Landing a big business gig is not impossible. Like any other kind of freelance writing job, it takes a bit of perseverance. The first step is to do some research. If there is a particular brand that blows your skirt up, check out their web site. See if they have a blog. If they do, spend some time in the archives. See if you can get a sense of the article authorship. Are the articles always attributed to the same person or are several or numerous authors mentioned? This makes a difference because if there are a lot of different folks, chances are they are using freelance writers.

Don’t go into this process thinking that there is no way a big business would want little ol’ you. Push for a single guest article and see what happens. Sometimes that much of a foot in the door is all it takes to work your way into something bigger and better. If you’ve researched the site as you should, you will come across the correct department or individual to contact. Jump in with a short and sweet pitch. Tell them why you love the business and what you think you have to offer. Don’t flood them with samples and links to all the stuff you’ve done. Remember that short and sweet is best.

What if you find a business that doesn’t have a blog? Win! Time to put on your sales hat and dive in. Work to find the right contact within the business. This requires a bit of finesse on your part. Don’t just send an arbitrary email and hope for the best. If you are really passionate about the business then you need to be passionate about them starting a blog. My best advice is to pick up the phone. You would be amazed at what can be accomplished through a personal phone call. These days, folks just aren’t used to it. Finding the correct department may be the toughest part of this gig. Try for the marketing or communications department. Human Resources may also be a good first step. Be persistent but not pesky. Keep a smile on your face as you speak. There’s a good chance that you’ll end up where you need to be.

If you don’t end up being the WalMart blogger, why not shoot for something closer to home? Most communities will have businesses large enough to support a blog. Time for a personal visit it seems. Cutting your teeth on a mid sized local business builds your portfolio and ultimately leads to other work.

It’s not impossible to land a big business blogging gig. It just takes a lot of work. If you are willing and able to do the leg work, the rewards could be tremendous.

I expect the career of many a freelance writer has started out this way. You bore your friends and family by droning on from the saddle of your hobby horse about how you will become the next Stephen King or JK Rowling, and all the while you’re working on turning your hobby into a career by crafting that spectacular blockbuster novel that will grab the publishing world by the balls and make it cough up millions.

Time passes and your novel creeps along. You start dabbling in commercial freelance writing. You get the odd gig from a friend or business acquaintance who probably just wants you to put your money where your blabbering mouth has been for too many years and produce a piece of literature for their website. You begin to think there could be a career in this, after all.

The work filters in. You reach the point where it’s decision-time. You need more hours from the day if you’re to make a go if it. The day-job finally gets the axe. You’re free. Finally, you can devote more time to … shit, SEO articles.

Hold on, weren’t you writing a novel? Isn’t that how all this began?

You spin around and realise your hobby horse has wandered off. It used to follow you around like Trigger, just waiting for you to leap on its back and bellow out your master plan to anyone who’d listen.

Actually, it’s still there. You can just make it out in the distance, meandering aimlessly. Every so often it stops to peek back at you, just in case you need it to gallop back to you.

But you don’t. It’s sad and vaguely embarrassing. None of those whose ears you battered from its saddle will have forgotten your lofty ambitions, but only the very closest of them would dare broach the subject now.

“How’s that novel of yours coming along?” one whispers, sensitively.

“Slowly,” you say, lying. Slowly would be good; it would be progress.

In a recent post called “Freelance Questions”, Tumblemoose asked how his fellow scribes balanced their paid work with their personal projects, admitting that the latter area escapes him. Regular commenter Steve echoed the sentiment. I do, too.

Last week, I passed judgment on several comments by novelist Pam Binder taken from a Q&A session with a Forbes journalist. In the same article, Binder described how she was able to write her first published novel.

“My advice is simple. All you need is 15 minutes a day. Ignore those people who say you have to spend 3, 4, or 5 hours a day in order to become a serious writer. Let me say it again, if you can write even 15 minutes a day, you can write a novel. I know this is true, because I did it.”

Binder says she wrote her book by snatching fifteen minutes a day from her lunch break while working a full-time job, and who am I to say that’s not true? But while I wouldn’t say it’s incredible, I would say it’s friggin amazing – and good for her.

