language to your native tongue. If you were raised bilingually, you might be able to translate in both directions. Many translation jobs require official training, testing and a certificate. There are also many freelance opportunities that do not require any such certification.

Media relations specialist

This position combines three key functions. One is strategic, developing strategies to get more or better media coverage. The second is preparing materials for the media, such as press releases with backgrounders and op-ed articles. The third is acting as a spokesperson for the company. Many careers in this field do not require the spokesperson role, but all require a heavy writing role, often with a lot of research involved. Large organizations typically have their own employees to do this; smaller companies usually rely on freelancers.

If you are desperate for work, you could always help someone cheat themselves out of an education. There is a thriving market for essay writers from students who don’t want to or are not capable enough to write their own essays. Just remember when the doctor removes your heart by accident instead of your liver that you helped him “earn” his degree. This is the perfect career for anyone whose head is teaming with evil characters demanding their freedom and threatening to set off TNT in your brain.

Grant Writer

There is a thriving market for people to write grant proposals. Non-profits, charities and NGOs often seek grants from government and from foundations. Grant proposal writing is a specialized niche. You get to know what the people who review the proposals are looking for so as to maximize the client’s chance of scoring with one single reader (it might be several people reviewing it, but it is one agency that will decide if that proposal fails or succeeds). For that reason it is a hard field to break into, but it is a field you can enter remotely as a freelancer.

As with grant writing, resume writing is a very specialized field, for a similar reason. After a while, you get to see what works in a resume and what doesn’t, what works in a cover letter and what doesn’t. As with grant writing, the whole goal is to maximize the client’s chance of scoring with a single reader. With people changing jobs more than twice a decade , there are plenty of resumes and cover letters to be written. There are both freelance opportunities and employment opportunities in this field.

Business plan writing is in some ways similar to resume writing and grant writing. You are writing with a very small audience in mind, hoping to score an investment with a single reader. It might be presented several times, but a lot of work goes into writing the plan, which will never go to a mass audience. This is typically a freelance career.

This is a nice little set of niches for a few people who are very passionate about the topics. Restaurant and food reviews, art exhibit reviews, entertainment reviews (theatre, concert, etc.) can be well-paying and a lot of fun, and there are newspapers and magazines that pay well for these. Breaking into this field is not easy. It can often be done freelance, but some publications have dedicated employees writing reviews.

Similar to a reviewer, a travel writer writes about places she has been and what one could expect to encounter there. Typically, the two skills a travel writer needs are the ability to fill readers with a sense of wonder and not getting sick on airplanes. Oh, and it helps to have really good photography skills.

There are plenty of careers teaching English, journalism, communications and creative writing. Don’t overlook these opportunities if you have the type of personality that works for teaching.

Everybody has a book inside them, but some people need help bringing it out. They turn to writing coaches, especially if they are serious about becoming a professional writer. If you want to teach, but prefer freelance and one-on-one, this is a great alternative to a professor position at a college or university.

Not every writer writes for a living. Professors and writing coaches are not the only ways to put your writing expertise to use in a non-writing capacity. Literary agents evaluate manuscripts and then represent the authors in pitching them to publishers. This career is one part making tough choices about which manuscripts to accept and which to reject, and one part pitching those they choose to represent. Typically, literary agents are freelancers and have some experience with publishing.

Acquisitions Editor

While the literary agent represents the author, the acquisitions editor works for the publisher. Her job is to find the ideal manuscript. In other words, her job is about making even tougher choices than the literary agent has to make.

The editor of a publication runs the publication. Her biggest job is to supervise the writers and graphic artists, make choices about the content and layout and often to manage the business end, as well. Magazines and newspapers have editors, and so do many book publishers. There might be several editors with various functions, such as a managing editor who manages a large editorial staff and an assignment editor who determines which reporters will cover which stories each day.

The copy editor’s job is to review manuscripts and articles, edit them for grammar and appropriateness, make sure they fit a publication’s style, sometimes check facts and do whatever else is needed to make an article publication-ready. In some anthology books, the editor is also responsible for supervising the various writers and providing context for the various entries. The role of editor is becoming even more important as artificial intelligence (AI) starts writing more and more of what humans read.

We started this off with novelists, but fiction is only half the world of books. There is a huge demand for how-to and self-help topics, and some people who lack the story structuring skills to write fiction find these sorts of books and eBooks to be just as fulfilling (and often more profitable) to write.

There are professional writers who specialize just in writing biographies. A few of them get very rich, writing biographies of famous people, and even richer ghostwriting autobiographies of famous people. This is not an entry level position. On the other hand, some people specialize in writing heritage books, family biographies that are never meant for mass distribution. Those usually are entry positions, but it’s still professional writing.

This is a deceptive career title, since a ghostwriter is somebody who writes the words for another person’s credit. If you write fiction for an author or for a publisher as a ghostwriter, you are at the same time a novelist – an anonymous novelist. If you write speeches for politicians or businessmen, or for best men and fathers of the bride, you are an anonymous speechwriter.

What is the most important characteristic of a good ghostwriter? Discretion is important. But there is one even more important characteristic you need to be a ghostwriter .

If you are looking for freelance writing work, try Listiller .

Ready to launch your writing career?

If you love to write, writers’ work isn’t even work at all. Your career options are almost boundless. There are just so many ways to go, and Your only limit is your imagination.  And for a writer, that’s not much of a limit!

If you have innovative writing career experiences of your own, I invite you to share them in the comments below.

David Leonhardt is President of The Happy Guy Marketing, a published author, a "Distinguished Toastmaster", a former consumer advocate, a social media addict and experienced with media relations and government reports.

Read more about David Leonhardt

So, as a blogger/columnist/editor, I applaud your great explanation of the choices available to those who consider themselves wordsmiths.

Hi David thanks alot for the explaination of the various writing careers. This has helped me alot in ascertaining the path to take.

Thanks for the list. I think I will try some of the options on the list. Some may not be as lucrative as others, but it will keep the passion for writing burning.

Hi David, A mega list of writers can be! Its a useful guide for those who might be wondering what they can become as writers. One of the most interesting career part I never thought of but listed here is Media Relations Specialist. I may have to checkout in detail what this professional writer does.

Nevertheless, the skills displayed in most of these careers for writers are interwoven. Hence, one may need to properly develop them effectively! I left this comment in kingged.com as well

I love your idea! I now think that the scope of the writer is extremely broad, changing my original thinking.

Great list for writers!

I like this list very much. This doesn’t focus on content marketing but it shares ideas on how to make money even without the heavy things to consider in.

Being a poet, lyricist and greeting card writer are some of the suggestions you shared that I like the most. There are certain sites that will pay you to create poems and alike. I am passionate with poem making and song writing, I must say.

All in all, great and awesome list!

What a great list to peruse. I had completely forgotten about proofreaders which I had actually done before I was married!

This article serves as a gentle reminder that we have MANY choices and thus, there’s no reason to panic. I am currently looking more into social media management and virtual assistance just to add some variety.

Otherwise, typical blogging will always be my home….along with the occasional ghostwriting :p

Take care, David Elvis

Would songwriting count?

This list has helped me fully understand the professions of the writer! Before I read the article, I thought that the writer was just a novelist or a storyteller and some other publisher. But now, my thinking about this profession has completely changed. Through this form, I am most interested in two professions, one is the travel writer and one is the translator.

I think to be a travel writer is my ideal job. First of all, because I love traveling, I love photography, and I love documenting my life, I meet the skills needed for this job. Secondly, my trip can even be paid for by a company or magazine! This is simply wonderful! Not only can I gain a lot of happiness and broaden my horizons, but I can also earn a good salary! The career prospects of travel writers are also good. As people’s living standards improve, people increasingly want to travel. Before people travel, they go online to make some plans. Therefore, articles written by travel writers will provide great value to these travelers. You can find a lot of excellent travel writers and travel bloggers on Weibo, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

At the same time, I think a translator is also a good profession as a writer. My first language is Chinese and my second language is English. At the same time, I am learning Japanese, bringing me a lot of benefits. By being a translator, you can exercise your language skills, and at the same time, you can bring new vitality to literary masterpieces in other languages ​​by using translation skills proficiently and flexibly. In the future, in this era of globalization, an outstanding translator will certainly be more popular. When I was a kid, the first time I read the Chinese version of the Great Gatsby, I found this story boring, but as I grew older, I started to contact the original English works and found that it was another scene. Therefore, a good translator is necessary for the spread of literature! Although it takes a lot of training and foundation to become a translator, I think it’s worth it.

Instructional designer/instructional design co-ordinator is another profession that requires quite a bit of writing skills.

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21 Famous Authors and Their Pen Names

For centuries, writers have created pen names to publish their literary works. Adopting a pseudonym grants writers the ability to conceal their true identity for personal, political, and ethical reasons. Some of our literary world’s most beloved, bestselling authors have formulated their entire careers using alternative identities. Female writers, especially during the 19th century , have often used male pen names to combat sexism and prejudice in a traditionally male-dominated craft.

Other reasons for using a nom de plume include privacy, avoiding overexposure, crossing into different genres, creating a sense of individuality, and even simplifying one’s birth name in hopes of making it more memorable. Whatever the case may be, choosing a pen name remains a personal choice that ultimately aids writers in their publishing pursuits.

Here’s a list of 21 famous writers and their real names you might not have known until now!

1. Anne Rice

Real Name: Howard Allen Frances O’Brien

Originally named after her father, the author of Vampire Chronicles changed her name to “Anne” upon her first day of school to avoid being bullied. After marrying her now deceased husband Stan Rice, she used her married name to publish the majority of her work. Rice adopted a couple other pen names including Anne Rampling and A.N Roquelaure when she published some erotic novels .

2. Dr. Seuss

Real Name: Theodor Seuss Geisel

Dr. Seuss, one of the more well-known pen names, was adopted from Geisel’s middle name once he started writing children’s books. He added the “Dr.” because his father had always wanted him to pursue a career in medicine . Some say that Geisel was saving his real name to one day publish his “great American novel”;  others suggest that Geisel simply felt more inclined to tell an “entertaining” story rather than a “true” one.

3. Mark Twain

Real Name: Samuel Clemens

While scholars have never been clear about the origin of Clemens’s pseudonym, the most recent investigations suggest that the name Mark Twain came from a short-lived, popular humor journal that he often read. Other stories indicate that Mark Twain had been used by Clemens’s former riverboat captain when he worked on the Mississippi river. If the man checking the depth called out “mark twain,” it meant a depth of twelve feet —meaning that the water was safe for riverboats that day.

