Make A Living Writing

There’s a lot of discussion online about writers’ rates. What’s the best way to bid a project — by the word? By the hour? By the project?

They all have their uses, especially since some publications and businesses are kind of in the habit of using one or the other of these methods for deciding what they’ll pay.

But which is the best way to price jobs? To my mind, it’s by the hour.

Time is your most precious resource. You only have so many work hours in the year, so you need to make as much per hour as you can. Which leads me to my one important rule of pricing jobs:

No matter how you price the job, track your hours and figure out your hourly rate. Because if you don’t know your hourly rate, how can you work on raising it? How can you compare clients and know which to keep and which to drop?

Now, if you’re working for an ongoing copywriting client, I personally believe bidding by the project is best. Your client is happy because they know exactly what they’re going to pay, and you can budget for the amount you will earn.

The trick is creating a flat fee for that project that will give you the hourly rate you want.

You can only do that by getting some experience with how long it takes you to do things. Obviously, this setup rewards efficiency. If you’re unusually fast, you can bid on a par with other writers, but end up with a better hourly rate, and earn more over the course of the year.

Before the downturn, I thought high per-article fees were the answer to maximizing earnings. But I’ve learned that’s not always true. When I was scrambling around for a few new clients in late ’08/early ’09, I got an offer from an old editor friend to write some quick articles for $100 apiece, just based on my knowledge of business topics, supplemented with a little online research. (Hey, it’s above my $50 an assignment limit, people!)

At first I was appalled. Prior to this time period, about the very lowest article rate I took was $300. Then I thought what the heck, and gave them a try.

I found I could write them in an hour to 90 minutes. A little quick math and hmmm…that’s $70-$100 an hour. Not too shabby. I’ve kept this work as good occasional filler projects — a quick scan of my bills for this year shows I picked up $1,700 this way so far in ’10, in maybe 20-22 hours. So the lesson is: Any work that earns a high hourly rate is good writing work.

Of course, getting a client where they’ll let you simply bill for however many hours you’re spending on their projects each month is the ideal. Then you know you’re getting paid for every hour you work. I had a client like that at $95 an hour for more than a year, sending me work every month. I think right now, those gigs are harder to come by.

But billing hourly protects you against the evil that is scope creep — the situation where you bid a flat project fee, but then the parameters of the project keep growing, as does your time spent. Been lots of discussion of how to handle this sticky problem on LinkedIn recently.

Most publications tend to assign a price per word or give a flat article price. In which case, you may need to work on your efficiency to make sure your rate stays as good as possible.

But you can always ask for more money — I’ve gotten companies to add $50-$200 to an article assignment or more if they ended up wanting sidebars, or a longer length, or I knew they were a slow payer. More about screwing up your courage to ask for more pay over at my latest post on WM Freelance Writers Community.

What do you prefer — billing by the project, the hour or the word? Leave a comment and let me know. Also, have you asked for more pay lately? If so share your strategy!

Photo via Flickr user zoutedrop

Earlier this week, I wrote about the many ways being fully booked helps your writing business. Obviously, I had a decent stable of clients…but I wasn’t at capacity. Finding a few new clients put me there.

Several readers asked if I could discuss the marketing strategies I used to help fill up my schedule. I’m happy to do so. I think many writers are wondering what the best marketing methods are, particularly what Web sites and online strategies are really useful.

So I will now reveal the single best place online for freelance writers.

First, the raw data: Below is a look at how I got each of the new clients I’ve landed over the past six months or so, which led to my being fully booked.

1.  Major TV network’s business blog — I found this gig through my weekly Gorkana alert, which offers job listings for a few specific areas in business, including finance and healthcare.

2.  Agency through which I blog and develop Web content for lawyers — I answered a Craigslist ad… I don’t exactly recall where, but I must have either seen it on About Freelance Writing (thanks Anne!) or on Writer’s Weekly (thanks Angela!).

3. Two small-business blog clients, both in business finance niches – These both found me through reading my blog for Entrepreneur magazine.

4. Fortune 500 company — They found me on a Google search for “Seattle freelance writer.”

There you have it. Have you guessed what the best place is to be for freelance writers? That’s right — it’s everywhere. As many places as you can be. Each place you are, each strategy you use, increases your odds of success.

