10 Ways for Freelance Writers to Market Themselves

Hi, readers! Got a query you're struggling with, and would like some feedback on? Had a query rejected and wish you knew why? Or simply want a pro to take a look at your latest pitch? 

Stay tuned--I'll soon be offering my Query Critique series, where I edit and comment on readers' queries (anonymously) here on the blog. (It's a bargain--my consulting/coaching clients pay me $100/hour for this kind of work--so get your query ready to submit when I announce the upcoming critique series!)

And do me a favor. Please comment on this post if you're planning to participate and let me know! Thanks.  

            

Now, onto my latest post: 

New to freelancing? Feel like you're doing nothing more than sending out queries and getting, well, nowhere? 

            

Welcome to the club. When you launch a freelance business, you spend the majority of your time marketing. As you develop experience and work for clients, though, you can expect to spend less time overall selling yourself. Yet you should plan on devoting a significant chunk of time, at least 20 percent, to marketing your business.

            

The way you market will depend on the type of work you do, which means that the strategies that work for a freelancer who writes for magazines won’t work for a copywriter. That’s why I suggest you create your own marketing plan, selecting different techniques that will vary depending on the type of work you do. In addition to those dreaded cold calls, here are ten effective techniques to use:

• Query letters. If you write for magazines, whether print or online, a powerful query is your first line of attack. Every query should open with a compelling lead, make the case for the story, show the editor how you plan to approach the topic, and describe why you’re uniquely qualified to write it. 
• LOIs. Second only to query letters in the freelancer’s arsenal is the LOI, or letter of introduction. You should have a template on hand that you can customize for potential clients, whether you’re contacting a custom publisher, a business, or a potential ghostwriting client. A template you can tweak lets you strike fast if you see a freelancing post or find out about a possible gig. The client will usually hire one of the first qualified responders, so you want to be as close to the head of the line as you can.
• Your website. You need one. Period. Your website should be designed to attract your primary target clients. If you’re writing for businesses, play up that aspect. If you freelance for magazines, include clips on your site and a list of publications you’ve worked for. At the least, your website should include: a description of the kind of work you do; a brief biography; and contact information. You may also want to list of prior projects or publications or client testimonials as well.
• Your email signature. One of the easiest yet overlooked ways to market yourself is to create an email signature that describes the work you do. Change it occasionally to highlight different aspects of your business.
• Satisfied clients. Clients who are happy with your work are one of the best ways to market yourself. Once you’ve proven yourself, ask your editor if she knows of other editors looking for freelancers. If you feel that’s too pushy, at least ask her to pass your name along to colleagues who might hire you in the future. 
• Article and book sources. I’ve interviewed hundreds of sources over the years, most of who are professionals in the health and fitness fields. I let them know that I ghostwrite and coauthor books, and have had work come through recommendations because of the way I treated a source. 
• Online job posts. Believe it or not, I’ve found good-paying work through online jobsites like craigslist. Check out http://craigslist.org, www.elance.com, www.online-writing-jobs.com, and www.guru.com for freelance job postings. Yes, most of the work is low-paying but there are legitimate gigs to be found if you don’t mind trawling through the dreck.
• Networking. Hate the word? Put a different spin on it. Don’t call it networking. Don’t call it anything. Just make an effort to create relationships with other humans, help them when you can, and connect. The person you connect with may not be a potential client, but he may know someone who is. The more people who know what you do, the better.
• One-on-one meetings. Every year, ASJA holds its annual writers’ conference in New York. Members can attend “Personal Pitch” to meet editors and agents. If you do a lot of work for businesses, it’s worth it to join your local chamber of commerce or attend other local networking events to introduce yourself to business owners.
• Social media. Unlike a website, a blog isn’t essential, but it can help you market yourself and your business. Same goes for your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Each should contain a brief blurb about the kind of work you do, again targeting potential clients. 

            Bottom line is to avoid a common marketing mistake, and one I’ve made in the past. You get busy with work and you don’t market for a while. Then after you crawl out from under your deadlines, you discover that you have to scramble to line up assignments.