4. Currer, Ellis, & Acton Bell

Real Names: Charlotte, Emily, & Anne Brontë

In 19th-century England, women were not permitted to publish poetry , so the Brontë sisters created the pen names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Each male pseudonym matched the corresponding sisters’ names, helping them publish their first anthology of poetry in 1846. Initially, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre were both published under their male names. It wasn’t until the Brontë sisters traveled to London to meet their publisher in person were their true identities revealed and, fortunately, they were given the credit they deserved.

Real Name: Charles Dickens

In the early stages of Dickens’s writing career, the author often published his work anonymously. It was not until one of Dickens’s earliest pieces of fiction titled “The Boarding House” featured an epithet that was signed by “The Inimitable Boz.” Boz was originally derived from the nickname Dickens had given his younger brother, Augustus. Dickens would call him “Moses” after a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield . Pronounced through the nose, the name became Boses, and was easily shortened to Boz.

6. A.M. Barnard

Real Name: Louisa May Alcott

Early in her writing career, Alcott used the pen name Flora Fairfield to publish her poems and short stories throughout the 1850s. A decade later, some of Alcott’s melodramas were produced in Boston theatre under the pseudonym, A.M. Barnard. Knowledge of Alcott’s alias did not surface until the 1970s when historians discovered letters from the author signing off with the androgynous pseudonym. Digging deeper, they were able to find other works published by Barnard in various periodicals.

7. C.S. Lewis

Real Name: Clive Staple Lewis 

Lewis published his first work titled Spirits in Bondage (1919) under the name, Clive Hamilton to avoid ruining his reputation as a tutor at Oxford University . The name was adapted from the author’s birth name and his mother’s maiden name. After Lewis’s wife passed away in 1960, he went on to publish a few more works under the name N.W. Clerk to again avoid being identified as the author. Eventually, Lewis published some of his greatest literary works under his abbreviated birth name.

8. Silence Dogood

Real Name: Benjamin Franklin

Franklin created several pseudonyms during his lifetime, each one possessing an ironically witty persona. His first pen name was Silence Dogood , a satirical middle-aged widower whom Franklin created when he was only fifteen years old. Some of his other pen names include Caelia Shortface, Martha Careful, Richard Saunders ( Poor Richard’s Almanack ), Busy Body, Anthony Afterwit, Polly Baker, and Benevolus. Franklin is one of the few male writers to take on a female alias—in fact, he often used his feminine personas to create a social critique of the patriarchy.

9. George Eliot

Real Name:  Mary Ann Evans

Like the majority of female writers in the 19th century, Mary Ann Evans used a male pseudonym so that her works would be taken more seriously. Her pen name, George Eliot, came around 1857 when Evans published her first short story titled “Amos Barton.” Evans took the name “George” from philosopher and her lover  George Henry Lewes to whom she never married but lived with until his death. Lewes oversaw Evans’s work and encouraged her to pursue her literary ambitions. Evans crafted her entire literary career and legacy under her pen name.

10. Lewis Caroll 

Real Name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass , Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. As a scholar and instructor at Oxford, Dodgson valued his privacy—especially when it came to his literary works. He translated the first two parts of his name (Charles Lutwidge) into Latin, which gave him “Carolus Ludovicus.” He then reversed the order and translated the name back to English, which left him with“Lewis Carroll.”

11. Mary Westmacott

Real Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie

Under the pen name Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie was able to divert from her usual realm of writing mystery and crime novels . The alias allowed Christie to explore writing about human psychology and love without expectations from her already established mystery fan base. Agatha chose her new name by combining her middle name (Mary) and the family name of distant relatives (Westmacott). She successfully used the pseudonym for nearly twenty years without revealing her true identity.

12. Voltaire

Real Name: François‐Marie Arouet

With a literary career stretching over 60 years, Voltaire may be one of the most immortal pen names of literature. While the origins of François‐Marie Arouet’s pen name are unclear, it’s been suggested that the adoption of Voltaire was a result of rejecting Arounet’s family name due to a strained relationship with his father. The most popular theory remains that “Voltaire” was an anagram of a Latinized spelling of “Arouet,” but others claim it could have been Arouet’s nickname “Voluntaire” (French for “volunteer”), which may have been a sarcastic nod to the writer’s stubbornness.

13. George Orwell 

Real Name: Eric Blair

Before Animal Farm and 1984 , Eric Blair published a memoir titled Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933. He adopted the name George Orwell so his family would not be embarrassed as he recounted his experiences growing up in poverty. Being a fan of English tradition, Blair also felt that Orwell sounded like a reputable British name.

14. Ayn Rand

Real Name: Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum

Author of bestselling books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged , Ayn Rand is known for promoting her philosophy of Objectivism . Rand adopted her pen name when she moved to the United States to pursue a writing career. Because her family was still living in Soviet Russia, Rand did not want to risk putting her family in danger with her outspoken, and often critical, works.

15. Pablo Neruda

Real Name: Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto

A young Neruda adopted his pen name around 1920 when he started writing for the literary journal “Selva Austral.” To avoid conflict with his family , who disapproved of his occupation, Neruda crafted his alias from the deceased Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda. By 1946, Neruda legally changed his name to match and embrace the poetic and politically charged identity he had created for himself over the years.

16. Maya Angelou 

Real Name: Marguerite Annie Johnson

Now a household name, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928. Married briefly to a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos, the pen name Maya Angelou was created when the writer combined her nickname (Maya) with an alternative version of her ex-husband’s last name.

17. Richard Bachman

Real Name: Stephen King

The “King of Horror” has published seven novels under the alias Richard Bachman. Apparently, King came up with the name on a whim while on the phone with his publisher; with a Richard Stark book on his desk and a Bachman–Turner Overdrive song playing in the background, Richard Bachman was born . King concealed his true identity for about five years until a bookstore clerk named Steve Brown determined that the two authors were the same person. Once the secret was out, King retired Richard Bachman, crediting his death to the “cancer of the pseudonym.”

18. bell hooks

Real Name: Gloria Jean Watkins 

One of the most prominent feminist voices of our generation, Watkins derived her pen name from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Watkins never capitalizes her pen name in order to preserve and honor the memory of her great-grandmother; a women she admired for her sharp opinions. Watkins established a reputation of a woman that “talked back” , for she was not afraid to speak up against the injustice she experienced in everyday life. She first used her pen name to publish a short book of poetry and made the grammatical decision to never capitalize the name in order to place the focus solely on her writing rather than the person behind it.

19. Lemony Snicket

Real Name: Daniel Handler 

Lemony Snicket is both the author and the narrator of Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events ; essentially, Lemony Snicket is Handler’s alter ego. During public appearances, Handler will introduce himself as Snicket’s representative explaining to the audience that the real author could not be in attendance due to some unforeseen disaster .

20. J.K. Rowling & Robert Galbrath

Real Name: Joanne Rowling 

The bestselling author of the Harry Potter series has adopted a few different pen names throughout the course of her career. Originally, publishers feared young boys would not be inclined to read her series once they saw it was published by a female author. Rowling, who has no middle name, took the “K” from her grandmother’s name, Kathleen. As a dynamic writer, Rowling ventured into writing crime fiction where she adopted the pseudonym Robert Galbraith to release new work without hype or expectation. In fact, no one had any idea Rowling was Galbraith until an investigation into forensic linguistics led by England’s Sunday Times revealed an extremely similar writing style between the author’s works.

21. E.L. James

Real Name: Erika Leonard 

The British author of the bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey series initially used the pen name “Snowqueens Icedragon” in an online Twilight fan-fiction forum where she first showcased an early version of Fifty Shades of Grey titled Master of the Universe . Once Leonard’s works started gaining popularity and she began transitioning to print, she adopted a new pen name that, in her opinion, was a little more professional. E.L. James was derived from Leonard’s family name (James) plus her first and middle initial. Ultimately, Leonard’s use of a pseudonym granted her the ability to keep her success as an erotic romance author separate from her soft-spoken, housewife reality.

Choosing a pen name is sometimes more than just a marketing strategy, and there are many ways an author decides on a pen name to embody the essence of their chosen alias. As we’ve seen as well, the majority of writers adapt them from their birth names—using abbreviations, translations from foreign languages, or variations of nicknames—to mark a personal claim on their chosen pseudonym. Regardless of why or how writers choose their noms de plume , there is no right or wrong way to go about it, for the work is bound to speak for itself.

There are several pen-name generators sprinkled about the internet that provide witty and humorous suggestions for contemporary writers. Tell us what your pen name would be!

Do you want to learn more about these authors and their other literary works? Check out  eNotes.com  to find detailed biographies of your favorite authors alongside full summaries and study guides!

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Home / Book Publishing / How to Come Up With a Pen Name in 2023 (+ a Pen Name Generator)

How to Come Up With a Pen Name in 2023 (+ a Pen Name Generator)

A pen name, or nom de plume, is a pseudonym (fake name) used by authors who don’t wish to publish work under their own name.

Authors use pen names for many reasons, whether it be for branding purposes or just for privacy. Regardless of why one chooses to use a pseudonym, figuring out how to come up with a pen name can play an important part in your book’s marketing .

• What is a pen name
• Why do authors use pen names
• Whether it's legal to use a pen name
• How to choose the best one

Let's dive into how to come up with cool pen names that will work specifically for your book .

Heads up: If you purchase something by clicking on a link in this article, I may receive a small commission. You don’t pay a penny more, but it helps me write more content like this .

Table of Contents:

• What is a Pen Name?
• Why Do Authors Use Pen Names?

Why & How to Choose Good Pen Names [Podcast]

• Pen Names of Famous Authors
• Step 1: Identify the Right Age For Your Pseudonym
• Step 2: Choose Options That Fit Your Literary Genre
• Step 3: Check Your Pen Name’s URL and Social Media Handles
• Step 4: Choose a Name That’s Easy to Spell, Pronounce, and Remember
• Step 5: Make Sure Your Pen Name Isn’t Similar or Identical to Another Author’s
• EXTRA: Choosing a Profile Picture For Your Pen Name
• The Best Pen Name Generators (Including Anagram Makers)
• How to Properly Copyright and Use a Pen Name
• How to Create a Pen Name in KDP

A pen name is a fake name used by some authors to protect or disguise their real name for a variety of purposes. This name is used on book covers , as part of copyright notices, and in marketing a book — in place of the author’s own name.

