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Writing about learning is where I step onto my home territory.

Before running my various businesses I spent my entire employed life in the learning and skills industry, which we once called training and education.

I know from experience that most people have a rather narrow perception of learning.  People who write are no exception.

Developing Skills

I find there are plenty of writers, copywriters, bloggers and other types of writer who are happy to build up their skills.  Writers spend lots of money on training programmes and guides to help them to write better.  Copywriters and bloggers will spend money on enhancing their skills, too.

All well and good.

As a businessperson who writes you need to develop and enhance your abilities to run your business, too. Then you need to learn how to manage your time and your finances and your marketing and so on.

This is the area where most people like to stay.  They like to enhance their skills: their ability to do various tasks.

This isn’t enough.

It’s the application of skills that matters.

It’s what you do in context that matters.

Contexts for learning

You might be able to write in lots of different styles.  You might have lots of interesting things you would like to write about.  This isn’t important.  If you want to make money from your writing skills, you must think first about the context and what your audience wants and is prepared to pay for.

What you can do is secondary.  Your skills are of less importance than what the market wants.

This means that as well as learning how to write better, you need to learn more about the publishing industry.

Do you keep up to date with what’s happening in the publishing world and in the small business world?  Do you read the news pages on large literary agencies’ websites to see what sort of deals they are closing and what the key industry trends are?

Do you look at The Bookseller - do you at least look at the front page?  Do you do the same with such guides as Publishers’ Weekly?

Do you visit forums to find out which issues are of most interest to writers or copywriters or bloggers?  Do you search out what’s really catching people’s attention right now by looking at the front page of Digg?

Applying your skills

Skills without a context for their application have limited value.

The ability to address real needs is more important.

Therefore, as you learn more, make sure you think as much about the application of your learning as you do about the learning itself.   You will gain more from your learning, if you do.

This is the third instalment in a series of ten posts for new writers.

See also: 

Think about the buyer

The most important activity

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset