Freelance Writing Versus a Freelance Business

I think part of the reason for the ongoing debate over working for what I've come to call writer mills is a gulf of understanding. However, I think the gulf is actually one-sided. The gap isn't between "experienced" writers versus "newcomers." It's not between "professional" and "amateur" or "talented" versus "pedestrian." The gap is between those who understand from experience the possibilities and requirements of freelancing as a business versus people who think of making some money off their writing. I see this as an underlying issue in the ongoing debate over Demand Studios and the other writer mills.

The writing and business camps, if I can put it that way at least for the moment, have different outlooks. The writing camp wants to make some money, maybe a significant sum, and wants to spend time only writing or editing instead of drumming up business, going through queries, and the like. And if someone understand the ramifications of that choice, and the potential upside of the other, it's fine. I'm convinced, however, that a good many don't.

To understand how experienced, monetarily-successful freelancers approach what they do, you have to understand that they are running businesses. It's not that money is the only measure of success, although it's an important one for practical reasons. You must make enough money to cover:

• higher taxes of independent work
• expenses that can run far more than you might think
• sick time
• vacation time
• health insurance
• life insurance
• disability insurance
• all personal expenses
• retirement
• profit for the business above your "salary"

In teaching writers business planning, and the course is generally for writers who are established to some degree, I more often than not come across shock when people sit down and do the calculations. They are high. Of course writers want to have the satisfaction of seeing their work published and knowing it's being read, but none of that can happen on any meaningful scale if the money isn't there to support the desire. Every writer is a media company in miniature. If the revenue isn't there, the writer can't get paid. Without sufficient income, you don't have the options to do the more rewarding work.

That realization begins to color how you look at writing. Sure, you can write something really interesting at a low rate (or for nothing, as I do in this blog and often, though not always, in writing plays). However, you need enough income to cover your expenses. The higher payment must subsidize the lower and the work you might do for the love of it.

As my colleague Michelle Rafter notes in her blog, it translates in part into freelancing being about selling. That's because sales is intrinsic parts of running any business, whether writing or masonry. There are other tasks as well, including marketing (a little different from selling), business development, financial analysis, planning ... also taking in new ideas, reading the work of others, contemplating, professional development, and, not to be ignored, constantly improving and honing your work. Also occasional rest, or else you burn out.

These are things that become impossible when you work in a low pay, high volume paradigm. (If the pay is low enough, you can call that a pair-of-dimes. Sorry, couldn't resist.) When I see people considering work with the writer mills calculating what they can do, they make assumptions of the volume of work they can both get and undertake. "Sure, I can knock off three pieces in an hour, so I should be able to do 21 in a day." But that includes two massive assumptions.

One is that the stream of work is available. A person who does work for Demand Media has told me that the work isn't unlimited and that there are times when the assignment stream temporarily dries up. If that happens and you've committed to depending on this source of work, you are screwed because you are unlikely to find other outlets quickly enough. It goes to Michelle's point about sales cycles. Writers who are well-established in their careers are constantly marketing because a) only some of those queries will turn into assignments, and b) you need a variety of sales cycles so the business doesn't become feast or famine. When you've gone down the path of waiting for someone to give you business, then you depend too heavily on one source. If it slows, even if you start marketing like crazy today, you may not have work for another few weeks. Planning on favorable circumstances is setting yourself up for an eventual crash.

The second assumption is that you can keep up the pace. "No problem," I'm sure some say. Well, let's put it this way. As someone who wrote me correctly calculated, it would take 7 pieces a day five days a week to gross $2100 a month -- an inadequate figure for almost anyone, I'd argue, if you sit down and calculate all the expenditures I mention above. Beyond that, that would be 2400 words a day at least. Over 52 weeks it becomes 624,000 words, or enough to fill six large novels. Now I can write large volumes of publishable material if I know the topic well, and I've been known to write in the 300K to 500K words range in a year. But 624K? I'd find it impossible to maintain that type of volume and my health and sanity at the same time. It's not just the writing, because wire and daily newspaper reporters are used to cranking it out, but finding the topics and doing the research. If you're covering hard news, there are always releases and events and incidents that offer fodder. But evergreen articles? Anything but easy.

Penny a word work was tough in the 1940s and 1950s when pulp fiction writers had to bang it out to make a living, and most quickly got tired and aged. But with today's cost of living, getting a few cents a word is a recipe for disaster. Even if it works today, it will soon blow up in your face. And the writers who have been freelancing for years and sustaining themselves and families know that because they've seen the bad times as well as the good.

A Disastrous Marketing Success

Today I was planning to attend a teleseminar given by two experts in negotiation, one being Jim Camp, author of the book No, which I've mentioned on this bog and recommended to people, and a former FBI special agent who was a main kidnapping negotiator for the agency. In fact, I was supposed to listen to it at the very time I'm writing this.

So why am I not learning something useful instead of writing? Because the teleseminar was a complete and total technical mess. At first all you could hear was a moderator, incessant beeping as people came onto the line, and, eventually, Jim Camp who had to dial in through some separate means and tell the moderator that neither of the guests had been able to be heard, as everyone who dialed the published number was automatically put on mute.

Oops.

They discussed it back and for a minute or two, constantly being interrupted by all the beeps, an experience that you've probably seen only as a small annoyance if you've ever been party to a conference call. Camp suggested that perhaps everyone could drop off the call, give the guests five minutes, and then call back. This was at around quarter after the hour.

I tried hanging up and giving it a few minutes. The beeping was even worse than before, and one lone, thin voice kept saying, "Hello ... hello ... hello ..." The very popularity of the event and its resulting size was causing all the problems that drove me and, probably, thousands more away from the call and onto something productive. That became a complete waste of everyone's time and left Camp's organization appearing unable to handle operational planning. Not good if you're in the negotiation business.

Double oops.

If you're going to be successful as a freelancer, or even help a client work on a marketing campaign, then you need to be cognizant of the problems brought about by success. I'm sure you've heard people, who were surprised by and unprepared for a strong positive response to marketing, say, "It's a good problem to have." The only difficulty with this phrase is that it's completely wrong. It's not a good problem to have. It's never a good problem to have.

There's nothing good about being unprepared for success. In fact, to call it a good problem is like a backward expression of sour grapes. Instead of writing off failure as something you wouldn't want, you're writing off not being ready for having succeeded. This is only an excuse for a lack of planning and anticipation that are part of smart business.

When you are planning any event or activity -- marketing campaign, customer relations outreach, technical conference, or what have you -- these issues need to be brought up at the onset. As part of the creative team, you should at least ask some of the questions:

• Is there an upper limit on the number of people who should be invited? (Should there be a response mechanism that can restrict the eventual number?)


• Are there any technical restrictions that might require particular directions? (Should we tell people to press the number 6 immediately after getting on to mute themselves?)


• Has anyone tested the venue? (Is it possible to can the beeps?)


• Is there a better mechanism to deliver the content? (Did anyone consider an interview format podcast for release on the web, possibly only to people who would fill out a form and qualify themselves?)


• What are alternative plans if something doesn't work as required? (Is there a separate number for those who need to talk?)


• If everything blows up, are there at least tentative emergency response plans that might help repair some of the damage and transform the experience into something useful? (Will someone tape a podcast, make it available, and provide an additional white paper or some other inexpensive-to-produce and yet valuable-to-receive apology?)

Too many freelancers see themselves as just writers, which means they're wasting their talents and experiences as well as not communicating the value they can bring to a business relationship. That translates into not being taken seriously and not being paid what they are worth.

Don't fall into this trap of poor self definition. Go off and consider what skills and abilities you actually bring to an engagement, whether corporate writing or editorial, and how you make a client more successful and keep the company or person from wasting money, time, and energy. Look at the hats you actually wear during the process, and in a relaxed way make sure people realize this. Why be a "freelancer" when you could realize that you are a communications consultant and be paid accordingly better?

6 Lessons From Using Twitter

I've been experimenting with Twitter over the last six months (@ErikSherman) and have learned a few things:

1. Every form of social media has its own way of working. Don't assume that what you've seen work on one will necessarily work on another.


2. If you can figure out the rules for a given type of social medium (and many who pontificate over what works and what doesn't don't actually know, so far as I can tell), it might work for you. But what you want may have to come indirectly. For example, endlessly tooting your own promotional message on Twitter (or anywhere else, come to think of it) quickly gets tiring for the audience.


3. Generally, what works involves providing things of interest to an audience and some of your personality, within reason.


4. You don't have to live on Twitter to use it. Smart judicious use is much better than a torrent of mistakes.


5. If you're going to post links, do so using bit.ly or some other URL shortening service that will let you track clickthroughs. You want to try seeing what works and what doesn't.


6. Clickthroughs can be low - really low. As in 1 or 2 percent of the people
   seeing a message. However, they can at times be much higher. I recently got over 900 clickthroughs to one of my articles in a single day. That is far beyond anything I had seen before, and I don't have a huge number of people following me. I attribute it to a topic that interested many, a headline that had some life to it ("Stop the Facebook Valuation Madness!"), and adding appropriate hashtags.

If you're active and say things that people find interesting, you'll get more followers. In the last six months, I've gained 525 followers without following the "official rules." For example, I follow only a fraction back (and say so in my profile) and don't thank everyone for following when they do. Yet I think my approach of following what interests me and trying to post things that will interest others is working, because that way the messages are essentially about them, not me. And I want to develop an approach that could work should things continue to scale.

Seven Tips on Using Twitter Hash Tags

I'm no expert in Twitter, but I've learned a few things in the last few months, and one thing is the importance of learning how to work with hash tags. When you see something like #topic, someone is flagging the post for people who might be interested in "topic." Hash tags can become a powerful way to use Twitter, whether you're looking to promote your work, find sources, or even just get a sense of what people are discussing. So here are some pointers that you might find helpful:

• If you're promoting something you've written via Twitter, be sure to add all the relevant hash tags you can think that might apply (and that fit within the 140 characters). That will get the post in front of potentially thousands of people who might be interested.


• Don't assume that all hash tags will work. You want to search on a hash tag before you use it, to be sure that it's in general use. On the Twitter site, point your browser to search.twitter.com and type in the hash tag (remembering the # in front) and see what comes up. If nothing does, you know it doesn't make sense to waste the characters on that one. If you're using a software app like TweetDeck, then take the appropriate steps to search on the hash tag.


• When you've found a hash tag that gets attention, start going through the posts, not only to be sure that you're directing your message appropriately, but to see what other hash tags people use in their messages. This will generally suggest other tags that you might consider yourself.


• If the topics you cover vary, then keep a spreadsheet or word processing document with potential tags to use. If you're working in few enough predictable areas, group them together, so you have the hash tags for a parenting story or the ones for your pieces on scuba diving.


• Check out hashtags.org. You can look at trends in hash tag use, see who is using them, and even find a directory of hash tags. The trend info is not only useful for marketing, but for looking at the state of the virtual zeitgeist, which then becomes fodder for topics you might pitch or for evidence to an editor that something is cooking and that an article on the topic might be just the thing to assign.


• Confused about exactly what a tag is supposed to mean? You can use Tagalus or Hashtag Reference might help. They let you search to see if there's a definition that's been assigned to the tag and, if there isn't one, you can create one.


• Be smart about how you incorporate hash tags. If you're using the term in your post, include the hash there instead of repeating the term and wasting characters. For example, you could write "read a good #book" instead of "read a good book #book".

Picking Favorites to Improve Social Media Skills and Build Audience

Don't let the opening throw you, because while I start with a Twitter-related service, I'm going to end someplace different.

Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned a site called Twibes. On going to the site, you enter your Twitter user name. Twibes fetches your follow list (for those who don't use Twitter, the list of people whose 140-character messages you elect to receive). You click on the "10 people who you think deserve more followers." I stopped after that, because next it was going to send messages to all of them, asking to sign up in turn and put me on their lists.

Although it seems like another form of virtual mutual admiration society, in the process of trying the site, I realized something: It was pretty easy for me to choose the top ten. And as I picked the first few, I noticed the criteria I was using:

• Doesn't send out dozens of tweets, but sends out enough that I'm not surprised to see something from them.
• If mentioning something personal, is at least witty about it.
• Might provide links to material that I find particularly interesting.
• If provides links, gives enough of a description that it makes me want to read.
• Doesn't limit links to their own writing.
• Represents a person, not a company or organization.
• Shows some personality in their tweets, not lines that could come out of a text book.

That's when it hit me. By picking a list of favorite Tweeter feeds, I had to pull together the characteristics that made something appealing to me. But then, those criteria should apply to what I wrote on Twitter.

Yes, there are lists of the things you "should" do on Twitter, or Facebook, or in a blog. But forget about the often repeated didactic collections often espoused by those who are trying to promote themselves as experts in social media. Not all people have the same tastes, and you're never going to satisfy everyone. What you can do is start with understanding why some things appeal to you. When you do, you're probably on the way to knowing how to attract kindred spirits, who might enjoy your work.

You could apply this "list of ten" (or 20, or 30, but not too many) to anything else in social media. What are your top favorite blogs and why? Not the blogs that you monitor for a beat or another professional purpose, but that you actually enjoy reading? What web pages are your favorites? It's a human and genuine way to distill the qualities that you might want to emulate.

I suspect there's another level any of us could take this. Are any of your list of favorites one of the "big" names that gets many followers? (Alas, my own tastes seem to run to the relatively obscure.) If so, then you might spend a little extra time seeing what they are doing, because not only are they reaching you in an authentic way, but they're pulling in a lot of different people. That might be due to notoriety of one form, but other factors could aid in the process.

This approach won't guarantee you more traffic or attention. However, it might help you improve the aspects of your online work that tend to make people want to read and come back, and that's a foundation of building an audience

Asking for Work Isn't Marketing

Yes, the economy is down. Yes, a good number of publications have been cutting back and even going under. Yes, you have to market harder to get work. But, no, simply asking people for work is not marketing.

One of the topics I"ve seen in the writers' newsgroups and forums is that of sending out letters of introduction (LOIs) and the disappointment that comes from not getting a response. But think about it for a moment. A letter of introduction should be just that: an introduction of the writer to the client. It's nothing more than knocking on the door. To expect work to immediately come from one is to expect that, to the potential client, you are important. You're not.

You need to be ready to follow up on an LOI, particularly at a time when everyone and their writing siblings are trying to nail down work. Even if you've found some approach for LOIs that seems to turn into assignments for you, be prepared to go further. And if you've never had much luck with them, don't expect more today.

That goes for asking for assignments from editors. It's one thing if you have a strong relationship that you've build over time (meaning that you have been marketing, particularly by satisfying the client's needs through your work). But if you haven't, then you're just another yelping writer outside the door, asking for a handout. Instead of doing the usual, try something different. Send an idea or two with an LOI to show that you're capable of taking some of the burden off an editor. Make a sharp observation or two (diplomatically put, of course) about a company's latest marketing campaign to show a prospect that you have paid attention to what it has done. Show that you can provide some value. That will help you stand out from the gimme crowd.

