in this age of the “writer as an entrepreneur” responsible for a growing share of the work required to not only create but also sell a book, adding management skills to our repertoire of abilities is not at all a bad idea.
as launch time approaches, authors get overwhelmed by thinking that they have to do “everything:” Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, ad campaigns, bookstore talks, conference panels, media articles, email newsletters, book clubs…you name it.
Based on our mission and our definition of success, we can then work out a manageable set of steps to take in line with our specific interests and goals. We feel more in control and less anxious about having to “do it all.”
A more viable definition of success does have a quantitative element, but it doesn’t necessarily mean “number of copies sold or dollars earned.” It can mean other measurable outcomes such as landing a teaching job or a column in a respected publication.
The Writer’s Market and Mediabistro’s How to Pitch guides both offer information on their listed magazines for what percentage of the publication is freelanced out, and of pay rates. If the magazine you want is in there, you’re set with the info you need.
Many magazines have their writer’s guidelines right on their website these days. Poke around there and see if you can turn up any “write for us” information.
Don’t overlook the insights the mighty search engine might bring you if you do a search on “pay at X magazine.”
Do some searches on job-ad compilation sites such as Indeed.com, or on LinkedIn and see if they’re hiring staffers. If they hire paid writers full-time and do use freelancers, it’s a fair bet that they pay freelancers, too.
If you don’t know other freelance writers, you need to. Don’t think of other freelance as the competition — they are your sounding board and may know about magazines you want to try. They can refer you gigs, too.
When all else fails, see if you can scare up a phone number for the magazine and call. Barring that, find an editorial email and try that. View lack of response as a strong indicator that they don’t pay.
If you are writing for income, you obviously want to get paid. This article gives some good advice on how to gain the knowledge and avoid the school of hard knocks.
My mantra is to do it instead of thinking about doing it. If I catch myself doing the latter I just switch to doing instead of thinking. Easier said than done for me, but I’ve gotten better at that.
But there aren’t enough hours in the day. Or not if you’re also going to stay healthy and be a part of your family and not get burnt out. So things fall off the table, even more so if you’re hell bent on creating really great work. Yet, I find that quality is what wins at the end of the day and that solves a lot of other problems.
People scan and don’t read, so you have to format your content to meet that reality.
And if they share it, you gain greater readership. So I encourage writers to think of the entire canvas when creating content. Think about the headers in your piece and about the images you’ll use to enrich the story.
Writers still concentrate too much on the text and not enough on formatting and presentation. Making the content you create readable, portable and memorable is what will gain success.
The other thing that I think was important was commenting (with links) on other content.
I believe in 90-9-1 participation inequality. Comments are the area on a piece of content where the 9 (contributors) and the 1 (creators) are most frequently found. Those are the people I wanted to connect with because I had a better chance of them carrying my content to other places. And they did.
Social media is a key factor in SEO and Internet marketing for businesses and individuals. You rock at social media, sharing across multiple platforms and gaining reach. Social media can be intimidating and time consuming. What advice do you have for managing individual as well as business social accounts?
Well you hit on the big issue; it’s time consuming and most people don’t want to invest that amount of time. So that’s the first thing. You can’t half-ass it and expect to do very well.
One of the things I try to do is make my content on these platforms consistent, readable and memorable. On Twitter I decided to use a convention for the vast majority of my tweets.
[Activity]: [Title] [URL] [Comment] [Hashtag]
The last one is to not do work for free.
Well, I’m seeing more and more evidence of what I describe happening and believe that Knowledge Graph Optimization (KGO) is going to be more and more important moving forward.
How, then, do writing opportunities work?
To be paid for writing, you need to look for a person with two characteristics:
They’ve got money to spare.
They’re looking for writers.
This could be:
A magazine editor who is looking for feature articles.
An aristocrat or multi-billionaire who wants to support the career of an aspiring artist.
A blogger who makes money from advertisements, or from selling information products, but is too busy to do all their blogging themselves.
A book publisher who is looking for the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter.
A business owner who needs help from a writer to promote their business.
Do you see where this is going? There are writing opportunities out there, if you know where to look, and if you know the right people.
First, the more money a potential client has, the more they’ll be willing to pay you. Bloggers and content creators don’t typically earn much money from advertising. That’s why revenue sharing sites, which share advertising revenue with writers in exchange for content, often pay a relatively low rate. Magazine editors and book publishers are somewhere in the middle. They pay reasonably well, but they’re looking for extremely high quality, so you’ve got to be real good to get their attention. Business owners who have a steady income usually pay the most generous fees to writers. Businesses have a budget for marketing, so they’ve got cash to splash.
Forty percent of respondents admitted that poor spelling and grammar reduced their favorable impression of a brand.
As a marketer with a limited budget, the good news about focusing on quality content creation is that you don’t need to think in terms of producing more content but rather in terms of making each piece of content more effective.