Fifteen minutes a day, for me, would be useless. I know from writing three books (one languishing unpublished) how I approach the job of novel-writing, and fifteen minutes would probably not see a single word committed to the screen. If anything productive did occur in that time, it would amount to one sentence that had been rewritten several times in my head prior to even sitting down. And one sentence a day is not a viable way to write a novel.

I’m the “3, 4, or 5 hours a day” writer that Binder describes. I started off very slowly, feeling my way back into the world of the novel, and, the longer I sat there, the quicker I wrote and the less I needed to rewrite what I’d written. I’d be rolling after a couple of hours and could easily write for ten to twelve hours non-stop. I wrote for twenty-four hours without a break to finish my first book.

I like Binder’s approach better. My approach has not seen me write a fourth novel in ten years; just no time. I could grab fifteen minutes a day – who couldn’t? But it’s not enough. My brain can’t get up to speed that quickly. I like to craft my sentences so they don’t need much tweaking later on. Possibly Binder’s approach was to get the words down however they fell from her head, just to move the story along, and not worry about the finer edits until the novel was complete.

If you feel like your hobby horse has been put out to stud, it may be something to consider. Perhaps then you won’t feel quite so bucked off with the way things are going.

From a freelance writer’s perspective, many of the writing conferences I see are geared to folks that are writing fiction and seeking a publisher. For me, the only fiction I write that is continually accepted is sent to the IRS every April. So I would be more interested if indeed the conference was geared especially for freelance writers.

Potential Benefits

No rocket science here, folks. A writing conference is an opportunity to learn something new that could help your freelance writing business. Chances are good that you will meet some folks that you are drawn to and with whom you are able to connect. The relationships established at these conferences can be long term and beneficial to everyone involved. As well, sometimes it’s important to see what is happening in the freelance writing world through a portal other than your computer monitor. I tend to think that anything worthwhile is accessed through the Internet and that I know about most of the big stuff out there. Truly, this attitude is arrogant and a bit short-sighted. I think there are discoveries to be made.

Potential Downfalls

In my previous life, I attended a lot of conferences. I attended local and national conferences often as a presenter. Other times I was a mere attendee. I enjoyed these conferences for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the opportunity to travel and see different parts of the country. At the time, I was living in Alaska and trust me, any chance to get the heck out of Dodge for a week was welcome – especially in January. With that said, I freely admit the conferences were on my employer’s dime. Conference fees and travel expenses were all paid for by someone else.

The perspective changes a bit when you are looking at coughing up a grand (or more) for a conference. The danged things are expensive and you had better figure out the cost/benefit thing before you sign up. As well, the first time you attend a conference you are rolling the dice. A particular conference may not be beneficial to you at all and you won’t know until you go.

Another potential drawback is the temptation to:

Catch up on your sleep in a comfy hotel room.
Catch up on the newest pay-per-view movies in your hotel room.
Explore the local community. After all, you came all this way. Who knows when you’ll get to St. Louis again?
Hang out in the vendor area instead of going to the breakout sessions.
Work on a client project because you are up against deadline.

The point here is that a writing conference may be a good thing for you but you need to do the research and you need to be self aware in terms of how you may respond to the temptations listed above.

Have you been to a conference? What was the experience like?

Yet I dislike headlines like that for their inane simplicity. No one has ever written a sure-fire guide on how to become a successful freelance writer, and no one ever will. No matter how good the advice contained within such a book or article, no wannabe writer will ever be able to replicate the path taken by those successful souls who have trekked ahead of them.

Careers can turn on one sentence spoken within one meeting to one specific individual. Even with a detailed map of every action and decision that brought the most successful writer to their current position of greatness, the success of the avid follower of that map is never assured. The guide is little more than a fairytale. There are just too many variables.

Moving beyond the headline, the article described a Q&A session the journalist conducted with a “New York Times best-selling author”. The author is Pam Binder. I had never heard of her, let alone read anything by her, so I cannot offer any opinion on the merit of her work. She’s obviously done well, so I take my hat off to her.

However, she said something within her responses that made me groan. She said this:

“So, if there are any words of wisdom I can share it’s that you really can follow your dream. If your dream is to become a published author, keep writing, learn all you can about the craft as well as the business side, and never give up. The art of storytelling is a gift that everyone can attain.”