            That’s why you should set aside some time, even if it’s just a few hours a week, to market. That may mean sending out a query or two, touching base with your regular clients, or checking online sites for possible gigs. Consistent marketing will make for more consistent work, and consistent money. 

                    ***This post is drawn from Secret 18: Market constantly, from Writer for Hire: 101 Secrets to Freelance Success. 

More on Writers" Goals for 2013

For the last couple of years, Kristine Meldrum Denholm has asked writers about what their coming goals are for the coming year. Check out her roundup post, to see how your goals stack up--and possibly add some new ones as well!

Time to Set your Freelance Goals for 2013

Hi, readers, and happy new year! This is my favorite day of the year. To me, January 1 represents promise, potential, possibility. It's also when I set my goals for the year, and I suggest you do the same for your career. Because I'm working today (I have a story due tomorrow!), I'm reposting last year's January 1 post. The advice is just as good now as it was then! 

           Consider the Past           

           Before you look forward, you first must look back. At the end of each year, I review what types of writing work I performed, for whom, and how much money I made as a result. I also add up the amount I made fromselling reprints and from speaking engagements so I know how much I’m making from both activities, and I look for trends, both good and bad.

Another issue to explore is how you spent your time last year. Look at when projects were assigned and when you turned them in. Are you turning around your profiles quickly but spending too much time on shorter, lower-paying pieces? Are those heavily-researched business articles really worth spending so much energy on? Remember that it’s not how much you make for a particular project—it’s what your hourly rate turns out to be.

            Finally, how diversified were you this year? Were you working for only a handful of clients or for dozens? (The former may be unavoidable if much of your work is writing books, which take much longer than articles.) Did you have lots of short, lower-paying assignments or did you focus more on bigger projects or feature stories? Does your income come from a variety of sources or only a few?

Consider the Future

So, now you know where your money came from. The next question is how much you want to make this year—and what kind of work you want to perform to make it. Should you focus your efforts in a particular area or would you rather try something new? Are you feeling burned out and want to switch gears—and try writing fiction, for example, instead of essays? Consider too how much time you can dedicate to “projects of the heart” compared to the work that pays your bills.

After you’ve set an annual income goal, determine how you’ll get there. How many hours must you write to earn that income? If you’re freelancing fulltime, the answer may be as many as necessary. Having adaily financial goal can help keep you on track. If your goal is to make $30,000 a year from freelancing, that averages to $2,500 a month or $125 a day (with four weeks off during the year.) In other words, if you can average that amount of income 240 days a year, you can make $30,000 this year. Make sense? 

Strive for a Balance  

By setting monthly, weekly or daily financial targets, you’ll be on your way to achieving your overall financial goal this year. But remember that your writing career isn’t only about the money. Your goals may also include non-financial ones like spending more time writing fiction or developing a stronger voice. (One of my goals last year was to finish my latest novel, The Honesty Index, and get it into print. And I did! 

That's why I suggest you build writing time into your schedule for projects that don’t produce income (at least not yet) but are important to you for other reasons. Even though I write for a living, I give myself time to write for myself as well. After all, if you only focus on the bottom line and continually take work that bores or frustrates you, you’ll be likely to become bored and frustrated with your career as well. 

Instead, strive for a balance between the money you want to make and the work you want to do—and both you and your bank account will be better off in 2013. 

***I've got a great list of blog topics for this year, so stay tuned. If you have a question or subject you'd like me to address on the blog, tell me so in a comment below. And in the meantime, thanks to all who have bought Writer for Hire: 101 Secrets to Freelance Success. I'll have more book news soon, and I'll be conducting my annual freelance income survey again soon, so stay tuned! 

Smart Year-end Advice: Name Your Whales

          

You may have heard of the 80/20 rule in business, which says that 80 percent of your income (and your work) comes from 20 percent of your clients. In the gaming industry, they call the high-rollers “whales,” and casino staff do everything possible to encourage them to spend time, and money, at their casinos. 

