Reflections and New Beginnings

For many writers, the New Year means a time to reflect on what happened during the past year. For others, it’s a chance for a new beginning. Whichever one it is for you, the New Year offers a time to set new goals and analyze your situation. Just as retailers set aside the month of January to review their inventory, so should you review not only what you wrote and published in the last year, but accomplishments you achieved and problems you need to solve.

To move forward, you have to plan ahead. Recognize problems early on—set down goals you want to reach, obstacles you need to overcome, and the resources you have at your disposal. Doing all of these things is almost as good as solving the problems, themselves.

But you can’t move forward successfully without a plan. You need to assess each situation and draw on the resources or ideas best suited for it. To do this efficiently, you’ll need to prepare a situation summary. This is not only a review of each particular situation, but an analysis of it with goals specified for its improvement.

First, jot down each problem you had in 2015. You may have had only one or two, but if it wasn’t such a good year, you may have more than that. Tackle each one separately by preparing a situation summary for each.

Decide the best way to improve the situation, followed by the goals you need to achieve to solve the problem or get started in your new direction. Together these are known as a situation summary.

Although you can use a situation summary at any time to resolve difficult business decisions, writing up one or more of them at the beginning of the year will set you off on the right foot.

A common problem facing many freelance writers is upgrading their markets. Perhaps you’ve published several articles or short stories in local newspapers or small regional magazines, none of which pay you enough to make a living. You want to continue freelancing but to do that you’ll have to sell to more reliable, higher-paying markets. This is where a situation summary can work wonders.

To begin, jot down a short concise statement of what you’d like to do. Next you need to write down your goals—both long and short term—as well as actions you’ll need to take to reach them. Be specific. Lay out a detailed plan, including relevant dates and resources required. For each goal, write down three actions.

Following your goals and actions, you should write down the benefits of the actions you’ll be taking. Will they increase your financial bottom line, increase your work schedule flexibility, or give you peace of mind—or all three?

How much time or money will be required to achieve your goals? Will you have to spend additional time writing and marketing that might be spent with your family? Will you need to purchase new or additional computer equipment and programs? Or will you need to do a good deal of research to go in-depth with a subject?

What if what you’ve got planned doesn’t work out? List some alternative solutions and why you should stick to your main plan. Let’s call this “Plan B.” However, often these alternatives present other problems that make reaching your goals for the new year doubly hard.

If you’re seeking to improve your markets, you must allow a block of time to study what’s out there. Are there editors out there that you know that might help you advance your plan? List anyone and everyone who may be able to help you. Can you build on what you’re doing now? Perhaps you can spin off a new specialty from a subject that you’ve written a lot about?

Lastly, set a date to review your actions—say in a month or two. And set a date to review your short-term goals to see if you’ve reached one or all of them, most likely at the end of the first or second quarter.

A situation summary should be flexible, so you can adjust it as you go. Look for the positive side of whatever develops and build on it. And if you do, you’ll definitely have a Happy New Year.

NEXT WEEK: I’ll continue with designing a successful writer’s Web site.

Organizing for Success

You’re in the midst of a project and you need some information that you know you have in a file from a previous article. But try as you might, you just can’t put your hands on that file. After an hour or more looking for it, you become frustrated and give up. By now, the motivation you had to continue writing has passed, so you do something else. Annoying as this situation may be, it’s an all-to-common occurrence among writers. If you were better organized, perhaps this wouldn’t happen.

Even in today’s seemingly paperless world, writers usually amass a huge volume of paper files and books. Most like to have information at their fingertips. And while you can easily search for anything on the Internet, there are some offline sources that you’ve gathered that you prefer to use.

So how can you organize your writing office for the most efficiency which will eventually lead to more writing jobs. Having information at hand means that you can complete jobs faster and in the end increase your income.

To get organized, it’s best to start out with a plan. Think like a journalist. The key is the five W’s—who, what , when, where, and why—plus how. Answer these concretely to know what to keep and what to discard.

