The Writers Manifesto Blog

As I’m writing this I’m sitting in the office of my former employer, borrowing their Internet. After a horrible Thursday this week, having spent 7 hours trying to sort out why I suddenly lost my Internet connection, buying a new modem and still not getting back online I was close to tears out of pure frustration.

So much so that I wanted to throw my laptop against the next wall and just curl up in bed and never wake up again. LOL.

I really had the most crappy day then and the fact that I had deadlines didn’t help.

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It’s time for another installment of my Freelance Writing Guide For New Freelancers. Setting rates is perhaps the most puzzling of all aspects to a new freelance writer, because of all the conflicting messages presented on the Internet.

In one corner you’ll see the $3 for 400 word article jobs advertised and in another you see that a writer gets paid $0.30 a word which would net him a nice sum of $120 for a 400 word article. Not bad at all, but nothing in relation to getting paid $2 per word or more for offline writing.

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This post is inspired by my good friend Brett from 6 weeks and Dave Navarro from Rock Your Day.

The noise of the alarm bell interrupts my dreaming. I’m rudely awakened and can’t believe that John manages to sleep on like a baby (considering the bell is on his bedside table). Yawning I fold back the bed covers and step out into the cold morning air. It is 5.30am and the world is still asleep.

While I perform my morning ritual in the bathroom, my mind wanders to the tasks ahead for the day. As usual my plate is full and I start stressing about balancing the lot.

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Being a published writer is a great achievement and no matter what some people say, to me there is no difference to being published online and offline than perhaps the money you can earn. Published is published, regardless of the time and place.

Many offline writers lift their noses to us online folk. For some reason they consider their writing to be somewhat aloof to ours and while I don’t agree with that for one second, I do accept that some just agree to disagree with me.

Either way, once you are published and paid for your work, you are officially a writer. Congratulations!

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In my last post I touched on the subject of queries to find work as a freelance writer. This post is yet another one in my Freelance Writing Guide For New Freelancers. While queries are more used to apply for jobs that aren’t advertised, we also need to have some guidelines we can follow to propose for a job say from an online job board.

While I mentioned that some attributes of a query apply to proposing for a job, it isn’t quite the same to propose for an advertised job and much less work intensive too. Here is what I do when I propose for a job in answer to an ad.

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Writing a successful query is perhaps one of the most important parts of being in freelance writing. Without it, we won’t be able to score jobs except for job ads and you know what that means.

Here is an excerpt of what The Free Dictionary has to say about queries:

que·ry (kwîr)

n. pl. que·ries

1. A question; an inquiry.

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[Alteration of obsolete quaere, quere, from Latin quaere, imperative of quaerere, to ask, to seek.]

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Why a query?

As you probably already gather, a freelance writer writes queries to find new work. In most cases queries are emails or letters you will send out without knowing whether the publication you target has a job offering.

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This is not a review about a make money online ebook. As a matter of fact I don’t particularly advocate make money online ebooks anymore since most of them are worthless anyway.

I offered to blog about this ebook to a good friend of mine because she inspired me with her words, her passion and her strength to push through her darkest fears.

Ebele is a gifted writer who has the rare ability to capture you with her humor and her amazing sense of down to earth, tell it like it is wisdom. She caught my attention month’s ago and I have been bumping into her all around the blogosphere ever since then.

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This is my second installment of the 16 part freelance writing guide for new freelancers and is perhaps the most important for those of you who are anxious to get earning. There are so many ways to find work as a freelance writer that it would be impossible to blog about them all in one post. So instead of trying to cover everything known to me under the sun, I will concentrate on how I got started with my freelance writing business and where I found my first writing jobs.

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