Finding Your Emotional Bottom Line

Heather Boerner, who has taken my business planning class, has done some smart thinking in planning her marketing work. If you find that you freak out about what you think you need to do, this is worth reading:

Now I have a better idea of the number I need to send before I make a sale. But for me, there's a difference between what I know I should do and what I'm capable of doing. To me, three queries a week seemed doable, it didn't overwhelm me and it seemed like it might be enough to make a difference.

That is the type of insight that can shake you loose from things that are holding you back. It's fine to talk about what your goals need to be. But what if you can't make yourself get there? Do you give up? No, because that's guaranteed failure.

What she addresses is that even if you can't do what you'd like to do, any progress toward your goal is better than no progress. Write that on a piece of paper and stick it to your monitor, because it's critical. Climbing a mountain is a combination of many steps upward (and a good number sideways and even backward at times). Some people can race along the side. If you can't move as quickly, move a bit more slowly.

That does bring some problems. You're out longer, and so you are more exposed to the elements. You need more supplies to keep you going over the longer period. But you will eventually get there. And here's a second benefit: you build muscle and strength. Keep working at this, and you'll find that the time to climb starts to drop. In other words, you'll be able to query more frequently, or write more articles, or whatever it is you need to do.

Blog Ahead of Time

One of the big challenges in blogging is to keep it going day after day - or even day after every other or every third day. Miss frequency, and you don't gain readers. But posting more often means having time. Here's a trick that just became available in Blogger.com (which I use), and which has been around for some time in some of the other blogging engines: post-dated publishing.


What you're reading today I wrote on Sunday, when I had a bit of time and was knocking off some blog entries in advance. I write when I have a chance, and then set the date and time when I want the post to appear, and then publish. Voila! Instant literary (or not) time travel. It doesn't solve the overall issue of time commitment, but it does let you work on your schedule a bit more. Then, if something comes up that is timely and you want to cover that instead, get to the post before it goes up, change the date, and keep it for another time. In Blogger, you get to this by going to Blogger in Draft; that's the version with all the new features that haven't quite made it to regular Blogger. As for other blogging engines, you're on your own there.


I'm still experimenting with this, and the feature doesn't seem completely solid yet in the way it works. But, hey, it's free, so I'm not going to argue

Four More Outlook Tip for Writers

Here are a few more things I forgot in my recent post on tips for using Microsoft Outlook:

• Send Email in the Future Sometimes you need to remember to send an email in the future. It might be a second or third follow-up email that you don't want to send yet, having just launched a message. Perhaps you realized today that you need to send someone a reminder a week from now. Whatever the reason, when you've written the email and before you've sent it off, click the Options button. Check off Do not deliver before and provide a date. Now the email will sit in your outbox until the day it's supposed to go. After that, the next time you send and receive, the message will be on its way.


• Get a Receipt Another feature of the Options button is the ability to request a receipt for delivery and/or when the recipient actually reads the message. This won't always work; some people won't allow receipts to go out, but sometimes it works. I find that getting a receipt on delivery works better, because generally the receiving email server can do that without getting permission from a user (if it's set up to do so at all, which not all are).


• Set Importance Another choice on Options (and available is setting low or high importance (instead of normal). You may have seen this on receiving emails that seem to have a little red exclamation point - that's an "important" one. I think the importance button should be called the PR minion button.


• Automating Send/Receive if You want mail to go in and out on a given schedule and don't want to think further about it, go to Tools/Options. Click on the Mail Setup tab and click the Send/Receive button. Check the first Schedule an automatic send/receive every and pick the amount of time between send/receive cycles. Look a bit farther down and you'll see a second such check box. That lets you have Outlook go online to send and receive on a regular schedule even when Outlook isn't online.

Seven Microsoft Outlook Tips for Writers

Even since I did sessions on time management at a couple of ASJA conferences, other writers have often asked me about how to save time. I thought I'd put together some tips for making Microsoft Outlook work for effectively for those who use it. Unless I explicitly mention an alternative, these functions are unavailable in Outlook Express:

• Turn Emails Into Contacts Drag-and-drop is a great Outlook feature. If you get an email from someone you want to add to your contact list, position the cursor over the closed email, hold down the left mounse button, drag it over to Contacts, and drop it. A contact record with the person's name and email already in place will appear. Copy phone numbers and addresses from the body of the email (which is now in the notes field) to the appropriate places, erase the email remains if you want, and save. For Outlook Express, open the email, click on the Tools menu, and select Add to Address Book.


