Shifting with the Economy

As life looks continuingly uncertain on the macro economic front, it's important to take a close look at your business and make the shifts that can help minimize the impact.

• Sell globally, write locally I've mentioned in the past how a weak dollar can mean improved overseas markets. The dollar has strengthened some, but that doesn't mean it's time to look only at domestic work. Yes, there is turmoil the world over, but it's particualrly intense at the moment in the US. So consider how you might diversify your business portfolio. As a personal example, I'm now working on a custom publishing project for a large Indian company. The project may run through a US firm, but the source of cash is a well financed client overseas, which helps spread risk from various geographic economic weaknesses. It's no guarantee of safety, but does help reduce the issue of having all my eggs in one basket.


• Don't Do Panicked Price Drops I know some writers are getting the "we'll no longer need your services" communications. But I think it's a mistake to react by immediately lowering prices. Now, to be fair, it may be that you might get pressure to drop prices. However, if you're dealing with relativelyh strong clients, they're doing that as a negotiating tactic. Particularly if you're doing corporate work (and a lot of editorial is essential that, as you're writing for big comapnies), the amount you get as a writer is really pretty insignificant in terms of overall budgets. That doesn't mean you can simply demand what you've always gotten. Instead, you have to show the benefit you offer them. Some clients may bottom fish for price, and they tend not to be valuable clients in the long run. Those that appreciate value are more likely to continue paying reasonable amounts to those who can deliver.


• Spend Money to Make Even More When things seem tight, you don't want to spend money. I can appreciate that. Heck, I don't like spending money if I can avoid it anyway. However, as the old saw goes, you can be penny wise and pound foolish. Recently we finally got broadband into the rural area where I live and work. I could have put off the additional amount a month, but it would have made no sense. For the $30 or so I spend a month, I'll be saving hours a week. Save say three hours a week and you have 12 hours at the end of the month, enough to fit in at least a short that would pay hundreds. If you write a 300 word piece even at $1 a word, that's a 900 percent return on your investment (figuring that the additional revenue over the cost is $270). Not a return to sneeze at.


• Drop Duds Now is not when to sink time into clients that sink your business. Go out and find replacements, which will probably increase your revenue and decrease your irritation.


• Market a Lot This should be pretty predictable. You always have to market. But you're at an odd advantage here. When thigns get tight, many businesses, including writing businesses, pull back on marketing activities because they don't want to incur the expenses. That means you've suddenly got less competition. So go to the trade show or attend the seminar where you might meet potential clients, because you're stand out if, for no other reason, by being one of the few writers there.


• Be Ready to Build If things do slow down, you'll find yourself with more time on your hands. So invest the time. Try creating a new specialty that you've been unable to establish before because you were too busy. Pick up some knowledge in an up and coming technology that will affect writers, such as HTML coding or video. Then when companies are ready to invest more, you're in a better position to get the work.

Guardian "How to Write" Series

I just stumbled across an interesting series of articles in the Guardian about how to approach various types of writing. Some might be obvious to professional writers, and yet there is gold to be mined. For example, Catherine Tate, a funny and witty performer and writer in London, mentions a rule of three for jokes: if they don't work on three different audiences, then the problem is the joke, not the audience. There are articles on how to get a screenplay into the hands of a Hollywood producer and how to get a play read. There are sections on dialog, visual storytelling (important in multimedia work), character, honing a joke, developing and editing - quite a bit and all from people accomplished in the specific area. It looks as though they're at the beginning of a seven-part series as well, so enjoy.

New Tool for Reporting on Politics and Money

The people at MAPLight.org have come up with yet another innovative reporting aid. The Committees Tool let's you look at key bills and see how much money different special interest groups have donated to committee members and who received the dough. Here's an example:

SPOTLIGHT on H.R. 5632, which would prohibit importation of radioactive waste, in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce
H.R. 5632 would effectively prohibit the importation of radioactive waste into the United States. Energy Solutions, a nuclear waste management company, is currently seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to import 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy. Currently the bill has been stuck in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and House Committee on Ways and Means since it was introduced on March 13, 2008. MAPLight.org's 'Committees Tool' reveals special interest money given to each member of these Committees. The nuclear plant construction, equipment & services industry, which is trying to block passage of the bill, has given John Dingell (D, MI-15), Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, $45,250. Environmental policy groups, which support passage of this bill, have given significantly less, just $3,760 to Dingell.

