Tag Archives: the writer’s life

Becoming a Real Writer: Pitching

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No matter what kind of stuff you like to write, odds are there is someone out there who will pay you for it (if it’s good enough). Straight news? There’s absolutely a market for that. Political commentary? Yep. Science writing? It’s been one of the shrinking markets the last few years, but as a freelancer, sure, you can still find outlets. Comedy writing, yeah. Features? Definitely.

Of course, you have to find your market. You can do some research and write an article on gardening and sell it, even if you’ve never even kept a houseplant alive, but the closer you stick with what you know, the more likely you are to earn a paycheque that justifies the time you put into it. Not to mention, you know, caring about what you’re writing.

I have a little notebook file with article pitches. I’m looking at science and science fiction magazines that buy non-fiction articles, so I can write about, well, both science and science fiction. I’m looking at education journals, because I have a few articles in mind for that as well. And I’m also looking at a couple of writers’ magazines.

Sometimes you have to write the whole article and then see who wants to buy it. Sometimes they just want your basic idea for the article, and they’ll let you know if you should write it. Of course, it’s often much better to know who you want to write for beforehand, so you can keep publication style guidelines — and more importantly, your audience — in mind during the writing.

Even a news article will have a different focus if it’s addressed to a specific audience, say in a trade journal, compared to a general audience. An article on the employment crisis in education will be very different if it’s written for a magazine that circulates to teachers compared to one read by the general public.

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You may have been doing a particular kind of writing “for the love” for years, without even realizing someone might be willing to pay you for it. Some time after I realized I didn’t need to depend on my editors to get me books anymore, I realized I also am capable of getting paid for my book reviews. Maybe not much. Maybe only between twenty and fifty dollars per review, but if I’m reading the books anyway (and already reviewing them so that publishers will provide me free copies), why not get a little pocket change out of the deal?

Back in the summer I was named the writer of the week on the Blogcritics site. Here’s the quote:

With Comic-Con over, it’s time to appreciate the excellent writerly skills of J.J.S. Boyce, who’s written a couple of dozen crystal-clear pieces for Blogcritics on books, movies, and games, many (but not all) centered on science fiction. All you sci-fi fans out there, and anyone who appreciates good critical writing, zip on over to J.J.S. Boyce’s writer page for a sampling of some of the best he, and Blogcritics, has to offer our readers.

So, okay, great. It’s nice to be appreciated. There are almost 1, 000 active writers on the site, which has been in operation for a few years. It’s called “writer of the week” so only about 50 win each year (actually a bit less since some “weeks” stretch to 14 days). I started writing a little before last Christmas, and, as mentioned, I’ve done 20-odd reviews on the site.

There are writers with hundreds upon hundreds of reviews who I’ve seen named “writer of the week” in the months since I was so named, and no doubt there are many more still waiting for their moment in the sun. Most will never get it. I don’t have as much seniority nor am I nearly as prolific as most other recognized writers. So why me?

Because the writing on the site can be spotty. Some writers are great but there are plenty of amateurs. Almost every article I write becomes an editor’s pick, and close to half end up being picked up by other publications that purchase content from Technorati Media (the umbrella under which Blogcritics falls). So a lot of my stuff is being sold, but I’m not getting paid for it.

That’s no one’s fault but my own. I didn’t bother to search out markets because it hadn’t occurred to me. But if anything I write is making money, probably some of that money should go to me. Similarly, if you’ve been writing a regular unpaid comedy column that’s getting major hits for a web site, or you’ve developed a decent following covering medical news for a community newspaper, maybe you ought to consider who else might be interested in publishing your stuff.

But, of course, you have to get ready to pitch it. No one’s going to do it for you. It’s tempting to be a big fish in a small pond, but if you want the satisfaction of breaking into tougher markets, you have to be pro-active about it. As my high school English teacher always said, “Get out there and sell yourself!”

Becoming a Real Writer: Getting Paid for Copywriting

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It’s not as easy nowadays as walking into a newspaper office and impressing the editor-in-chief with your spunk. The newspaper and magazine industries have both been in decline for years, a decline that was certainly exacerbated by the financial crisis in 2008, but can trace its roots to the increasing number of people getting their news online, and a certain amount of uncertainty about how to make money this way, and pay their writers at the same time.

