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*****

This month marks the 10th anniversary of when I went full-time freelance. Since then I’ve written for more than 120 magazines (I lost count after that!) ranging from The Federal Credit Union and Multi-Channel Merchant to USA Weekend and Redbook. I’ve co-authored eight books, including The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success and The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock. I’ve been through slumps — and times that were so busy that I had to hire a virtual assistant. I’ve probably made every mistake in the book, and I’ve also discovered which rules to follow and which to break.

For my 10th anniversary, here are the top 10 things I’ve learned about freelance writing:

1. Queries: There is no “right” way to write a query. When I started teaching my eight-week e-course on breaking into magazines, I would occasionally tell a student not to do X, or that Y would never fly. And sometimes, those students went ahead and did X or Y anyway — and landed an assignment. In fact, I had one student who did everything the opposite from how I would have done it, and she got plenty of work. So now I recognize that every editor is different, so you can’t generalize on the perfect query letter. One editor will prefer a traditional query with quotes and bullet points, and another will prefer a one-sentence description. It’s really freeing to know that there is no such thing as a perfect query, so all you can do is go with your gut and do your best work.

2. Organization: Create your own systems. I’m not dissing prepackaged organizing systems, but they don’t often work for me. That’s why I use a homegrown hybrid of homemade forms, binders, a physical inbox, my iCal, e-mail folders, and whiteboards. It’s part Getting Things Done and part Linda Formichelli. For you, the best way to organize your queries, income, and work might be 100 percent computerized, it might be 100 percent paper, or it might be a mix. It doesn’t matter, as long as you use it.

3. Negotiating: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. For me, the non-confrontational wuss, negotiating is super-scary — but I also recognize that I’m the only one who’s looking out for me. After all, my editors certainly don’t care if I write for the same payrate for ten years! So I’ve made it a habit to occasionally ask for a bump in pay from editors who like my work. The editors often manage to wrangle some more money for me, from an extra $50 per article to a 50 percent increase. Two newsstand magazines even gave me raises that put me (so they say) above their typical highest rate that they pay other writers. Well, maybe that’s because those other writers didn’t ask!

4. Work-Life Balance: Occasionally I have low-energy days, and this is really hard for me because I like to be very productive. I’ve learned that if I can, I need to just go with the low energy: turn off the computer, get out of the house/office, and forget about work for a day or two, even if it’s mid-week. For example, I had an article due on Monday that I wasn’t able to finish last week, because I was so burned out that the idea of finishing the article literally had me in tears. So I turned off my computer, made an appointment for a massage and a pedicure, went to FunSpot, played Guitar Hero at a friend’s place, and saw the new Harry Potter movie. On Monday, I was able to whip out the rest of that article in under an hour. (Oh, and I should mention that the pedicure was indeed productive: When the woman in the next pedicurist’s chair over heard me tell the pedicurist that I’m a writer, she said that she’s an exec at AARP and has been looking for someone to write their newsletter. I should hear from her in mid-August.)

5. Marketing: I like to call it “planting seeds” — doing a few little things every day that will bring me closer to my goals. These aren’t big projects, like writing a huge query or writing a marketing plan. They’re small bits that I fit in between other tasks or when I feel like procrastinating, such as sending an editor a letter of introduction, tweaking an old query to send out somewhere new, or following up on a query. I do these things and then forget about them, and often I’m pleasantly surprised when, months after I planted a seed, it blooms and I end up with an assignment.

6. Attitude: I’ve found that the less I need work, the more I get it. This doesn’t mean that I’m lolling around on a pile of money, shooing away assignments, but it does mean that I get more work when I’m already comfortably busy than when I can hear the last dollars being drained from my checking account. It’s like dating: You always seem to attract more interest from potential mates when you’re already attached than when you’re actively looking for a partner. You don’t have to actually be busy for this effect to work for you in freelancing — you can pretend; for example, when you write to an editor looking for work, don’t tell her that the repo man is at your door and you’ve been eating Kraft mac-and-cheese for a month — instead, tell her you just finished up a bunch of deadlines and have some time opening up if she needs anything.

7. Interviewing: I’ve probably done thousands of interviews, and I still find them slightly scary. I’m better at writing than at talking on the phone, and I’m so non-confrontational that I sometimes have trouble directing an interview when I’m talking to an overbearing source. My life coach suggested that I do two things before an interview:

1. Take a few minutes to close my eyes, meditate, and center myself.
2. Give thanks that I have an interview, because it’s part of what allows me to work at home and generally live a life I love.

8. Rejection: If you’re a freelance writer, you will be rejected. the biggest reason for freelance failure is not an inability to write, report, or market — it’s an inability to get past failure. A rejection doesn’t necessarily mean you suck — it means your idea was off-base, or the timing wasn’t right, or the editor didn’t get his morning Starbucks, or the magazine is undergoing a redesign, or Mercury is in retrograde. I never let fear of failure hold me back from reaching for what I want, because doing nothing guarantees I will fail.