Pretty slick. Another benefit is that this isn't just for "political" reporters. I can think of a lot of reporting areas where this could help. For example, if you're covering an industry or specific company, or your beat is an area such as environmental, business, consumer, or the arts, the information here could be a great addition to a story on a topic or even provide a springboard for a story idea.

Story of a Wired Assignment

Wired has an interesting blog feature: the story behind a profile of screenwriter (and now director) Charlie Kaufman. You see the pitch letter, draft, edits, notes from the photo director on trying to get a shot of someone who won't sit for a photo shoot - the whole works. It's interesting, although some of it reads as a bit sanitized. Look at the first editor, for example. Maybe this is how they edit, but it comes across as a bit too respectful. For example, the first comment:

Wonderful writing here. One suggestion about construction: Instead of starting with what he isn't (Nicholas Cage) can we start with what Kaufman is (slight, healthy serving of reddish brown curls, etc.].

How many editors do you know who wouldn't just say "swap the what he is with the what he isn't"? Or, more likely, do it themselves. But, overall, it's an interesting look. I would have liked to see a commentary on it in addition, like an annotated version, with someone noting the various allusions in construction and wording, like "here's a take on the typical celebrity profile, only done as a screen treatment." However, it's interesting nonetheless.

Techniques for Making Query Services Work

There are a number of journalist query services, including ProfNet, HARO, Gorkana, and Businesswire. Some don't do much, and some can create inundation. Someone on a writers' forum had mentioned getting swamped by responses, so much so that using the service in question became a problem. Here are some suggestions I had for how to effectively use the services and cut down on the unnecessary flood:

• Choose the right service for the right use. Over time you'll get a sense of how they work in different circumstances. For example, I've found that to reach lawyers at large firms, for example, ProfNet is the way to go. HARO has a broader reach. As you use a service over time, learn the characteristics and put it to the most effective use possible.


• If you're being swamped for days, set your deadline for same day or next morning. That alone will reduce things. You'll still get some people trying after the deadline, but you won't get the people who do respect deadlines, which will cut back the volume.


• Use it for specific, possibly "technical" (as in referring to specific expertise or knowledge of a subject) topics. Fewer people will assume that they could position themselves to be a fit.


• Quickly scan emails and have a "thanks, but no thanks" copied onto the clipboard. Then hit reply, past in the answer, and send it off.

A Writer in Need

You may have heard of this on various writers' boards and blogs: Lori Hall Steel, a long-time freelance writer, is a 44-year-old single mother battling ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and chronic Lyme disease while confined to a hospital bed. Her medical expenses are over $50,000 and the mortgage institution holding the paper on her home is ready to foreclose. She needs money now, and every little bit can help. The fastest way to get something there is to go to this blog site set up specifically to help her. She's gotten assistance from a few charities, but it's not enough. If you've got a spare $25 (or more, if you can afford it), it would be a help. We all could end up in a bad way through no fault of our own, and the writers' community is one that has traditionally hung together. If you can't afford to send something (and we've all been in that position), at least send some prayers and/or good thoughts her way.

Online Stories Can Come Back to Haunt

There's an important lesson for digital age writers in a mis-dated reposting of a business story by the Sun-Sentinel:

Shares of United Airlines' parent company UAL Corp. were hit hard and briefly halted Monday after a 6-year-old story on the company's bankruptcy filing was reportedly republished with a new date on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper's Web site.

The company's stock price dropped by over 75 percent in a few hours and trading had to be halted when a story about UAL emerging from bankruptcy hit the Sentinel's web site. The problem: the story was actually from 2002, but incorrectly redated.

It was only on one site, but when information gets sucked up by the Internet and automatically distributed, a single mistake in one state can spread internationally in a twinkling and have an overbearing influence. When you're working with online publishers and giving away rights, remember that if a story gets dragged up, possibly badly edited, your name might still be attached. Then, to some degree, many will perceive the mistake as yours, even if done so unreasonably.

