You don't need any kind of special education. Before I became an author, I got an education as a cook and was flippin' burgers at Mc Donald's. I just decided that I need another job and I couldn't be bothered to do yet another education. So I just started to write for free for smaller websites and local newspapers. I sent them some articles which I thought would fit and asked them to publish it. It took quite a while until the first article got published. When I got like a dozen articles published with my name on it, I used that as a reference to find paid work. There are portals where companies acitvely search for freelance authors. That's where I found my first paid orders. Payment was shit, often less than one cent per word. But I stuck to it and published more and more articles.

With the time, my articles got the attention of bigger companies and they asked me to do orders for them. Over the years it got to a point where I don't even need to look for orders anymore. Instead I have to constantly turn some of them down because I am just not able to write them all by myself. I was even thinking about hiring a second author. But I'm a little bit scared of all that taxes and social insurance stuff. Whatever, today I got quite a lot of articles published and even wrote cover stories for magazines and whatnot.

When it comes to gaming, the initiative came from my end. I actively searched for work in that regard because it was kinda like a childhood dream for me to become a gaming journalist. Getting those jobs was easy as I had quite a lot of articles published by then. It also helped to get the internship at Gamestar. But when I discovered just how little you earn there, I decided that it will stay a thing on the side for me. It would be ok if I would still be in my 20s, but today I have a wife and a son so I need myself some more munniez. 

But yeah, all you need is a good writing style and you can be successful as an author even without having studied journalism or something. And please don't take my posts here as a reference. My english is often horrible, I am way better at writing in german. I really need to improve in that regard, because when I can write professional articles in english, that would open up a whole lot of new opportunities for me! ^^