On the surface, that all seems perfectly reasonable advice. Burrow down into reality, however, and you’ll find a few holes.

It’s not wisdom to say you can follow your dreams; it’s a cliché. I’ve been guilty at times of uttering such glibness, but only after delivering a hefty does of realism. To give her some credit, Binder does say “follow” your dream not “achieve” your dream, a distinction which will not be lost on those of you (and me) who have been following your dream for decades and never getting any closer to grabbing it.

I equally have no argument with Binder’s advice to keep writing and learn your craft, but then she ruins it by telling you to “never give up”. I hate reading that kind of crap. It’s so easy for the successful person to say such things. What they will never know, and therefore what undermines their advice, is whether they would have continued to slog away unsuccessfully for the following 20, 30, 40, 50 years until they turned their bitter and unfulfilled toes up.

I think not. And there is no shame in giving up when your head is in pieces from banging it against a wall you will never break through. Which brings me to her last pearl of wisdom: that everyone can attain the gift of storytelling.

No they can’t. Of course they can’t. Successful writers like Binder shouldn’t be saying things like that. We don’t need any more delusional people flocking into this profession, thank you very much. This is not a career that requires a recruitment drive. She also belittles the art of writing to suggest anyone can do it. Not everyone possesses every skill, nor is capable of learning every skill. Some people aren’t good at certain endeavours. Some people are good, but not good enough. Some people are phenomenal yet will still never make that crucial breakthrough. That’s life.

I understand why she says this, though. The autobiographies of the successful all contain the same “logic”. For successful people, it is self-evident: they wanted to make it, they tried to make it, they made it. QED. Then, from there, the “logic” arises that there’s a formula for success. It is often summarised by the psychology of achievement brigade who tell you: “What the mind of man can conceive of, and believe in, it can achieve.” Conceive, believe, achieve. Damn, that’s awesome. It’s so simple. What they don’t mention is the vast amount of hard work you need to put it, and the requisite amount of skill you should possess. You also need to take a good long look at who is doing the conceiving and believing; the relative sanity of the person. Unfortunately, the artistic world, with all its branches, has more than its fair share of people who are, to some degree, deluded. And when a deluded person believes in something, it often doesn’t mean a whole lot.

I can think of going to the moon, I believe I will go to the moon, so I will go to the moon.

Will I? Will I hell. I know that because I am fairly sane. In the belief category, I would say I am pretty realistic. Depressed, pessimistic, realistic, optimistic, mad.

Hey, if you want to pursue your dreams, you go ahead – I wouldn’t say otherwise. If people didn’t think such big and mad thoughts, and have such big and mad beliefs, the world would possess but a fraction of its human greatness.

But the clue is in the word “pursue”. You’re running after something, and it may always be quicker than you.

Writing Other Than Freelance

I know that a lot of freelance writers tend to write in addition to the writing they get paid for. I know that is the case as far as I am concerned. I do have a couple of personal writing projects that are always waiting in the wings. For me, these projects always seem to end up on the back burner (sometimes for months) and progress is very slow. It makes it seem as if they will be perpetual. I’m generally pretty good at multi-tasking but this area escapes me.

I guess what I’m wondering is how my fellow scribes balance their paid writing with their personal writing. Do you have writing that you do for you? If so, do you set aside specific time to pursue the personal writing or do you “catch as catch can?” Or perhaps you set aside a special day a week or month where you do no client work at all.

Book Proposal Question

I’m working on a book project for a client. Most likely we will pursue the traditional publishing route. One of the folks involved in the project relayed some information from a friend who was recently published. According to this person, as part of the query he let the prospective publisher know that he had a (fairly substantial) sum set aside for marketing and promotion. This is the first I had heard of this and I’m wondering if any of you that have done book proposals for a client have heard of this. If so, how did it turn out? Do you feel that it made a difference in the publisher accepting the proposal?

Big Project Thoughts

What is your take on taking on big writing projects. By “big” I mean books and the like that may take many months to complete. I think the potential is there to make some pretty good money, but frankly, taking on a commitment that large scares the hell out of me. (I have a list of “fear of commitment” references, shoot me an email and I’ll forward the list of previous girlfriends) Part of the fear of these big projects is based on how many things typically go wrong on small projects. In my mind, I see issues rising exponentially. Am I making too much of this? Do I have my risk/benefit ratios bass ackwards? What have your experiences been in this regard?