Naturally, you’ll want to keep a file on each article and story your write and several, if not a whole file box full, for each book. All those files will take up valuable space. If you don’t allow for them in your overall plan for your office, then you will be undermined later on.

Photos of home offices in magazines and on the Internet show perhaps one or two filing cabinets. That’s just unrealistic. While they may contain frequently used files, all the rest of the files must be hidden. In fact, you should consider a second storage area in your home for your archived files. These are all the ones from finished writing projects. While you may be lucky to have a basement, attic, or garage in which to store them, others living in smaller spaces may have to resort to offsite self-storage, which over time can be expensive.
                                       
You need to get organized from the start to increase productivity, but it’s never too late to start. Don’t try to do it all at once. Organize one part of your office at a time----books, files, research notes, photos, etc.

Let’s begin with files, both computer and paper. Start by finding the right containers. Filing cabinets work for files used often while cardboard filing boxes, sold at office-supply stores, work well for archived files. In the beginning, you’ll probably combine subjects in one box, but later on, you’ll need to divide boxes up by subject. Keep your system logical to make it easy to find what you want. Alphabetizing always helps.

Do the same with your computer files. Don’t follow Window’s or MAC’s plan and put all your files in one folder. Think of the folders in your computer the same way you think of those in your filing cabinets and boxes. In fact, you may want to create dividers for your paper files that match the names of the folders in your computer that contain related files.

A good way to ensure that you don’t lose any of your work is put install a second hard drive—or  have someone else do it for you. Another alternative is to use an external hard drive that connects to our computer via a USB cable. Either way, your files will be safe if your computer crashes. Unless your second hard drive, dedicated to your data, fails, your files will be safe because when a computer crashes, it’s the main drive that does so.

Next week, we’ll look at continuing the process, but before then, create a plan of organization and make an Organizing To-Do List.

Plotting Along

In a video interview on YouTube, Stephen King recently told a group of students, “Forget plotting. That takes all the fun out of writing.” That may be easy for him to say. As a famous writer of over 35 books and numerous short stories, plotting is second nature. But to most beginning writers, plotting fiction and blocking non-fiction is a fact of life. A necessary evil that they need to master.

The more you write, the easier it becomes. Just as any other professional, writers develop skills that become part of the routine. While Stephen King may think he’s just winging it, he’s actually plotting out his stories in his mind. He doesn’t need to plan them on paper, but you do.

Whether you’re writing articles or short stories, non-fiction books or novels, you need to know where you’re going—you need to know how it will generally will end—so that you can finally get there. Too many beginning writers start a book and only get a third to half way through before they call it quits. The article, short story, book, or novel won’t guide you. Only you can do that.

The reason most beginning writers shy away from blocking or plotting is that they associate these with outlining—that dreaded chore they had to do in school for their term papers and such. Neither is outlining.

Let’s take blocking, for instance. Blocking out an article is easy. You start by putting the word “beginning” at the top of the page and the word “ending” at the bottom of the page. In between you list what comes in the middle in whatever order you choose. This is simplifying this a bit, but, nevertheless, it’s as simple as that. You don’t have to write each step out in sentences, just make notes to yourself as to what it will contain. You may also may want to make a note as to how you plan to start your piece and how you’ll end it since endings usually wrap up where you began. You can do all of this on a napkin if you want. This isn’t a formal outline, but a flexible plan that may change as you write. But it’s a plan all the same.

Plotting a short story is similar. There are some basic plots for all short stories. So after you choose which basic plot you’ll be following, you need to write a synopsis of your story. Pretend a friend asked you what your story is going to be about, then just tell him or her, but do it on paper and limit it to one page. This will help you plot out your story. Again it’s a flexible plan. It can change as you go, but by doing this, you’ll have an idea how the story will end. So you write forwards towards that ending.