Pen names are also known as:

• Nom de plumes
• Literary double

What are pen names used for? Authors may use a pen name for many different reasons, including:

• Fear of reprisal: Authors may be afraid of some sort of retaliation against themselves or their families. This is particularly true when writing on controversial subjects. To protect themselves and their family, an author may write under a pseudonym.
• Separation of personal and professional life: Some authors have a day job and would like to keep it that way. If you don’t want to mix your side projects with your professional or even private life, a pen name can help.
• Similar name to someone famous: If my name was Steve N. King, you'd better believe I’d be choosing a pen name. Do yourself a favor starting out — have a unique enough author name to stand out online, and make sure no one confuses you with a more famous person.
• URL and/or social media handles for their name have been taken: For an author, your name is your brand — so make sure you have access to the URL and social media handles you need.
• Better marketing opportunities: Whether your name is hard to pronounce or has an overly complex spelling, simplifying it with a pen name may help you market your book(s) more effectively.
• Gender changes: Female authors throughout history have chosen male pen names for novels they didn’t believe would be as popular if readers knew they were written by a woman. This was especially common in the 19th century as women broke into literature but were still looked at as “lesser” writers. The Brontë sisters and J.K. Rowling are two famous examples. Even today, it’s perfectly acceptable to choose a pen name of a different gender than your own.
• A name doesn’t fit the genre: Hamilton Butcher probably isn’t a great name for spunky teen fiction novels about a 14-year-old girl. Penelope Thistle might not be a name befitting the author of detailed manuals on instructional design. Pen names can allow authors to choose names specifically targeted to their genre.
• Writing in multiple genres without confusing fans: To keep things clear when writing in different genres, some popular authors choose a pen name to match each genre in which they write. J.K. Rowling chose to write her Cormoran Strike crime fiction series under the alternate pen name of Robert Galbraith.
• Just for fun: I’ll let you in on a secret — we authors enjoy our creativity and fun. You don’t need a “legit” reason to pick a pen name instead of using your own name. If you want to do it, just do it!

I myself have published extensively under multiple pen names, although Dave Chesson is my real name. I started doing this because I used to work for a U.S. embassy and wished to separate the two worlds for professional reasons.

Should you write under a pen name? You should write under a pen name if you feel it’s the right choice for you. Whether it’s to choose a more memorable name, because you’re concerned about what people may think about your work, or if you think it just sounds fun, it’s up to you!

Is it Legal to Use a Pen Name?

Pen name legality is actually pretty straightforward. Yes, it is legal to publish written work under a pen name. There is nothing illegal about using a pen name, and it’s often a smart decision from a business standpoint.

Amazon and all major book publishing platforms allow authors to use pen names or their own names.

According to intellectual property attorney Matt Knight, there are several facts about using pen names that new authors should be aware of:

Authors are allowed to register copyrights for their created works under a pen name. However, this does reduce the length of time the copyright will be active. Plus, if you’re being very careful about your anonymity and choose to register a copyright without using your real name, it can be harder to prove you own the material. These are both items to discuss with your attorney before publishing.

You may acquire a trademark for a pen name. Even though your own name cannot usually be trademarked, there are certain conditions under which you can trademark your pen name. Dr. Seuss, for instance, is a trademarked pen name.

You can technically sign contracts using your pen name. It’s not done often, but it’s technically legal (according to Mr. Knight). Using your pen name won’t shield you from legal issues, though.

You shouldn’t use another author's pen name or real name. Unless you’ve negotiated with an author to take over their established pen name, choose your own pen name. (Fun fact: This type of pen name swapping is popular among writers of romance novels.)

Using a pen name doesn’t protect you from defamation lawsuits, taxes, or any other liabilities. Don’t badmouth other authors, skip paying your taxes, or breach a contract you signed, period. And don’t rely on your nom de plume to protect you from legal consequences of breaking the rules — it won’t.

Let’s take a look at some of the more well-known authors operating under pen names.

(Ready to pick your own pen name? Skip to the next section to get started!)

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There are many successful authors who write behind famous pseudonyms. Some of the most famous pen names are:

J.K. Rowling

Richard bachman.

• The Brontë sisters

George Orwell

Mary westmacott, george eliot, lewis carroll, lemony snicket.

Real Name: Joanne Rowling

Why she uses a pen name: Her publisher wanted to disguise that she was a woman so her books would appeal to boys as well as girls. She doesn't have a middle name, so she chose “K” from Kathleen, her grandmother.

Famous Works : 

• The Harry Potter series and various additional works in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (1997-2018, plus future unpublished works)
• The Casual Vacancy (2012)
• The Cormoran Strike series (by Robert Galbraith, 2013-2020)

Additional Pen Names Used: Robert Galbraith

Real Name: Theodore Seuss Geisel

Why he used a pen name: Geisel was banned as editor-in-chief from a magazine for drinking during Prohibition, so he wrote under the alias “Seuss”. He added “Dr.” for his father, who had hoped he would get his Ph.D., though he dropped out before finishing his education.

Famous Works :

• Horton Hears a Who! (1954)
• The Cat in the Hat (1957)
• Green Eggs and Ham (1960)
• The Lorax (1971)

Additional Pen Names Used: Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone

What do Harry Potter, Jack Reacher, and the Lorax have in common? Successful pen names. They work…if chosen correctly

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Real Name: Stanley Martin Lieber

Why he used a pen name: Lieber wanted to save his real name for his more serious literary work, so he used Stan Lee for the “kid stuff”. After achieving worldwide recognition for his comic books, he legally changed his name to Stan Lee.

Famous Works:

• Captain America (1941)
• Spider-Man (1962)
• The Incredible Hulk (1962)

Real Name: Stephen King

Why he used a pen name: Horror novelist Stephen King wrote as Stephen Bachman for 8 years early in his career. He says he made the decision because it was not considered “acceptable” in the publishing world at that time to release more than one book per year — but he had more to write.

After creating a rich backstory for the writer of his pseudonymous novels, King chose to stop writing as Bachman when the alias was revealed to be a nom de plume. While the name has not been used since the 1980s, critics still marvel at the unique writing styles of the Richard Bachman pen name compared to novels attributed to Stephen King.

• Rage (1977)
• Thinner (1984)

Real Name: James “Jim” D. Grant

How he chose his pen name: Grant heard an American mispronounce the car Le Car by Renault as “Lee Car”. Anything “lee” became a joke in his family. His daughter, Ruth, was “lee child.”

Famous Works : Jack Reacher thriller novel series (1997-2020)

Real Name: Samuel Clemens

How he chose his pen name: Samuel Clemens was a licensed river pilot by trade. “Mark twain” is a river term that means two fathoms (or 12 feet), when water depth for a boat is being sounded. “Mark twain” means it is safe to navigate.

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

The Brontë Sisters

Real Names: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë

Why they used pen names: The three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, feared their literary works with obviously feminine names wouldn’t attract readers. Instead, they chose the gender-neutral pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (respectively). Today, the sisters are famously known for their real names.

• Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
• Wuthering Heights (by Emily Brontë, 1847)
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (by Anne Brontë, 1848)

Real Name: Eric Blair

Why he used a pen name: Blair wanted to protect his family from the embarrassment of their time living in poverty. He chose George Orwell as a “good round English name” by which to publish his dystopian bestsellers.

Famous Works: 

• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Real Name: Agatha Christie

Why she used a pen name: Agatha Christie, already a famous author of Murder on the Orient Express (1934), used the pen name Mary Westmacott when she made the genre switch from crime and mystery to romance novels. Her Westmacott books include 6 semi-autobiographical books with a tragic and psychological take on the facets of love.

• Giant’s Bread (1930)
• The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947)

Real Name: Mary Ann Evans

Why she used a pen name: Like many female authors of the time, Evans chose a male pen name, in part, to conceal that she was a woman. However, “George Eliot” was also a cover for her unconventional lifestyle: an unmarried woman living with a married man (whose first name was also George).

Eliot is highly regarded as one of the most influential novelists of the Victorian era. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, he is credited with developing “the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction”.

• The Mill on the Floss (1860)
• Silas Marner (1861)
• Middlemarch (1871)

Real Name: Nora Roberts

Why she uses a pen name: Roberts is a New York Times bestselling author under her given name, but uses the pen name J.D. Robb for her suspenseful romance “In Death” series and science fiction police procedurals.

• Naked in Death (1995)
• Mirror, Mirror (Taken in Death) (2013)

Additional Pen Names Used: Jill March and Sarah Hardesty

Real Name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

How he chose his pen name: Dodgson, a respected mathematics lecturer at Oxford, chose the pen name Lewis Carroll for his romance and children’s works. He first translated his first and middle names to Latin (Carolus Ludovicus), then reversed the order and re-translated them to English, resulting in his chosen pseudonym.

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
• Through the Looking Glass (1871)

Real Name: Daniel Handler

Why he uses a pen name: Lemony Snicket was the made-up name Handler used to request materials for an early book project when he wanted to protect his true identity from the organization. He reused the name for his pseudonymous Unfortunate Events series.

Snicket became both author and morose narrator for the series, while Daniel appeared “on his behalf” at book events, encouraging readers not to read the works with “unhappy beginnings, middles, and ends.”

• A Series of Unfortunate Events series (1999-2006)

How to Choose a Pen Name [Step by Step]

When selecting a pen name, I would first remember the huge marketing value a pen name holds (particularly in the era of Amazon and Google search).

In my experience, and from working with many other authors, I can say that the pseudonym you use for your writing can have a large impact on your book and your platform because it:

• Can become the domain name of your website
• Stares your reader in the face on your book cover
• Can impact whether your readers easily remember you as an author or simply remember the names of your books

In essence, your pen name is your author brand . I recommend you choose a pen name that evokes the right emotions for your target audience, is easy to remember, and doesn’t resemble another author.

To choose a pen name:

• Identify the right age for your pseudonym
• Choose options that fit your literary genre
• Check the availability of your pen name’s URL and social media handles
• Choose a name that’s easy to spell, pronounce, and remember
• Make sure your pen name isn’t similar or identical to another author’s

Step 1 : Identify the Right Age For Your Pseudonym

I find the age of a writer plays a huge role in the psyche of the readers. If you are writing an instructional book targeted at middle-aged adults, it isn’t a good idea to choose a name that sounds like it belongs to a 21-year-old.

A name that sounds younger than your target readers is a fast way to kill a book project before you get started.

Pro tip: Once you know the age of your ideal reader, use BabyCenter to find the list of top baby names from your pseudonym’s birth year. Their lists of top baby names by year go all the way back to 1880 (although you’re probably not going to pretend to be a 141-year-old author).

It’s okay to pick a name a few years older than your target audience in most cases. Try to avoid sounding younger, if possible.

Let’s say, for instance, your target audience is 35-year-old females. You’d like to select the name of a woman of about 40 (born around 1981).

In many cases, people choose two first names for a full pen name. For female names, a male first name can also serve as a great last name.