If, like me, you don’t have a degree in journalism, or some kind of related education, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get one of these traditional writing jobs, at least right off. Actually, the odds are against recent graduates of those programs, as well. There just aren’t enough staff jobs to go around. But that still leaves freelancing.

Freelancing involves getting paid by the assignment. In fact, many of this work won’t be assigned at all, but written in advance and then pitched to potential buyers. There’s plenty of unpaid work for a skilled writer, but if you’ve been doing this for a few years, and think the copy you produce is of a consistently-high quality, maybe it’s time you got paid for it.

Having said that, if you’re just starting out, you need to take anything that will pay the bills. Don’t sit there starving because you refuse to let your work be published anywhere other than National Geographic (which would probably be about the pinnacle with respect to my writing interests).

There’s a lot of work out there producing ad copy or basic content for informational or business sites. For example, a banking web site may want to hire a publicity team, which will in turn require copywriters, to create a series of articles on the different types of accounts they offer. Informational/instructional sites may want a tremendous volume and variety of material, on everything from cooking tips to financial advice to homework help.

You need two things: pre-existing areas of expertise (or at least solid research skills), and technical writing ability. If they want their copy to be AP style, you need to be able to produce copy in accordance with that style guide. If they want Chicago, that’s what you have to come up with. But when applying to these kinds of jobs, this is where you really take stock of everything else you know, and start using that non-writing experience to get your foot in the door.

Have you ever worked in finance, education, accounting, engineering, with animals, in construction? It’s possible that someone out there wants someone who can write copy on any of these subjects, or many, many more. My science and education backgrounds have both gotten me gigs in the past; more recently, my experience as an investor has gotten me a gig writing about  finance.

It’s all very romantic to say you’re throwing it all away to be a writer, but in reality, nothing should be thrown away. Everything you’ve ever done, including non-writing jobs and training, may be something you can leverage for a particular job. The next time, I can just say I have experience writing about finance, and provide some samples. But this time, I had to draw on knowledge from the non-writing areas of my life.

This is good general career advice. You never know what past job or volunteer experience you can use to help sell yourself for a particular position. A varied CV is a job-seekers best weapon.

Freelancer.com: Where Dreams Go to Die

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Freelancer.com is a place where tele-commuting freelancers look for work and people looking to get odd jobs done look for cheap labour. It’s sort of the Internet equivalent of a bunch of illegal immigrants hanging around the hardware store waiting for someone who thinks minimum wage isn’t minimum enough.

What kind of work? Anything that can be done remotely: data entry, web design, programming, and ridiculously crappy writing jobs. $100 for 400 150-page articles? Seriously? Who’s going to write an article (even a short one) for twenty-five cents? You can’t even use a pay phone for that (where I’m from it’s 50 cents a call now).

But never mind that, the problem with freelancer.com isn’t the low paying jobs; these might actually be a great opportunity for self-employed Indians or Chinese with decent English and a low cost of living. What depressed me today when cruising freelancer.com was the amazing number of cheating students. I quote:

Project Description:
my project proposal is,I want a literature review of word limit 20,000.
my topic is :what is the role of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub saharan africa.case studay uganda.

QUESTION
What are the factors affecting the use of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub Saharan Africa?
[project details cut for length]

. . . i would like some one i will work with step by step with frequent communication.i will also require the the first introduction in 2weeks after agreeing.

thank you

The project was listed as “master’s dissertation”. Yeah. Someone may actually get a master’s degree based on the work some desperate freelancer does for them. Someone with atrocious spelling and grammar. Generally, for humanities degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from research reports and essays (just as, for science degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from tests and lab work).

If you’re sub-contracting that, there’s nothing left. That’s the totality of the skills you’re supposed to be developing. To have a degree in the humanities and not be able to do research or write a paper is like having a degree in physics and not being able to solve problems, perform experiments, or analyze data. Just what can you do, exactly?

Of course this is anecdotal. Fortunately, there have been studies, so we can get a sense of how widespread the problem is: MBA Students Cheat More Than Other Grad Students, Study Finds. Don’t get too smug, non-business majors. Very few groups come off well in that study.

There’s a great story I read last year from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which puts a more human face on this phenomenon: The Shadow Scholar. I tend to sympathize with the ghostwriter a lot more than his clients. “If I don’t write their term paper, someone else will” is not such a compelling defense, but in fact, he offers no defense. He just tells his story.