Thanks for indulging me with your answers to these questions. Hopefully we can get conversations rolling that will enlighten and entertain.

But before I could become overly concerned, I read the second paragraph and was utterly reassured:

“The fire ignited in an electrical panel in the ‘non-radiological side’ of one of the plant’s two units, said Edison, which operates the plant and co-owns it with Sempra Energy’s (SRE) San Diego utility. The plant’s fire department put out the blaze a few minutes before 1 p.m. local time, less than an hour before it started, the company said.”

Gosh, now that’s the kind of fire department I want in my neighbourhood. The sort that turns up to extinguish a fire an hour before it even starts.

I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I have a theory. The fire department is based on-site and has, over a period of time, been exposed to whatever it is they do at San Onofre. I expect it’s something awfully secretive, like out at Area 51. That’s why the tubes are rotting – some strange alien gas flowing through them.

So, several of the fire-fighters have been intentionally exposed to these fumes, or whatever, to see what happens. Lo and behold, they develop mystical powers of precognition. They are dressed in skin-tight silver suits and placed in a pool filled with a liquid of some kind (like “Minority Report” yes), and left to predict the future.

One of them foresees a small fire breaking out in the nuclear plant at 2 p.m. (He is quickly pulled from the program, BTW, for providing such piddling predictions when they really want to know what missiles North Korea is about to launch. Or not.) He telepathically transmits this information to a colleague who is wearing weird gloves and swiping images and information around a large transparent screen. Glove-Man gets on his cell phone (old habits die hard) and gives this information to his buddies who roll out their truck and arrive at the scene of the impending blaze just less than an hour before it sparks into life. They douse the area with fire-retardant foam, thus ensuring its flammability is, at least for an hour, safely removed.

That’s what I think, anyway.

The other possibility is simply too ridiculous to contemplate: that a professional journalist with Dow Jones Newswires is incapable of spotting a nonsensical piece of bollocks as they are writing it, and then either misses it when checking their work or doesn’t even bother to check their work, and the same goes for their editor.

Nah. That’s stupid. If I’m being gracious, which, as you know, I try never to be, then I suppooooose the writer could have been offering a direct quote from the company, but, even then, surely as a professional journalist you’d go ahead and change it on your own initiative to prevent pedants like me picking it up and writing disparaging blogs about it.

There has been discussion here before about the “crime” of making mistakes, and I can see both sides. In The Grand Scheme of Things, so what? We’re not curing cancer or solving hunger. But in The World of the Freelance Writer, I’d say it probably does matter because we are expected to live by certain rules. Our clients expect it of us. Our readership should expect it of us. (I say “should” because they are all living in The Grand Scheme so don’t really give a crap.)

In The World of the Freelance Writer, mistakes like this really shouldn’t slip through. Apart from anything else, there ought to be sufficient checks between first scribbling and final publication that errors are spotted and removed.

To be fair, I read a lot of Journal articles, and they are almost without exception exemplary. That may be why this jumped out so forcefully.

Still, there is a lesson to be taken from this by all freelance writers. Your work always needs a critical eye casting over it before submission for public consumption. That should be your own eye in the first instance, and then, if possible, an objective party who had no clue what you wanted your piece to say. What I mean by that is this: the problem arises when you become so comfortable with what you want to say that you believe you must have said it. On occasion, it has taken me several reads of an article before I realised it contained an error. My brain must have simply skipped over the mistake, seamlessly replacing it with the certain knowledge of what I thought I had said.

Unless I am horribly pushed for time by a deadline, I always read my work at least three or four times before submitting it. Even with a deadline, I won’t send anything out without a second read, and then I read it again after it’s gone, praying I won’t stumble across some awful cock-up. If I find one, I beat myself up. Only a little, because I know I tried to avoid it, but I still give myself a little Gladstonian flagellation of the brain. It works wonders.