Niche job lists are good sources of leads for specialized writing jobs.

Craigslist is full of junk, but if you keep scanning those ads, every once in a while you can find a very solid client.

Your great bylined work online is out there, marketing your business, 24/7.

Companies are finding writers through natural search on Google.

If I hadn’t had a broad-spectrum approach to marketing online — checking a lot of places, and really making the effort to make all my current online clients’ work shine — I wouldn’t have found all these clients. Just one important caveat: Be a skimmer, and don’t spend all day poking around the Internet looking for leads. I try not to spend more than 2-3 hours a week looking for job leads online.

I’d also make the observation that four out of five of these clients are on the copywriting side. My observation is that while publications are still tough to break into right now, copywriting is booming…so it’s not just where you’re looking online, but what you’re looking for, that’s important. Keep an open mind. Try new types of clients — you may find whole new areas of writing you discover you really like. That’s definitely my story.

Where are you finding good writing-job leads? Leave a comment and let me know. I’m sure I haven’t found all the great ways to market online yet!

Photo via Flickr user jared

It’s been a long time coming…nearly two years. But last week, it happened.

A prospect called to see if I could do some writing work for them. I took a deep breath, and then I uttered three magical words that unlock the key to making more money as a freelance writer.

Do you know what those words are?

“I’m fully booked.”

That’s right. At the moment, I am not spending time sifting through online job ads, obsessively trying to make new LinkedIn connections, or beating the street at networking events. I only had time to blog once for MALW last week, because I’m so busy. I have all the work I can handle, nearly all of it at very nice rates. I’m really overbooked, but I’m  hoping I can somehow figure out how to make the workload manageable again in July, once a couple of big new clients ramp up and get going.

It took a heck of a lot of marketing to get to this point, and later this week, I’ll tell you about what worked for me in marketing my freelance writing business. But for now, let’s return to the three magical words, and why they’re so important and magical.

What happens to your business when you’re fully booked?

You relax. The anxiety of starting each month with open time still on the planner is gone. I’m now starting each month with enough work booked to be confident I can pay my bills, and even take my family out for an occasional meal. Being more relaxed makes you more effective and creative, so your work gets done faster, allowing you to make more.

You gain confidence. It’s an ego-booster to realize you are in demand.

You get picky. In the depths of the recession, I took a lot of crazy assignments. One-off projects. Small-business clients with not much money. Quickie articles that paid $100. Stuff I never would have considered in 2007. Now, that’s over. If someone doesn’t fit my image of an ideal client, I can pass.

You start dropping clients. Now you can look at your client list and identify your biggest problem child — you know, the client that pays in over 90 days, is a whiner, never satisfied, wants a committee to edit your work, won’t return your emails for two days, or simply doesn’t pay enough. The next good client that comes down the pike, it’s time to swap that loser out. Repeat this process until you have only top-drawer publications or companies on your roster.

You become more valuable. When you’re fully booked, it’s like smoke signals go up. You start to attract great new clients. When you tell some prospects you can’t take them on because you’re too busy, they are impressed. You must be a good writer! They want to hire you even more. Sometimes, they offer you more money in hopes of getting you to kick someone else off your schedule to make room for their assignment. Sometimes, you say yes.

Your rate starts to rise. Besides all the reasons already stated above, your rate starts to go up when you’re fully booked because you don’t have to spend as many hours marketing (but don’t stop!). You have more productive, billable hours, so that translates to more income.

Are you fully booked? If not, maybe you want to take a look at my mentoring page and think about whether you could use a boost to get your freelance writing career moving forward. There’s a lot of work out there now — the economy is thawing, new magazines are starting, companies are ramping up marketing budgets, and now’s a great time to make new connections and find  new clients.

Photo via Flickr user Bohman

Well…it finally happened. I sat down with my designer today and the Word files for my e-book and we began the process of getting it ready to publish.

This project seemed to take forever! In fact, it took about 18 months. I’m so excited that it’s finally coming into the home stretch.

I learned a lot in the process of writing Make a Living Writing: The 21st Century Guide. If you’re thinking about writing an e-book — and everybody should be! — here are some of my tips on the e-book writing process:

1. Start small. Why, oh why, did I think my very first e-book should be a broad-spectrum, comprehensive guide to everything you need to know to earn well in the writing biz today? If I was doing this over again, I would have found a chunk to publish first as a stand-alone, smaller first e-book to get something out there while I finished the larger book. As it is, I’ll probably be doing that — I plan to pull out the copywriting section and offer it later as a separate product. But part of this information could have been out there helping writers already — and helping me earn — while I finished the bigger book.