Though he writes school assignments for money, the students are the cheaters, not him. Unlike, say, a drug dealer, who actually causes the damaging behaviour he profits from, I’m fairly certain the Shadow Scholar does not get anyone addicted to cheating. And I can imagine how much it must suck to depend on clients for work you can barely stand, let alone respect. I’m reminded of the protagonist in Robert Silverberg’s excellent novel, Dying Inside.

The chronicle article is worth a read. The final line is brilliantly depressing.

Becoming a Real Writer: Getting Published

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Step one is getting published. Technically, I guess you might argue step one is, say, learning the alphabet, but I’m assuming basic literacy and, ideally, solid spelling/grammar. Spellcheck aside, it’s worth learning the basics well enough to write a clean first draft manually. Therefore, step one is getting published, because it’s hard to judge your own work if you’re the only one reading it.

Note that by published, I mean, published by someone else. I don’t mean paid work, but I also don’t mean self-publishing on a blog. In other words, your work should be going through at least one editor who will hold you to a certain standard. Whatever your level of expertise, find a publication that you think you might be able to contribute to, and either query or just start sending in submissions, depending on their own publishing guidelines.

I started out with my university newspaper. Because writers graduate every year, typically you’ll see a general meeting which is open to everyone. Try to figure out which department or departments might be a good fit for the stuff you like to write, and start contributing. Even better, maybe your high school has a paper, but it’s likely to be published less frequently. Other options are school literary magazines, yearbook (more about photography and graphic design than writing, but still a possible in for something later), and newsletters.

If you’re not in school, start searching online. There are an amazing number of places looking for volunteer writers. Only a couple years into my school newspaper career I stumbled across an online review magazine, and sent in an audition review of a movie I had recently enjoyed. Two years of feature writing had honed my skills enough to get me on board, and they started sending me review material. Although this wasn’t a paying job, I was getting free product, which seemed pretty cool to me (school newspapers may receive freebies, too, actually).

Diversify if you can. Having a wide array of experiences makes it easier to customize your résumé to that job you really want. Any time a place you write for gives you a chance to do something you haven’t done before, breaking news coverage, writing for a different section, interviewing or profiling someone, that very piece may be the writing sample you pull up later to prove you can get a job requiring that skill.

But you can’t start building a portfolio of samples until you have someone to a) give you the assignment, and b) publish it. So get in somewhere, and write just for the fun of it.

Oh, and while you’re at your first writing job, there’s something else you should be doing: get better. Look at the writers, magazines, newpspapers, or whatever that you like, and strive to write something just as compelling. When inspiration comes, and you find you’re writing something a little over the top, just go with it, and edit afterwards.

Experiment with style, humour, and subject matter. Eventually you may write a piece and say to yourself, “Wow, that could have been published in [prestigious publicatilon]”, and it will be one of your go-to writing samples for later job applications.

Plodding Publicist

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For the second time in a few months, I’ve had the same one-sided conversation with the same publicist from the same publishing house. One of the review publications to which I contribute received a press release asking for reviews, I volunteered to take a look, he proceeded to ignore the e-mail from my editor, the e-mail from me with my mailing address, the follow-up e-mail asking if he was still planning on sending it.

In both cases, the books are niche titles, an odd little non-fiction, and a translation from a foreign author that is not known here. These are the kinds of books that struggle to get enough exposure, and being one of eclectic interests, I try to do my part. Both times, the same series of e-mails from me to him. And never a response. Not one.

Now you know why you’ve never heard of these books. What a slacker.

Time For a Fresh Look at Assessment?

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The latest issue of Canadian Teacher Magazine is hitting teachers’ lounges everywhere, and it may be early enough in the school year that some of those educators still have the time and energy in their day to read my article.

I haven’t even gone through it myself to see if there have been unexpected changes. This is my first time appearing in a national circulation magazine, specialized though it is, and right now I’m just basking.

This article was the culmination of some very basic questions that had been bouncing around in my head for awhile. It was also really nice to get back into feature writing — that special combination of essay- and editorial-writing I used to do all the time but have let lapse for the arts and culture scene.

Becoming a Real Writer: What’s a Real Writer?

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Even defining oneself as a real writer is a tricky proposition. Are we talking professional versus amateur? Well, by the strictest definition, professional writers don’t exist, as writing doesn’t fall under the definition of a professional career (i.e., a certain set of formal training requirements, a professional association which is in charge of accreditation/licensing, as well as disciplining its members if they break their professional code, as with architects, lawyers, physicians, etc.). Sure, there are journalism degree programs, writing workshops, but these are, to varying degrees, optional.