Using this list from BabyCenter, we can come up with age-appropriate pen names like:

• Tiffany Michelle
• Elizabeth Daniel
• Rebecca Nicole

Step 2 : Choose Options That Fit Your Literary Genre

Names evoke emotion. The very structure and sound of a name might bring to mind anything from sci-fi adventures to erotic romance novels and anything in between.

A great real-life example of this is author Ali Knight , who changed her name to match her genre. Her real name, Alison Potter, felt too close to children’s author Beatrix Potter (of The Tales of Peter Rabbit ) and the fantastical tone of the Harry Potter series.

When Ali’s publishers requested she change her name before her first book was published, they chose a name more sensible to the thriller genre. She needed something that was risky and dangerous — like her books. Ali Knight sounds much more fitting, right?

When choosing your author pen name, consider whether or not it fits with your genre. If you aren’t sure, check the other books in your genre and category on Amazon and ask yourself:

• Are there similarities to names in this genre?
• Do the authors more often use initials or fully spelled-out names?
• Are the author names primarily male, female, or a mix?
• Do the names feel simplistic and basic, like “Christina Stone,” or fantastical, like “Lemony Snicket”?

As an author who understands your target market and your competition , you’ll more easily be able to come up with a pen name that fits the vibe and makes sense to your readers.

‘Allison Potter' vs ‘Ali Knight' for a thriller author…a perfect pen name example. What author name will jive with your readers?

Step 3 : Check Your Pen Name’s URL and Social Media Handles

To promote your book , you’ll probably want to own the internet domain and social media handles for your pen name.

You may or may not intend to brand your pen name or write more books under it. However, if your book takes off and you want to pursue it, it will help if your name’s domain is already yours. Otherwise, you will be stuck with a second-rate URL or have to pay a boatload of money to get your name’s URL.

Before picking your pen name, go to Siteground and check if the domain name is available. This one step could save you a lot of heartache in the long run.

To find if a domain is available using Siteground:

• Type the pen name you're considering into the domain search bar.
• Change the extension if you’d like to try something other than a .com. (In the last few years, as .com sites have become harder to find, there has been a surge in popularity for new extensions.)
• Click ‘Search'.

Siteground will tell you if that domain is available or give you alternative suggestions if it is already taken.

Pro tip: Domain squatters (cybersquatters) sometimes track search frequencies of URLs to snatch up domains they can turn around and sell for more. It’s a good idea to be ready to purchase your chosen domain when you sit down to search, rather than searching for it several times over a period of weeks before buying. This unfortunately happened to me a number of years ago, where I was searching through a bunch of domain ideas over a few days, came back, and the one I was planning on buying had just been taken. It's unfortunately but it happens.

Many domains are available for between $7 and $80 per year from domain providers like Siteground . If someone else owns the domain, even if they aren’t using it, it can cost upwards of $1,000 to procure.

The good news is that, if you own the copyrighted and/or trademarked rights to a specific name, you may now have legal rights to a domain someone else purchased in bad faith.

You should also acquire the social media handles for your pen name. Consider signing up for the primary social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) with your pen name as soon as you can, even if you wait until later to use the accounts.

Step 4 : Choose a Name That’s Easy to Spell, Pronounce, and Remember

Try to choose a pen name that uses a simple and/or familiar spelling, is not difficult to pronounce, and is likely to be remembered.

This isn’t a shot at all those difficult names out there, but understand that someone is more likely to remember you if your name is something that sticks out and is not too hard to spell.

Just imagine your fan struggling to remember your pen name. “Oh, what was it?” they say, scratching their head.

Or, worse, it's a name they can’t even begin to spell. How will they ever search and find you on Google or Amazon?

A few rules of thumb for choosing an easy-to-understand pen name:

• If you’re picking a common name, such as Ashley, be very careful about going with an alternate spelling, like Ashleigh, just because you think it looks nice.
• Say the pen name out loud. Now, ask 5 of your friends to say it out loud. Did they all pronounce it the same way? Did any of them stumble over the pronunciation?
• Try not to pick a name so common that it’s forgettable. Ashley Nicole is a pleasant-sounding name, but it’s so common among millennial women that it might be easily forgotten.
• Consider using alliteration , initials, or making up a creative name (if it fits with your genre). After all, no one has ever forgotten the name Lemony Snicket after hearing it once — it’s even easy to spell!

Step 5 : Make Sure Your Pen Name Isn’t Similar or Identical to Another Author’s

Beware of choosing a pseudonym that's similar to a famous author, person, or character. Leeching off someone else's fame is not a good tactic. More than likely, you:

• Won’t get your author name URL,
• Might get into hot water with the famous person, and/or
• It will be nearly impossible to rank on Amazon or Google for your name

People who search for you will have to go through pages and pages about the famous person before they can even find your work or website. Having a name that's close to someone else who is more popular than you can be a real killer.

You can also search the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) for any existing trademarks using the name you want to use. Using someone else’s registered trademark will earn you a fast cease-and-desist letter.

Before you choose a pen name, do a Google search and look through the results. When I do this for “Dave Chesson,” it turns out there is a famous skateboarder in the UK who has the same name. Luckily, he isn’t uber-famous — or else we would be in major competition for Google space.

We’re safe on Amazon since he hasn't written a book . Hopefully, he doesn't get mad at me for overtaking the “Dave Chesson” search… sorry, bro!

You should also say the name out loud to make sure it doesn’t sound like another famous author’s (or another famous person’s) name. Mark T. Wayne may not belong to another author, but it sounds a whole lot like “Mark Twain”.

Choosing a profile picture for your pen name can be tricky. You might not want to use your own picture or else that defeats the point of choosing a pen name. Furthermore, you don't want to just grab someone else's image and use because that could be illegal.

Some authors will just purchase a stock image of someone using DepositPhotos or ShutterStock . However, it's usually obvious that an image is a stock photo image of someone and is usually a clear sign of being a fake.

So, how do we create a unique, authentic pen name image for our author that doesn't look fake or is illegal? By using A.I. generate image at Generated.photos/faces

Using this, you can select:

• Hair and eye color

Now, while they offer a free version, those free versions can't be used commercially and you must provide a link to them for using it. Therefore, the free version isn't the right choice. Instead, you'll need to pay their $20 month subscription (I'd recommend only using once and then cancelling). This way, you can use it on your Amazon author page, website, social media, etc. and have no problem.

Still not set on a good pen name? Try a pseudonym generator or anagram name maker below to create cool pen names.

Our Pen Name Generator

Before we list out all the other great generators out there, I want to call your attention to our own pen name generator, which lets you choose a pen name based on a series of possible genres. It's a fun little exersize to get your creative juices flowing.

Plus, we've specifically put together names that work for each genre, so you know they will feel appropriate for that genre.

Other Pen Name Generators

A pen name generator is a piece of software that randomly goes through a database and finds legitimate-sounding names. If you used the steps above, you likely have a first name in mind.

However, it can be difficult to figure out an interesting last name that doesn't scream “I'm a fake”. This is where a pen name generator can come into play.

One that I like is the Fake Name Generator . This pseudonym generator is above and beyond any other. Not only will it generate legitimate names, but it will also create a real address, phone number, occupation, and even a fake credit card number so you can give your new persona supporting context and a backstory, if you like.

The Fake Name Generator is one of the only pen name generators that lets you specify gender and culture. How about them apples?!

If you want to try more alias name generators, choose from the list below one that best fits your genre and needs:

Reedsy’s Pen Name Generator — Pick a first letter, gender (or neutral), and spoken language to find a fun author pen name.

Masterpiece Pen Name Generator – Get a list of pen name ideas after adding details and fun words from a few prompts. Masterpiece will give you multiple options by literary genre based on your answers. You can even choose zombie, vampire, or wizard names.

Fantasy Name Generator –  This massive name generator has hundreds of types of fake names to choose from, whether you need a Victorian-era name or want to sound like one of the Marvel Eternals. Hover over the name types on the top menu, select a name generator, and then generate 10 random male or female names at one time.

Evil Name Generator – This creative tool gives random creepy names for all your evil naming needs. (This one is also great for coming up with fantasy or sci-fi character names, including for monsters and beasts.)

Finally, some writers like pen names that use the letters of a word, sentence, phrase, or name to create a pen name with hidden meaning. An anagram maker makes this super easy.

I like this pen name generator anagram tool because it lets you customize more and gave better results than the other anagram makers I tried. The results were actually really cool. The letters from David Chesson can be turned into:

• Edison Chad
• Issac Devon
• Denis Vasco

A similar tool, Igne's Anagram Generator , used the letters from “Jonathan Blackwood” to generate names like:

• Janna Woodblock
• Honda Bowjack
• Jakob Landon
• Landon Jackboot
• Jacob Landown
• Dalton Johan
• Kahn Tojo Waldon
• Joanna Wonk
• Johan Walton

Whether you call it a pen name generator, an alias generator, a fake name generator, a pseudonym generator, or an anagram maker, these tools can help you come up with a pen name that makes both you and your readers happy.

Get Your Book Discovered

Look over my shoulder as I show you how to select the best keywords and categories so you’ll make more sales.

Choosing a great pen name to use for your books, poems, or short stories is the hardest part of this process (I promise!).

To properly choose, copyright, and use a pen name:

• Do all of your research using the 5 steps above, ensuring that you’re not choosing another well-known person’s name. (Just a note: While it’s okay to choose a pen name of a different gender, it’s not as acceptable to choose a name specific to a different ethnicity than your own. There’s no point in unnecessarily offending potential readers.)
• Purchase URLs and secure social media handles for your pen name.
• Legally set up a business using your pen name , especially if you plan to open bank accounts or other accounts using your pen name. Most authors choose sole proprietorship or LLCs, but you should discuss this with your financial advisor and attorney before proceeding to make sure you’re doing what’s best in your specific situation.
• Apply for a Fictitious Business Name Statement (FBN Statement) if you plan to receive payments under your pen name. This is a type of DBA (doing business as) statement. Some places in the US require you to have a qualifying word, like “books” or “publications” after your name when setting up an FBN Statement. These registration websites differ by state. (Amazon will make payments to the account owner name of your KDP account, so if you’re only selling on Amazon, this may not be necessary.)
• Inform your agent and publisher of your real name for contracts and tax purposes, if possible. (There are a few exceptions to this rule — you can sign contracts with a pen name — but using your real name for official purposes makes things easier in most cases.)
• Use your pen name on your book cover and copyright notice (like this: © 2017 [your pen name]).
• Register the copyright for your work under your real name and/or your pen name. There are drawbacks to using only your pseudonym. In particular, it’s harder to prove your ownership of the work with a pen name only — plus, it reduces the amount of time your copyright will be in effect. Attorney Helen Sedwick says , “I recommend that authors register their pseudonymous works under both their real names and pen names. This creates a permanent record of ownership, and few readers are going to research copyright records and find out the author’s real name.”