Nine Sources of Trade Magazine Lists

For those who don't realize it, trade magazines can be a great regular part of a freelancer's income. They always need copy and many pay reasonable amounts for articles. It is best to have knowledge of the industry in question, or at least to be able to show your fit for a particular topic pitch. Here are some resources for finding trade magazines in given industries -- all found in the space of minutes by doing some straightforward web searches:

• TradePub.com -- The site provides subscription services for business-to-business (b-to-b) publications. But it also gives you the name of publications and lists them by industry, so it's a great research tool.
• Free Trade Magazine Source -- This is another subscription stop.
• Yahoo's Media Directory -- Yahoo's directory, or categorization of links by topic, is one of the best. You can look by topic and see what publications are listed. It's not exhaustive, and you'll find consumer-targeted titles as well as b-to-b, but still useful. You can even go right to the trade magazine section of the directory.
• TechExpo Directory -- These are touted as science and technology trades, but there also seem to be more general industry titles as well.
• Amazon's Trade Magazine Listings -- Amazon sells magazine subscriptions and has an entire category of professional and trade titles. On the left you'll see links by topics. Not all the topics have associated titles, but many do.
• About.com
-- The link in this case takes you to a Google search page that looks for the term "trade magazines" on About.com. It won't all be a fit, but many of the entries will be lists of trade magazines put together by people who cover various topics on About.

• HighBeam Research -- You may hate how they try to sell your articles when you're getting nada for it, so make them pay in a different way by turning their lists of trade journals into a marketing mine.
• Encyclopedia.com -- For some reason, the reference site, which republishes many trade magazine articles, has them listed in reverse alphabetical order.
• Magazines.com -- A site for ordering magazines, you can browse by title or by category.

When the Marketing Response is Disappointing

In the online marketing class I'm currently teaching, someone had sent a pitch to a number of prospective clients and was unhappy with the result. Given that many writers send out letters of introduction to multiple companies as part of a marketing push, I thought it would make sense to address the issue.

Although this seems to be a basic type of marketing, it actually falls into an advanced form called direct marketing. Yes, all the junk mail and spam you receive and all the infomercials and full-page pitches in magazines and newspapers you see are actually advanced forms of marketing. They use varying degrees of marketing savvy, mathematical analysis, writing technique, and design innovation to be effective. Your success depends on the following:

• Picking the right target audience.
• Identifying the specific members of the audience to contact.
• Finding some hook or offer that will be compelling to them.
• Creating materials that adequately present the offer and overcome objections.
• Dealing in larger numbers.

That last point is the focus of this post. When you undertake direct marketing, there are a number of places where things can and will go wrong:

1. You may not be able to identify people who would be the perfect fit.
2. Those who would be a good fit might have no need for what you're selling at the moment.
3. They might have a need, but your pitch might not provide an offer that pushes them into action.
4. There may be something off-putting about your marketing.
5. They might not even look at what you sent, assuming it to be "junk" or "spam."
You could be targeting the wrong person at the prospect company.
6. You might do inadequate follow-up to close any business.

Any of these can kill off the chance of getting work from a particular prospect, and a number of them may be a problem at some times but not at others. For example, even if you reach a company that needs writers and somehow find the person in charge of retaining their services, that person might have just hired a few writers for all the projects they have over the next few months.

Direct marketing is generally judged in terms of the percentage of desired responses that you are trying to get. You've probably heard of the "two percent" rule of thumb. Toss that out the window. There is no single rules of thumb. Some campaigns would be doing fabulously well to get two percent of the recipients to respond. For others that are more narrowly targeted, that amount might be failure. That is because direct marketers analyze how much profit the client is likely to bring in over time and the cost of reaching each one. If the total profit from the business is larger than the total cost of the campaign, you're making money. If it's lower, you're losing money. Then it's an issue of whether you're making enough money for the expenses and time you're putting into the project.

To even begin judging how your campaign went, you must ask a number of questions:

• Who was your target audience?
• How did you select the companies?
• Who did you target within the companies?
• How much research did you do on these companies?
• How many pitches did you send?
• How many companies did you contact?
• How many of these companies gave you at least one assignment before you followed up?
• After the follow up, how many had given you at least one assignment?

If you've sent out 20 LOIs and received two assignments, you're getting a ten percent response, which would generally be considered very healthy. Even if you get one assignment from an email campaign this small, you are doing well. If you don't get one, it might be that there is a problem with your letter, but that is hard to say because you aren't sending enough to measure your success. I can't stress that enough. Say that you have a campaign that we know from extensive past experience would get a three percent response - out of every 100 contacts, we've seen that you get about three assignments. Send it to 20 people, and the numbers say that you'd get 0.6 assignments. You're sending it to so few people that even if the campaign is successful, you might get no assignments on that round.

Until you start to understand the dynamics of direct marketing and look at your results in context, you may be doing better than you think.

Two Principles to Get Control Over Your Business in Bad Times

In various freelance forums and message groups, I've been hearing an increasing number of people feeling as though they have no control over what happens to them. As a result, they begin to take every setback personally and wonder who to get out of the emotional rut.

There is much in business that is beyond personal control - always. Even in the good times, you might be buoyed by a run of luck or economic conditions where companies are doing things because they think the entire nature of business has changed. We're just getting out of a long run of that. To have a sane relationship to your business, and not go through cycles of elation and depression, you have to start thinking and working above momentary events.

Rejections are almost never personal, and when they are, you wouldn't want to be working with that client anyway. While you cannot control how people react, you can influence it in two ways. One is to focus on how you market and the way you structure pitches and introductions. The more you can figure out what prospects need and focus on that, the more likely you'll catch the group that is willing to do something. You won't get every assignment; you never did. But remember, even when budgets get cranked down, companies still have to do business and publications need material.

That leads into the other way to control things. I remember many years ago reading the book "Rites of Passage at $100,000 to $1 Million +". It is a book about executive job change written by an experienced recruiter. He made the point that if someone really wants to get a job, the person should do direct contacts to literally 1,000 firms. The reason is timing and the law of averages. At any one time, a candidate is only going to be a good fit for only some percentage of companies, and at any one time, only some fraction of them will be interested in hiring. By sending out 1,000, candidates start to statistically ensure that they'll get interviews and, likely, a position (assuming that they have the experience and talent).

The way you deal with questionable conditions is to increase marketing. The more feelers you have out -- not even necessarily full-blown queries, but checking with potential clients to see what they are doing these days -- the greater a chance that some of your efforts will turn into sales. Between incresaing your contacts and honing the approach you take, you can start to control things because you're not letting yourself be dependent on what any one given client or prospect might be doing. This will probably mean more diversification in the past, but it will keep the business going well and put you in a position to do that much better when the economic cards turn a different way in the future.

On White Papers

There is some white paper "summit" that a number of people who sell books, courses, and consulting to writers are promoting. Now, this can be a good area in which to work. I know of one writer who has pulled down close to a half million a year at times writing white papers. Sound good? Yes, it does - but he had a deep technical knowledge of the topics he covered and was particularly good at writing about them. His background was not in copywriting, but in journalism.

Some of the points in the summit advertisement -- such as "painlessly" creating white papers, learning "closely guarded secrets," and "discover the deadly mistakes that will bar you from success" -- make me suspicious. They are straight out of copy writing 101, and exactly the sorts of things that won't work in white papers.

So I thought I'd offer a few points that might be helpful to those who want to work in the area:

1. You really need to understand the topic. Forget about faking it, because these papers are usually written for business-to-business marketing. The clients and ultimate target audiences know far too much and want some understanding.White papers are far closer to articles than marketing copy. So forget the hype and focus on the details of the message that you have to get across.These things take time to do well, so plan and price accordingly.Bring some marketing expertise. Help the client remember that they have to consider the audiences they must reach and the messages that might work. After all, you're there to help them communicate, so don't be shy.
2. There are three general sources of white paper business that I know: direct assignments from corporations (which means developing clients the way you would for other corporate work, usually focusing on the corporate communications department); custom publishers (including magazine publishers that have associated custom pub arms; and marketing and advertising agencies.
3. When looking at custom publishers and marketing or advertising agencies, find ones that focus on the industries in which you have some expertise.

Negotiating Client Budget Reductions

Yes, economic times are tough. Yes, some industries are particularly hard hit. Yes, some number of clients are going to push back on rates, crying that they are in budget difficulties. And, yes, it's true: many are and might not have more money to spend.

But, as I've written before, no, your first reaction should not be to drop your prices in a bid to make clients happy. There are a few reasons:

• Some clients may be desperate, but there will also be many interested in knowing how much they can save by crying poor.
• Anyone who wrote for technology publications in the late 1990s knows that when the dot com bubble burst, specialized magazines were going out of business right and left, and the remaining ones reduced their rates. (To be fair, the rates were related to high demand for writers and their relative scarcity to the work load.) If a client says, "We'll pay less until times are better," realize that the probability that times will get better enough for them to raise rates is about zero.
• Clients often talk, and once you're known for writing for those who pay less, the ones who pay more may want to revisit your rates.
• The more you give in on pricing, the more you have to work to make your living. Eventually your life is there to support your work, not the other way around.

To reduce your rates is to devalue what you are doing. There may be times it is necessary, but that is probably a rare occasion. More often you can try renegotiating to balance out the value you are giving up. Here are some approaches that can work:

1. Reduce what you offer -- Look to see where you can scale back what you provide to the client. Mind you, this is something you do out in the open so they understand that they are getting less because they are paying less. Maybe you don't search for art, or write something shorter, or provide fewer options.
2. Better payment terms -- If budgets are smaller, it might be that the client can pay faster or pay for a bank transfer instead of your waiting for a check to clear. Be careful, as some clients will promise anything knowing that the accounting department will work on its usually time frame.
3. Get regular work -- It takes a certain amount of time to find work. Get to some reasonable estimate of how long that is, and you can use your bottom line hourly figure to determine how much that time is worth to you. Discount an assignment by less than that, and you're actually ahead because you open more time for assignments and other marketing. So trade off a somewhat lower fee for guaranteed work.
4. Improve other terms -- There may be other conditions that, if changed, either improve cash flow, open time, or provide some other benefit whose financial value you can calculate. It may be that having more time to work on an assignment lets you manage your schedule more effectively. If you're doing work that requires outsourcing sections, it could be that you can have the client directly pay the other people (though you do face the potential risk of their making deals independent of you, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your business model). It might be that you can get money forwarded for expenses, rather than receiving payment after the fact.

As with all forms of negotiation, creative problem solving can take you a long way and even turn what could have been an income drop into a net gain.

Business Planning and Marketing Classes in January

As I do periodically, I'm teaching some on-line courses at Freelance Success (FLX members get a discount, but they're open to anyone). Instead of one at a time, however, I'm experimenting and teaching both the business planning and marketing classes simultaneously, because there was a split among those who wanted one or the other. Anyone potentially interested can click the links or can also email me for additional information.

NYT Debt and Watching Clients

There has been some good coverage of late on the finances of some media bellwethers, but it is in places that many writers may not check. Silicon Alley Insider, which generally covers the high tech industry, took a look at the cash position of the New York Times Co.. If their analysis is right, then the company is in far worse shape than you may have been hearing -- bad enough that it might be a reason to avoid writing for any of their publications at any time other than the immediate future only.

The long and short of it is that the company owes $453 million more than it has in assets in the short term. In the long term, it actually has about $33 million more than it owes, but that counts current market rates for things like land and buildings. That would mean the company would essentially have to liquidate itself to have that much left:

When a company like NYTCo is healthy and generating cash, none of this really matters. The New York Times's value isn't in buildings or land--it's in the value of the brand and ongoing business, which aren't reflected on the balance sheet. Now that NYTCo has gotten itself in a financial pickle, however, the balance sheet and current cash flows matter a lot.

The NYT's "current ratio"--current assets vs. current liabilities--is now about 1 to 2, which is horrible (In the next year, the company will be required to pay out more than twice as much value as it has on hand). For comparison, a robustly healthy company, such as Google, has a current ratio of 8 to 1. Even General Motors has a better current ratio than the NYT.

That doesn't count the potential cash value of such properties as the Boston Globe, which it's been trying to sell off, but who wants to buy a newspaper these days? The short term view is the real killer, because by May it could be facing this big deficit in a tough credit market.

I'm not inclined to write for them in any case given the contracts and my back being up over retroactive provisions. Heck, even the NYT Magazine insists on joint copyright ownership these days. But even if I were inclined, this would make me concerned about whether a day might come when I wouldn't get paid.

The Problem with Social Media Campaigns

I'm about to talk about corporate marketing because there's a chance that some readers will seek financial solace in the arms of big business. One of the trends in marketing has been social media, putting together campaigns that are supposed to work on such sites as Facebook or MySpace. The concept actually isn't new and we've seen all sorts of "viral" campaigns bravely rolled out by corporations hoping to surf on the zeitgeist.

Unfortunately, if you've had the sense that many of these efforts will go nowhere, some research bears out your pessimism. A Gartner researcher said that three-quarters of the Fortune 1000 are trying to use social media, and that half of these efforts will fail:

"(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won't have a mutual purpose, and they'll fail," Sarner said. By a "mutual purpose," he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don't go over as well with the public.

In other words, people don't go to social media for the sake of companies. They go for their own interests. If the campaign you write doesn't take that into account, then it won't work. The campaign also must have an intelligent goal. Trying to "get people talking" isn't enough, because without action there will be no business benefit.

So you have to match the venue of the campaign, and its content, with the types of people you will find at that venue and their interests. It's really basic marketing, but easy to overlook in the rush to do trendy work. So act as a consultant, not just as a writer, and help your clients see the basic problems and be sure they are framing a campaign in a way that's likely to work. Because if it doesn't, guess who is likely to be seeing a good portion of the blame?

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.

Amazon Buys Book-Centric Social Network

Writers trying to understand the book marketing and various commercial forces within it might do well to read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. It's a social network for book fanciers and, clearly, a potential indirect (or even direct) marketing outlet for Amazon.

As I mentioned before, Amazon also bought AbeBooks, which gave the former a stake in LibraryThing, a Shelfari competitor:

This resulted in an awkward scenario - while Shelfari and LibraryThing are similar and could conceivably be merged by Amazon pending a dual aquision, there is bad blood between them. LibraryThing’s founder has openly criticized Shelfari for spamming users and astroturfing blogs, and generally behaving as a “bad actor”.

It might be that Amazon will cut LibraryThing loose, or it could try to fully acquire it as well and merge the two services together.

What is clear for authors, though, is that the market - in a broad sense, running from production to consumer marketing and distribution and sales - is being tied up by Amazon. I think this is a bad situation for any who want to make book writing a part of their businesses. The more concentration in one set of hands, the more control those hands have. If those hands happen to use spamming and other techniques that annoy users, the results could spill over onto the authors.

Another Read for Book Authors

Unfortunately, I came across an amusing concept in a Guardian blog this morning after my post for the day had already gone out, or I'd have combined these two. A novelist decided to bring in some extra cash by selling shares in his future US royalties. Though, on reflection, perhaps amusing isn't the right word. There is something sad about having to trade on your future potential because you can't get enough money to undertake your profession based on what you've already done. But there is something intriguing about the publicity possibilities in such a move. Sadly, once done, I think it would be tough to get attention a second time. All you have to do is come up with the next outrageous gimmick to get media attention on your book, which is really where you want it.