9. Writer relationships: Sharing is important. I’ve always been the sharing type: For example, when I was playing the slot machines in Atlantic City and hit a jackpot, a woman nearby came over and claimed that she was playing that entire bank of machines. So I gave her half of my winnings (maybe 10 bucks).

Okay, that proves that I’m a sucker, not that I’m a giver.

Anyway, the more you put out there (good stuff that is!), the more will come back to you. I can’t even count how many people I’ve helped who later recommended me to their editors for assignments (and vice versa). In fact, it just happened yesterday. I’m happy to share market info, advice, and editors’ contact details (all within reason, of course). There’s more than enough work to go around — and it’s more fun to have friends than competitors.

10. Writing: Actual writing is really a small part of my job as a freelancer, which is why I’m devoting just one item to it. My pet peeve as a writer has always been flabby writing: weak verbs, passive constructions, too many adjectives, vague wording. My favorite tip, which has served me well for these ten years, has been to be specific whenever I can, even using popular brand names if they fit. For example, instead of saying, “If your shoes are too tight, you can get blisters,” I might write something like, “If you’re teetering around in too-tiny Manolos, blisters may pop up on your feet.” Even though it has the exact same meaning as the first sentence, it’s more interesting, snappy, and fun to read.

So those are the ten most important things I learned about freelancing in the last ten years. What have you learned from experience? Post your advice in the comments! [lf]

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• The pay makes burger flipping seem like glamorous high-rolling.
• The only way to really make money is to let quality fly to the winds, because you almost need to end the assignments before they start to make a reasonable dollar per hour figure.
• They constantly advertise for new writers, suggesting the deal is so bad that they cannot keep people around for long.
• (Bonus Characteristic) They have executives scouring the web, looking for potential criticism and trying to counter it.

Need some convincing that writer mills aren’t worth a writer’s time — even for a beginning writer? Here are some interesting posts on these business models:

Erik Sherman recently posted a good piece on Demand Studios. Demand Studios responds, and Erik dissects the response.

On Michelle Rafter’s WordCount blog, Tim Beyers writes “Freelancers. do not write for content aggregators.” As a counterpoint on the same blog, Barbara Whitlock, Helium’s new member outreach manager, writes, “Yes, freelancers should write for Helium.”

On his own blog, Tim Beyers posted “Was I Wrong About Helium?”

Also on Michelle Rafter’s blog is the post “Writer games Examiner.com to make a point about content aggregators.” In this post, Rafter described how one successful writer purposely wrote articles for Examiner.com that were filled with exaggeration and half-truths. Do you think a fact checker or editor called her?

I’ve said it on this blog several times, but let me say it again: My very first clip, in 1997, paid $500. You don’t need to write for free or ultra-cheap just to break in. In addition, these writer mills churn out such junk that no editor in her right mind would be impressed by a clip from them.

What do you think? [lf]

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To me, the difference between pounding out a dissertation on time and dithering around with queries (and letters of introduction, and other marketing tactics) and making no progress is this: Deadlines. When you write a dissertation, you have an end date. You have a goal. But when it comes to writing queries, there is no deadline, and no one is breathing down your neck waiting for your perfect pitch.

If you have trouble getting yourself to market, I suggest setting self-imposed deadlines for queries and other marketing activities. But the problem with that is, well, you’re not stupid. You know the deadline is not a real deadline. If you don’t make your self-imposed deadline, there is no editor who will yell at you or threaten to cut your fee.

Luckily, there are ways to give your self-imposed deadlines some oomph. For example:

1. Tweet Your Goals

A writer on a forum I frequent mentioned that if you tweet your writing goals on Twitter using the hashtag #writegoal, other writers will see it and send you motivating messages. Also, you’ll feel the pressure to make progress so you can report your successes later in the day.

2. Recruit a friend.

As I wrote in The Best Productivity Technique, my goal buddy and I started doing “boot camps” where we check in with one another by phone every hour during the day to report on what we did in the last hour and what we plan to do in the next hour. When I wrote this post we had just started doing this practice, and it’s worked so well that we do it every week. You can recruit a buddy to do boot camp, and on that day, let her know that you plan to write X number of queries or market in other ways.

3. Use negative reinforcement.

One writer I know made a pact with another writer: If she didn’t get her writing project done by a certain date, she would have to do something she really, really hates — and is actually afraid of. If you try this, maybe you’ll have to eat a food you can’t stand, watch a movie you hate (Leprechaun, anyone?), Or take over your spouse’s toilet-scrubbing duties for one month. (Oh, and my friend finished her project on time.)

4. Use positive reinforcement.

This is like the negative reinforcement tip, but you promise yourself something you enjoy if you do X amount of marketing in Y time. Be sure to tell a friend so you can’t cheat. For example, if you finish five queries you can treat yourself to a massage, a middle-of-the-workday movie, or your favorite dessert.

What are your tips for setting self-imposed deadlines, or for getting your marketing done when you really have no motivation? Please post in the Comments below! [lf]

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I think the beginner’s mind is the perfect attitude for a writer — especially in today’s economy, when we’re all looking for new ways to land writing gigs. In fact, The Renegade Writer is all about the beginner’s mind: Why not try this? Let’s see if that works. Instead of saying, “I’m an expert and I know how this works,” we can benefit by saying, “This has worked for me in the past, but maybe there’s something else that will work even better.”

For example, I’m a huge proponent of e-mailing queries — and I was even when all the magazines and books insisted that you had to snail mail them — but a couple of years ago, I wondered what would happen if I went back to my early days of querying and sent letters of introduction to custom publishers via mail. I mailed out around 25 packets with letters and clips, and had a lot of fun collating clips just like in the old days. One publisher held on to my clips for over a year, and surprised me with an assignment out of the blue. I can’t say my snail mail experiment fared any better than my usual e-mailing tactic, but it may have gotten me an assignment I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.

Here are some ideas for harnessing the beginner’s mind in your writing:

1. Instead of dipping into your tried-and-true (read: overused) list of go-to sources, why not start from scratch and find someone with a fresh outlook on the subject?
2. Rather than churning out the usual bullet-pointed article or anecdotal lede, try new formats. Would your editor go for an illustration with call-outs or a clever chart?
3. If you always pitch magazines X, Y, and Z, try finding some new-to-you magazines to query. It’s always good to expand your client base.
4. Put together a beautiful snail mail package with a query, clips, and your business card. Maybe e-mail-overloaded editors will find your package refreshing.
5. Do something crazy. One writer, in our Comments section, mentioned that she uses a funny, self-deprecating subject line on her follow-up e-mails. My business cards say “My clients think I’m swell.” I once interviewed a writer who ends his queries with a joke. What can you do that no one has done before — but that might work?

What have you done lately that breaks out of your old, tried-and-true methods of working? What happened? I’d love to hear about it in the Comments below. [lf]

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Following up is an important part of a writer’s business. One writer I interviewed for The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock told me that up to 90% of her assignments come through follow-ups.

Not hearing back from an editor doesn’t always equal rejection. Your e-mail may have been filtered to the editor’s spam folder, she may have lost your e-mail, or she may be so busy that your e-mail is sitting in her in-box, buried beneath hundreds of others. Or, best-case scenario, the editor passed your query along to her boss or is holding onto it for the next editorial meeting, and she hasn’t had the time to let you know.

Whenever I send a query or letter of introduction (LOI), I save it to a special folder in Gmail labeled “Follow-Up.” Every couple of weeks, I go through the box and follow up on those queries and LOIs that haven’t gotten responses. You could also be a little more tech-savvy than me and schedule follow-ups in your calendar such as iCal or Google Calendar. (For some reason, I schedule follow-ups with potential corporate clients in iCal, but don’t do that with queries and LOIs. Maybe it’s time to change that!)

The writers’ forums are clogged with posters asking, “When should I follow up?”, and there are as many answers are there are people who want to know. I say to go with your gut on this one. Personally, I follow up by e-mail in two weeks, then again in another two weeks, and then I do a final follow-up by phone two weeks after that. The only thing you need to be careful of is coming off as a stalker. (And yes, I have heard horror stories from editors about writers who followed up every day.)

Now, two weeks is just my preference. You may want to follow up sooner with editors you have a relationship with, and later with new-to-you editors. See what works for you.

When writing your follow-up message, it doesn’t hurt to be polite and assume that the e-mail was lost and that the editor isn’t just sitting on it to torture you. I use the subject line “Follow-Up: Name of Query,” then I write something like:

Hello! I’m writing to follow up on my query “Hire Me Now,” which I sent to you on May 1. Since I haven’t heard back from you, I’m afraid my query may have been lost in cyberspace or in your spam folder! When you have a few minutes, would you mind letting me know if this idea is interesting to you? I’ve pasted the query below. Thanks so much, and I look forward to your reply!

Then, I paste the query below so the editor doesn’t have to go back digging through her old e-mails to find it.

If you don’t hear back after a couple more weeks, it pays to pick up the phone. Scary, I know! but I do it all the time and I’ve never been yelled at. To contact an editor via phone, call the main magazine number, which you can often find online, and ask for the editorial department of X magazine. If that doesn’t work, try calling the ad department — their number is often listed on the masthead or on the website — and tell them you’re trying to reach the editorial department, and would they happen to have the number?