Can You Trademark a Pen Name?

While it's uncommon for pen names to be trademarked, it is actually possible, unlike real names which cannot.

Authors, therefore, have to be careful when selecting a pen name to look up trademarks to make sure that pen name is not already protected by law. You can search through your local government's trademark listing to ensure it's safe. Here are the links for the US, UK, and Canada:

• US Trademark Search
• UK Trademark Search
• Canada Trademark Search

How Do You Trademark a Pen Name?

If you'd like to trademark your own pen name, you will need to prove that the name has “secondary meaning”, which means that it is part of a unique brand used specifically in marketing and business. It helps if the name is recognizable.

For example: J. K. Rowling is a trademarked name owned by Joanne Rowling. While you definitely don't need to be as popular as her, you should have an established brand before you register a trademark.

Also note that while you can't copyright/trademark your real name, people can sue for identity theft. For example, if I decided my pen name was Stephen King, you can bet that I would hear from his lawyers about it, even though Stephen King cannot trademark his own name.

Once you finally choose a pen name, make sure you have it set up correctly in KDP.

To set up your pen name in Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for Amazon book sales:

• Go to the KDP website .
• Select a book already uploaded to your account or start the process of adding a new book.
• Enter your chosen pen name in the author First and Last Name fields.
• Press “Save and Continue” and finish publishing your book to KDP.

Because you entered the name within your KDP author account, which is under your legal name, Amazon knows you’re the true owner of your book. There should be no legal concerns of someone with the same name claiming authorship or any other legal standing for your book with Amazon.

Amazon will make payments to the name listed on your KDP account, not your pen name.

You will also be taxed via your KDP account with your legal name. If your KDP is used to publish books by multiple authors, you will be responsible for ensuring they cover the taxes for their books — and that you pay them what they’re owed for their book sales. Pen names won’t help get you out of your dues to Uncle Sam.

Watch the video below to see how to set up a pen name in your Amazon author account .

Want more videos like this? Subscribe to my YouTube channel!

So, What’s Your Pen Name?

As you can see, there are many steps that go into choosing a pseudonym.

A pen name shouldn’t be something you carelessly decide because it can be an important part of marketing your book. Pen names can be your brand and your identity — and once you've established that brand, it can be costly to erase and restart.

Choose wisely using the tactics and criteria listed above.

Did the pen name generators give you any perfect or terrible pseudonyms? What about our pen name generator ? Let me know your results in the comments below.

Dave Chesson

When I’m not sipping tea with princesses or lightsaber dueling with little Jedi, I’m a book marketing nut. Having consulted multiple publishing companies and NYT best-selling authors, I created Kindlepreneur to help authors sell more books. I’ve even been called “The Kindlepreneur” by Amazon publicly, and I’m here to help you with your author journey.

• Why & How to Choose Good Pen Names [Podcast]

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183 thoughts on “ How to Come Up With a Pen Name in 2023 (+ a Pen Name Generator) ”

I noticed that in your children’s picture books (The two I checked anyway) that you use a pen name. I won’t stomp my foot and demand to know if you did it to keep a separation between the genres you write, or if you didn’t think “Dave Chesson” would sell a children’s picture book, but..wait a second..that’s exactly what I want to do! haha

Most importantly the second one. With everything else equal, will a children’s picture book sell better with a female pen name, over my real name?

I chose a pen name for two slightly different reasons. As a child, I always disliked my surname, and I knew my husband I were heading for divorce, so didn’t want to use my married name, although I have kept it for our children’s sake. Joy Monette seemed to fit well with women’s fiction and romance, so there we go.

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1,000+ Clever Author Names

So, you've come up with the perfect author idea, but in order to launch, you need a good business name.

And not just a name , but a creative and descriptive name that will make your author stand out.

The name of your business will forever play a role in:

• Your customers first impression
• Your businesses identity
• The power behind the type of customer your brand attracts
• If you're memorable or not

We've put together a list of the best author ideas, provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to name your business and give real-world examples of how other founders came up with the name of their business.

Additionally, we provide you with a free business name generator with an instant domain availability check to help you find a custom name for your author.

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Author Name Generator

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Learn more about starting an author :

Where to start?

-> Author plan -> How to finance an author? -> How much does it cost to start an author? -> Pros and cons of an author -> How to get clients for an author?

Need inspiration?

-> Other author success stories -> Examples of established author -> Marketing ideas for an author -> Author slogans -> Author Instagram bios -> Author Instagram captions

Other resources

-> Profitability of an author -> Author tips

Funny Author Names

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Guide: How To Name Your Business

Why is your business name important.

Your business name is one of the single most important pieces to starting a business.

Because your business name has power.

It reflects your reputation, your mission, values, and represents what people (and customers) are searching for.

It impacts the way in which people remember, refer you, and perceive your business

When choosing your business name, there's a lot to think about in order to get it right - so it's important not to rush this process.

Let's take a look at everything you need to consider before deciding on a business name:

Tips To Consider When Naming Your Author:

Simple is always better

This means a few different things. Your author name should always be:

• Easy to spell
• Easy to pronounce
• Easy to remember

Consider avoiding long names as much as possible, as this will only lead your customers forgetting your name and feeling frustrated.

To test this point, try to think of any well-known reputable brand off the top of your head.

The first that come to mind for me are Alexa, Google, Nike, Apple - each unique in their own way (hence, easy to remember) , less than six characters and easy to spell.

Your Business Name Should Define What You Do

The name of your business should reflect a defining characteristic of what you do.

Before your customer goes to your website or speaks to you, the name of your business should spark some initial thoughts in their brain as to what you're all about.

For example, marketingexamples.com describes exactly what their company is about: providing great examples of marketing tactics.

Consider SEO When Naming Your Business

Bottom line: If you don't show up in google, you're going to make it that much more challenging for customers to find you.

There are several different aspects to think about when it comes to SEO & naming your author:

• Try not to pick a business name that's crowded with other businesses
• Consider naming your business based on highly searched keywords
• Make sure the name of your business matches search intent and what people are looking for

Think about the emotions you want to evoke

Your business name has the power to evoke certain emotions and thoughts from your customer.

It has the ability to evoke a positive or a negative feeling. An inclusive or an exclusive feeling. A fearful or a loving feeling.

It's not to say that any of these feelings are wrong, but it's important to ensure that they are in line with your values and mission.

For example, the brand Death's Door makes me feel a bit risky and uncertain - but that's the point. They're selling Gin.

Try Not To Pick Something Too Limiting

Your business name should be fitting for the future and growth of your business , that way you don't have to confront a re-brand down the road.

If you choose something too narrow, it may be challenging to diversify your product and revenue streams down the road.

Here are some tips to avoid making this mistake:

• Try not to name the business after a particular geographical area (this makes it hard to grow in other areas)
• Try not to name the business after only one product you sell
• Try not to name something based on a current trend

Brainstorming Names For Your Business

If you're in the brainstorming phase and trying to come up with a business name, there are a few key things to think about in order to get the juices flowing:

• Write out a list of words that reflect your brand, personality, team etc. These should be the first things that come to your mind and you shouldn't have to think too hard about it.
• Look at competition in the space and see if there's a common theme. Write down some key words or phrases that resonate with you and add them to the list.
• Think about the emotion you want to evoke with your business name
• Ask yourself: If I had to describe my business in one word, what would it be?

From there, you can create a shortlist based on the words that resonate best with you and follow the naming guidelines above.

Tips on naming your business

In addition to the requirements from the State, there are some general naming guidelines that may help you down the road as well.

We've put together a full guide here for naming your business here but will also cover the most critical pieces below:

Is your URL available? Social media handles?

You can check for domain availability here:

Find a domain starting at $0.88

powered by Namecheap

As soon as you resonate with a name (or names), secure the domain and social media handles as soon as possible to ensure they don't get taken.

Other general naming tips

• Consider SEO when naming your business
• Consider naming your business something that reflects what you do and/or who you are
• Keep it simple! Easy to spell, easy to pronounce and easy to remember
• Try not to pick something too limiting that could impact your businesses growth in the future!

Check out our full naming guide here .

Here is a video covering all factors to consider when naming your LLC :

Examples of Great Business Names

When choosing a business name, it's critical that you look at other examples of businesses not only in your space, but business names in other industries that have done particularly well.

Here are a few examples of great business names (+ how some of these businesses came up with their name):

Competitor Analysis Example

One great way to name your business is by looking at the competition and getting inspiration.

Gia Paddock, founder of Boutique Rye analyzed other businesses in the space and added her own personal spin to her business name:

A popular national brick & mortar women’s boutique that many may have heard of is called Francesca’s… How original, right? So we came up with Boutique Rye named after our son, Riley. We put "boutique" in front to be a little different.

The name "Boutique Rye" checks the boxes for naming a business:

• Short and simple
• Easy to spell and easy to remember
• Clearly defines what the company does
• Optimized for SEO (people searching for boutiques)
• Unique and personal touch - tells a story.

Ask Other People

Sometimes, coming up with a name is as easy as asking other people, whether that be friends, family, people at a coffee shop, or in Spyq Sklar case, his own customer!

How we came up with the name Cat Sushi :

So, we put together a quick business plan and set aside some money that we were willing to risk. One of our loyal customers actually came up with the name. We still give them free cat food.

Read the full story ➡️ here

The name "Cat Sushi" checks all the boxes for naming a business:

• Memorable and funny
• Obvious that they sell treats for cats
• Fun & unique story - their customer literally came up with the name of their business!

The Amazon Example

Formerly called "Cadabra", Jeff Bezos decided that the name was too obscure, hard to spell, and easy to misinterpret.

The name Amazon came from a simple dictionary search .

Jeff Bezos wanted something that started with an A, looked through a dictionary and came up with the word Amazon.

When he told his team, he didn't care for anyone else's input. He was set on it.

Here's how the word "Amazon" checks all the boxes (aside from being worth a trillion dollars):

• Represents the largest river in the world, making it very memorable
• The story and meaning of the word matches the vision of the company: To be the larger and better than any other business!
• The name allows for future growth opportunity - they didn't name something specific to just "books," even though at the time, that's what it was.
• Easy to spell, pronounce and recommend!
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• 7 Simple Tips for Writing a Compelling Grad School Resume

So, you’re preparing to apply to graduate school. There’s lots to do, like ordering transcripts, taking any necessary exams, writing a statement of purpose and asking for letters of recommendation.

