Hi David – thanks for the considered comment.

You raise some very interesting points – and I would love to talk to you about some of them in more detail.

I think PCN should support all kinds of copywriters – and we must always be careful not to actually make things harder for anyone. So I’m keen to see that PCN never becomes ‘competition’ for anyone.

You’re right that one problem our profession has is the proliferation of less-able and less-qualified people working as copywriters. As a freelancer I often encounter clients who have wasted hours on ‘copywriters’ that couldn’t really do the job properly. How do we help clients identify capable copywriters? As professionals we need to improve the perception of copywriters in general.

We are considering some kind of certification or accreditation scheme. The challenge is making such a scheme affordable and simple but also meaningful and relatively stringent. I definitely don’t want to create a costly system that prices out new copywriters – or becomes a kind of tax on doing business. It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

At the moment, the main advantages for more experienced copywriters – and agencies – are that PCN is a great platform for developing your network, finding clients and finding other copywriters to work with. But yes, we can certainly do more. And I would appreciate hearing any other ideas you have.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

I think £3 per month sounds very reasonable.

However, I’d suggest you maybe might want to think through what support for in-house, freelance and agency copywriters might look like in a little more detail. If you can provide things that are more compelling than the listing, that would be great.

Otherwise (the listing aside) you’ve described a brilliant resource for new, would-be and inexperienced copywriters, and that should be applauded. But you’re essentially asking people to fund an increase in competition (when the market is already getting muddied by a growing number of people people who hear about copywriting and just think they can have a go because, you know, words are easy – I guess it’s a problem our design colleagues have had for a long time).

If you’re going to widen access to copywriting (a good thing), is there some way you can also encourage an improvement in standards and openness about things that aren’t very good?

Also: you mention connecting great writers with great jobs. It occurs to me that job ads might be another revenue stream for the network.

Anyway, that’s just a gut response from me. Keep up the excellent work.

I’m interested in your comment about video tutorials, as this is something I do for a living. I’d be willing to help the PCN with this task. I’ll email you to follow up.