Another question writers ask is when to finally give up and move on. If I don’t hear back after two e-mail and one phone call follow-up, I generally give up. But I have been known, during times when I feel like procrastinating, to go back through that folder and follow up on queries that are six months old or older! Why the hell not?

So…do you follow up on your queries? If not, why not? Are you afraid to follow up? Do you have any stories of assignments you’ve gotten from follow-ups — or horror stories of follow-ups gone terribly awry? We’d love to hear them! [lf]

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From pastors and members of the Christian writing community, we are seeking stories that can be inspiring, humorous, enlightening, or motivating, and can cover anything you’ve learned about yourself or the world around you because of your pastor, your faith, or by ministering to your congregation.

From our photographers we are looking for images that capture pastors as they work and minister in traditional and non-traditional settings, that feature ceremonies, special events, or services.

Please visit www.ultimatehcibooks.com and review the synopsis and chapter topics we’ve posted for The Ultimate Pastor.

Also online are format guidelines for stories and photos, submission information and FAQs that answer most questions you may have. Just use the links on the website’s menu tree on the left of each page to browse the comprehensive information we provide, but should you have questions that aren’t addressed, feel free to drop us an email.

Please remember, photos and stories are separate submissions and will be reviewed independently of one another for publication. Please do not embed photos in a story. Our publishing format does not place photos near or with specific stories, and it not necessary to submit both a story and photo to be part of the project.

If you have friends or colleagues you feel may be interested in participating in this project, please help us network and forward this information to them, or post it online on your blog, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter page.

I look forward to seeing your work for possible publication in The Ultimate Pastor and to the opportunity of sharing your experience about living your faith with our readers.

Blessings,

Candace Johnson
Editor, The Ultimate Pastor
cj@ultimatehcibooks.com
www.ultimatehcibooks.com

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When I put out a request for sources, I like to thank all the people who get back to me. But with the overwhelming response I have gotten from HARO, it’s been difficult for me to answer every person — even pasting in a standard reply takes forever when you have 80 responses.

So I set up a separate gmail account just for HARO requests: lindasources@gmail.com. Then I set up the vacation autoresponder to say something like:

“Thanks for responding to my HARO request! The response I get from HARO is usually overwhelming, so please forgive the standard reply. I just wanted to let you know I received your e-mail and will be in touch if I’d like to interview you or your client. Thanks!”

I have the lindasources gmail account automatically forward to my regular e-mail account, but you could also not forward the e-mails and just check the account periodically when you do a HARO request.

Having a separate account also helps me avoid getting stuck on random press lists…if someone harvests my address from HARO to send junk to, I know where they got my address because I use it only for HARO. Then I can write to Peter and let him know that someone is abusing HARO.

The form e-mail is probably not the ideal solution because it lacks the personal touch, but it does save time.

When I shared this solution with some writers, one of them responded that at the end of every HARO request, he adds a note that he’ll reply only to those respondents that are a good fit. Another good solution.

Do you ever get an overload of potential sources? Do you try to thank them all? Why or why not? [lf]

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My writing buddy and fellow FLXer Elaine Grant mentioned to me that she’s recorded calls on Skype. In case you’re not familiar with it, Skype is a free program that lets you make phone calls through your computer. If you have a video camera in your computer, you can even make free video calls. (My husband video Skypes with his mom often so she can see her new grandson!)

I did some research, and here’s what I found out:

• It’s free to call another Skype number, but to call a non-Skype number, you need to buy credits (in increments as small as $10) or sign up for their monthly service (which is around $13 per month and gives you unlimited worldwide calls — cheaper if you want only a US plan).
• Calls to US numbers (and many non-US numbers) if you use credits cost just over 2 cents per minute. There is a small connection charge per call.
• Ecamm Network is one of the companies that makes a Skype recorder for Macs. They give you a free one-week trial, and if you want to buy it, it costs $14.95. (If you’re looking for a Skype recorder for the PC, try this one).

Last week I bought a $10 credit on Skype and downloaded the Skype recorder. Whenever I open Skype, the recorder automatically pops up. All I have to do is press the Record button — it automatically stops when you hang up the call. The recorder saves the call as a .mov file. The files are pretty big, so instead of e-mailing them to my transcriptionist, I upload them directly to her server using Fetch FTP. This usually takes three minutes or so.

I’ve done three interviews this way so far, and have made a few other short calls, and I still have $7.45 left on my account.

The sound quality on Skype has been excellent; I’ve asked my interviewees, and they say they can hear me just fine. Do test the system out before jumping in with all your cash, though…I’ve heard reports from other writers that they experienced terrible sound quality.

Anyway, thought I’d share in case anyone is looking for a cheap, good call recording solution!

How do you record calls? Have you found a really cool set up? Please let us know! [lf]

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