Do you know who your whales are? The only way to be sure is to do (eek!) some math.

The end of the year is the perfect time to take a closer look at your income. Every quarter, I add up my gross income, but the last quarter of the year I take it a step further, and divide it by client. Then I categorize my income into categories--like money from original magazine articles; money from my own books; money from ghostwriting and coauthoring clients’ books; money from reprints; and money from teaching and speaking.

Totaling these figures tells me where my money is coming from, and what types of work have been the most lucrative for me. It also helps me set my goals for the coming year—such as increasing the percentage of income I receive from books, for example, or doubling the amount I make from reprints, which are a relatively easy way to make extra money.

You can do the same thing quite easily. At the end of the year (or any other time you want), list your clients, and add up what each has paid you this year. Then determine what types of work you’ve been paid for in the past year. The categories you use will depend on the nature of freelance work you perform. If you write for magazines, do PR work for nonprofits, and do copywriting for corporations, for example, then add up the income you've made for each type.

Adding up your income and where it came from is a critical first step. With this information, you can set more specific, realistic career goals for the coming year, focusing on what areas of your business are promising. You’ll also identify your whales--the clients who provide with you with the most work and money. Those are the ones you want to continue to work for. It’s much more efficient to do a lot of work for a small number of clients than it is to do a small amount of work for many clients. This seems obvious, but a lot of freelancers don’t take the time to determine who their most valuable clients are, and focus more time and energy on them. 

Your mileage, of course, may vary. If you write books or do ghostwriting, you may have more one-shots, or clients you only write for once. In this case, you may have different whales each year, but I still suggest you stay in touch with each--they’re a source of referrals and possibly more work in the future.

            

            Then go a step further and consider cutting ties with clients who aren’t worth the time and effort. If you’re writing for more than ten clients a year, chances are that there is some dead weight--let’s call them remoras--on your client list. Maybe you’ve been writing for a client for years but your hourly rate isn’t all that great--or the client’s PIA factor is so high, you’d like to cut him loose. Every client you work for involves opportunity cost, and if you never get rid of your remoras, you may be losing out on more lucrative ones.

            Make it an annual goal to determine not just your income, but where it comes from. When you know who your whales are, you can make sure they get the attention they deserve.

**This post comes from Secret 52: Name your whales, from my latest book on successful freelancing, Writer for Hire: 101 Secrets to Freelance Success. If you want to make more money from your freelancing in 2013, I suggest you pick it up! And happy holidays to my readers...I'll be back in 2013! 

Better Writing=More Money! Smart Tips on Crafting Nonfiction

While this blog focuses on making more money in less time, it's important to write well. Duh, right? Well, today's post is loaded with smart, practical advice from Christina Boufis, author of the new book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Nonfiction. So let's get right to it:   

Christina, you cover nonfiction articles in your new book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Nonfiction. What kinds of tips do you give freelancers for writing stronger, more informative articles?

First and foremost, as a nonfiction writer, you need to make sure you get your facts straight. Nothing can make you lose credibility faster if you don't. That means double and sometimes triple-checking statistics, quotations, sources, government publications, so that you are your own fact-checker. 

That aside, your lede has to be so compelling that the reader is completely hooked and wants to keep reading. I like starting with an intriguing bit of dialogue, an arresting statistic, or something ironic or humorous. If you can be funny or witty (appropriate to the subject matter), you'll keep your reader engaged. Then on the sentence level, my biggest tip is to rethink your verbs. I tell my students  those are the $500 words. Adjectives are probably worth a nickel, and adverbs a penny. I stole that metaphor from somewhere, but it's true. We tend to use the same verbs over and over, so finding a strong verb (or one that is used in a different context) just punches up your prose. 

New writers often struggle with structuring articles. Any tips on how to do that? 

I have a picture of an iceberg over my desk, and I tell my students to think of the first draft as the iceberg draft. Don't worry yet about structure; just get it all down. Then on subsequent drafts you're looking at the water line: what needs to be submerged? What needs to be above the surface? It's at this point that I tend to do an outline, so I can find out whether I'm ordering information correctly or not. 