Writing isn’t easy. Anyone who tells you that or gives you that impression is only telling you what you want to hear. Writing is work—hard work. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Once you start blocking or plotting, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. Yes, writing can be fun, but if you’re stressed out trying to write something, there’s no way it can be.

Betting on a Hunch

What do horseracing and freelance writing have in common? Actually, quite a bit. Before someone places a bet on a horse, he or she has to study the racing sheet—the lineup for the race. Based on the knowledge they glean from constantly studying these sheets, they pick a horse that they hope will be a winner and place their bet. But sometimes they play a hunch.

Hunches, intuition, and instinct can play a major role in freelance writing. A writer bases all of them on prior knowledge and experience and draws conclusions from what has been learned in similar situations.

Before the days of the automobile, people lost in blizzards or too drunk to drive let go of the reins and counted on the instincts of the horse to get them home. They took a calculated risk, knowing from past experience that their horse would probably make it home. Developing your understanding of your instincts, hunches, and intuitions coming from your subconscious to a fine point so that you’re in a position to take the necessary calculated risks is something you’ll need to work on.

You’ll have to rely on them many times for guidance in the management of your career as well as the shaping of your imaginative work. The trick is to induce your subconscious to work smoothly with the rest of your mind.

Unfortunately, all three of these are notoriously hard to schedule exactly. In spite of your encouraging them, they often doze in some dark corner of your subconscious. Perhaps the best way of luring them out is to lay out a rational game plan. By having such a plan you can lure your hunches to help solve problems.

You could apply this principle to plotting a course for your work over the next year. If you sit down and examine what you did last year with an eye to deciding what you’d like to do this year, you’ll have something to guide you when the hunches start occurring. Besides listing the projects you can count on, add some others just in case those don’t work out. Most likely you’ll get hunches about market trends, but you may also get a hunch or two about that sort of pieces may best fit the adjusted scenario.

In all probability you won’t sell to exactly the markets you targeted. But from experience—instinct—you know which ones will most likely buy the type of writing you do. Plus, you already know the editors with whom you have a working relationship. You already know how much time different types of projects take to finish. All of this gives you an instinct to search out places where your work is more or less guaranteed to be sold. By planning ahead, you’ll be able to find the right ideas early enough to stay ahead of your competition.

Hunches, instinct, and intuition can also play a part in predicting when markets will go bad. Sometimes, the writing, as they say, is on the wall. Unfortunately, you probably have looked up from your computer long enough to see it. Has a publisher been repeatedly late with payments recently? Is an editor forgetting that he or she made an assignment? Have market trends in a particular subject area been showing that there’ less interest in that subject? And is the opposite also true? Has a particular subject gotten more press lately, making it more visible?

Betting on a hunch in any of those areas is a calculated risk but one that may yield great results. 

The Five-Year Plan

In freelance writing, the present often dominates. But unless you look to the future, you’ll be stuck in the present with nowhere to look to. This is especially true as your assignments get bigger and more complicated. Managing them can be a bear.

You need to know or at least have an idea of where you want to be in five years. Do you see yourself freelancing full time for a host of markets? Or do you see yourself writing books, one right after the other?

Do you know how much money you want to be making? What kind of writing—articles, stories, books, brochures, or a combination of these—do you anticipate selling? Projecting further into the future gives you a push to start acquiring the skills you might need.

But before you start planning for the future, begin making a list of the people who might help to make your dreams come true or at least of places where you'll find help in accomplishing your goals. This will help you to avoid veering off into sidelines that aren't financially beneficial to you.

A five-year plan also helps you to keep tabs on your best, most lucrative and satisfying ideas. Be both realistic and ambitious—five years can be a very short or a very long time. But if you don't look that far ahead, you'll discover you've lost much more than just five years of your time.

Begin your five-year plan by asking yourself where you want to be at the end of your career as a freelancer? Do you even see an end to your career? Freelancing is a profession that doesn’t have to end. It’s something you can do more or less of as time goes on. It’s all up to you and your health and economic status.