A Must Read for Book Authors

I literally just finished going through the Businessweek article, The Online Fan World of the Twilight Vampire Books, and cannot reccomend it strongly enough to anyone writing fiction or nonfiction books. This is a story of a woman who used online intelligently and imaginatively:

Meyers success isnt due simply to her vivid imagination for vampire romance. She also figured out before almost anyone in the book industry how to connect with readers over the Internet and inspire them to build on her work. Since Meyer published the first Twilight book in 2005, she has reached out to readers on social networking sites, such as MySpace (NWS), and participated in online discussion groups. Fired-up fans have championed her books on Amazon.com (AMZN) and set up their own sites, such as Twilight Lexicon and TwilightMOMS. That has helped propel sales of the series to 7.5 million books. "Other authors have pockets of fans online, but nothing to this extent," says Trevor Dayton, a vice-president at Indigo, Canada's leading bookseller. "Stephenie Meyers Twilight series is the first social networking best seller."

To be fair, her publisher, Little Brown, saw the possibilities and got behind her first novel, as it paid $750,000 for a three-book deal. But that could have flopped. And it's not as though she was a trained marketeer. Instead, Meyer started taking up opportunities that presented themselves. Will every book pushed online do this type of business? Absolutely not. Run quickly from any "silver bullet" solution to your marketing needs. However, the example shows how it is possible to go beyond what the publisher alone can or will do.

Myth of the Long Tail?

A study in the Harvard Business Review looked at some data in the light of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory and concluded that while the tail is getting a bit thicker, the head - the "popular stuff" - is really what is growing. Or in the words of that great business philosopher, Ira Gershwin, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news." I've written about this on BNET (the new business arm of CNET), and that has links to the study as well as to Anderson's reply (which I found essentially unsatisfactory).

But enough of them; let's talk about us. Does the long tail hold any hope for individual writers? Yes and no. The upside is that if you have some writing that will interest a large enough community, and you market hard, then you can make money. You can, that is, if you put in the work and don't sit passively, assuming that the long tail is going to bring your income to you.

I get the sense that many writers look to the long tail concept as a silver bullet that will bring money in without them having to do anything else. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Say that an Amazon sees 20 percent of its 2007 sales of about $14.8 billion in the long tail (though the study would suggest more like 10 percent). According to Anderson, the tail should be everything that you wouldn't find in a Borders or Barnes & Nobel physical location. That means every one of the estimate million book SKUs the 10 or 20 thousand you might find in a store. So be generous and call the remainder 9.8 million. Divide and you get ... $285 per year per SKU.

Even if there is an average of 2 SKUs per book (each SKU representing a specific version of the book you could buy), that's annual revenue of $570 from Amazon. Even if that is only part of what you get (and remember, physical book outlets won't even have your title, by definition of tail), what are you going to make total? Maybe $1100, and that's in total sales. The cut going back to the publisher is half, so you're back to your royalties on $570 a year, or maybe $60. Self-publish and you could get the number higher, but that's hardly the passive approach to the long tail.

The only hope the "long tail" offers the individual author is the old concept of niche audiences, marketing to them, and making money. Nothing new there, and nothing easy. In fact, I'd argue that the only writer who is really making money off the long tail is Anderson himself.

What Your Hourly Rate Isn't

Many writers misuse hourly rates and, as a result, end up damaging the smooth and profitable operation of their businesses. Here are points to check when you consider what you make per hour:

• Double-check your calculation of a minimum hourly rate. I've seen writers assume that they will bill a much higher percentage of their time than is realistic. Calculating a minimum hourly charge involves tallying all the money you need to make for a given time period, say a year, and then dividing it by the billable hours for that period. Most consultants and freelance businesspeople will do reasonably well if they can charge for half of their time. However, I've seen writers assuming that they would be able to charge for 70 percent or more. That is great if it can happen, but it's a terrible idea to assume it will. The higher your number of billable hours, the less money you have to make per hour to hit your financial goals. The problem comes when you find that you don't bill that many hours but have been charging as though you would. Suddenly you wind up with less money than you need. Do yourself a favor and figure that at best only half of your time is billable.


• Don't focus on the hour and forget to look at the bigger picture. If you want a sobering number, take all the money you actually make, not need to make, for a year and then divide that by the total number of working hours, not just the amount you can bill, in that year. Taking two weeks vacation, holidays, weekends, sick time/personal days out of the picture, but leaving in marketing and administration time, that should leave you with 1,840 hours. So divide a year of income by 1,840 to find out what you actually made per hour for a typical 40 hour work week. Here's a hint: if you grossed $100,000, that would be just over $54 per hour. If you're grossing $40,000, that would be under $22 per hour. When you think you're satisfied because you made $100 per hour on a given job, remember the big picture. You have to aim higher in revenue because you have to pay yourself for all those unbilled hours.


• Remember to aim high. The previous couple of calculations should suggest that it is all too common for writers not to be charging enough. Remember that when setting your pricing. If your current clients pay far lower than you need to make per hour, it is time to find some new ones.


• There is a fallacy of "market" hourly rates. There are too many variations on markets to come up with a number that is really representational; rates will vary by company size, industry, type of writing, needed expertise, and so on. You might ask another writer what he or she makes for a certain type of work, but is that what you can make? Do you offer enough value to match that number? Or is the writer charging too little, and will you leave yourself in someone else's economic hole? Focus on what you need to make as well as the value you can bring, because you can't get away with charging more than what clients perceive you to be worth.

Why Have a Web Site?

If you've been debating whether to spend the time and energy on a web site, or you have a site and wonder what more you can do with it, here are some suggestions of business advantages you can get from your site:

• Show a range of writing that you do or topic ares you understand.


• List special training, talents, certifications, or expertise that might not be immediately clear from the writing.


• Keep a page of links to recent work so editors don't have to track everything down or deal with attachments.


• Offer a range of informative articles that provide value to clients and prospects while demonstrating your professional abilities.


• Show a client list and a set of testimonials so it's not just you talking about you.- Set out the nature of your business and the types of work you tend to do.


• Show speaking engagements that can communicate a more robust sense of your expertise.


• Provide a frequently asked questions section that can offload the more rote and time-consuming questions that you get.


• Convey the idea to prospects or even editorial sources that you are "real."

Book Promotion 2.0

Author Dennis Cass has a funny video on Youtube.com about an author hopelessly trying to get with internet promotion of his work. So smartly depressing that you can only laugh.

Fear of Phoning: 5 Techniques to Reduce It

From time to time I see writers posting online messages about feeling afraid to call clients. Personally, I think it's a mistake to simply avoid the situation by using email for several reasons:

• Constantly avoiding what you fear only strengthens the emotion's grip on you.
• Editors often ignore email, or the messages get pushed into a spam filter, leaving the writer wondering why there is no answer.
• Sometimes the phone is the best form of communication, next to being in-person, and to avoid it is to give up an important marketing and sales tool.

I often see another writer answer something to the extent of, "Oh, but you're great, so just call. Don't be worried about it." Tell that to the person in the middle of fear. It may sound good, but the results can be exactly the opposite of what the encourager might want. Instead, here are some approaches that can be helpful. None of them require you to directly confront the fear, as often the most effective approach is an indirect one that lets you focus on intellect or action, both of which offer you far more control:

• Write it down One of the ways the fear of phoning comes out is the sense that you're babbling and sound like a complete loon. So write down all the points you want to make in roughly the order you want to make them. When you're prepared and know what you have to say, then you can stick with that, rather than trying to wing it.
• Take your time There is no rule that all negotiations happen within one sentence, let alone one conversation. Take the time you need to make your points. If someone comes up with something you're not ready for, say that you have to give it some thought and plan a subsequent discussion on the issue.
• Schedule ahead It's tought to make yourself pick up the phone when you're in the middle of fear. But the entire situation is different when you've scheduled the call and you cannot simply not bother. Use the power of your own obligation to get you on the phone in the first place, when possible.
• You can always say no You tend to get on a call to conduct a negotiation, whether over a contract, an assignment, or even the attempt to get an assignment. Fear comes in part from the concern that you won't get what you want. When that happens, invoke the power of walking away. There is no single assignment that will make or break your career and no single job that will make or break your entire financial existence. There are always other clients and other work out there; remind yourself to reduce the pressure of how much you need this particular negotiation to go through.
• Do some marketing A variation on the previous point, you can become more confident when you have more prospects. Reduce your dependence by sending off a few queries before you get on the phone. The more choices you have in work, the more control you have and, as a result, the more confidence and less fear you will feel.

Work with every intellectual and physical tool you have in a way that increases the odds in your favor and reduces the power of fear.

Steady Clients: Passion or Passivity?

I had a couple of recent experiences that got me thinking about the nature of long-term clients and customer satisfaction. In one case, I had thanked a writer who had referred me to a client and got a pleasant note about the feedback being strongly positive and saying that it was likely we'd be working on the next project together. ON the other hand, I found myself on the other side of the writer/client relationship, being highly displeased with one writer, as I was editing a feature package for a magazine, and saying that I'd never work with the person again. When I talked to my editor, the real client, she said, "You know, you've inspired me. I've been putting up with that writer for a long time, but maybe I just won't use the person again."

Most people in business assume that a steady client is a good client. From some views, that is absolutely correct: you lower your cost of acquiring a new customer while increasing the customer's lifetime value, or the amount of money the entity spends with you over the span the two of you do business. In short, the more money you make over time from a customer, the more efficient your marketing becomes, the more time and resources you can invest in building the future of your business, and the greater return on your previous marketing time and money investment.

Not all steady customers are the same:

• Some like doing business with you. They will seek you out, at least for the types of work they perceive you as doing well.



• Another group does business out of convenience. They have experience with you, so you become the devil they know, rather than the one they don't. That's not to say that all clients in this category consider you a devil, but we all have our weaknesses. On the balance, they find that doing business with you is a reasonably move on their parts.



• Third comes clients that work with you out of habit or inertia. They may not particularly like your work, business model, or style, but it's not enough to drive them off immediately.



• Fourth is the captured group that does business with you because they feel that they have no other choice, but they are actively interested in finding a replacement.

As you go from top to bottom, the clients may still be steady, for now, but they are increasingly likely to find another writer as soon as is convenient. That means there are different levels of vulnerability in your business even when you think some of your income is from tried and true sources.

I know we'd all like to think that all of our clients love us, but it's simply untrue. Look back over your career with some honesty, and you'll remember companies that flushed you out, or that took some work but didn't seem overly interested in having you do anything additional. There may have been some companies that kept a relationship only to get through a project - they were captive at the time - and beat a hasty retreat at the first possible moment.

Looking at your clients this way isn't to enter the land of blame, but of assessment. It may be that you and a client were or are simply incompatible, and that further business would run counter to either of your interests. The client might have been so unrealistic that a reasonable business effort would never have sufficed, and that there would never be enough forthcoming compensation to justify the exertion. Or it could be that you need to improve something - writing, business practices, areas of knowledge, or so on.

It generally takes time to know yourself well enough to begin making these judgment calls. I remember many, many years ago screwing up royally on some work and trying to blame the other party, but in my heart I knew that I was at fault. In a case like that, all you can do is work like hell to get good at what you do. Over time, the better you are, the more business starts coming your way, and the more you are able to command in the market. If you can get better faster, more power to you. If you're behind, why not work at getting better? Over time you might be able to increase a client's enthusiasm, and the chance that it will be around tomorrow.

Dealing With Rejection

Heather Boerneris addressing hte topic of rejection on her blog. That got me thinking about the topic and sending her a reply to a LInkedIn message she had sent out. But I thought I'd also look at the topic here.

Rejection is a constant companion for the self-employed. In fact, ask a group of experienced freelancers about the most important qualities for success, and not getting bogged down by rejection is one of the answers you'll inevitably get. The reason is that success in freelance writing comes from reducing the inevitable amount of rejection you'll get.

It's easy enough to say, "Develop a thick skin," but that doesn't explain why it is necessary. If you've been writing for any period of time, imagine what would happen if everyone said yes to everything you proposed. You'd drown in work and have no life. Getting work depends on hitting the right person in the right company at the right time with the right idea and right background to carry it out. That's a lot of right. The odds of that happening each and every time you send out a letter of introduction or query - given how much is completely out of your control - is unrealistic.

To get down from rejection has three parts. One is normal disappointment. I'd really like to know that the work and money were coming in, but they're not, so I have to move on to the next prospect.

Another part is not so normal, because it involves taking rejection as personal failure when you don’t accomplish what literally cannot be done. One is when the freelancer takes everything personally. Do you agree with your significant other on everything? Probably not, and you’re far less close to your clients, so why expect that much acceptance? You may be involved in your business, but you are not the same as your business. Focus on your decisions and the efforts you make, not on others.

The third problem is when you view each rejection as a threat. It’s not. Rejection works two ways, and you constantly reject clients – by not pitching them, by turning down projects that don’t make sense for you, by negotiating different terms than they originally wanted. It’s a game of numbers, and you need to make enough efforts so that, on the whole, the numbers break your way.

There is enough heartache in the world; why needlessly manufacture more for yourself? Clients aren’t family, friends, or lovers. They’re people who pay you to do something. Keep some distance and save the bitter rejection tears for those times that they are really warranted.

Taking Low-Paying Work

In response to my post about tips for writers during fears of a recession, a reader responded with the following:

Your latest email is great. I think there’s a #10 issue to address: whether to take on work that pays less than your normal rate because some money coming in is better than none. This is an issue that we go around and around about online, I know, but it’s a very real one, especially in this economic climate. Yes, taking lower-paying work will take time away from my marketing for better gigs, but I need to pay the mortgage, too. I know I’ve seen you opposed to doing this, in general, but you might want to revisit the issue and examine it from both sides.

Happy to oblige. What I oppose is taking low-paying work when that becomes a reflex action to any business difficulty. The problem is that you set yourself up in a few ways:

• You generally have to work more with low-paying work to make a living, which means that you end up cutting down your marketing time and reducing the chance of getting something that pays reasonably.


• Often writers point to an effective per-hour rate that seems reasonable. That may be true for the off-piece, but those who do significant amounts of such work don't generally seem to do that well overall. That's because you still have to spend time getting the work in and managing the flow. Now your marketing needs increase, because an increased set of assignments means you must bring them in. So you're cutting down on the time available for that lower-paying work and putting a ceiling on what you can earn.


• It should take about the same amount of time to do a competent job on a given length assignment; it's independent of the pay. To decrease the time and increase the hourly rate, you cut corners. Read the writers' boards and you'll see how many people complain about having the do the extra interviews, concept planning, rewrites, etc. That means, to some extent, you must do less than your best, and certainly less than would be required with a higher-paying and more demanding client. You end up turning the writing into factory work. Those who want the commodity writing excuse their lower pay by lowering their expectations. However, if you do this all the time, you end up with a lot of work samples that, to a more discerning client, will speak of such factory work. To put it bluntly, when you skimp, you make yourself appear like a hack to the clients you really want to attract, who then are less likely to use you and you do more of the low-end work. It's like the old concept of company-provided housing and a company-owned store; you never get to make enough to get out from under.