And then ask yourself for every paragraph: what am I really saying here? How well am I saying it? How does it fit with the whole? I try to end with a really good quote or something surprising, so the piece ends on a lift and ideally stays in the reader's mind. If I can't figure out how to end something, I take a look at the beginning. Is there an image I can return to? Also, your lede is your promise to the reader. It's like your train ticket. If you've told the reader you're going to Milan and the end of the piece you wind up in Venice, than something went awry with the piece. 

I'm a service journalist primarily, and find that I have a hard time writing profiles. Do you have any strategies you use to write a profile that captures a reader's attention? 

Profiles are hard as you're encapsulating a person (or some notable aspect of her life) in a very short form. But I love reading profiles because they're all basically sort of heroes or heroine's journeys: what has this person done that's so remarkable, unexpected, admirable? What obstacles did they overcome to get there? It's the tension that can make a profile come to life, so I basically start with the conflict, the seemingly impossible odds. 

Don't try to build tension or save it for the end to build suspense, as some of my students try to. On a separate note, I tell my students to scour their local papers for profile subjects. I've sold stories to national magazines based on a short profile I've read in my hometown paper, so always look for a person, an unsung hero or heroine, who might have national appeal. 

You also talk about interviewing, which is essential for freelancers. I'm seeing a lot of writers use email as their first choice instead of phone interviews. Do you have a preference? Why or why not? 

Oh, I loathe email interviews. I don't think you can capture the voice or even warmth of your interviewee or allow for the serendipitous remark that didn't come from your questions but just popped out of your source's mouth if you do an email interview. I use them as a last resort. Most of the meat of the interviews (I do mostly all by phone) seems to come at the end. And I use your trick -- Is there anything I haven't asked you -- at the end of each interview, and I get gold almost every time. If you send someone questions in email format, you get quick, static answers. And lots of incomplete sentences. I truly find them a waste of time. 

I know your book is aimed at newer nonfiction writers. Tell me more about it and what readers can expect to get from it. 

I wrote the book to answer all the questions (or at least some of them) that my creative nonfiction students always ask me: How do I begin? How do I tell my stories? How do I write well at the sentence level? How do I actually force myself to sit down and write? So it's really a book for novice writers. I cover a lot of ground -- everything from long-form nonfiction such as book-length memoirs and biographies to short profiles and travel essays. 

But the main thing I want to do in the book is to be encouraging. I think narrative nonfiction is the form of the late 20th and early 21st century. We're hungry for true tales told well. We want information in story form. And creative nonfiction is a democratic genre, open to everyone. So I think the book is the first step for someone interested in jumping in. 

Tell me a little bit about your background as a freelancer. How did this book come about? 

I started writing narrative nonfiction almost 20 years ago, before I realized it was a genre. I was teaching women prisoners at the San Francisco County jail, and I'd come home every day just feeling full of emotions that I had to get down on paper. I'd recently finished my PhD in Victorian literature and women's studies, and I wanted to be a writer, not really an academic, so I started submitting my articles about the jail. 

But I was working off an academic model where one or two published pieces per year is considered prolific. It took me years to learn that freelancing is a business -- and I learned a lot of that from your books, so thank you -- and over the last decades I've still taught and freelanced, though I no longer teach at the jail. I'd seen a call for this book on the FLX (www.freelancesuccess.com) forum, and I contacted the agent looking for a writer. So that's how that came about. 

Any other advice for successful nonfiction writing for my readers? 

A: Read, read, read. And then pitch the kinds of magazines that you're drawn to. Also never give up. Keep rewriting. And get support -- a forum like FLX, a writing group -- it's hard if not impossible to do this alone. 

       
***Thank you so much, Christina, for your excellent advice. Readers, please check out her book for tons more great advice on writing stronger, more compelling nonfiction articles, essays, and books. And please let me know what you thought of this post! Do you have any questions about writing nonfiction you'd like to see answered here.