But there’s one more item you shouldn’t overlook: writing your graduate school resume.

Wait … what?

Yes, you generally need to submit a resume with your grad school application. A grad school resume is similar to a standard professional resume, but it has a specific focus: how your previous education and experience have prepared you to undertake advanced study. And like a professional resume, it should tell a compelling story about you.

How do you go about writing a standout grad school resume? We asked two admissions experts from the University of Washington for their top tips. Here’s what they shared.

1. Put Your Education First

Resume Template

How should you organize your grad school resume? Check out this template for one layout example.

Because the specific objective of this document is to get admitted to graduate school, you should list your education on the first page. This section should prominently include details like:

• Undergraduate degree and major (including the school you graduated from)
• Your undergraduate GPA
• Other degrees or certificates you’ve earned

You can also include academic awards and roles with campus organizations here. Or, if you have enough of these, they might warrant their own section (see Tips 3 and 4).

It’s also valuable to include info about courses you’ve taken that are related to the degree program you’re applying for. (Here’s an example of a place where you might tailor your resume to fit the exact program you’re applying to.)

“The resume is a great place to showcase courses that meet prerequisites for the program,” says Crystal Galván, a graduate adviser in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell. “Even though you’ll also submit your academic transcripts, you can use the education section of your resume to highlight particularly relevant courses.”

2. Show all your work

The admissions committee wants to see the evolution of your career and get a full sense of who you are, so go ahead and include your entire professional work history — even if it stretches the document to two or three pages.

“More is better on the grad school resume,” says Randell Hernandez, director of admissions for the Executive Master of Business Administration at the UW Foster School of Business. “In the Executive MBA program, for example, we’re looking to understand the totality of an applicant’s experience — to get a sense of your career growth and the impact you’ve had in different roles.”

For someone applying to an MBA program, for example, that means including specific details about leadership or management responsibilities in each role. It also means quantifying the impact you had (e.g., “Led department to 20% increase in sales year-over-year”). If you’re applying to law school, you’ll want to emphasize any experience that relates to the legal field. And so on.

3. Don’t Forget Research Projects and/or Fieldwork

Any research experience — including any capstone or research projects you are or were involved in — is important to include [on your resume]. — Crystal Galván, graduate adviser, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell

“Any research experience — including any capstone or research projects you are or were involved in — is important to include,” according to Galván. “This demonstrates your engagement with academia, and that you’re up-to-date with research in the field. If you’ve hosted community workshops or presented at any academic conferences, be sure to include those as well.”

Did you win any academic awards? Be sure to include those, either in the Education section (noted above), in this section or in a separate section (if you have more than one).

Your research experience can be listed in its own section on your resume. This allows it to stand out and makes it easier for admissions readers to find.

4. Unpaid work counts too

Remember that a prospective graduate program will value all your experience, not just what you were paid for. Internships and volunteer roles (both on and off campus) help illustrate what you're passionate about and how you took the initiative to make a difference in your profession or community.

“We appreciate leadership experience in all areas, including professional associations, civic groups, etc.,” Hernandez says. “Recruiting and motivating a group of volunteers requires next-level abilities that can directly apply to an MBA student’s ‘day job.’ And these commitments also offer a window into a candidate’s humanity.”

This content can be placed in its own section (possible header: “Leadership and Extracurricular Activities”). It should be located below your professional experience.

5. Write clearly and proofread carefully

Nothing spoils a first impression like typos and grammatical errors in a resume. If this isn’t your strong suit, have a friend who’s good with words read it over for you. Many times, fresh eyes can catch things that you miss.

Also, it’s possible that you use a lot of cool abbreviations and insider terms in your field. Those should be left out of (or spelled out on) your grad-school resume.

“I see a lot of acronyms in applications, especially from people coming from the tech field or the military,” Hernandez says. “Remember that you’re giving this to an admissions reader who may know little or nothing about your particular job function or industry. It’s important to use terminology that people outside your field would understand.”

6. Link to your LinkedIn

The world often judges us by our online presence, and grad school reviewers are no different.

“It’s natural to want to Google someone, so it’s a good idea to include a LinkedIn profile link on your resume,” Galván says. “LinkedIn is a great way for applicants to illustrate their expertise, professional experience, skills and education — beyond the resume.”

7. Don’t be afraid to ask questions

When in doubt, reach out! The advisers and other staff at the graduate schools you’re interested in are there to answer your questions about the application process.

“People do themselves a disservice sometimes by not seeking guidance from the graduate program about what their resume should include,” Hernandez says. “Most of our MBA programs at the Foster School offer application workshops, which include detailed guidance about resumes. We also supply that content on our website .”

Check out our other articles about graduate school , including tips for writing a statement of purpose , asking for letters of recommendation and going back to school as a working professional .

• Graduate School

For more career tips and industry trends,  visit the News & Features section  of our website, and subscribe to our email list. To learn more about UW Professional & Continuing Education certificates, specializations, degrees and courses,  explore your options  or contact us .

David Hirning

David Hirning is an accomplished writer and editor with extensive experience in both tech and higher education. He began his career in journalism, then spent over a decade as an editor at Microsoft, where he worked on Encarta Encyclopedia and related reference products.

David worked for six years as a full-time writer and content manager at UW Professional & Continuing Education. He also operated his own editorial consulting business, with stints at leading companies like Amazon and Expedia, and taught English for two years in Costa Rica.

David has served as an instructor for the UW Certificate in Editing program and as a teaching assistant for the UW Certificate in Storytelling & Content Strategy. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University and a Certificate in Literary Fiction from the UW.

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Pen Name Generator

Choose from over a million pen names.

Kickstart your writing career with this pen name generator that boasts over 1 million fake names. Search through the pseudonyms using filters such as language, gender, or first letter until you find the right nom de plume for you.

Ebner Holland Debut Bestselling Author

Why do authors use pen names.

Even further back than modern literature, authors have adopted pen names. Back in the day, they were a necessity for some trying to make it in the publishing industry. Women, for instance, often had to conceal their identities by adopting a masculine “nom de plume” in order to even be considered for publication — and this trend has not entirely disappeared with times gone by. As recently as the 1990s, Joanne Rowling was urged by publishers to publish the Harry Potter series under the name JK Rowling (the “K’ was fabricated, Rowling does not actually have a middle name) out of concern that young boys — a large demographic of the books’ target market — would not be inclined to read something written by a woman.

While it’s less common for authors to publish under pseudonyms, it’s still often done for marketability purposes — and sometimes simply for the author’s own comfort in anonymity. Finally, authors will often adopt a pseudonym in order to write in various genres without confusing their fans.

How to pick a pen name

If you’ve created a shortlist of your favorite names from our fake name generator but are struggling to figure out what the perfect nom de plume for your publishing career is, here are a few tips that will help you:

Consider your genre. For instance, readers might be more likely to pick up a crime novel by “Ali Knight” than by “Allison Potter” because the former simply fits in more with the expectations of a crime novelist.

Consider the demographic of your target readers. How old is your intended reader? Are they from a particular region? For instance, when author Judith Reumlet published the first book of her YA urban fantasy series, The Mortal Instruments , she knew her name might not resonate with young readers because it sounds a bit “dated.” So she decided to publish under the pen name Cassandra Clare.

Consider whether your pseudonym rings any bells. In other words, maybe don’t go with the name “Steve N. King.”

Consider the availability of your name for social media and website purposes. Creating an author website and social media profiles is a key part of book marketing. So before you decide on a pseudonym, you might want to check the availability of your name.

Examples of famous pen names

Theodore Seuss Geisel — AKA Dr. Seuss

Reason: After being fired from a magazine for drinking during the Prohibition, Geisel decided to adopt the pseudonym “Seuss.” He added the “Dr.” as a poke at his father who’d always encouraged his son to get a PhD.

Famous works: The Cat In The Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Mary Ann Evans — AKA George Eliot

Reason: So that her publications would be taken seriously.

Famous works: Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — AKA Lewis Carroll

Reason: To maintain privacy by separating his public and private lives.

Famous works: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, The Hunting of the Snark

Eric Blair — AKA George Orwell

Reason: According to the biography, Orwell: The Life, Blair chose his name “...because it's a good round English name." Others have speculated he chose a pseudonym in order to avoid embarrassing his family while he lived as a poor writer.

Famous works: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia

Agatha Christie — AKA Mary Westmacott

Reason: Christie had already achieved notoriety for her mystery novels. So she adopted the name Mary Westmacott to publish romance novels without confusing her existing fans.

Famous works: Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile

Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — AKA Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë

Reason: In order to avoid the prejudice critics displayed towards women writers in 19th century England.

Famous works: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Stephen King — AKA Richard Bachman

Reason: King explains that “back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept.” So he adopted Richard Bachman to be able to publish several novels a year without judgment — until, of course, “Richard Bachman” was uncovered .

Famous works: It, The Stand, The Shining

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How to watch the golden globe nominations, ‘grey’s anatomy’, ‘the diplomat’, ‘tiny beautiful things’ among winners at sentinel awards.

By Erik Pedersen

Erik Pedersen

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Norman Lear Remembered: Jennifer Aniston, Fran Drescher & Barbra Streisand Join In Praise Of An Icon Who Inspired

Attendees heard a statement from Lyn Lear read at the start of the show by Marty Kaplan, founding director of the Norman Lear Center.

“I would have been there tonight if not for the passing of our beloved Norman,” she wrote. “He was so proud of the work of The Lear Center and Hollywood Health and Society. And he would not have wanted all of us to mourn. He would want us to celebrate the important shows you are honoring tonight, and most of all… he would want us to laugh.”

Wilmore joked, “Well you got to say this about Norman – the man knew how to make an exit. He knew his audience. And wanted us to make sure we were all listening.”

He continued, “A giant has left us and we’re going to do him proud. This evening meant a lot to Norman, because he believed television can reflect our best. That’s why the Sentinel Awards were created – to honor television’s best and brightest writing.”

Here are the winners of the 2023 Sentinel Awards: 

Depiction of Abortion Julie Wong, Grey’s Anatomy (ABC), “When I Get to the Border” 

Depiction of A.I. Tara Hernandez & Damon Lindelof, Mrs. Davis (Peacock), “The Final Intercut: So I’m Your Horse”  

Depiction of Breast Cancer Brent Fletcher & Todd Helbing, Superman & Lois (The CW), four-episode storyline  

Depiction of Disabilities Matt Fleckenstein, Zach Anner, and Gillian Grassie, Best Foot Forward (Apple TV+), “Halloween” 

Depiction of Climate Change Scott Z. Burns, Extrapolations (Apple TV+), ‘2046: Whale Fall”

Depiction of Economic Disparities Chris Estrada, Matt Ingebretson, Pat Bishop, Jake Weisman, This Fool (Hulu), “Los Botes”

Depiction of End of Life Liz Tigelaar, Tiny Beautiful Things  (Hulu), “The Nose”

Depiction of Maternal Health Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX on Hulu), “Me-Time”

Depiction of Mental Health Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt (AMC+)  “Episode 6”, BBC 

Depiction of Systemic Racism Zoanne Clack and  Zaiver Sinnett, Station 19 (ABC), “We Build Then We Break”  

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530 Professional and Cool Blog Names For Writers

If you’re a writer looking to start your own blog, one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is choosing a name for it.