I think freelance writers who make mistakes when they tried their damnedest not to can restrict their mental beating-up to a hard, self-inflicted pinch of the fleshy part of the arm. Those who are a bit come-day, go-day about the whole affair should bring in outside help, using someone they’d hate to let down to mentally slap them around the back of the head. Those who just don’t give a shit should actually get on the phone to Mike Tyson and ask that he cruise by to knock seven shades out of them in a real-world beating. I know he’s meant to be a changed man now, but you could always try taking the piss out of his face tattoo. Something along the lines of “What WERE you thinking?”

Lord, I hope I haven’t made a mistake in all this; I’m going to look like a proper dickhead.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I often write an article based on a title that pops into my head. Sort of reverse engineering for blog posts. Weird, but it works. If nothing pops into my head then I get a bit frustrated and will close down shop for a bit until I’m able to approach things from a different perspective.

After doing this for so long, sometimes I feel like I’ve said all there is to say about freelance writing. That’s where I am at this moment. No topic seems fresh or interesting to me, and the last thing I want to do is to insult the readership here by posting something that is not worthy of my skill nor worthy of my reader’s time. This happens from time to time on my own blog as well. I’ve found that when my well has run dry, it can be helpful to ask the readers to delve into their well and provide ideas for what they would like to see. That is exactly what I’m doing here, now.

I’m interested in knowing what you folks would like to see posted here. I know I do a lot of opinion posts and it occurs to me that maybe you would rather see more straight tips about freelance writing. Even though I feel as if everything has been covered, is there any topic you feel hasn’t been covered well enough? Is there an area about freelance writing that scares you because you feel like you don’t know enough about it? Also, would you like to see more top ten lists? How about book reviews?

I guess what I’d like to say is that pretty much anything is fair game and I’d be happy to tackle most any subject. The thing is, when I research an article I learn a lot as well.

So, let’s hear it. What’s your pleasure?

From the FAQ Smashwords page:

What types of books work best on Smashwords?

Straight form narrative (all fiction and some non-fiction), biographies, memoirs, poetry, essays,
narrative-heavy non-fiction, scripts, screenplays and plays. Yes, the book can contain images.
Follow the instructions below.

Will my finished Smashwords digital book look like my original print manuscript?

Often, it will look different. Don’t try to make your ebook look like an exact carbon copy of your
print book. Such an objective is ill-conceived. Ebooks are different from print books. If you
carefully follow the Style Guide, you’ll get good results.

Do I own my copyright if I publish with Smashwords?

You own your copyright. When you publish with Smashwords, you grant Smashwords a non-exclusive right to publish, promote and distribute your book, as well as samples of your book. Because the relationship is non-exclusive, you can publish and distribute via other services, if you wish.

Is your publishing agreement exclusive?

No. It’s non-exclusive, so you maintain all rights to your work and have the freedom to publish anywhere else you like.

How is price determined?

You (the author/agent/publisher) set the price for your works. The price can be free, any price above $.99, or reader-sets-the-price. In instances where your book is distributed to other online retailers, the retailers do not discount your work. If you select reader-sets-the-price, such books will default to a price of $4.95 at Smashwords’ retail partners because none of them support the Reader-Sets-the-Price option (Note: As of December 1, 2010, we can no longer distribute Reader-Sets-the-Price books to Barnes & Noble). If you would like to set a separate default price for retailers only, go to Dashboard: Settings. Once you make a price change at Smashwords, we will automatically notify Smashwords retailers of the price change in our once-weekly updates to them. Please allow anywhere from two days to two weeks for price updates to reflect at retailers (usually it’s about a week or less).

Where will my book be sold?

As an ebook publishing and distribution platform, Smashwords will distribute your books via multiple online channels, including but not limited to the Smashwords.com web site, major online retailers (Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Baker & Taylor (operates Blio, a popular e-reading app, and also operates Axis360 which distributes ebooks to public libraries), the Diesel eBook Store, others coming), mobile phone appvendors (Stanza on the iPhone/iPod Touch; Aldiko on Android; Kobo on all mobile platforms) and other online venues.

How often are my revenue shares paid?