All that said, the reader who emailed me is right. There may be times to take lower-paying work. If you have to send off the mortgage or rent, you need money to do that. But given the above discussion, I think there are a few principles to follow when taking lower rate work:

1. Don't discount. You want to preserve the ability to charge more, because that makes a living easier to get. So don't drop your rate with regular clients in a hope to attract more work. If they are regular clients, then they know what you're capable of doing. If you start taking less, you will continue to take less, because you've said through your action that what you do is actually worth less.


2. Limit the exposure. Treat lower-paying work as something literally to make your nut. Keep marketing fiercely to make it as unnecessary as possible. Continue focusing on getting better-paying work.


3. Balance the value equation. As I teach in my various classes, business is a value equation. You provide value and expect value in return. I don't believe in cutting corners. If you get paid less, still treat the assignment as seriously as you would any. But try to balance the equation to get enough value back in one form or other. Low paying assignments will have to turn around cash quickly enough, be limited in the rights they get, or possibly sit on research you've already done. If you can't make it a naturally more acceptable assignment, then you should pass on it.


4. Incorporate it into your business model. Low-paying work can be a distraction when you just react to it. So don't. Make the lower paying work part of your business model, even if only while economic times seem tough. Have a strategy for it, set boundaries for how you deal with such work, and stick to them. That way you reduce the possibility of losing a grip on your higher-paying "real" work, and increase the chance that the two work streams will harmoniously co-exist.


5. Don't buy someone else's PR. Economic downturns are funny things. They don't affect everyone and everything evenly. Don't go into lower paying work from a panic. Instead, watch how things are going in your usual work. Are you sure that any problem isn't a result of your letting up on your usual marketing? (That can happen too easily to any of us.) Try doubling up on marketing first, unless you're in a cash crisis and the turnaround on such efforts will take longer than you have.


6. Don't buy someone's negotiating tactic. Sad as it is from a view of humanity, there are people who will try to use a recession as an excuse to reduce what they pay, even though they don't have to. But it's not as though you can find a way to work more cheaply as manufacturers often do. Maybe you can to some degree, but be wary of any client who tries to strong arm you into what is unwise for your business. Another way of putting it is that there are poorly-paying clients, and then there are cheap clients. The latter are generally ones to avoid, because they're not providing value in other ways. They just want something for nothing.


7. Don't panic. Douglas Adams had it right in the Hitcherhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The biggest mistake you can make is to freak out. Take a deep breath and consider all your options in dealing with an economic crisis. Some of those might include borrowing money, negotiating with creditors to spread out payments, or reduce expenditures. The more creative you can be on money, the more space you can make for smarter business decisions.

It may be that a recession will force you to consider lower-paying lines of work, and that can be part of life. But if you have to go there, do it with your eyes open.

Nine Tips for Writers During Recession Fears

What kills business isn't a recession so much as the fear of one. I don't just mean the overall economic effect, but the paralysis that can happen when you own a business and start thinking that you are the plaything of inevitability. You aren't. Here are nine tips you can use to strengthen your approach to doing business during a recession:

1. Market more - a lot more.


2. Don't be picky about topics. You can focus on the "but I *love* to write about XYZ" when you can afford to.


3. Look not just at the clients (and advertisers), but the industries. For example, the legal industry is often considered to be virtually recession proof, because companies need lawyers to do the deals when things are good, and bankruptcies/restructuring debt when things are bad.


4. Read trade press and talk to other writers to see if a given publication shows any of the signs of financial trouble. Ziff Davis just went into bankruptcy, but the signs were there for a while - one reason I didn't try to get work out of them.


5. Look for signs of trouble in your own clients. If checks start taking longer to get to you, start looking for other people to work for.


6. If you have a knowledge/experience niche that gives you a strong in with certain types of stories, strengthen it. If you don't, develop a niche. And keep adding niches as you can.


7. Don't put all your eggs in one client type basket. If you cover a topic for consumer pubs, see if there are things you can do for trade pubs as well, and vice versa.


8. Don't end up using a recession as an excuse: "I can't do any better because of the economy." When most everyone is marching in one direction, go in the other to find opportunities.


9. Look for companies that are more likely to keep producing written materials. An association magazine is one of the better examples, because if they're not sending something out to the members, it's probably because they're out of business. A custom publisher is a lesser example, because when companies feel the pinch, the custom publishing projects may be some of the first things to go, unless not having the publication is unthinkable for their businesses.

If it makes you feel any better, during the last major recession, right after the dot com bubble, there were writers who didn't see big drops in their income. Keep working away and, even if things aren't pretty, you can weather the storm.

Update

A reader emailed, asking me to address the issue of taking lower-paying writing to fill in cash needs. Here's my take on it.

Newspaper Publisher Facing Interesting Economic Times

Media General, claims to own more daily newspapers in the Southeast than any other company, is facing some potential economic shake-up. According to AP, the company is going to meet with a hedge fund that wants to nominate directors to the company's board:

Last week, [hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners] said it is nominating a slate of candidates for the company's board because Media General "has lost strategic, operational and geographic focus in recent years," according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

When a hedge fund wants to place directors on a board, it's generally because it doesn't see enough short term profits from the company, which could turn into return on its investment. The changes the directors might push for could run from smarter strategic directions to cost cutting and even selling off properties.

Media General owns The Tampa Tribune; the Richmond Times-Dispatch; the Winston-Salem Journal; 22 daily community newspapers in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama and South Carolina; and more than 100 weekly newspapers and other publications. If you are writing for a Media General paper, then I think it would be prudent to assume that there will be continued belt tightening, incluidng smaller freelance budgets and all the joys that brings to people like us.

Crossover Market Strategies

Someone on a writers' forum asked about strategies from moving from one topic area to another in which you have no expertise or experience. Here are four approaches you can use to get into new markets. The first is one that I teach in my online marketing class. You create a series of steps that get you from one subject to another, creating a trail that you can follow. For example, pretend that you write about classical music in specialty magazines and that you want to write business stories about retail. Here is a set of steps that could plausibly get you from one to the other:

1. Write music pieces for magazines devoted to classical music lovers.


2. Pitch and then write an article that looks at the business life and realities of a free-lance classical performer.


3. Pitch a story to a small business magazine about a small album label that is trying to go against the conventional wisdom that classical music is dying out.


4. For another business magazine, write a story about the economics of niche music at retail establishments, and how that affects what you can hear.


5. Pitch some retail stories.

It generally shouldn't take more than about five or six steps to make the transition, and if you're clever, you can sometimes combine steps to shorten the amount of time. In the above example, the writer could have turned the third step into writing a story about a retail store that was trying something interesting to increase sales of classical music. Suddenly you're into writing about retail stores almost immediately.

Another crossover strategy is to create a strong enough relationship with an editor that he or she has a level of trust in you. The editor may know that you don't have specific expertise in the area, but understands that you won't get involved in something where you can't deliver. The first assignment or two may be shorts, because that reduces the exposure for the editor; if something goes wrong, it's easy to recover.

You could do so much research up front that you demonstrate some expertise, even though you haven't officially had any. Infuse the query with insight that builds confidence on the part of the editor. Then you complement the research with compelling clips. There are a three major tactics, in general, for choosing clips. You can focus on writing technique, expertise, publication prestige. You can use any combination of them. Because you don't have the expertise (otherwise this wouldn't be a market crossover situation), you take a mix of clips with great writing from the biggest publications to which you've contributed. (This is difficult to pull off when you don't have good national clips.) Mix the topics of the clips so you convey the impression of being able to cover a lot of different things.

Entering a new market is one circumstance under which pitching poorly paying publications can make strategic sense. If you have strong clips in other areas and want to build a track record for a new one, the editor with little budget might jump at taking a chance on you. Then you start to get your legs underneath you, without asking a mainstream pub to underwrite your learning curve at its usual rates. You get a clip or two on the topic, then quickly start moving up to the level of publications that you want.

It's vital for writers to understand ways of moving from one market to another. Not only can an infusion of new material keep you flexible so you can respond to changes in the economics of the industry, but it can shake up your usual beats, adding depth and insight that comes from making the intellectual and emotional connections among apparently disparate topics.

Learn to Say No

Every writer knows that there are times to just say no. Sometimes pay or terms of a deal are far enough from your business model and practices that you can't afford to take on a given assignment or client.

And yet there is another circumstance under which many writers would do well to reply in the negative, even if their impulse is to agree almost before the question is asked. That's when someone approaches a writer with a potential assignment out of his or her experience and the writer relies on the theory that yes is always the right answer, with a scramble after to find a way to satisfy it.

I disagree that yes is always the smart thing to say, and would argue that the approach is often business disaster waiting to happen. There are areas that need specific experience and knowledge. For example, it's difficult to write about investor relations, whether in an article or as part of an annual report without some clear understanding about the regulatory nature of the field and what can and cannot be said. You could agree to cover semiconductor manufacturing without the right type of tech background, and things could blow up without your even realizing that they have at the time.

This isn't to say that you can't shift to new areas. Sometimes a topic unfamiliar to you has analogies in what you've already covered, making a transition smooth. It could be that something new, or the treatment of it, doesn't require anything that you don't already have. You might be able to develop expertise in a different field, if you invest the time.

Clients usually know when a general background will do, and when they need someone specialized. In the latter situation, making a promise and then assuming that you'll be able to cover the ground is not just taking a chance with your time, but with your client's business and money. Such cases are con games.

A business relationship is not just about you. If you find that you don't readily grasp the essentials of the topic, then you should not be covering it, or both you and the client should go into it with eyes open - and fees that reflect the fact you're on a learning curve.

Warning: VistaPrint

I've never used VistaPrint myself, but a writer in an online discussion mentioned that there have been reports of people getting unauthorized charges after placing an order with the company:

• Ripoff Report


• Random Thoughts Review


• Yahoo Finance Message Boards


• SmartMoney

These are just a few hits I got on a Google search on "VistaPrint" and "unauthorized charges." I've never used them and am not saying to avoid or use them. But if you're considering a purchase from them, doing some research before laying down your hard earned money would seem prudent.

Custom Publishing Becomes Custom Marketing

If you've ever done work in custom publishing, you know that it's really been about marketing - creating material whose value the client hopes to wear in the perception of its clients and prospects. According to this important article in AdAge, you can now put the emphasis on the marketing and take it away from the "publishing":

"We would rather call it custom marketing today," said Wendy Riches, exec VP at one of the biggest custom players, Meredith Publishing Group. That's because what used to be custom publishing now includes word-of-mouth, the internet, e-mail newsletters, mobile alerts, deeper database crunches and complex behavioral modeling.

The reason I emphasize the importance is that as custom publishers change their focus, they will look for writers with a broader set of experiences and competencies. If readership drops on magazines in general, chances are that it will, as well, with custom-published magazines. The publishers and their clients need to find new, productive outlets - and freelance writers need to find ways to show that they are the ones who can create the content for these new ventures.

Do not assume that a previous track record with the publisher will help. The client ultimately calls the tune, not the publisher. That is why the custom publishers often have the clients vet potential contributors. If you can't show that you've written for the web and email delivery, that you haven't produced any multimedia, that you don't understand the results of data modeling, it's likely the clients will say, "Please get us someone who knows these areas." You might argue that adapting to a new form isn't that hugely difficult, and I'd agree, if you are a versatile writer. But the client will perceive the world as it will, and will not want to foot the bill to let you get up to speed. Get the experience now, before you need to demonstrate it.

Don't Ignore Monthly Goals, Either

Earlier this week I discussed how you can put too much emphasis on monthly goals, wasting time and effort chasing something unnecessarily. But there is a flip side: complacency. Yes, it is possible to make up a month's revenue short-falling, but the possibility shifts with the circumstances.

Pushing additional revenue needs into a following month is fine if the amount is small. But the larger a deficit you try to cover, the more difficult your task becomes. Now you've committed yourself to longer hours and more work just to get back on track. The key is percentage by which you misss your goal. If you're down by a few percent, that probably isn't going to be impossibly difficult to attain. Hit 15 or 20 percent, and you're working some longer weeks; 50 percent, and you might be giving up sleep.

You might need to spread a large enough deficit over several months, but what happens if you have another off month? Or if you're crowding the end of the year and you want to hit your annual goal? You may have set yourself up to solve a problem that you cannot.

If you find yourself missing a monthly goal, don't panic, but do see what you can learn from it:

• Have you fallen short because of an unexpected event? Consider whether it really was a something that you could not have forseen, or if you might be essentially lying to yourself through overly optimistic estimations of the likelihood of closing business.


• Does your goal show unrealistic expectations for the markets and types of work that you've chosen to do? If so, you must revisit either your business model or your expectations.


• Are you working hard enough in marketing and selling? If not, the work won't come in. You should be pitching to get more business than you need, because not all of your marketing will turn into assignments.


• Are you working hard enough to finish the assignments? It doesn't matter if you've got an assignment; it won't help you meet a monthly goal if you don't finish in time to invoice during that month.


• In a similar vein, are you being realistic in the amount of work you can complete in a month, and how long it will take to do each assignment? If you find that important parts of your goal are going to be done right at the end of the month, assume that the schedule could slip and your revenue could slide out of one month and into another. That's not a big problem (assuming that the client is fine with the change) if you're finished at the beginning of the next month, but let it go too far and you'll be bumping revenue for that month as well, creating a situation where you cannot catch up by earning more than your goal.

Giving Away E-Books to Drive Sales

Author Paolo Coelho has apparently been giving away electronic versions of his books to great marketing effect. There's a quote on a site called TorrentFreak:

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]

I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]

So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.

And here's something from his official blog discussing a talk he gave about the phenomenon. I'm not saying that every author should immediately run off and give away copies, but the success that some have with this method does give one pause to think. With so many book purchases happening online, maybe this is the online equivalent of going to a book store, having a title catch your eye, flipping through it, and deciding to buy it. Or perhaps this will only work with a few authors and eventually the whole approach will fall apart. Interestingly, the people I've heard of who have had success - Coelho; journalist, science fiction author, and co-publisher of the popular web site BoingBoing.net; and M.J. Rose - have all been giving fiction away.

It makes me wonder whether there has been any success with giving away non-fiction - at least the non-literary type. (If you've heard of a case, please email me and let me know.) It could be that it's an approach that only works with more "literary" works. Or perhaps it's just that non-fiction authors generally have an easier time to get commercially published, and aren't quite desperate enough to take big chances that could result in success.

What's the Payoff?

One of the most difficult things to address in any business, including writing, is the value of speculative ventures. I've seen attitudes among writers go from the free pass ("It gives me good exposure," even if someone doesn't check metrics and can't track work to the blog) to the determinedly skeptical ("When will it turn into high paying work?"). Being on the extremes is often a bad idea because your view is like looking at something with one eye closed: there's no depth of field and no perspective.