Your blog name will serve as your brand identity on the internet and can have a significant impact on its success.

A good blog name should be memorable, easy to spell and pronounce, and reflective of the content that you publish.

Blog names for writers are not just random words but instead are carefully crafted to reflect a writer’s style, niche, audience and goals.

Finding the perfect name for your blog can be challenging as it needs to stand out from thousands of other blogs in the same genre.

In this article, we will explore some tips on how to choose a compelling name for your writer’s blog that will help you build an engaged audience and grow your online presence.

Sections At a Glance

Blog Names f or Writers

Serene Scribbles

Pen and Poetry

The Literary Lounge

Writer’s Empyrean

The Pen’s Path

Plotting Panache

Enchanted Escapes

Noble Narratives

Poetic Passageways

Inspirational Ink

Narrative Novelties

The Writer’s Vision

Writer’s Opulence

Pen Possibilities

Enigmatic Epics

Wordplay Wonders

Prose Perspectives

Eloquent Escapades

Sovereign Sagas

Writing Wavelength

Pen & Paper

Prose Palooza

Expressive Excursions

Writer’s Toolbox

Prose Playground

Literary Lane

Regal Reflections

Dreamweaver’s Delight

The Ink Spot

Fiction Foundations

Majestic Chronicles

The Creative Corner

Quill & Quest

Fiction Flow

Whispers of Wisdom

Legendary Linesmith

Quill and Verse

Writer’s Abode

Majestic Masterpieces

Writer’s Compass

Writer’s Reflections

Writer’s Wisdom

Majestic Musing

Crafted Chronicles

Expressive Escapades

Literary Haven

Literary Lore

Penmanship Perks

The Writing Well

The Ink’s Refuge

Storyteller’s Oasis

Royal Rhymes

Literary Legendry

Plot Points

Prose Puzzle

Illustrious Inkpot

Literary Limitless

Storyteller’s Studio

Pen Prodigy

Writer’s Whisper

Sovereign Sonnets

The Pen’s Monarchy

Scribbler’s Sanctuary

Literary Latitudes

Plot Ponderings

Writer’s Treasury

Ethereal Expressions

Narrative Nirvana

Inkwell Illuminati

Written Wonders

Literary Treasures

Inscribe Ideas

Quirky Quills

Inked Interludes

The Creative Cradle

Scribble Chronicles

Plotting and Prose

The Ink Pot

Best Blog Names f or Writers

Writer’s Arcadia

Majestic Memories

Poetic Prism

Mystical Manuscripts

Celestial Cadence

Metaphorical Musings

The Bookworm’s Lair

Wordsmith Wonders

Majestic Monologues

Narrative Nuggets

Poetic Paradiso

Wordsmith’s Oasis

Majestic Memory

Grandiose Grammarian

Pen and Parchment

Mythical Musings

Storytelling Strokes

Prose Passages

Imaginative Impulses

Majestic Metaphysics

Plot Pilots

Majestic Inkblots

Tales Untold

Majestic Sagas

Write On Point

Quill and Keyboard

The Story Vault

Prose Prodigy

Quill Questers

Literary Lenses

Prophetic Prose

Word Weavings

Prose Palaces

The Scribbler’s Corner

Regal Rhapsodies

Majestic Memoirs

Poetic Potency

The Writer’s Den

Writer’s Hideaway

Scribble Space

Whimsical Wordplay

Whimsical Words

The Pen’s Repertoire

Writer’s Elysium

Inked Majesty

Literary Escapades

Crafted Characters

Inked Epiphanies

Prose Pantheon

Writer’s Quill

Prose Paradise

Prose Enchantment

Literary Mirrors

Sovereign Scribe

Stately Scripts

Artful Alphabets

Scribbler’s Chronicles

Quill Quest

Majestic Manuscription

Literary Legacy

Inked Legacy

Inked Illumination

Inked Whispers

Enchanted Pages

Word Wizardry

Writing Rituals

Enigmatic Enchantments

Plotline Ponderings

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Good Blog Names f or Writers

Pen to Page

Wandering Wordsmith

Dreamweaver’s Domain

Poetic Proclamations

Expressive Expanse

Tales in Transit

Whispers of Words

Majestic Visions

The Inked Insight

Word Weaver

Writer’s Tapestry

Majestic Inkspiration

Enchanting Echoes

Wordcraft Quest

Writer’s Canvas

Parchment Pages

Regal Rhymester

Poetic Paradigm

The Ink’s Embrace

Enigmatic Euphony

Boldly Blogging

Pen’s Embrace

Pen and Prodigy

Regal Writing

Plotting Perceptions

Pen Pathways

The Pen’s Might

Poet’s Paradise

Pen and Purpose

Story Scribes

Illustrious Ink

Word Wanderlust

The Pen’s Kingdom

Plotting Perfection

Language Legends

Poetic Pathways

Timeless Tapestries

Majestic Mythology

Literary Symphony

Writer’s Expedition

Royal Reflections

Narrative Navigation

Noble Narrator

Fiction Finds

Ink and Insights

Plotting Paradigms

Luminous Lore

Word Workshop

Writer’s Odyssey

Majestic Poetics

Muse Memoirs

Writer’s Digest

Poetic Parables

Scribbler’s Sanctuary

Verse Vignettes

Plot Perspectives

Write Minded

Majestic Manuscribe

Author Avenue

Tales Unveiled

Sovereign Stories

Inkwell Majesty

Prose Panorama

Narrative Nook

Legendary Literature

Ethereal Epiphany

Novel Notions

Storyteller’s Haven

The Art of Writing

Writing Waves

Witty Wordsmiths

Poetic Portraits

Plotter’s Paradise

Writer’s Reflection

Literary Life

The Writer’s Refuge

Majestic Moments

Creative Chronicles

The Pen’s Serenade

Character Carvings

Creative Blog Names f or Writers

Literary Labyrinth

Prose and Poetry

The Pen’s Oasis

Prose Prism

Writer’s Retreat

Plot Pursuits

Wordcraft Majesty

The Pen’s Reverie

Majestic Manuscripts

Inked Impressions

The Creative Cadence

The Pen’s Enthrallment

Prose Citadel

Celestial Sonnets

Muse’s Manifesto

The Writer’s Voice

Literary Lair

Enchanted Elocution

Enchanted Epistles

Inked Insights

Pen and Papyrus

Prose Parables

Fiction Fuel

Mystical Musings

Writer’s Enthrallment

Whimsical Writings

Regal Revelations

Epic Inkwell

Prose Parnassus

Writer’s Reverence

The Pen’s Citadel

Majestic Memoir

Writer’s Voyage

Writer’s Sanctum

Writer’s Notebook

Majestic Metaphors

Lyrical Legends

Prose Profound

Inkwell Infusions

Muse’s Mosaic

The Writer’s Hearth

Literary Latitude

Crafty Characters

Pensive Pages

Prose Potpourri

Writer’s Eden

Writer’s Journey

Literary Musings

The Pen’s Allegory

Inkwell Imaginations

Page Turner

The Writer’s Terrace

Legendary Language

Inklings of Inspiration

Writer’s Haven

Language Labyrinth

The Pen’s Whimsy

Ethereal Epics

Muse’s Melody

Dreamer’s Domain

Wordsmith’s Refuge

Poetic Perceptions

Royal Rhetoric

Prose Paradiso

Celestial Chronicles

Literary Junction

Fiction Fragments

Inked Reveries

Inked Imagination

Writefully Inspired

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What are some cool blog names f or writers ?

Inkwell Impressions

Royal Ruminations

Imaginary Escapades

Quill Quips

Legendary Lexicon

Mythical Masterpieces

Epic Euphony

Mystic Metaphors

Melodic Memoirs

Majestic Melodies

Pen and Plot

Fiction Fusions

Inked Illuminations

Writer’s Cache

Crafty Creations

The Ink’s Haven

Writer’s Muse

Regal Resonance

The Pen’s Journey

Enchanted Epics

Inked Enigma

Mystic Inkblots

Enchanted Euphony

Mystical Melodies

The Scribbled Scroll

The Word Weaver

The Pen’s Palette

Writer’s Wonder

Plotting Adventures

Word Whispers

Crafty Compositions

Literary Luminary

Wordplay Vortex

Ethereal Express

The Pen is Mighty

Plot Twist Central

Noble Penmanship

Poetic Tapestry

Writer’s Whispers

Fiction Finesse

Mystic Musings

Majestic Quill

Poetic Pinnacle

Inkwell Illumination

Poetic Ponderings

The Pen’s Enclave

Majestic Museology

Prose Pathfinders

Writer’s Dreamland

Prose Playgrounds

Majestic Imaginations

The Written Word

The Muse’s Diary

Euphoric Epics

Language Lovers

Inkling Insights

Noble Novels

Word Wanderings

Penning Perfection

Majestic Inkwell

Pen & Prose

Writer’s Quest

Grand Storyteller

Literary Legends

Fiction Frontiers

Typewriter Tales

Writer’s Retreat

Literary Muses

Literary Lighthouse

Chapter and Verse

Enigmatic Epistles

Pen and Perspective

Writer’s Insight

The Writer’s Journey

Writer’s Reservoir

The Write Life

The Writing Tribe

Majestic Musings

Literary Lovers

How to Find a Unique and Catchy Blog Name f or Writer s?

With so many writers out there, it can be tricky to come up with a name for your blog that will make it stand out from the rest.

But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. Here are some creative tips for naming your writer’s blog:

Understand the Purpose of Your Blog

As a writer, it’s important to have a blog that reflects your personality and helps you connect with your audience. But what should you name your writer’s blog?

There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a name for your blog. First, think about the purpose of your blog.

Are you using it as a platform to share your writing with the world? Or are you using it as a way to connect with other writers and build an online community?

Once you’ve decided on the purpose of your blog, brainstorm some potential names that reflect that purpose.

If you’re looking for something creative, try playing around with puns or wordplay. If you want something more straightforward, try using your name or initials.

Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something you’re comfortable with and that represents the type of content you’ll be sharing on your blog.

Consider the Audience

The most important thing to consider when naming your writer’s blog is your audience. Who are you writing for?

What kind of tone do you want to set with your blog name? Are you trying to appeal to a wide range of readers or a specific niche?

Your answers to these questions will help you narrow down your list of potential names for your blog.

If you’re writing for a general audience, you’ll want to choose a name that is catchy and easy to remember.

If you’re writing for a specific niche, you can be a bit more creative with your choice of name.

Think about the overall message you want your blog name to convey.

Is it professional? whimsical? serious? funny? The right name will give readers an idea of what they can expect from your blog.

Don’t be afraid to experiment – try out a few different names before settling on the perfect one for your writer’s blog!

Use Alliteration

If you want your writer’s blog to stand out, one creative way to make it memorable is to use alliteration in the name.

Alliteration is when two or more words in a phrase begin with the same letter. For example, “The Lively Writer” or “Write Now.”

Using alliteration can help make your blog name more catchy and easier to remember. Plus, it can be fun to come up with alliterative names!

If you’re stuck, try thinking of some key words related to writing or blogging and see if any of them start with the same letter.

Combine Relevant Keywords

When it comes to naming your writer’s blog, be creative and combine relevant keywords.

Your blog’s name should be reflective of your topic, but also catchy and easy to remember.

Use keyword research to determine which terms are most popular and relevant to your target audience, then use those keywords in your blog’s name.

For example, if you’re writing about travel, you could use the keywords “travel” and “writer” in your blog’s name.

Use Rhymes, Rhetoric and Humor

When it comes to naming your writer’s blog, be creative! Use rhymes, rhetoric, and humor to come up with a catchy name that will make people want to read your blog.

If you’re looking for a little inspiration, check out these tips:

1. Use Rhymes: A rhyming name is easy to remember and can be quite catchy. Try something like “The Writer’s Block” or “Pen and Paper.”

2. Use Rhetoric: Be creative with your word choice and try to come up with a clever pun or play on words. For example, you could call your blog “The Write Stuff” or “All Write.”

3. Use Humor: A funny name will definitely help you stand out from the crowd.

Be careful not to go too overboard, but something like “The Procrastinating Writer” or “Writer’s Blockbuster” could be just the thing to get people interested in reading your blog.

Check for Domain Availability

If you’re starting a writer’s blog, one of the first things you’ll need to do is choose a name for your blog.

And one of the best ways to come up with a good name for your blog is to check for domain availability.

There are a few different ways you can go about checking for domain availability. One way is to use a domain checker tool like GoDaddy or Namecheap.

Another way is to simply do a Google search for the name of your desired domain.

If the domain you want is available, congrats! You’re one step closer to having a great name for your writer’s blog. If the domain you want is not available, don’t worry.

There are plenty of other great options out there. Just keep brainstorming and you’ll find the perfect name for your blog in no time.

Avoid Unoriginality

There are a few key things to keep in mind when choosing a name for your writer’s blog. First, you want to avoid anything too generic or unoriginal.

A good way to come up with something unique is to brainstorm a list of words related to your niche.

Then play around with combining them or adding suffixes and prefixes until you find something that feels right.

You also want to make sure the name is easy to remember and spell, as this will help people find your site more easily.

And finally, don’t be afraid to get creative! A great name can really set your blog apart from the rest.

Creating a great name for your writer’s blog is essential if you want to attract readers.

The tips in this article should help you come up with some creative and unique options that will make your site stand out from the crowd.

Remember to choose something that reflects the content of your blog, as well as something memorable and catchy.

With these 10 creative tips for naming your writer’s blog, you’ll be sure to find the perfect title in no time!

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The 10 Best Books of 2023

The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s standout fiction and nonfiction.

Credit... By Timo Lenzen

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By The New York Times Books Staff

• Nov. 28, 2023

Every year, starting in the spring, we spend months debating the most exceptional books that pass across our desks: the families we grow to love, the narrative nonfiction that carries us away, the fictional universes we can’t forget. It’s all toward one goal — deciding the best books of the year.

Things can get heated. We spar, we persuade and (above all) we agonize until the very end, when we vote and arrive at 10 books — five fiction and five nonfiction.

We dive more into the list in a special edition of our podcast . And in case you’d like even more variety, don’t miss our list of 100 Notable Books of 2023 , or take a spin through this handy list , which features all the books we’ve christened the best throughout the years.

Here they are, the 10 Best Books of 2023.

The Bee Sting , by Paul Murray

Murray makes his triumphant return with “The Bee Sting,” a tragicomic tale about an Irish family grappling with crises. The Barneses — Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ — are a wealthy Irish clan whose fortunes begin to plummet after the 2008 financial crash. But in addition to this shared hardship, all four are dealing with demons of their own: the re-emergence of a long-kept secret, blackmail, the death of a past love, a vexing frenemy, a worrisome internet pen pal and more. The novel threads together the stories of the increasingly isolated Barneses, but the overall tapestry Murray weaves is not one of desolation but of hope. This is a book that showcases one family’s incredible love and resilience even as their world crumbles around them. Read our review .

Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon | Apple

Chain-Gang All-Stars , by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A dystopian satire in which death-row inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom, Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel — following his 2018 story collection, “ Friday Black ” — pulls the reader into the eager audience, making us complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. “As much as this book made me laugh at these parts of the world I recognized as being mocked, it also made me wish I recognized less of it,” Giri Nathan wrote in his review. “The United States of ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’ is like ours, if sharpened to absurd points.” Amid a wrenching love story between two top competitors who are forced to choose between each other and freedom, the fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick. Read our review .

Eastbound , by Maylis de Kerangal

De Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, first published in France in 2012 and newly translated by Jessica Moore, follows a young Russian conscript named Aliocha on a trans-Siberian train packed with other soldiers. The mood is grim. Aliocha, unnerved by his surroundings after a brawl, decides to desert — and in so doing, creates an uneasy alliance with a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman. Their desolate environment — de Kerangal describes the Siberian landscape as “a world turned inside out like a glove, raw, wild, empty” — only heightens the stakes. “The insecurity of existence across this vastness and on board the train emphasizes the significance of human connection,” our reviewer, Ken Kalfus, wrote. “In a time of war, this connection may bring liberation and salvation.” Read our review .

The Fraud , by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters. Chief among them are a widowed Scottish housekeeper who avidly follows the trial and a formerly enslaved Jamaican servant who testifies on behalf of the claimant. Smith is a talented critic as well as a novelist, and — by way of the housekeeper’s employer, a once popular writer and friendly rival of Dickens — she finds ample opportunity to send up the literary culture of the time while reflecting on whose stories are told and whose are overlooked. “As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself,” Karan Mahajan wrote in his review. “Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.” Read our review .

North Woods , by Daniel Mason

Mason’s ambitious, kaleidoscopic novel ushers readers over the threshold of a house in the wilds of western Massachusetts and leaves us there for 300 years and almost 400 pages. One after another, in sections interspersed with letters, poems, song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations and assorted ephemera not normally bound into the pages of a novel, we get to know the inhabitants of the place from colonial times to present day. There’s an apple farmer, an abolitionist and a wealthy manufacturer. A pair of beetles. A landscape painter. A ghost. Their lives (and deaths) briefly intersect, but mostly layer over each other in dazzling decoupage. All the while, the natural world looks on — a long-suffering, occasionally destructive presence. Mason is the consummate genial host, inviting you to stay as long as you like and to make of the place what you will. Read our review .

The Best Minds , by Jonathan Rosen

An inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of the author’s long friendship with Michael Laudor, who made headlines first as a Yale Law School graduate destigmatizing schizophrenia ; then for stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death with a kitchen knife, after which he was sent to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. Drawing from clips, court and police records, legal and medical studies, interviews, diaries and Laudor’s feverish writings (including a book proposal of his own), Rosen examines the porous line between brilliance and insanity, the complicated policy questions posed by deinstitutionalization and the ethical obligations of a community. “The Best Minds” is a thoughtfully constructed, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care. Read our review .

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs , by Kerry Howley

Howley’s account of the national security state and the people entangled in it includes fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. At the center is Reality Winner (“her real name, let’s move past it now”), the National Security Agency contractor who was convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to The Intercept and sentenced to 63 months in prison. Howley’s exploration of privacy and digital surveillance eventually lands her in the badlands of conspiracy theorists and QAnon. It’s an arc that feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole. The result is a book that is riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Read our review .

Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon

Fire Weather , by John Vaillant

In 2016, raging wildfires consumed Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta. In the all-too-timely “Fire Weather,” Vaillant details how the blaze started, how it grew, the damage it wrought — and the perfect storm of factors that led to the catastrophe. We are introduced to firefighters, oil workers, meteorologists and insurance assessors. But the real protagonist here is the fire itself: an unruly and terrifying force with insatiable appetites. This book is both a real-life thriller and a moment-by-moment account of what happened — and why, as the climate changes and humans don’t, it will continue to happen again and again. Read our review .

Master Slave Husband Wife , by Ilyon Woo

In 1848, Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, made a daring escape north disguised as a sickly young white planter and his male slave — Ellen as the wealthy scion in a stovepipe hat, dark green glasses and a sling over her right arm to conceal her illiteracy. Improbably, despite close calls and determined slave catchers, the Crafts succeeded in their flight, going on to tour the abolitionist speaker circuit in England and to write a popular account of their journey. Their story, which a leading American abolitionist called “one of the most thrilling in the nation’s annals,” is remarkable enough. But Woo’s immersive rendering, which conjures the Crafts’ escape in novelistic detail, is equally a feat — of research, storytelling, sympathy and insight. Read our review .

Some People Need Killing , by Patricia Evangelista

This powerful book mostly covers the years between 2016 and 2022, when Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines and pursued a murderous campaign of extrajudicial killings — EJKs for short. Such killings became so frequent that journalists like Evangelista, then a reporter for the independent news site Rappler, kept folders on their computers that were organized not by date but by hour of death. Offering the intimate disclosures of memoir and the larger context of Philippine history, Evangelista also pays close attention to language, and not only because she is a writer. Language can be used to communicate, to deny, to threaten, to cajole. It can propagate lies, but it also allows one to speak the truth. Read our review .

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

When the Irish writer Paul Lynch started working on his novel “Prophet Song,” he worried it might destroy his career. Four years later, the book won the Booker Prize .

Nora Roberts, a titan of the romance world, discussed how she redefined a genre that was all too easy to dismiss .

With millions of books sold and a TV adaptation starring Gary Oldman, Mick Herron, the author of the “Slow Horses” series, has yet to wrap his head around his success .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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