Quarterly. Our Terms of Service states that authors’ earnings will be paid within 40 days of the close of each calendar quarter, though we usually pay in 30 days.To qualify for payment, accrued earnings must be over USD $75.00 for U.S. authors who want paper checks, and $10.00 for all authors who want electronic payment via Paypal. All authors and publishers outside the US are paid via PayPal. Unlike sales transacted at Smashwords.com,where you receive instant notification and account credit, sales at retailers are reported back to Smashwords on a delayed basis, and there’s a lag time between the end of the quarter and the time we receive the reports and the payment. Once we receive the reports, we will reflect this data in your Dashboard. For each quarterly revenue period, you will be paid your share of all payments received from retailers as of the last day of each calendar quarter. Considering that all retailers pay on a delayed schedule of 30-60 days, this means that often, your Dashboard’s retail sales reports and payments will only include the first or second month’s receipts for each quarter, as well as all previous receipts.

These FAQs address the most common questions. To access the rest of the FAQs, go to

http://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq

The economic downturn has caused a whole bunch of shanty towns to spring up and encroach on my ivory tower. It’s all very upsetting for me. Masses of plebeians who would never have loaded Word onto their laptop when times were better have settled in my back yard, erected flagpoles, and unfurled their hastily-painted old T-shirts, daubed with the insidious lies with which they aim to steal my livelihood from me: Freelance Writer for Hire.

Oh, I know times are tough, and – to shift my land-based analogy to a maritime one – any port in a storm, but this is my port, that’s my yacht, and I’m getting sick of all these $20 kids’ dinghies rubbing up against my hull, leaving unsightly orange scuffs.

Yes, I know: you heartless bastard, Pepper. I’m kidding. It’s a free world and you do whatever it takes to put food on the table, even if that means you have to bluff your way into work with forged (and poorly spelt) credentials. Like it or not, freelance writing is one of those professions you can wander into without any checks or qualifications or even any discernible talent.

The global economic crisis has left many people with little option but to try and work from home, because the job they used to leave their home for no longer exists. A laptop and an internet connection and you’re all set: you’re suddenly a freelance writer. Our ranks have swelled, and those extra voices crying out for work have inevitably made it more difficult for all of us to be heard.

A better economy should also see an increase in the rates offered for our wares. Clients will have more money to spend on their businesses. They won’t have to write the content themselves or farm it out to someone in a dinghy, or offer amateur prices to time-honoured professionals. And those clients who never stopped having the money will no longer be able to hide behind a veil of bogus poverty, using the economy as an excuse to also drop their rates.

With the dark times behind us, the T-shirts can be run back down the flagpoles, the shanty towns can be deconstructed and returned to pasture, and the dinghies can be deflated.

Now, let’s just hope the North Koreans and the Iranians don’t screw it up for us.

For the record, I have to say that I love these guys. I have several books published there and I’ve been signed up with them for a few years now. They are totally free and Smashwords is quickly becoming one of the most recognized e-book publishing sites on the planet. Me thinks they deserve it.

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Go to Smashwords.com and sign up for a free account. It only takes a few minutes. While there, poke around the site a bit and have a look at the titles. I think you’ll be amazed.

Publishing your first e-book is a snap. The very first step (and the most important one) is to download the Style Guide. It is your Smashwords publishing best friend. Whenever I publish a new e-book, I have the Style Guide open for reference. Read the Style Guide to get a feel for the basics. I’ll sum it up in a few words: Put your text in a Word document and remove most formatting. The Style Guide will walk you through the process of doing that.

From the Dashboard, you will be able to select “publish.” The site then guides you through the process. You will set the price, upload your cover, add short and long book descriptions and choose your tags. Choose your book file and you’re ready to go. You have the option of publishing in all of the popular e-book formats. Once you submit everything, the Smashwords “meatgrinder” will convert your properly formatted Word file into your chosen e-book formats.

Once the conversion is complete, you can get a free ISBN and if you have done your front end work well, the book will be included in the Premium Catalog for distribution to some heavy-hitter e-book players like Apple and Sony.

Once you have published, your work has really just begun. I know I’m taking a giant leap here, but I’m going to assume that you want folks to find and buy your book. If that’s the case, Smashwords also has a free Marketing Guide that is pure gold. The Marketing Guide will help you to be a very successful e-book author.

This has been the most basic of primers to publishing your work at Smashwords. The next post will go into more detail and will offer you strategies to avoid most of the pitfalls that cause frustration.

If you go to Smashwords and publish, I’d love to hear about your experience and I would be happy to try and answer any questions you may have.