The problem with the enthusiastic view is that you won't determine if the venture does offer your business anything. As I've mentioned, exposure for its own sake does nothing. It only makes sense as part of a planned business if your potential clients (whether a corporation or an editor or someone who might be part of your audience) see it and if the exposure helps to positively market your work. If the venture is simply low paying, then you must decide if there is really something of value, or if you are wasting time that might be better spent elsewhere.

Now that we've spent some time I've worn the glasses of the pessimists, let's look at the other view. It's great if you can predict that a venture will turn into a significant revenue stream, or lead to better paying work, but sometimes there is no way to know in advance. At best, you may only be able to use the clips as examples of your work and/or expertise in a given area, which might lead to better assignments, or the connections you make in covering an area may pay off in other venues. There is also the question of whether you just want to write about a given area for your own pleasure and don't care about payment.

So, when it comes to speculative ventures, I'd suggest the following approach:

1. Determine if the subject and format are ones that you would enjoy doing anyway. If the answer is truly yes, and not an affirmative that is really rationalization, then you have some benefit no matter how the money comes out.


2. Take a look at the venture and determine what skills and knowledge areas you might gain, and then do research to see if there might be some advantage to them. For example, learning to use a blogging system in a mechanical way isn't of that much value. But if you pick up how to embed online references, control such aspects of formatting as italics or bold, and learn how to set up tables and embed images, then you have skills that will make doing online work easier, and possibly increase your marketability with clients.


3. Consider the market for this type of work. Are the rates reasonable? Or are you effectively learning to use a word processor to become the high tech equivalent of a typist? If there is the opportunity to make significant money, then you might have a solid financial reason to start. However, realize that most new undertakings don't succeed. You need a realistic estimate of the chance that the venture will thrive and deliver what you anticipate. That means don't throw yourself completely into it unless you have the resources to carry you and your business in the meantime.


4. If the venture is a new business that you will own - maybe publishing your own blog or specialty web site - then ask if you've factored in the need for marketing the venture as its own entity. You might make money or you might not, but you certainly won't if you aren't promoting the venture to its potential audience. That will require time and could even demand monetary investment. That becomes a counter balance to what you might gain from it.


5. Finally you get to the question of the promotional value to you of the venture. This is not an area for feel-good guessing. You must be able to pinpoint what prospects will see it and potentially contact you to do work.

For a venture to make sense, I think it's smart to have more than one factor going for it. Look at each factor skeptically, but recognize that multiple benefits increase the chance of "success," at least as defined as being of more benefit to you than the time and energy you put into the venture.

Hold the Response

When you're pitching yourself - which, if you're a working writer, is virtually every day in some way or another - you'll find times when someone doesn't seem interested, or doesn't seem to get what you're saying. There will be days when the temptation to snap back and the ignorant putz will be great. Refrain, as you'll only do yourself ill.

The other day I had a couple of Profnet queries out, and I got a response from someone whose pitch didn't grab me for the particular story I was writing. When I replied, he asked why, and I told him. "You've got me laughing," he said, going on to explain how I was wrong. And the guy was promoting a book on marketing. My reaction? Who the hell are you to say whether something is actually a fit or not? I replied in a rather terse and sarcastic way, and he was smart enough to apologize. He said that he had meant it humorously - and maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. It wasn't for me to judge, but I did appreciate the gesture, and he saved a potential future relationship, or at least opportunity.

Not all do. Sometimes you'll find someone, usually not a PR professional, react. The minute that happens, the person cuts himself or herself dead. It doesn't matter whether you're talking to a journalist, editor, or corporate buyer; the mechanism is the same. When you feel that urge rise, fight it down and substitute something more useful, like, "Thanks, maybe next time."

That doesn't mean there's never a situation in which you answer back, but it's rare. There are only two circumstances I can see it happening. One is when people are so outrageously abusive that for the good of society you must make them understand that they cannot walk over people with impunity. I've seen many writers talk about abusive contacts, and personally I suspect that perception is exaggerated. Abusive isn't someone being short or even insensitive - it's a level of harangue or attack that is hard to miss.

The other situation is when you are absolutely sure that an idea you have would be a fit for someone. Under these circumstances, you go back, apologizing and indicating that if it's really not of interest, you'll drop it, but you're sure that you failed in your description, because you see a clear connection, and that you'd appreciate another chance. This also should be extremely rare. If you find yourself doing it more than a couple of times a year, there is something wrong - either you are pushing your ideas into places that really are not a fit, or you're dropping the ball in your initial explanations.

Except for these rare times, learn to lose the battle so that you might come back to the same field another day.

Two Dozen Literary Blogs

Book blogs have become a significant tool in book marketing. Get major bloggers to look at your book and review it, and you could start reaching a bigger audience than most major book review sections of newspaper (the ones still left). Here are a few that I picked up from a variety of sources. All had to be mentioned in at least one other high profile place, so if you have a book blog, don't take offense - mine certainly didn't make the cut.

• Beatrice


• Bookdwarf


• Bookslut


• Booksquare


• Buzz Girl


• Chekhov's Mistress


• Conversational Reading


• Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant


• Elegant Variation


• Emerging Writers Network


• Fantastic Metropolis


• Golden Rule Jones


• Literary Saloon


• MadInkBeard


• MoorishGirl


• OGIC - Courtesy of ArtsJournal: About Last Night


• Old Hag


• Rake's Progress


• Shaken & Stirred


• The Happy Booker


• The Millions (A Blog About Books)


• The Mumpsimus


• The Reading Experience


• Tingle Alley

Another WGA Lesson

Those who have heard me talk for, oh, five minutes and who haven't dozed as a result know that I've been beating the drum for how writers need to become their own publishers. Well, that's another lesson we all can learn from the Writers Guild strike. Check this LA Times piece. NBC has decided to air a show that started on the Internet. Why? Because it hasn't been on television yet. (Does that mean it hasn't existed any more than the tree out in the forest?) It's already produced, so isn't affected by the WGA strike - and probably won't be, because the writers own the damned stuff!

Read the LAT article carefully. A number of recent movies that have done well were financed by outside money people - and largely in control of the writers:

Being entrepreneurial isn't for the faint of heart. If you want a sweet upfront paycheck, you may not have the stomach for it. But after seeing studios bowdlerize their scripts, many writers will swap a big payday for more control. [Writer-director David] Twohy says that after Relativity read his script, "They told me, 'Script approved as-is.' I've never heard a studio ever say that."

I don't mean to be insulting or to belabor a point, but are you getting this yet? Writers can find ways to control their own work. The reins are slipping out of the fingers of those who traditionally controlled them.

What does this mean for the type of freelance writing you do? It's time to consider what you might create that a major publisher won't buy. No, you probably cannot afford to go off and do it full time without an investor. But what if someone did invest? Or what if you did it on the side, much the same way that some popular novelists who make boatloads now started by writing in the mornings, before heading to their 9-5 job?

Maybe you start with a blog and begin building an audience. Maybe you write something really good and go after book clubs to pick up your self-published title, sending free samples to those willing to consider it. Maybe you develop a site that will eventually support advertising. Don't expect that the money will roll in from day one. If you are going to be an entrepreneur - which, by the way, you already are, whether you realize it or not - then you have to start thinking like one. Real payoffs don't get offered up front. You invest your time and energy and take the compensation farther down the road. Some things you try will be a bust. Maybe some won't. But it's a hell of a lot better than passively griping about bad contracts, low pay, committee editing, and one-sided contracts.

Realistically, very few writers will start down this route. Most will look for safety. But it's the safety of a cage left on the beach, and the tide is coming in. The only safety in the long run is breaking out, building a boat, and learning to sail.

Shuttered Magazines and Their Running Web Sites

Yesterday it was looking at newspapers, and today an interesting piece in Folio about magazines closed by publishers that decided to leave the web sites up. As was true with the newspapers, the data is from Nielsen. This time we don't have the average time spent. The data below compares the date the magazine was shuttered (2007, unless otherwise stated) to the number of unique visitors for August 2007 (unless otherwise stated):

Site	Mag Gone	Visitors
NickJr.	February	3,260,000
Child.com	March	534,000
Cracked.com	February	365,000
ElleGirl.com	April 2006	358,000
InfoWorld	April	559,000
StuffMagazine.com	October	223,000 (July)

Without the time being spent, it's hard to determine whether people are seriously using these sites or just breezing through - the former meaning a better chance for the necessary advertising dollars. But it's interesting how many people some of these sites are bringing in even after the magazine itself closed. What would be really interesting to know is wht their revenues and profitability were compared to the print days. My guess would be that revenues are significantly down, but that profitability may not be - after all, why close the magazine and keep the web site open if you were a publisher and didn't think the site was adding to your bottom line?

The difficulty for writers is that the publishers have set an expectation of lower pay on the web, as they constantly complained about having to invest all this money into it. Well, of course they did, just as tradtiaional big consumer magazines can lose tens of millions - otherwise known as investment by the publishers - until finally turning a profit. Only, writers are getting suckered into underwriting what the publishers are doing. That can't last; if it does, we're all going to be out of the editorial business. Now is the time to push for treating the web and print as equals. Wait, and you'll contribute to the industry "standard" of paying web writers - a.k.a., you, in the future if not now - less than print writers.

Why You Need to Plan Your Business Today

In the middle of teaching one of my periodic online business planning classes, I've had some students saying that they're getting behind because they're too busy now. You may have said the same thing yourself - I'll start my business planning next week, or at the end of the year, and then you never get around to it. But planning isn't an affordable nicety.

I don't mean writing a formal business plan to shove into the drawer. Planning is the process of knowing where you need to go, where you are now, and how to get from point A to point B. It's a process, not a single activity, so there is no perfect answer. You might make some decisions only to find that they put you in a direction away from where you want to go. That's fine, so long as you keep looking at your client mix, the money you're making, the money you need to make, your pipeline of possibly work, level of marketing activity, cash flow, and other metrics critical to the running of any business. If you want to write for a living, then whether you like it or not, you have to treat this as a business.

Would you say you're too busy to send letters of introduction to prospects or queries to editors or proposals to corporate clients? You might, but you'd soon be in desperate financial straits, because only continued marketing keeps you solvent. Would you say you're too busy to send invoices? In that case, you could find yourself out of money, if not assignments, because you haven't kept up with what others owe you.

A process of business planning is just as important to your business as marketing and invoicing. The point isn't to come up with "the" answers. Instead, it's to start building a planning process, so you can move ahead over time. So, for example, if you can't analyze the profitability of all your clients, analyze that of the top few, to start. If you can't go through your entire old client list, at least examine a promising few.

Delaying planning to some future time offers no benefit, because you're still thinking in terms of a light switch: Today I'll plan and then everything will suddenly be OK. It won't, though. Only by continuously planning over time can you eventually make progress toward your goals. It's like hiking toward a mountain. You keep checking your progress, examining your direction, and noting the terrain and how you may have to adjust your gait to meet it. Eventually you get to the mountain, and every step brings you closer. If you wait to do the planning until you're there, you could end up tumbling down a ravine.

Prospect Resuscitation

You send a query or a letter of introduction to a prospect. You researched the market, tailored your approach and bio, and made sure you were sending it to the right person. Hitting the send button, you wait. And wait. And wait. Nothing happens for days, and then weeks, and then a few months.

You could write it off, but you don't have to. Don't assume that the potential client looked at what you send and thought, "Oh, give me a break! Who would ever want to hire that person?" It's far more likely that an email went into spam, that you got lost in a flood of other entries, or that the recipient took note and then forgot.

What you should do is dig out some of these old letters and queries as an experiment. Instead of writing again, telephone. Say that you had sent something and realized that you had never followed up, so you're getting in touch. At worst, the person ends up saying, "Send something again," without remembering you. At best, the contact may be far more satisfying.

I did this yesterday with an introductory email I had sent in either June or July. The editor remembered my name (maybe he was getting me confused with someone else, but that was fine because I was top of mind) and explained what they were doing. He requested me to resend the info, and I used what I learned in the conversation to further tailor it. He also explained that they give new writers a test assignment that should be easy to do - and I showed my understanding of the market by noting that it would probably be something easy for them to recover from should the writer mess up. He agreed - and I branded myself at least partly as a professional who understands the custom publishing (in this case) business.

I choose appropriate content - both multiple assignments from one custom publisher and an example from another that correctly suggested that I had done ongoing work, all of which will make me more palatable. At the end I said I'd be interested in a test assignment, because I had enough information to know this was the next step, and so I wanted a targeted call to action.

I'll be doing this with other leads that have fallen to the wayside. In fact, I emailed another editor who said that he still doesn't have budget to hire, but to check with him near the end of the year. Not all of this work will turn into assignments, but some portion will, and that's what counts.

Using Sweepstakes in Your Marketing

I've worked on just enough sweepstakes promotions in the past to know they're a pain in the rear. But recently a colleague, Rachel Weingarten, had posted something on a writers' board about having run a contest to promote her own book. Rachel, a marketing and PR pro, got a lot of inquiries from writers who wanted to do the same. She realized that many probably didn't appreciate the legal requirements. Here's a blog post she put together at my request about some of these considerations.

Australia Becomes Viable Market

A little over a month ago I mentioned that some foreign markets were becoming interesting business prospects for writers because of the fall of the dollar. Since then, the Canadian dollar has reached complete parity with currency here, which means that a magazine in Canada that pays $1 a word Canadian has just become a market that pays $1 a word American.

Now add another market - Australia. A few years ago, the Australian dollar was running at about 50 cents American. Yesterday, it hit a 23-year high - just over 90 cents - according to the Wall Street Journal. The trick here, as with Canada, is to find a publisher paying a reasonable amount in native currency. That means you'll bee seeing the same here, so long as you don't get quoted a lesser rate in dollars.

Another consideration is any country on the euro. At about US$1.40, you could get a premium. Something interesting is that a strong job report did nothing to boost US currency. This could mean that the dollar will continue to drop, making foreign markets even more attractive. Ironically, you'll be using the same business strategy as major investors: find where the return on the money (or time, research, and writing) you've invested is more, and take your profits from there.

Before using such a strategy, though, check with your bank. You want to be sure that wire fees and possible charges for converting currency to the US dollar doesn't put a crimp in the deal.

Watch Your Words in Pitches

With email, it's easy to quickly assemble a query or letter of introduction and send it to a prospect or client. Unfortunately, it's too easy to get sloppy, even when you swear up one side of the street and down the other that you'd never be guilty of the offense. The strongest piece of marketing you have is whatever you've written that is sitting in front of someone. If it is unclear in structure, the buyer will think that all of your writing is. Someone isn't going to ignore the email, because they'll assume that to be a clearer indication of your work habits.

Also be aware of reader sensitivities. As an example, the phrase "very unique" is unlikely to bring in additional assignments, but for people who count the phrase as silly (there are no degrees of uniqueness), it could be the kiss of death. When the phone doesn't ring, you'll know it's them. No mafia don will ever pay such heed to omerta, the code of silence.

Take a moment before you hit send, run spell check, and then read over the message yourself. Maybe you think you've never had a problem, but you'll never know who was unimpressed and decided to pass.