2. Chunkify. This is a phrase I learned from one of my Seattle Times editors. Especially when people are reading online, they need information broken up into small bites. So most of my sections are short or broken out into bullets or numbered items to make them easy to digest.

3. Listen to your audience. If you’re writing any sort of nonfiction, how-to e-book, don’t sit in a vacuum in your office writing what you think people want to know. Find out what they really want to know! I’ve gotten great feedback from my mentees and readers of this blog about exactly what they wanted to know about traditional markets today, emerging writing opportunities and new techniques for finding good-paying clients. The e-book would not be nearly as strong without that critical feedback.

4. Think landscape. E-books lay out in landscape format, not portrait — that is, 11″ wide by 8 1 /2″ high, not the other way around. When I started out, I wasn’t thinking about this. I ended up reorganizing and editing a lot as a result. Landscape format is the shape of  most computer screens (though not e-readers like the one above!) — so it helps to think about that shape while you’re writing and looking at how much will fit on a page.

5. Think about structure and style. One of the toughest challenges for me as someone used to writing articles of maybe up to 3,000 words was organizing so much material. I should have spent more time up-front working with my table of contents to figure out where topics would fit best — would have saved a lot of reorganizing on the back end. On the style side, I kept doing things differently — how to put dashes, how to format lists. Think of a style and stick with it to avoid lots of combing through to change little format problems later.

6. Let it go. At some point, it’s time to call the e-book done. But I found it hard to get there. I got great advice from my online buddy Robert Earle Howells of Write Where the Money Is, who told me to just press “send” and move on to the next e-book. It doesn’t have to be perfect,  he said — it’s an e-book. Nonfiction e-books are meant to be timely and produced quickly. He told me he still sometimes goes back in and changes something in the PDF of his book, and that it’s no big deal. That helped me a lot…I probably would have kept tinkering with this forever, until the recession was long over and a lot of it would have needed revising! Wish I’d heard his advice six months ago…probably would have the e-book out already!

Have any questions about writing an e-book? Let me know — if I think the readers would benefit, I’ll answer them here on the blog.

Photo via Flickr user cloudsoup

Earlier this week, I shared the table of contents for the first half of my upcoming e-book, Make a Living Writing: The 21st Century Guide. Below is the second half, covering copywriting and earning from your niche blog. Some of you may recognize a few of these headings from previous blog entries I’ve done here or on WM Freelance Writing Connection. They’ve been revised and in many cases expanded for the book, which also includes a lot of new material I have not blogged on before.

Please feel free to leave comments about any topics you don’t see included that you would like to see covered in the book.

Thanks all –

Make a Living Writing: The 21^st Century Guide

By Carol Tice

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

PART II: THE COPYWRITING CRASH COURSE

An Introduction to the World of Copywriting

Choosing a niche

Use your life experience

My breaking-in story

Is copywriting “selling out”?

Getting Copywriting Assignments

Seven ways to find your first clients

A sample opening pitch

Two more strategies for getting those first samples

Blogging for business—a great new break-in opportunity

Five signs of a good business-blogging prospect

How to create a great business blog

The mechanics of business blogging

Break in with crowdsourcing contests

What to Charge

Why I don’t have a rate sheet

What to do if a prospect requires a quote

Sample copywriting client questionnaire

Negotiation tips for getting the best rate

Listen in on a client negotiation

Completing Your First Copywriting Assignment

Client meeting 101

Writing your assignment

Submit your work and deal with edits

Turn one assignment into a regular gig

How to Gain Confidence and Move Up

Social media + copywriting = good pay

Team with a graphic designer to earn more

Copywriting for nonprofits

Learn more about copywriting

PART III: MAKE A LIVING WITH YOUR BLOG

Blog vs. Article: What’s the Difference?