Finally, I apologize for this post looking kind of screwy. I've spent several hours trying to debug it but am giving up now! 

Platform: What it is and How to Create Yours

What comes to mind when you think of “platform”? If you’re a book author, or aspire to be, you probably already know that platform refers to your ability to sell a book—in other words, what your name and connections bring to a book project.

Platform is as essential to an author’s success as writing ability and a stellar idea. “First an author needs a platform to convince the publisher that he or she can muster up advance interest in the topic that will result in eager buyers for the book when it is released,” says Christina Katz, author of Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008). “In today's tight book publishing market, if you don't have that, it's going to be very difficult to convince a publisher to invest in you and your book concept.” Platform is just as important after your book is published, adds Katz; it helps you garner attention, interest, buzz, and sales.” 

However, platform isn’t just for book authors any longer. Freelancers of all stripes are finding that developing platforms helps set them apart from other writers, making it easier to market themselves. “In the ‘gig economy,’ every independent contractor needs a shorthand way to communicate the value he or she offers,” says Katz. “A freelancer's platform would emphasize value to the kind of client the writer is aiming to serve.”

A platform is more than a specialty. Platform encompasses not just what you write about, but who your readers are--and how many of them know who you are, and may do something (like buy your book, or read a blog post or article because you wrote it) as a result.

If you’re a freelancer without a platform, you can start building one by thinking about what your clients (both current and future) need, and what you can offer them. Freelancer Meagan Francis, creator of the blog www.thehappiestmom.com, says platform is important because she covers a specific topic that she has personal knowledge of and strong opinions about. “I'm a mom--I write about motherhood,” says Meagan Francis, author of The Happiest Mom: 10 Secrets to Enjoying Motherhood (Weldon Owen, 2011). “I know a lot of writers feel boxed in and limited by the idea of narrowing down to a specific focus. But for me—at least right now—it gives me much-needed structure and focus to my work.”

Francis has been writing about parenthood for eight years and says developing a platform has made her more focused. “I was always interested in mind/body, wellness, psychology, relationships and self-help, from a mother's perspective, but could never figure out quite how to make that work for me when I was trying to make a living selling one magazine article at a time,” says Francis. “At some point I realized that I actually wanted to be like the Martha Beck [a well-known life coach] for moms (speaking of platform!) and that helped it gel for me. For now, it works…in my case I am lucky enough that my platform actually encompasses almost all the other things I wanted to write about, anyway.”

Once you’ve identified your unique value to clients, you can start building your platform, continuing to grow the one you already have, or creating a new one. John Borchardt, a Houston freelancer who writes for magazines and corporate clients, developed a new platform to help him diversify his freelance work.

“Platforms are important to me in both writing for magazines and working as a technical writer for corporate clients. My original platform was writing magazine job-hunting articles customized to the needs of industrial scientists and engineers. I continue to write in this area. This builds on my work experience as an industrial scientist and engineer,” says Borchardt. “I developed a second platform based on this same industrial background: writing articles on various aspects of science and engineering: energy, recycling, the environment, global warming, etc. More recently I have drawn on my industrial background as a technology manager to write articles on business management.”

When you have chosen your platform, make sure you can describe what it is and what it means for clients. For example, my current platform is that I’m an experienced collaborator who helps health, fitness, and nutrition experts writebooks. That’s a short, specific statement that describes my value to potential clients.

Second, make sure that you’re spreading the word about what you do. Your social media presence on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter should remind people of your platform, as should your email signature. The same goes for when you meet someone online or in person. Ideally, everything you do should support and continue to build your platform, whatever it is. 

If you’re resisting the idea of limiting yourself to a specific identity, remember that your platform can always grow and adapt as your writing career does. A platform isn’t static; it can grow and change as your career does. The key is that it reflects your unique identity as a writer, and helps you reach clients who will want to hire you.

**This post was drawn from Secret #11: Create a platform, from Writer for Hire: 101 Secrets to Freelance Success.