What about money? If you get paid you’re a real writer, right? I once received a cheque, very early in my part-time writing, for under $5.00 for a story I had written. Was I a pro from that point forward? SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) has specific guidelines before they’ll recognize you as a pro SF writer, which includes selling a certain number of stories to markets they categorize as professional, all of which pay more than $5.00 per story. So, according to them at least, no.

What if you quit your day job and make enough money to live on just from your writing? Well, that certainly seems reasonable, at least on the face of it. It’s not about getting paid, but getting paid enough, and getting paid consistently that matters. It’s the only way you’ll be able to do it as a living, after all. But if you’re living in your parent’s basement and not paying rent, then getting enough money to buy frozen burritos and slurpees may not be the same as being a real writer.

Having said that, though, plenty of great writers don’t get to ever quit their day jobs. Lots of the magazine articles you read come from freelancers, who may not make enough sales to quit their bartending job. This has been particularly true in the last five years or so where staff jobs are harder to find, and many newspapers and magazines are cutting back or shutting down. On the fiction front, even novelist Steven Gould started writing full-time only very recently, 20 years and half a dozen published books in. What did it for him? His first novel, Jumper, being turned into a movie. But I considered him a real writer long before that.

So, I’m inclined to say you’re a real writer if you write, and people read what you write. Maybe you’re a part-time writer, maybe you’re a writer with a day job, but if that disbars you from being a “real” writer, then there are actually far fewer real writers than most people realize.

Reviewer Cred

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I’ve made somewhat of a surprisingly realization recently. I don’t need to pay for books anymore. It turns out that if I ask, publishers will pretty much give me what I want for free. I found this out a few months ago when the publicist for a book I was looking forward to passed over all the outlets I normally review for. I decided to take a shot at simply contacting the publicist and asking if I could have a review copy, providing links to a couple recent books I’d reviewed for that publisher, and basically saying I could publish the review wherever they wanted.

I wasn’t sure I had the reviewer cred to pull it off, but the book arrived shortly and, emboldened by my success, I went down my Amazon wish list and started grabbing publisher imprints and sending e-mails. So far no one’s turned me down. In some cases there was no e-mail response, but the book and press kit still arrived promptly. I’ll still buy books — I read as much stuff from decades or centuries ago as recent releases, and that’s what used bookstores are for, after all — but for those brand new titles that still have publicists working them, I’ll hit them up for a copy.

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Although my first foray into writing for an audience was in my student days, for my university newspaper, I’ve been reviewing books for various online magazines nearly as long as I’ve been writing news articles. And I still enjoy getting advanced reading copies of work I’ve been looking forward to. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal as a student still in my teens, and it still seems like a good deal to me today.

I know that technically I could save the two hours I typically spend on a review for paid writing work instead, and then buy the books I want with money left over, but you have to break it up. Some of my paying gigs are of a technical and very constrained nature, utilizing my scientific background and following very specific style guidelines, and it can get tedious. I need to always remember that I enjoy writing, and a good way to do that is to write things that I want to write, not just what I’m being paid to write. This blog should also ideally fall into that category.

And there is a balance. I prefer a certain degree of scheduling tension, which forces me to do this “for the love” writing within a reasonable time-frame, and on a regular basis, and that’s why I commit to a schedule for my unpaid writing just as I do with my paid writing. Agreeing to review something is a perfect example of writing for the joy of it, but still being committed to a reasonable turnaround time. Of course, there is a little more leeway in my schedule than with my paid work.

The Freelance Life

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I started this site — which is now, and likely will continue to be, primarily a blog — because I’ve recently started writing full time, and I thought I could justify grabbing my own little piece of the Web. I foresee this as a focus of organization for myself, more to help me keep track of my ongoing projects than to promote them, or myself. It seems like I’ve been writing articles and essays and, yes, blog entries, in my head for some time now, and I need a place to get it down.

I’m sure the blog will develop its own focus over time. One of the things I hope to do is share some of the nitty gritty details that have taken me from part-time writing to being able to take a year off from my day job and being able to pay the bills with words. The full-time writing experience, for however long it lasts, is also something I’d like to get down for posterity. And of course, I’m always looking for work, so any readers out there are invited to contact me for my services.

We’ll leave it at that for now. See you soon.