Why Your Blog Needs a Niche

Best Traits of Successful Niche Bloggers

Nine Ways to Monetize Your Blog

Advice from Successful Niche Blogger Nathan Hangen

Conclusion: Making it Happen

You Gotta Believe

Make a Living Writing: The Sequel

Some of you may have seen me mention that I’ve been writing a comprehensive how-to e-book about breaking into paid writing. Well, about a year later than I imagined it would happen, Make a Living Writing: The 21st Century Guide is shortly headed to the designer for layout.

Wow, am I thrilled to be saying that! What a slog it’s been, trying to get this material written and organized inbetween all my regular writing assignments and all that other life stuff that happens when you have a family with three kids.

But I’m pleased to say the e-book table of contents is ready for review. I invite MALW blog readers to take a look at the table of contents this week and leave comments about any topics they don’t see being covered in the book that they’d like to see me add.

Please keep in mind this e-book is intended mostly for new or low-earning writers looking to learn how to break in and start earning well. I’m planning a sequel with more advanced tactics for moving up to higher-paying writing work, so if I think a topic doesn’t belong in this e-book, it may end up in the sequel.

Today, I’m sharing the table for the introduction and part one, which is all about breaking into writing for publications, either print or online. Later this week, I’ll share parts two and three, which are on copywriting and earning from your blog.

Appreciate your feedback, readers! And hope to have the book ready for purchase soon.

Make a Living Writing: The 21^st Century Guide

By Carol Tice

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction-

Let’s Get Started

Who am I to give advice?

Freelance writing today

Myths about getting published

Three ways to make good money from writing

What’s your goal?

Watch for unexpected opportunities

The 7 Habits of Successful New Freelance Writers

PART I: Writing for Publications

Get Ready to Write

LOOK IN: What do you know?

Choose a focus

Finding the time

LOOK OUT: 7 Steps to Your First Paid Writing Assignments

1. Identify your writing type

2. Find your rung on the ladder

3. Start marketing your writing

A baker’s dozen ways to look for writing work

Research and The Writer’s Market

4. Use social media to build your writing career

Social media do’s and don’ts

5. Find places to get your first few clips

All about writing for Internet content sites

Six problems with content-mill writing

6. Find editors to pitch

7. Create your pitching toolkit

Your resume

Your bio

Your Web site

Three reasons to organize your clips on your own site

What if I don’t have a Web site?

Your blog

Your in-person pitch

Get Set to Pitch

Finding and developing story ideas

Evergreen article ideas

Submitting unsolicited, completed articles

Preparing your query letter in three easy steps

Step one: Know your publication

Writer’s guidelines and editorial calendars

A look at an editor’s life

Step two: Define an angle

Step three: Match your pitch to the right publication

Online articles vs print articles

In the back door: Online articles for print magazines

Crafting your pitch

Two foolproof approaches to writing queries

Query don’ts

Case study: Pitching Kiwanis

Send the most queries in the shortest time

Three ways to pitch editors

1. Pitching via email

Don’t help your editor rip you off!

2. Pitching on the phone

Sample script for a phone pitch

How to leave a voicemail for an editor

3. Pitching via snail mail

Should you nag that editor about your query?

Go: Writing your first assignments

What to know before you start writing

What determines writer pay?

Finding sources and interviewing

Twelve interview tips

How to find facts for your article—fast

Timesaving tips for fast article writing

Seven tips to beat writer’s block

Making your article great

Getting paid

Final thoughts on writing for publications

Image via Flickr user Ivan Walsh

Earlier this week, I talked about the opportunities out there now that the economy is finally starting to recover. Today I want to talk about one really cool niche I think few writers even consider that could bump up your earnings: Company magazines.

Many big companies put out magazines. Some are for their own employees. Some are for various segments of their customers.

In some professions, there are magazines they can get customized for their business — you’re looking at an example in healthcare in the photo above. That’s a customized healthcare magazine hospitals are buying a template of, and then inserting a bit of information about their facility and bingo, they’ve got a magazine to send to everyone who lives near the hospital. Somewhere, there’s a company creating that magazine and hiring writers to write those articles.

My experience is company magazines are decent- to very-good-paying markets. In part because the knowledge is a bit specialized, and in part because company magazines are just not considered a sexy, glamour place to write like a national newsstand magazine. They have to pay a bit more usually to get quality talent. They also pay well because often their circulations or viewership is HUGE!