To a big degree, I can't see how a writer might avoid this type of problem. There is only so often you can check the web (though, frankly, subscribing to the RSS feeds of publications to which you contribute might let you catch something like this). When you can't anticipate and head things off, you need to know how you'll deal with the aftermath. Maybe it's a blog post about the problem and using that mistake by the publisher as a reason to talk about the story's update and where things sit today. Or maybe you can directly post that as a comment to a story, showing that you, at least, know what's going on. But be ready in any case to take action and do what you can to protect your professional reputation. As a writer you have little else of value.

Learning From - And Avoiding - Mistakes

Not all your work will be your best - that's true of everyone in every undertaking. But if you want to be good at what you're doing, you have to make a point to learn from the experience and do things differently the next time. If you don't get better, you'll get worse by becoming calcified in untreated mistakes.

Ultimately, you become what you do, because what you do creates the expectations of the people you deal with, and they start putting you into a box by asking you to do more of the same. If you're taking assignments on quick turnaround on every manner of topic to essentially fill column inches, then you'll find you continue to attract similar assignments until you start to do something else.

That's fine if you're happy with the work you're doing, but if you're not and you can't stand reading your own pieces, then something is wrong. The promises of money act like a trap to draw you back to doing work that you'd rather not meet again, like running into an ill-advised one-night-stand at a party later in the week. ("Oh, how are you?" "Fine .... fine." Uncomfortable silence.)

You generally need a certain base of time and budgetary resources to perform adequate work. If you haven't been getting them, then it's time to find other clients who will provide what you need. Instead of cringing at work of yours that you didn't like, you can actually start running across articles that you think are pretty good, only to find they are ones you wrote and forgot.

Writing's Hidden Secret: Determination

Any writer who's been around for a while has heard a variation on the question of what it takes to be a good writer. The closest thing to a good answer I've heard has been determination. It's something that few writers talk about directly, even though they'll discuss logging large amounts of research time or submitting that novel to one more publisher. Every good writer I know well has multiple experiences of not being able to get a bit of information, a source, a section of an article to read well ... something ... and then continuing to push until things worked themselves out.

I had this happen recently in a business/law article, needing another in-house corporate source, and finally getting the main intellectual property lawyer at a huge corporation and perfect fit on the phone for a solid hour of conversation. The only reason I got an interview I wanted is because I never gave up. It can get a bit hair-raising, but I think determination is the real difference between being decent and really good. You must become completely unwilling to accept anything but what you are intent on getting. This sounds heavy-handed, but it's not. There's no brow-beating or begging involved. You just keep at it and at it until ... suddenly something comes along. It's the same attitude necessary to make enough money in writing and to write a good piece as well. You'll still miss the mark at times, but if you combine this with setting your goals high enough, you'll at least end up where you need to be.

Good Read on Custom Publishing

BtoB, a magazine on marketing, has a good article by my colleague Karen Bannan about custom publishing. It's always smart to understand what motivates clients, and this gives some good insight:

• Custom content can be cheaper than traditional advertising, particularly for b-to-b when you're considering the difference between producing a white paper and taking an ad. The former probably has a longer shelf life and the company is freer in how it distributes the content.


• Companies have greater ease in creating different versions of content for different demographics. (Wouldn't surprise me to learn that if a company actually included an ad for itself that it might test different versions, and then use what it learned for a national roll-out.)


• Digital media has become a big growth area. (If you don't have credits writing for the web, get them now - and better if you learn some HTML and other pertinent technology as well.) Clients are also treating digital largely as additional activity, not as replacement for print, particularly as they have to use regular marketing to drive people to the digital.


• Search engine optimization is becoming increasingly important, because that's how companies get people to know about the content. (Getting this right is far more complex and subtle than adding a handful of keywords, so find some references to the subject and learn about it.)

One weakness in the article was the research stating the growth of custom publishing - that 29.4 percent of business-to-business marketing budgets were being directed to the activity. The problem is that the research was from BtoB and Junta42. The latter is a company that matches custom publishers and marketers. (My bet is that the "research" use was mandated, given that the publisher was involved.) Then there is the study from the Custom Publishing Council and Publications Management saying that the "average U.S. business spends $912,532 on custom publishing or content marketing activities." That "average" must be of pretty large companies to have that amount available for custom publishing. At the same time, if that is a bias in the methodology, who cares? If that's the group paying for custom content, than those are the people you're looking at, if you're working in that market.