17 Tips To Becoming A Successful Freelance Writer

As a freelancer, remember you’re working without a net – no staff copy editor, no proofreader, no company style manual. Just you. So you have to be careful and become your own severest critic. In short, learn to be excellent without supervision.

The key is the more work you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Here are some pointers in no particular order on how to be an effective freelance writer.

• Write a lot to keep in practice whether you sell or not.
• Read up on ways to protect your work. My method is to have a notary certify that I sealed a manuscript beneath a wax seal. Then, there’s always the U.S. Copyright Office if you have $45 for a valued manuscript. However, reading up on protecting your work can show how to guard it without expensive fees. Be careful posting work on the Web. Drag and drop is just a mouse click away. What’s irksome is to post something you feel is mediocre and not very good, then finding someone who makes it sing like Pavarotti.
• Read everything you can get your hands on. It’s good to get the feeling, “I can do that,” especially if you can. More than that, it’s a way to get in touch with excellence. So many writers declare themselves good without proving it.
• It’s okay to read writing books about writing, but it’s better to read writing – magazine articles, good books, newspapers. Find them on their Web sites and even subscribe to them when they’re free. It’s a way to see what good writing looks like. Listen to books on tape in your car. Immerse yourself in the words of others. Notice names of writers and experts. You don’t have to memorize them, but make them part of the reading. Read about stories as well as the stories themselves; how did they get from ideas to print. Otherwise, the only text I recommend is “Writing for Story,” Jon Franklin .
• Spend an hour or so two to five days a week working over an old story to make it shorter and more interesting. What should you have done – interviews, research, vivid writing, description.
• Never edit with the spelling checker. It’s to check spelling. Don’t trust grammar checkers; they’re made for business letters and often aren’t very good.
• Cross pollinate your writing with methods from other disciplines. Look to fiction for ways to describe setting, character and dialogue. Look to poetry for lyrical writing, symbolism, tone and voice. Read psychoanalysis and comparative religions to learn why people love what kinds of stories (especially work by Jung and Campbell ) and the consistencies of human experience.
• An expertise is good, especially for a beginner or a part timer. Being an expert helps sell your work because you don’t have to train yourself to write competent information. The flip side is that you’re too close to the jargon to write effectively. So be alert. Once you get that under control, being an expert with a body of writing work will get you closer to selling big articles to big magazines. They buy expert information from experts who write well. The area that’s really closed is fiction. That’s reserved for published authors, generally.
• Be creative. There’s no rule as to what sells and when. But don’t be ridiculous.
• Keep trying. Persevere. Staying power will help you outlast the competition. Sometimes being there when the smoke clears is better than being good. If you have a 1 percent chance, then send out 100 articles and you’ll sell one.
• Don’t be discouraged if you crash and burn on an assignment – you can’t finish, you misspell a name, you work two weeks and the editor changes his mind – that happens. It’s a way to weed out pretenders.
• Know your market. What magazines print the sort of information that you write? What Web sites?
• Web sites normally don’t pay well, or at all. But they’re a place to practice where you won’t get hurt. Also feedback on Web sites can alert you to ways to improve your work. Just because someone criticizes you doesn’t mean they’re wrong. If you want to use Web sites for practice, use a pen name.
• Reviews are a good place to look for work. Review something that you know. Movies and restaurants will have a lot of pretenders who tend to be friends with the editor. Book reviews can be steady because pretenders don’t read. This is another area where you can practice on Web sites.
• For pros, learn to be a copy editor. Often, publishers and magazines look for first readers and copy editors. Then you’ll need to be an expert on grammar, verb mechanisms, and especially antecedent agreements, participles and dangling modifiers.
• Don’t personalize rejection. The editor who says no today in a year will take the exact same story. It depends on what the publisher needs that moment. You won’t get a critique and don’t ask for one.
• Join a good writers’ group. The groups have writers and editors. While networking, ask writers about editors and see whose name pops up most often. Early on in your career, it may be worth the investment. In any event it will be much less than taking creative writing courses at local universities. Also, these groups have access to information about writing conferences.

A lot more tips are out there, but those are the ones where you’ll need to concentrate most of your efforts.

Web sites:

Freelance Writing

Read the items about writing. Also, the site has forums and other information. Ignore the sales pitches about writing software. If you need those, you probably shouldn’t be trying to write for a living.

Poynter Institute

While the Poynter folks tend to be a little full of themselves, they write some good information about writing. They write mostly about journalism and how to improve the quality of journalism as well as how to adapt to new markets. It’s best for people who want to write about people, places and things.

Associated Content

This claims to be a writers’ cooperative that exposes work and helps to get it sold. I use it for ideas, although I haven’t signed up or registered. So I don’t know if it requires a fee to become fully active. If it does, don’t pay it. It’s not necessary.

List of United States Magazines

I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia. But this list of magazines is pretty comprehensive, although it’s incomplete. For example, under men’s magazines, It mentioned Esquire and Men’s Health, none of the others. The name of the magazine links to more Wikipedia articles. The good part about that is the magazines can and do rewrite the entries about themselves. So you get a look at their egotistical definitions. Still, after getting the name of the magazine, find its Web site and see what it wants and when it wants it.

MS Word Tutorials

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR061958171033.aspx
• http://www.baycongroup.com/wlesson0.htm
• http://www.bcschools.net/staff/WordHelp.htm
• http://atto.buffalo.edu/registered/Tutorials/msword/index.php

Why is this here? You’d be surprised how many stories disqualify themselves because the writer screwed up everything from page numbering to font size and line spacing. These are a few tutorials. The first one is by Microsoft and is a series of audio files.

The site for MS Word 2007 focused too much on business use. I found a good but not great tutorial in About.com:

If you’re really serious:

http://www.nwu.org/nwu/

The National Writers’ Union represents contract writers. The only thing I find useful is it’s protection of your work. However, this is closer to a good professional organization than anything outside of a writer’s guild.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under St. Louis Marketing, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.