You might be asked to write about a company product or service in your article, but many times I’ve found the requirements are no different from articles I might write for a consumer magazine in the same niche. The company just wants to build customer loyalty by providing useful information for their type of customer.

Note that some of these magazines are online. Corporations including Dell and American Express have huge online magazines, for instance. Many have multiple online magazines for various audiences — for instance, here’s Microsoft’s magazine just for professionals who’re certified in Microsoft software programs, MCP Magazine.

My advice: Any time you’re in a store of any kind, look around at the reading material and see if they put out a magazine. You might just turn up a great new possible market to pitch. If you can’t find a masthead, just contact the company’s corporate communications head and ask who to pitch. If you see a company with an online magazine, do some sleuthing and try to find out who’s in charge. These don’t tend to turn up even in the Writer’s Market and other guides, and they don’t tend to post writer’s guidelines, so you’ll have to be a little enterprising to connect with their editors.

Pitching the magazine of a company you patronize gives you an immediate inside edge — you already know their stores or products and like them!

Here’s some information on just a few company magazines below:

Curves gyms: Diane is their magazine all about exercise and healthy lifestyles. Looks like it comes out four times a year.

Costco: This is probably one of the best-known company magazines around — Costco Connection has a circulation of 8 million, making it one of the most-read American magazines! You can scan their issues online to get an idea of the content.

American Express OPEN Forum: Their online small-business magazine is one of the most highly regarded business Web sites on the Internet. Highly retweeted. And I don’t just say that because I’ve written a few things for them.

Tractor Supply Co: Out Here. If you live in a rural area, check out the lumber and farm-supply chain Tractor Supply’s high-quality magazine for its customers, which is all about rural life.

Best Buy: @Gamer is a new magazine they’re just launching for their game-buying audience. Word is it launches this month, so be on the lookout.

Have you noticed any interesting company magazines? If so, leave a comment and let us know about them.

Photo via Flickr user pr1001

I hate to get cranky on everybody, but I’ve had it with the whining about  how hard it is to find good-paying freelance writing assignments in this terrible, down economy. The fact is, there are a lot of signs of recovery out there. A couple of them:

Retail sales have been rising for several months now.

I’ve had about 10 really solid leads turn up in the past two weeks, way more than I’ve been seeing in recent months. My own personal economic-recovery indicator.

Do you know the first things that happen at the beginning of a recovery?

• Savvy companies start to ramp up their marketing — a recent FedEx study showed 42 percent of small businesses said they were contemplating increasing their marketing budgets. FORTY-TWO PERCENT! Know how many small businesses there are in the U.S.? Oh, more than 20 MILLION.
• Magazines begin selling more ads and adding pages or expanding their number of annual issues.
• New magazines are born — I counted six of them in just one week in my recent Wooden Horse newsletter.

My point: It’s time to stop using the recession as your excuse for not earning.

There’s plenty of writing work out there right now, and there’s going to be more. You can get in on the start of this up-trend, or you can be one of the last to jump on the bandwagon. Put it out there now, because the universe is starting to respond.

I got an email out of the blue this week from a Fortune 500 corporation looking to start a new e-newsletter for its customers. I would bet that this sort of thinking is taking place at many, many big companies right now. They all want to be first in line to get their share of the recovery. And they’re going to need skilled writers to help them achieve that goal.

It seems like twice a week now, I’m talking to some small business person who needs social media explained to them. They’ve heard they need a blog or articles on their site, but they have no idea how they promote that online and use it to drive traffic. The opportunity in this niche alone — presenting complete social-media proposals that include promotion and blogging or article-writing — is huge.

I speak from experience, since 2009 was my best-earning year ever — you can defy the downturn. And now, it’s not even as much of a downturn anymore!

So it’s time to stop moaning about low-paying content sites that rip you off, rear up on your hind legs, and start marketing your writing business. Send queries. Meet prospects. Use LinkedIn or Biznik. Put up a billboard. Whatever’s your speed.

You’re out of excuses, so get out there and find clients who’re willing to pay you a living wage. More and more of them are out there every day, now that the economy is finally thawing.

Later this week, on this blog and on WM Freelance Writing Connection, I’ll be talking about a couple of specific niche opportunities for you to think about as you make your marketing plan for growing your business in 2010.

What will you do to capitalize on the recovery? Leave a comment and let us know your strategy.

Photo via Flickr user psd