• Turn Emails Into Calendar Items Click and drag the email as above, but drop it on the Calendar. Choose the day and time and then save.


• Turn Emails Into Tasks Same thing here - drag and drop the email onto Tasks, fill out the due date, and save.


• Remember Tasks You can set up a task that you need to perform on a given date. but how do you remember to get it done? Check the Reminder box and pick a day and time to be reminded. You can set the reminder to occur before the due date, so you start in time, and can keep moving the reminder forward to get additional reminders. Also, you can track the progress as either 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%.


• Track Your Email Queries After you've sent an email to an editor or other client, go into the Sent folder. Open the email and click the little red flag icon. You can set a follow-up flag for a given day, and also add a reminder for a day and time of your choosing. To get an overall view of what you have out, look at your folder list. See the folder called Search Folders? Click on it and you'll see a few sub-folders, including one called For Follow Up. Click on that and you see all emails that you've flagged for follow up. You can similarly flag any email you receive, as well.


• Track Your Contacts You can also set a follow up flag on any contact. Go to the contact record and click the red flag. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to show up in the Search Folders/For Follow Up folder along with the flagged emails, and you can't set a reminder date, so it has limited value. However, you can see which contacts are flagged. Go to Contacts, and then click the View menu at the top of the window. Choose Arrange By/Current View and choose By Follow Up Flag.


• Group Contacts Go to Contacts and open any contact. Click the Categories button at the bottom. You can put a contact into any number of categories, and can create new categories as you want. Then, when in Contacts, you can choose View/Arrange By/Current View/By Category and see all the contacts under each category. That can be handy for concentrating, say, on particular groups such as editors or PR reps.


• Track Everything With Journal You can set Outlook to automatically track a number of things, including meetings, phone calles, and emails. Go to the Tools menu, choose Options, and under Preferences/Contacts click the Journal Options button. Check off your business contacts and then the times you want to track. You will get entries in the Journal, so you can trace the time line of a discussion or item. Some things the system watches for, like emails. Others, such as phone calls or letters, require you to go to the contact record directly click on the Actions menu, and choose the appropriate item.

This won't change your business overnight, but it will make it easier to keep track of what you're doing while spending less time doing so. If you've found these helpful, I have four more here.

Short or Long - Investing in the Periodical Market

Short and long are stock market investment terms, but they also describe a different type of investment for a writer: time. If you work in the periodical area, you can take on short work - front of book (FOB), charts, and other pieces that are often in the 150 to 500 word range - or longer work like features or department pieces that could run 750 to 3,000 or more words.

Most writers understand that getting a check for $1,200 to $3,000 or even a lot more is nice. But shorts are worth far less, so are they worth the investment in your time? It actually depends on two factors. One is the hourly rate. Remember that you need to calculate how much you must make an hour to keep yourself in business. (See the business planning article in the writer resources area of this blog.) A short that runs, say, 500 words, that pays $1/word, and that you can finish in three hours, comes out to almost $167 dollars an hour.

That is a nice rate, but you have to really watch your time. Add up all the time - all interviews, all writing of all drafts, answering questions from the editor, and so on. When I hear writers estimate the time it takes to do something, I know that most significantly underestimate the time they actually spent, because people do in general. When I run my business planning class and have people closely monitor where their time goes, they are almost always shocked, if they've never checked it before.

But say that you are accurately monitoring your time. Why not then do a lot of shorts to make your income? Because there's another consideration - the time for marketing, billing, and overhead. If you make $500 for a short, then four of them pay as much as one 2000 word article paying $1/word. The amount of writing time might even be comparable. However, figure that a 500 word piece really needs two to three sources to come across as sold. You're now booking 8 to 12 interviews, versus the 6 or 7 that might be all you need for the longer piece. That means more time interviewing and scheduling your time.

You're also going to spend about as much time writing a query for a short as you would for a longer piece, plus you have to generate the ideas and pitch editors. So your marketing and sales time has just quadrupled. If you make a lot of your income from shorts, then you're probably spending many more of your hours marketing, interviewing, managing your time, and billing (and collecting). Now you see the real drawback - not the hourly rate, but the time you must invest to do enough shorts to make a living.

I'm not knocking shorts, and still do them sometimes myself if I think it makes sense. However, recognize that your time is valuable - because once its gone, you can't get it back. Maybe you could use a few more hours of sleep, or exercise, or reading, playing with the kids, writing a novel or play - you get the idea. Don't base your business planning only on hourly rates. Keep in mind the overhead and support you need to provide per piece and factor in how long a week you need to sustain the income you want.