When Writing Marketing, Organize by Emotions

Many writers have difficulties in writing effective marketing, whether for themselves or for others. They start using predictable glib phrases that they've seen in ads and collateral, or else they aren't sure what to say. "Should I tell they why I'm good? Do I end by saying, 'I hope you'll call?'"

The problem is that non-fiction writers are either too accustomed to trying to dazzle someone with wordplay or have become overly accustomed to arranging facts. Although good marketing is based on solid information, it is really an issue of emotion. People generally make purchase decisions based on their feelings, not on an intellectual analysis (and when it seems that they're thinking it through, it's usually to congratulate themselves on how practical and in control they are - which is nothing more than emotional gratification).

In marketing, you are actually trying to convey a number of emotional impressions and unconscious psychological messages. It can be dangerous because if used wrong it turns into blatant manipulation. However, when done right, you're telling someone something the person needs to hear that is emotional, not rational, in nature. You are telling a story in which the primary aim is to convey a set of emotions in a particular order.

In writing a fact-based story, you would determine what structure the story demands and then convey the information. When you are writing marketing, you arrange the necessary emotions in the proper order and let that order set the structure. Then you get out of the way, except to the degree that your quirky ways of putting things can help deliver the message.

Here's an example I offered to a writer who was wrestling with a query. The setting is that the letter is intended to an organization doing ecological work. I've made some assumptions and used some data that the writer had brought up, but the main thing I did was to uncover the emotional story and then to tell it:

I've been following the work your organization has been doing - the snake habitat program, the headwaters water quality program - and wanted to congratulate you for your active and effective stance on important issues.

But although local media have been running environmental stories, I've noticed that your projects receive relatively little press. It may be that your communications strategy is unintentionally faltering in ways that could be costing you public and legislative good will and even money.

In my field - strategic business communications - research suggests that weaknesses in communication strategies and skills can actually cost businesses, governments, and non-profits up to 30% of their annual operating budgets. That's a serious amount of bottom-line shortfall.

I'd like to schedule a conversation with you - absolutely no obligation on your part, but I think I can offer some suggestions that could help improve awareness and support of your activities and, as a side benefit, improve morale within the group, which would increase staff efficiency and effectiveness. I'll phone you later this week to see if we can set up an appointment.

Notice what I've done. At the opening, I say something that will get the person's attention (in this case a bit of sincere flattery) while, in the process, demonstrating my knowledge of their activities, which means I've been paying attention to them. Virtually everyone likes attention, so the emotion is ego gratification and generally good feelings.

I then bring up a problem they face but that they may not realize. Through that, I've introduced a note of fear for the organization's ultimate mission and, indirectly (and subtly) for the job security of the recipient.

Next, I offer something of significant value - essentially an opening consulting session - indicating the benefits. This speaks to the fear, offering a way out, and also to greed, because there's the chance of getting something for nothing. Also, there's the tone of helping the organization's goals, which will also be of interest to the recipient. I stress that there's no obligation, which means I'm basically showing that they can't lose.

The whole intent of the letter is to convey one set of emotions after another, and then to offer a way or resolving the conflict in feelings so that the final emotion is pleasant. Think of it as an emotional outline, and then using available information and appropriate word choices as building blocks to create the story.

Create a No-Wordsmithing Zone

I hate the term wordsmithing - I have since I first heard it as a professional writer. The word, and the attitude it represents, are dismissive, placing the process of writing on the level of clever assembly line operations. You take what the client gives you and "massage" it until it reads better. There is that unspoken assumption that the writer adds window dressing only.

Of course this is absurd. Writing is about analytic thinking, the absorption of information, the analysis of this mental material, and the design and construction of an intellectual road map that can get readers from point A to point Z while leaving them feeling more intelligent than when they started reading. Of course they feel smarter: suddenly they grasp something. however, it's the writer that does the heavy lifting and leaves a paved path where once there was bramble and brush.

There was a time that I didn't flinch when I heard wordsmithing. That is no longer the case. When a client uses that term or something similar ("The document only needs a little editing."), I disabuse them of the notion. When a corporate client plays the editing card, I say, "No, you're looking to condense material and to find the most important points. That's not editing; that's writing." When an editor sits on an article for weeks and then suddenly surfaces and says, "I need this changes," I say, "That's fine - I can get them to you in X number of days."

The more you remain quiet when a client effectively dismisses what you do, the more value you help drain from your services and the lower you set your price. The next time someone asks you to wordsmith, point out that you don't polish words like so many pieces of silver plate. You're a writer, and the work takes time, skill, and proper compensation.

Blogs and What's In It For Me?

I saw a writer on a board ask about blogs and focus on the question, "What's in it for me?" It seems logical enough: you only have so much time for your marketing, and you have to decide what to pursue. But I think the logic quickly breaks down, because the question is wrong.

There is a fundamental flaw when you look at marketing and keep asking what the benefit to you is. Marketing doesn't provide a dollars and cents bottom line that you can bank. In marketing, you reach out to people that you can help and offer them products and services that they would want. The activity should be focused on the customer, not on the provider. The profit you make is a byproduct of how well you serve the needs of your customers. If you do that well, you can make money. But if you want every conversation to be about you and your needs, it gets a lot harder. It's tiresome to talk to someone who is that narcissistic.

In a blog, you can't count on getting sales or anything else. You might as well say that you write books only to promote yourself and to make more money in other activities. While a book might become part of a platform, if you've written a single one you know that that must be more to it than that.

For example, blogging about finding a topic you care for, writing about it, coming across other people who are also interested and want to hear what you have to say - and who want to say something back. It's building relationships with people in the context of the one topic.

If that turns into business, fine. If not ... well, then it doesn't. Blogging can make sense as marketing if you think that real marketing is building relationships. If that is your focus - if you want to find people and reach out to them because you have something to offer - then a blog can be marvelous, though it takes time to establish. You have the perfect opportunity to become your own publisher, to avoid large media as intermediary, and to find your own audience.

Re-Placing an Article

There are times that publishers will kill an article or, more often, turn down a pitch that you swear is perfect. You might send the idea out again to similar publications, but eventually you might find that you run out of "more of the same." But you may not be ready to retire the idea. here are some ways you can take a fresh look at where to send your query:

• Category Analogies You can get locked into thinking that a certain type of article has to go into a publication dedicated to that subject. But often, magazines with other focuses will still be interested. For example, an article on a parenting issue might have a home in a women's magazine with an appropriate demographic. A piece on a new audio technology for a home audiophile title might find a home in a men's magazine or something like Popular Science or Popular Mechanics.


• Change Focus Don't get stuck on your original focus. You can always consider changing the specific subject of a narrative, the problem or solution approach for a service piece, or the entry point of a think piece.


• Turn it Inside Out This is a more extreme version of changing focus. You might be able to take an article that you thought was one type and completely transform it into another. What you might have originally conceived as a reported article might actually work as a personal essay. Your experience, that was the center of an essay, might also spark ideas for bullet points in a service article. If you can't sell it one way, try another.


• The Consumer/Trade Shift You can get unnecessarily stuck if you think of yourself strictly as a "consumer" or "trade" writer. They often have different styles, but the gulf isn't that large. If something is old news for a trade, it might be the first time the consumer mag has heard of it. If the latter finds a topic too "inside baseball," the former might think it right up their ally (to mix the metaphors). Or you might find, as I have at times, that both trades and consumer pubs have similar tastes at times.

And here's the bonus: you don't have to use these techniques only to find a first home for a story. You can use them to get new spins and markets for work you've already done.

Dealing with "Harsh" Rejection

Gawker has a tale of a writer who received what she thought was an overly harsh rejection from a Village Voice editor. Here's the original note:

I'd shoot myself before I had anything like Julia Allison in this paper. What you're pitching sounds like the 256th version of Sex in the City, and that's so played out. I'm satisfied with the two sex columns I have now, and I really don't have room for additional columns at the moment. But thanks for thinking of us.

What did the writer do? Send it on to someone who was likely to publish it. Any doubts as to whether this will get back to the editor? If so, then I also have a bridge I'm trying to peddle.

From what I've seen in a thread on Freelance Success, some writers think the editor was trying to be funny, and some agree that he was being nasty. My take is that it shouldn't matter. If you don't like the way an editor works, then don't work with the editor. This tactic has not only burned the bridge with that editor, but anyone that editor knows. Such things don't stay secret.

but even more importantly, whether you like the tone of the editor's response or not, it was a gold mine for marketing. Suddenly you've got a grasp of the editor's sensibilities and tastes, great market info (no room for more columns, meaning that to sell one you'd have to find supplant the weakest column there, which is a tough sell), and a bit more understanding of editorial strategy than when you started. This is a prime case for not taking things personally and, instead, being thankful that someone let his guard down and helped you by accidentally disclosing information that you couldn't buy.

Business, Accident, and the Law of Averages

Accident plays a much larger part in business than most of us like to think. I don't mean that the people who do well are only lucky, though some seem to be. But by and large, you actually make your own luck. If you are working enough, and in an effective way, then assignments, whether corporate or editorial, will come your way.

It's law of large numbers - that is to say, the law of averages. This concept is that when things happen at random - that is, by accident - and there are enough of them, you will inevitably see patterns come out. The end results are predictable, like dropping marbles down one of those devices that are a board with lots of pegs, so they can bounce this way or that. You can't predict where any single marble will land, but you know that some small percentage will be all the way at the ends and that the numbers increase until they hit a maximum in the middle, producing the classic bell curve.

There is a lot of accident in business. Sometimes clients need writing, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they'll want certain topics or treatments, and sometimes others. Sometimes it's one person at a company or publisher who needs something, and sometimes it's another. You don't know for sure which one will need help on any given day. But, you know that if you take enough clients together, some of them will need help on any given day. The more with whom you're in contact, the greater a chance that you'll talk to the ones that need the help when you'd like the work.

To make marketing effective, you have to take the long view. You also have to be in contact with enough people that you hear about the work coming in that is available. That's why numbers are so important in marketing and sales, and why you must keep making marketing efforts even when the work is coming in.

Sometimes it will seem that work comes in for no particular reason, but I've found that such happy occurrences generally happen when I'm working hard at developing my business, and it's the constant effort that makes things work. If you don't make the marketing effort, well, you might have some business show up of its own accord, but chances are that you won't be making much of a living. If you do make the regular and sustained efforts, you will eventually have success - it's mathematical.

On Rate Cards

I recently took part in an online conversation about rate cards. A writer had a client asking for one and didn't know what to put on it. My suggestion was to avoid rate cards entirely. When clients ask for rate cards, what they really seek, whether they think of it this way or not, is control over what you do and how you charge.

An hourly rate could potentially vary depending on the nature of the project ... and the client. And how can you quote a project rate when you don't know anything about the project's details? Recently I was asked for a corporate rate and I mentioned a range within which I'd typically work, but I can't offer a single number Some projects rquire me to deliver more value - not time, but value. They may require specific expertise or information. Why should I offer that at the same rate a simple press release or front of book article might take?

If a client wants something that completely predictable without offering any details as to what the work entails, then perhaps finding another client would be the best thing.

Diversify Out of Danger

As I've written on this blog and said to people in talks and courses, you have to be able to walk away from a deal if you're going to negotiate with any integrity. Anything less and you are a psychological slave. The answer I've often heard is, "But I need the work. I need the money. I can't say no!"

I understand the pressure of having to bring in cash and feeling at a disadvantage when contractual issues come up. What you need to do at times like that is work like mad at marketing so you can diversify out of the danger areas. For example, I'm increasing the amount of corporate work I take on to raise my income and, as importantly, to make myself less vulnerable.

I don't expect to keep rights for corporate work. I also know that I'm not going to run anywhere close to the same risks under such things as libel and right of privacy. If it takes two months to get paid - well, it's not that much longer than publishers, and in some cases it can be shorter.

Now I'm sure some will say, "But I don't like doing corporate work!" Then find something else - teaching, maybe, or editing, or work for non-profits. But definitely start developing the attitude that if you're going to be in business, you can't guarantee that you'll be in love with everything you do. Not even great artists have that luxury. Think Michelangelo or Rembrandt or Bach never had to consider clients?

Sometimes you won't work with someone because you find it too distressing, but you have a duty to keep yourself financially sound enough to do the work that is important. The sooner you diversify enough to operate your business while minimizing your risk, the sooner you can be picky about the types of work that you want to do. You've undoubtedly heard of suffering for your art or craft. I think many in the creative fields don't really grasp the concept. They think they have to be miserable to produce good work. Not at all.

To suffer for art means that you undertake and solve difficult situations so you can stay on track with what is important. It doesn't mean living in an impoverished state. It means working hard enough, and bearing what seems unpleasant to you enough, so that you can do what is more important. If you can't manage that much for your duties to craft - let alone family and society - then you should get out of the business, because continuing is irresponsible and affects not just you, but everyone around you.

Low-Balling Pricing is Bad Business

There are a lot of writers who take low-paying work. If you're one of them, know that it's killing you and your business - for no good reason. Here are some of the results of this business strategy:

• You get caught in a trap. When you take low-paying business, it means you need to do more work to make what you need. That leaves you with even less time to do marketing and to pull yourself out of the hole.


• It's the marketing of need. People who are willing to work for little send off vibes of being needy, because the client generally knows that what it's offering is less than the market might generally demand. If you're willing to take it, that must mean you are ripe for the picking.


• You drive down the average. The more writers go for low pay, the more they help drive down average rates, and so actually create a condition for lower pay for everyone.


• You miss the power of value. People and businesses buy things because they perceive that they want or need them. They want value for what they pay. When you charge low amounts, you say through the action that you don't offer much in the way of value. If you're talking to an entity that has a real need, there's a good chance that you'll lose the business to people who charge more, because they communicate that there's something of value to be had.


• You feed low self-esteem. When you work for too little, you feel like crap. By taking more work at too low a rate, you only feel worse. That turns into self-pity (keep a look for it as it hovers near), which likes even more such experience. I once heard self-pity described as sitting in a tub of warm piss. Keep that in mind next time you're feeling sorry for yourself.

Getting out of this rut is easy - charge for the value you can deliver. If you can't deliver enough value, learn how to. I recently got a large chunk of corporate work that will pay very nicely over a month, without even being full time. I know there were three other people in the running, and I doubt I was the low-bidder. When they wanted a sample to compare to the other writers, I said sure - at my regular rates. And they agreed.

If you have respect for yourself, your abilities, and the value you can bring to someone, then you charge a reasonable amount. When you have true respect for yourself (not defensive attitude), then others start to as well. Remember the saying that the way to get respect is to earn it? This is the big first step.

Never Walk Away From the Good Fight

There will be times (if you haven't already seen them) that you are in conflict with a client. Perhaps it wants to unreasonably delay payment or demand significant more work for no extra compensation or ask you to shoulder other burdens that never were mentioned during discussions of the assignment. You may have talked to the people involved, trying to get a resolution, but to no avail.

