In the last week or so I’ve met (barely) deadlines for book reviews for the Library Journal, Winnipeg Free Press, and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, each of which has fairly specific editorial needs.

Left to my own devices, I’ll tend to write something in the neighbourhood of 800 words for a book review. I will frequently personalize it, writing in a conversational, informal style. The Free Press’ book reviews style guide is fairly standard for a newspaper, with a firm word limit of 600 and an avoidance of the personal pronoun. This is not a tremendous adjustment, but it does mean I will write a different review than I would for the same book at a different outlet.

By contrast, AE is stylistically more open, and flexible on length. My editor over there will frequently latch onto something in my review and ask me to expand it, turning fairly straightforward book coverage into a more far-reaching critical essay. When you consider the subject matter and audience, this makes sense. A sci-fi magazine talks specifically about sci-fi, and will want to bring to the table more than surface-level insight about its area of expertise.

As a result I’m often very proud of my finished product over at AE, but put more time in on these essays than the general audience reviews I publish elsewhere. Exceeding 1000 words in this pieces is not unusual. I also draw more deeply on my literary knowledge to make connections as a matter of course, and frequently find myself looking up minute details of related works in the process of writing.

Then there’s the Library Journal, which poses an entirely different challenge. Writing a review that gets at the essential point in a mere 175 words is the ultimate exercise in brevity. I’ve learned to quickly identify the audience and the essential details of the book as concern that audience (including the basic review question: whether the book achieves its intent), which is about all you can do in that space.

It’s certainly possible to spend more time at one of these micro-reviews than one in which one is able to meander, perhaps because an extra step is involved: cutting and rephrasing all the extraneous information until the necessary level of conciseness is reached.

These aren’t my only review venues, of course, but they do represent a nice variety in terms of editorial and stylistic expectations. Perhaps you didn’t realize there was so much to writing a book review. I didn’t quite know myself.

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!”

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.