I understand the reluctance to take significant action. A number of thoughts are running through your head - don't want to lose the client, I'm friends with the editor, what if they get angry because I hate conflict - as your emotions bubble over. And I certainly understand how you would prefer a reasoned solution that got you what you needed. Obviously if that is possible, then it's a good outcome.

But there will be times that does not happen, and the company is happy to string you along or out or whatever preposition best describes your state of misery. In those circumstances, for your own sake as a human being, you cannot back down or give in. To do so is to allow yourself to be stepped on. That sets a bad precedent for the future and puts you further into a frame of mind where you feel like you're getting what you actually deserve: "If it's happening, then I must have done something to bring it on." This is the abused spouse mindset, and one that you must discourage.

That doesn't mean you necessarily become crazed and demand a knock-down, drag out fight. However, you stand firm for what is right and take the actions necessary to see it happen. It's good for you, it's good for your family and friends - it's particularly important if you have children, because somehow they know when you act in a righteous, and not self-righteous, manner and it teaches them to stand up for themselves. It's good good for the writing community, and it's good for the world. If people firmly planted their feet at such times, we'd have far fewer tragedies, because we would not let things go so far.

Be firm and hold your ground. You did the work and they owe you the money. If they want more work, they can pay more money. Insist that they make good. And when they do act in a reprehensible manner, add your voice to the others descrying such atrocious behavior. The more you do this, the lest often you'll find people ready to take you on. You don't go into new business relationships with a chip on your shoulder and frothing at the mouth because you won't have to. People will just know. And, more importantly, you will know. You may win, you may lose, but you'll feel better about yourself no matter what.

Upcoming Marketing Class

I'm teaching one of my periodic marketing classes at FreelanceSuccess.com. Here's some info:

Selling and Marketing for Writers

When: Aug. 20-Sep. 28
Where: An online teaching forum
Cost: $179 ($159 for FreelanceSuccess members)

Most freelancers love to write but feel like ducks out of water when it comes time to market and sell. If you find yourself in that category, it's probably because you never learned how. In the Selling and Marketing for Writers class, that's exactly what Erik Sherman teaches you.

Understand such basic concepts as marketing, brand and platform, all of which are more subtle and intricate than you might think. Make your marketing organic, and know what you are to the client. Find clients that fit your business, create a profile of the ideal prospect, and know what the prospect is to you. Check your marketing materials - even the ones you don't realize that you have. Understand the sales process and take control of it. Do vital market research and develop profiles of real prospects and clients. Create a prospecting program and move toward your financial goals. Make use of the rule of numbers, even if you don't take to math. Effectively follow up to get more business.

Syllabus

Week 1: Learning basic marketing principles and unlearning some bad scuttlebut. What motivates customers. Selling to a client and a buyer at the same time. Learning the emotional triggers. Handling conflicts between clients and buyers. Who your marketing is about. Getting the right relationship to a client.

Week 2: Deciding on the “right” customers, profiling customers and prospects and their fit, discounting assignment payments, lifetime customer values, rate research, client financial stability, profiling prospect needs.

Week 3: How and when to talk about yourself, unique selling propositions, positioning, branding, platform, understanding how to really use these buzzwords and knowing what they aren’t.

Week 4: The need for good marketing materials – and what they are, your most important calling cards, the difference between marketing and tools, the two basic types of marketing, understanding the tools you really need, knowing when to use a given tool, learning the basic structure of any marketing piece, the time line of marketing.

Week 5: Difference between marketing and sales, what selling isn’t, stages of the buying/selling process, get the right emphasis when approaching prospects, matching the sale to the need, getting into a conversation with prospects, handling objections whether heard or silent, closing the deal.

Week 6: Need for numbers, determine your personal sales conversion rate, planning on enough marketing and selling, enjoying marketing and sales, the biggest single problem in getting business, the power of unimportance, being genuine, negotiation.

Testimonials

Here are some unsolicited comments that some students from the last session I taught posted on FreelanceSuccess when I mentioned that I'd be offering it again:

"I just scored a new column this morning by putting to use what I learned in the class."

"If you're stalled on your marketing, just getting started, looking at new revenue streams or just want to tweak your message, this is a great class."

"I snagged a $4,000 project using techniques I learned in Erik's class."

I can't promise this sort of response, but if you do the work and apply it, you will start seeing positive results.

Three Marketing Approaches When Things Are Good

I can feel it now - that warm comfortable sense of well-being that comes on when my schedule is full. But it's the same warm sense that reportedly comes on before you freeze to death. Whenever you feel that things are going right, you can depend that they will soon go wrong. So when things are looking up for business, that's when it's time to knuckle down and push forward on your marketing. However, there is a difference between times like these and when things are slower. Here are some ways to make your marketing pay off:

• Replace clients. Because you're in a strong position, seek replacements for your least desirable clients. You aren't in a rush, so begin testing a few new clients, see which ones provide the most satisfaction, and then begin weaning yourself from the ones that aren't worth the time you spend on them.


• Think long term. Different companies or publications take various amounts of time to bring into your business fold. When things are going well, you can begin developing relationships with the ones that take longer. These are often the greater prestige and better paying prospects.


• New areas. You might have wanted to move into new areas - whether subjects, industries, or types of writing. When you go into something new, you often can't prove the value you can in more established areas. So when things are going well, you're in a position to take some lower-paying work, if necessary, to establish your credits in the new area so that you'll be in good shape to get the better pay. When things are leaner, you may be more dependent on the revenue from each assignment, and so won't necessarily have this opportunity to develop your business.

Marketing isn't a uniform and unchanging activity. Let yours be sensitive to where your business is at any time and shift your focus and approach to make marketing increasingly effective.

The Dangers of Big Projects

At some point in your writing, you'll get involved with a project that seems great - a large sum of money (think five or six figures), work guaranteed for a period of time, and all looking right with the world. But the big-ticket job can, in its own way, be as dangerous as the assignments that pay too little:

• No client should be too important. You don't want any one client to provide too much of your income; losing it can become a devastating financial blow. That's what can happen with a big ticket project, particularly if it's out of scale with the rest of your work. If something like this does seem likely to happen, then consider pushing to expand the rest of your business to keep it in balance. After all, few clients offer such projects on a regular basis, and you don't want to become used to nice money only to see it dry up.


• Emphasize the client, not the project. Real success comes from relationships. A big project may seem a delight, but keep it in perspective. Big projects just don't happen as often as smaller ones and so are harder to find. Clients that provide significant revenue over smaller projects year after year are always worth more.


• Keep projects in their places. When you have the chance of a big project, there's always that temptation to do nothing else. But that has its price. If a five figure project keeps you from maintaining ties with important long-term, high-value clients or from ongoing marketing, it disrupts your work flow after it's over. And then, 30 to 60 days after it's over, you'll take a hit to your cash flow because you didn't keep your business pipeline filled. Always have projects and customers fit your business model. See if you can negotiate and schedule the work to be part-time over some number of months. In any case, always keep marketing so that when the project is done, you aren't done for.


• Clients cancel. Many contracts have termination clauses, which means there's always a possibility that the project will suddenly end. Even if there isn't a provision, if someone stops paying, you can go to court, but it can take a long time to get satisfaction. Manage your risk so it's at a level you can tolerate.

I'm not suggesting that writers shouldn't take large projects by any means. Just use some caution and common sense so that the offer that seems to be too good to be real doesn't turn out that way.

The Fallible Book Excerpt

The New York Times had yet another article on book marketing, this one on whether book excerpts help sell the titles. It's another facet of what I covered in my Book Blockbusters article. It comes down to the subtle and treacherous world of publicity. Contrary to popular opinion, not all press is good. As the article points out, if there is one major revelation to be found in a book and that finds its way into the excerpt, then you've just killed sales. Here are two paragraphs of the article that give a good summary:

Because the excerpt is just one weapon in the publicity arsenal, publishers are hard-put to assess its role in the campaign. Still, they can point to recent successes like "It Ain’t All About the Cookin’" by the restaurateur and Food Network host Paula Deen, which was serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal and hit the New York Times best-seller list immediately after publication.

On the other hand, Time magazine’s excerpt of "I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," by Rick Bragg, put a dent in book sales, according to Mr. Bogaards of Knopf. "The excerpt gave away too much — I think people felt they’d had their fill," he said. "We sold 175,000 in hardcover but had expected to do twice that."

Publishers in the past were motivated to place excerpts because the money for them could hit $100,000 - and that's the equivalent of a lot of copies at one shot without the actual cost of producing them. Yes, writers get a big chunk - sometimes 90% of such serial sales - but that's still a lot of cash for a single book. When the magazine paid big money, they wanted big and juicy parts, sometimes even taking a bit here, some there, and putting them all together, even if they've given away important parts of the book.

Now the fees are less and the benefit less obvious. As the publisher of Hyperion was quoted, "For $1,500, why risk exposure of all the juicy bits if it’s going to hurt sales?" That's pretty short money, which means someone will have to explain why this is all a good idea and just how many copies moved as a result. For authors the point is clear: You have to take significant interest in the marketing of your book, because there are so many ways it can go wrong. So much habit, so little desire to do something new, which only shakes up the status quo and leaves everyone at the publisher feeling less comfortable. Oh, and then the entire marketing department is so overwhelmed with work and titles and lack of resources that all they can do is plod along like automatons. If you're not keeping watch, there's little chance that anyone else will.

Value and Pricing

Pricing seems one of the most contentious business issues that writers face, if posts on every writing board I've ever seen are an indication. People want to know what others charge, what they should charge, how to bill it, when to bill it, and in what form the invoice should be.

Unfortunately, while the information someone gains could be useful, it often isn't. Pricing is an individual thing, not a regurgitation of all that the market will bear, because what it will bear for one it will deny another. A large company in the high tech industry is likely to pay significantly more for a press release than the mom-and-pop local business, largely because they will require a significant level of experience as well as relevant knowledge on the part of the writer. A corporate writer experienced in navigating the regulatory requirements of the SEC will command significantly more to write an annual report for a public company than one with less experience. That's because there is a difference in the value offered.

Price is the compromise between the value a writer can offer and the value the client perceives. You start with your own hourly price and then do research to try and find what equivalent work from writers with equivalent background and experience for similar types of clients might command. That tells you if there is additional you *could* charge because the client is likely to expect it. Then you layer on the specific value that you bring. For example, I've charged companies $150/hour and more at times to write marketing materials, but I had significant experience in the specific type of work and could bring a lot in specialized knowledge of the customers and products. I can think of a time that I literally got 20% more than another experienced writer because of a specific value edge.

But there is another part of the value equation - what value you receive. Value is more than the money you receive. I've recently embarked on a large project (not the speechwriting I previously mentioned) for less than I might ordinarily charge, but then I'm gaining a credit in a particular type of project that will let me win more bids in the future and charge more. Don't just look at what the market will bear when pricing a project. Consider the value you offer, the value you gain, the money you need to make for the time invested, and market realities. Then you can intelligently use the feedback you get from other writers.

Breaking the Book Blockbuster Bane

I have a new article up on getting smarter about book publicity that came from a post I had at ASJA that a number of people found useful. Hope it's useful to you as well. Look under Resources to the left, or click here.

Simon & Schuster Takes Aim at AG

Last Friday I mentioned the Authors Guild warning about the new Simon & Schuster contract changing so that a book could effectively be "in print" forever, and how that has been creeping into publishing for years.

Early this week, S & S decided to fire back with an open letter "To Our Colleagues in the Author and Agent Community." The company made its central point in the first two graphs:

The Authors Guild has recently perpetrated serious misinformation regarding Simon & Schuster, our author contracts and our commitment to making our authors’ books available for sale. Unfortunately, these distortions were released by the Authors Guild without their having undertaken any effort to have a dialogue with Simon and Schuster on this topic.

In recent years, Simon & Schuster has accepted, at the request of some agencies, contract language that specifies a minimum level of activity for print on demand titles. Our experience with the current high quality and accessibility of print on demand titles indicates to us that such minimums are no longer necessary. Our position on reversions for active titles remains unchanged. As always, we are willing to have an open and forthright dialogue on this or any other topic.

Let's start taking this apart. The first graph is rhetoric - distortions without having trying to have dialog? That's a corporate way of saying that unfavorable news leaked out. Surely the company knows how professional writers would react. Did it seek to have "dialog" with the Authors Guild? Apparently not; it put the clause into contracts and, according to the AG, agents are reporting that S & S will not remove the passage. I guess talk is talk and printed contracts are something else.

Now for the second paragraph. Historically, the minimums were never to ensure a given quality of printing; they were to ensure a sufficient level of commitment on the part of the publisher. If you have to keep inventory, then you have an inducement to get it the hell out of your warehouse. And, again with the dialog - who cares if they won't negotiate the point.

Then the letter goes on to ask authors and agents to consider a number of points:

• Through print on demand technology, publishers now have the ability, for the first time in history, to actually fulfill the promise which is at the core of their contracts with authors – to keep the author’s book available for sale over the term of the license.

Oh, please. A publisher is interested in profit. The core of the contract was to ensure that the publisher made reasonable efforts in exploiting the rights it was granted so that both it and the author could make money. Keeping something available for purchase means nothing if you aren't promoting the item, unless it has so much self-renewing demand - like The Catcher in the Rye - that the publisher almost couldn't screw things up even if it wanted to. Also, virtually every book contract I've reviews as ASJA Contracts Committee chair was for the length of copyright. That means past when the author dies. Having an ebook or POD text in a database isn't promoting the book.


• We view this progress as a great opportunity to maximize the sales potential for slow moving titles, and some of the best news for authors and publishers in a long time. The potential benefit for all concerned in incremental income for the publishing partnership far outweighs any imaginary negatives purported by the Authors Guild.

This may be good news for publishers - get a bit more from that old dog in the virtual warehouse. But for authors? Not a chance. If there are dribs and drabs coming in through someone finding a book online, why not use POD yourself and get all the money coming in and not some small slice of royalty. Also note that many royalty clauses actually reduce the percentage for POD and ebook versions.


• We and others are investing heavily in digitization so that authors and publishers can reap the maximum benefit of publication over the long term. New technologies including print on demand will extend the life of a book far beyond what has been possible in the past.

Yes, they will extend the life, but again it's the publisher that will really benefit. Most books never earn out their advances, so as these sales continue of their own accord and with absolutely no help from the publisher, the writer will likely never see another penny.


• Contrary to the Authors Guild assertion, using technologies like print on demand is not about “squirreling away” rights, nor does it mean that “no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.” Print on demand is simply a means of manufacturing a book, making it widely available to retailers and consumers.

POD and ebooks are technologies, but they have an impact. They are considered "versions" of a book, and if your contract says that a title is in print so long as any version exists, that means the rights are perpetually theirs. The intent doesn't have to be focused on keeping the rights to make the effect that.


• Publishers must and will continue to invest in sales and marketing organizations that work on behalf of its books regardless of how they are manufactured.

A publisher works on PR and marketing - in a minimum way for the vast majority of titles and for only three months. After that, it's the author doing all the work. This claim of S&S is actually laughable if you have any experience in the industry. And then there are all the ways in which they claim to promote. Stores don't stock backlist books unless they move heavily, and the publishers are the whipping posts of the retailers. The sales team reviewing "inventory opportunities?" That means pushing new titles, not keeping old ones in place. Category promotions? How many of the backlist books actually appear?

Yes, POD and virtually warehousing provide important tools for publishers - and I think they should use them. But lets stick with some level of sales activity that they create. If they can't do that, then they're not doing their jobs, and they shouldn't keep the benefit of the rights that they licensed.

UPDATE: According to the Authors Guild, Simon & Schuster is now saying that it will negotiate the rights reversion clause "on a book-by-book basis."

Pen-Ultimate Freelance Job Site Guide

Sorry for the pun (alright, not really), and this isn't intended as the absolute "ultimate" guide, but the sites that you can find in the Freelance Job Sites link under Resources (on the left) work and don't require a fee. If you like checking Craigslist, then look at the FreelanceWriting.com Career Center, which, somewhere down the page, has a compendium of listings from the different CL locations.

No Coverage Outsourcing to India ... for Now

I had mentioned the story about a web site outsourcing Pasadena city council coverage to India. Now it appears that public attention has kept the site owner from doing the outsourcing. Some writers have been passing the word triumphantly, but if anything the problem for writers is simply postponed:

"We've been prevented from doing that due to the attention that we've received," Macpherson said Monday.

What happens when the attention focuses elsewhere? Or when the next web site, or magazine or paper, does it more quietly? Polish up those skills and increase the value now. Wait, and it may be too late.

Market Research and What Publishers Don't Know

A New York Times piece suggests that book publishers largely fly blind, knowing nothing about their readers and so essentially publishing a lot of titles, hoping that some of them work out. The reason some get high advances is that the publishers think it will be a hit - but there is apparently little correlation. Numerical analysis does enter the equation:

In estimating value, editors rely heavily on an author’s previous sales or on sales of similar titles. Based on those figures and some analysis — about the popularity of the genre, the likely audience, the possible newsworthiness of the topic of the economy — they work up profit and loss projections.

Unfortunately, publishing success often hinges on something new that hasn't been a success in the past, so the publishers are effectively trying to drive a car by looking in the rear view window and seeing where they've just been.

Sounds like the recipe for an accident, and given the low profit levels of publishing, it has been. A friend pointed me to a blog entry by one of his friends, noting that the article made a big mistake by not talking to Amazon.com, because sure Jeff Bezos is sitting on a heaping pile of customer data. So someone - the online sellers - have a much better idea of what is happening in publishing. But even if they shared, the publishers would have to be willing to change the way they do business, and having dealt with a number of them as a writer, I'm not sure that they're willing. Suggest something new and the answer is almost inevitably, "But we've never done that before."

Indian Outsourcing Teaches Business Lessons

I've seen a number of writers on writers' boards upset by news that a web site called Pasadena Now is outsourcing coverage of the Pasadena, Calif. city council to a couple of reporters in India. They are concerned that over time more reporting jobs will move overseas, putting them out of work. Their concern about the movement of work overseas is well founded. This is the way of the world, folks, and if what you do is purely intellectual in nature, there's a good chance that under the right conditions it could be done by someone in another country willing to charge much less than you. But the question is what makes up the right conditions?

In this story, you can learn three things about your business today. One is a concept called barrier to entry. That means something necessary to do a job and the difficulty of being able to supply it. In this case, the only barriers to entry for this reporting job were the ability to speak and write in English, a basic knowledge of news writing, the ability to see and hear the council meetings, and the willingness to work cheaply. What has taken people by surprise is that they assumed viewing the meetings could only happen in person.

But look at that list again. The barriers to entry were always absurdly low. Anyone who could write halfway decently and had read a beginning book on news writing would have been capable of doing the job. So ask yourself what barriers of entry there are for the types of writing you do. At writers' conferences, editors often say that they want to know what makes one freelancer the best person for the job. I think the formulation is a bit overblown, but still important. What value do you bring in terms of special knowledge, contacts developed over time, or abilities that would be difficult to duplicate? If all you offer is a willingness to make some phone calls and maybe an idea or two, your business is highly insecure. Smart writers keep improving their skills and areas of expertise and learning new ones as well as finding new ways to build relationships with clients and continually adding value that they bring to the table.

The second lesson is that you have to keep examining your current assumptions. Don't become a buggy whip manufacturer who scoffs at these new fangled horseless carriages. In the case of this story, people don't realize just what Internet distributed video makes possible. Instead of becoming a victim of technology, put it to work for you. Then you can go back to the first lesson and consider what extra value technology might let you bring. Maybe it's time to learn how to create your own photos, audio, and video so you can offer a full selection of media choices to your clients. Then you have the added benefit of additional revenue streams.

Third lesson is that value is a relative thing. I'd argue that being unable to question people both before and after the meetings meant that the coverage would be inferior. But the web site publisher in this case disagreed. Something is only of economic and business value if someone is willing to pay for it. While you're upgrading your skills and knowledge, it's time to upgrade your clients. Don't chase the cheapskates who think that there is no difference between the work of different writers. Leave them to writers who are apparently happy to work for little, because that's what they keep doing. Look for a better type of client, and when you find them, offer knowledge, skill, value, and professionalism that will keep them coming back.

Print Publishing Top Licensing Earner

A list of the top licensing properties of 2006 hit my virtual desk today. From The Licensing Letter, a publication of market research firm EPM Communications, it tracks licensing sales - the money made in various industries by charging money to allow companies to use their intellectual property. For example, celebrities make money by allowing use of their names and images. Sports teams license logos and names. Guess what's seventh on the list? Print publishing. In terms of average royalty of 8.5%, it's almost up there with fashion's 8.6% and even the 9.2% that sports gets.

Don't get into the dollar amounts for a moment. What this data says to me is that printed text - old fashioned magazines and books - get licensed for sums that would be considered significant in the licensing industry. When publishers tell you that all the ancillary rights are insignificant, you know that selling the use of content to others is actually big business in the aggregate, and that sum is made up of the individual parts. When you give away rights because you won't "do" anything with them, you miss the point of modern business. You should be making money because someone else is making money.

Using Audiobook Podcasts to Promote a Book

If you haven't seen it yet, here's a link to a new York Times story about how authors are starting to use quicky audio versions of their books to help sell them. Some companies are recording audio versions of books that might never make it into print. I think this is notable because it shows another aspect of how publsihers are losing the advantages that economic scale once gave and how authors might consider becoming publishers in their own rights and more successfully funding their own businesses.

Shrinking Sig Lines

Some people wonder about how to handle their signature lines and what to put in. Yes, you want the marketing message, but there is the danger that the sig line gets waaaaay too long and people dread looking at it. I've had that reaction to some people's, and realized that my own had become bloated with listings for my writing site, photo site, and four blogs. What I had read as follows:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com Flash in the Pan blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/the-pan
BizBlast blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/bizblast
En Words blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/enwords
WriterBiz blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/WriterBiz

Ack! Who wants the equivalent of the Cliff Notes for War and Peace staring at them? So I moved all the blog links to a single page on my web site and combined descriptions as follows:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Writing, Food, and Business Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/index_files/BlogPage.htm
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com

I could even take a further step and use a redirecting URL, like Tiny, to create something short that would stay within the line. An additional possibility that I literally just considered and put up on my web page (there's something to be said for learning to maintain it yourself) is creating a new subdirectory or subdomain. In this case, http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs leads to the page with all the blog links. So now I have the following:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Writing, Food, and Business Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com

Much tidier (and in an email the blog information is all on a single line). Notice that I could have changed the blog line to read "Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs". That might have looked simpler, but then I would have gone too far in reduction, no longer giving the reader a clue as to the topics and whether to potentially be interested in clicking the link. The art here, as in writing, is to communicate exactly what you must and nothing more.

Another reason to simplify and centralize where possible is maintenance. If you start including time-dependent things, then you have to remember to edit the sig line. For example, I've seen writers list upcoming articles they have in their sig lines. Talk about something that will look old quickly. Ever get a voice mail with an obviously out-of-date message and shake your head? That's exactly not what you want a potential client to do, and if you have multiple email accounts, you might have to change the signature for each of them in your email program.

For something that will change regularly, like a list of current articles or new book releases, you can do as I did with my blogs. Include one line for a link to your latest and greatest page on your web site, and keep that updated. That reduces the amount of maintenance and you can enhance the look and marketing effectiveness over what will work in an email.

Smart Idea on Getting Book "Blurbs"

Here's an idea from Daylle Deanna Schwartz, a pro writer and music industry person:

Something that I've had some success with is not asking for endorsements but instead asking for a comment on the topic or why it's so important. For example, for my first music business book I got the Susan Blond agency to get me a quote from P. Diddy Combs about the importance of getting a good education about the music business. I come up with requests that get me quotes that seem like they're about my book but aren't.

That's so slick that it has me grabbing for the railings to keep from sliding off into a wall. There is one potential problem, though - you have to be honest in how you present the quotes. Avoid the temptation to massage things a bit so what is clearly a comment about a topic appears to become more of a comment about your book.

Repeat Impressions and Postcards

I read a post on Freelance Success from a writer who had some recent luck sending post cards to clients and prospects. As with most marketing, though, part of success comes from the luck of being in the right place at the right time - that is, when the client needs help. If you're using postcards, consider a marketing technique many photographers use. Include something that will catch the reader's attention (photographers will have one of their images on one side) and send them periodically - monthly or quarterly. You build awareness of who you are and have greatly increased the chance of catching the prospect or client at a time when he or she actually needs help.

What Assignment Not to Take

I saw complaint about a publisher in WritersWeekly.com. Between the end of 2005 and spring 2006, the writer in question claims to have written three articles for a publisher without getting paid for a single one.

Writers often focus on finding, taking, and completing assignments. Not much of a wonder, as that's the way they make their livings and get their work out into the world. but there are times to focus on not taking an assignment:

• You are wroking with a publisher that is new to you and that wants to give you several assignments. You're excited - but don't be. Professional publishers rarely assign multiple pieces to new writers because they don't know how the first one will turn out. Writers should work in a similar way. Do you want to be ethically and legally obliged to an editor who turns out to be a nightmare?


• You've completed one assignment for a new publisher and haven't yet been paid. This is similar to the first situation. Wait on another assignment until the first check clears. You can plead a full schedule (which helps battle Writers Puppy Syndrome) and be sure that the check comes in ... and that it clears.


• If you've been doing business with a publisher that suddenly slows in making payments, has a rapid exodus of editors, or otherwise shows signs of instability, financial or other, consider taking a break. Wait a month or two and see whether things straighten out. At worst you've shown that your work can't be taken for granted, and at best you avoid dealing with a corporate meltdown.


• Skip an assignment that rquires you to significantly compromise your business model. There are always other clients and even other ways of making money, so unless your back really is to the wall, don't arrange your business to suit the client.


• Always - always - heed assignment red flags. They may be false indicators of problems, but living through one actual disaster more than makes up for a half dozen times of avoiding false alarms.


• Pass on assignments that don't fit your brand and specializations. Unless it's a topic that is fascinating to you personally or represents a new direction you want to take in your business, don't get distracted.


• Don't take work that you can't do well. Stretching yourself is great, but there are ways to do it and ways not to. If you don't have the background or detailed knowledge necessary for a certain task (for example, knowing enough about disclosure regulations to write an annual report for a publicly-held company), don't pretend.

Avoiding these situations doesn't mean that you'll avoid all problems with clients, but it's going to reduce unnecessary grief - and think of the assignments you could take in the time you've just saved.

Finding Business that Fits

Many writers try to fit themselves into the perceived needs and expectations of clients - "I'm a specialist in the dietary healthcare needs of left-handed chimpanzees, as you can see from this clip (or brochure)."

Meeting the need of your client or prospect is vital. If you don't, they won't hire you. But before you rush out after every potential work lead, remember that before you fit yourself to the client's needs, you fit the client to your needs. Some won't pay enough, while others might pay enough, but wait for publication, leaving you to effectively fund their accounts payable department. A magazine might want to keep you from writing for its direct competitors, even if those titles are important revenue sources. One corporation buyer may keep changing her mind and always asking you to jump through hoops and toss your plans to the wind because she never made any plans of her own.

You can't always tell what a client will be like before you first do business with it, but after one assignment, you should have a pretty good idea. Once you know that its requirements don't fit yours, don't keep doing business there. Get one client that doesn't fit your business in one way or another, and you'll find that it affects the rest of your business in a negative way. That might seem unrealistic, but it really isn't. One disorganized client slipping its schedule can force you to say no to a long time client with an atypical tight deadline, reducing what your income could have been. A slow payer at a bad time could force you to take on work that pays far less than your target rates but that quickly sends a check that might help reduce the cash shortfall.

When you provide a service, the customer comes first. But your business supports your life and even as clients come and go, you always have to be there. Make sure that you like the fit.

Danger of Over Eagerness

Writers are often an earnest lot, falling in love with stories, jumping for joy at the idea of an assignment, and ready to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Unfortunately, if you want to have a profitable writing business, this is a tendency that you have to correct - now.

If you find yourself doing any of the following:

• spilling details of your personal life as asides in your communications with clients
  
• adding smiley emoticons to your business emails
  
• spontaneously offering to turn articles in several days early
  
• forcing yourself to be jovial when talking to a client
  
• immediately responding to any email from a client, no matter what else you are doing
  
• wanting to become "best friends" with a client
  
• panicking because you sent a query a whole two days ago and you still haven't heard back
  
• sounding breathlessly enthusiastic

or if you do other things that could easily fall into such a list, then you're suffering from WPS - Writers Puppy Syndrome. Puppies are cute, they're fun, but you don't expect anything serious from them because ... well, because they're puppies.

The same thing goes in the writing business, just like in any other business. If people are so enthusiastic as to to bounce and beam, your inclination will likely be to find their care takers and seem them safely back into a room with soft walls. Think of this is a more common setting: dating. Do you now or did you ever get interested in someone who would follow you around, anxious for even slight amounts of attention? Probably not. You can't take someone seriously if they have no sense of self worth and dignity. That's one big reason why people who stand off a little have so much more of a draw.

Don't creep out your clients and prospects. Get yourself calm and centered before speaking with or writing to one. Remember that this is not the only fish in the business sea, and that you have other things you also need to do with your time. That's not to suggest being frosty or unaccommodating. But when you're interacting with others, be relaxed, self-aware, and yourself. You might find that suddenly you become far more attractive to those who need work done.

How Not to Tick Off Editors, Agents, and Others

Sally Wiener Grotta is a writer and photographer friend of mine who has a great blog entry on what not to say to editors and agents.

It's on the book end of things, but I think the comments are applicable to anything a writer does, whether book, magazine, corporate, or non-profit. Outside of the usual culprits - like "Don't screw up my name when sending something to me" - are some particularly relevant ones. For exmaple, the impulse to talk about yourself can be off-putting and can set off a red flag that you are going to be high maintenence. This is a perfect example of starting to understand your prospects and doing things to make them comfortable and happy. And when the prospects are happy, they're more inclined to give you assignments.