Set a target for two years from now. This is enough time to let your plan play out, but not so long as to not give you time to reflect on it.

What kind of assignments do you want to receive on a regular basis? In the beginning, you’ve been so focused on just getting published at first, then regularly, that you probably haven’t had time to think about the bigger picture. Are you taking anything that comes along just for the money or are you weighing in other things, like the relationships you have with editors, how quickly and how much they pay, and, believe it or not, if they appreciate you and your work.

Once you think about the types of assignments you’d like, think about what you need to know to get them? How much education, formal or otherwise do you need to upgrade your skills? How  much experience will working with particular assignments require? What types of people to you need to gather for contacts?

The next question you have to ask yourself is what have you done so far that will help you? For this, you’ll need to start keeping a log, noting each assignment, how you did it, and the resources, people included, that you used to complete it.

What barriers do you see between where you are now and where you want to be in five years? Perhaps you don’t see any obstacles, but the road to freelance success is littered with them. Recognize this and prepare for them.

Publishing is changing at a rapid pace. Magazines are dying like flies sprayed with insect bomb. Trying to stay afloat, book publishers are merging faster than you can blink your eye. Will your long-term plan be able to cope with upcoming industry changes?

How well do you present yourself and your talents? Are you too timid or too difficult? Do you overreact to criticism? Are you trying to handle everything yourself instead of looking for the right kind of help? Have there been warnings that you’ve ignored?

As with any plan, your five-year plan must be flexible. You should constantly be updating it and adjusting it to fit your needs. But more importantly, be realistic. Know what you do best and then do it.

Budgeting for Success

Freelance writing is one part creative skill and one part business sense. The only problem is that too many writers who get into this business don’t have much of the latter. Unfortunately, this came from what most learned in school—albeit subconsciously.

Writing has always been looked upon as an intellectual endeavor. Therefore, it shouldn’t be tied in any way to business. But when you’re in business to make money, having a bit of business sense is a prime concern. And if you’re going to make money in this business—at least enough to live on—then you have to know what’s coming in and what’s going out. If these aren’t relatively balanced, you’ll be out of business sooner than you think.

To keep tabs on your finances, you’ll need to create a budget based on what you’re spending now and what you predict you’ll spend in the not too distant future. The best way to do this is to create a budget sheet for each month for at least six months. Doing so will let you know if you’re going down the right marketing path and making enough money to cover your expenses. Once you know how much you can afford to spend based on your earnings, you’ll be able to take control of your finances. If you're always coming out in the red, you’ll find it easier to change your work patterns once you're faced with the actual figures.

One of the best ways to start budgeting is to faithfully record the details on your budget sheet. After you've recorded these for a month or two, you'll have a better idea of what sums to enter in your budget for the month. At the end of the year, add them up and divide by 12, putting the resulting figure in the proper slot, even though you may pay some bills quarterly, semiannually, or annually. With an accurate monthly record, you'll be able to more easily adopt counter measures if your receipts aren't tallying with your expenditures.

Lay out your budget sheet like this: Divide it into three columns.

The first lists your sources of income for that month, your uncontrollable expenses, and your net income (the first minus the second). Under that, list your regular expenses—mortgage or rent, gasoline, equipment, office supplies, utilities, travel, etc—and the their totals. At the bottom, create a line for profit or loss.

The second column lists the predicted and the actual amounts in each category in the first column.

The third column lists the predicted and actual totals for the year to date.

A budget sheet faithfully kept will show clearly where your problems lie. Are expenses in one category heavier than you imagined? Is disaster looming around the corner if you continue to work for a specific market? Where and how can you cut down on expenses? Will you have to negotiate for a higher fee from your best client? Should you aim for more sales volume? Do you need to consider getting a part-time job? Are you paying too much rent? Are you billing properly? Has your inventory of stories and ideas been turned over quickly enough?

Obviously, this budget sheet, too, needs to be balanced monthly. Be sure you carry over the figures on the following month's sheet where indicated. To accurately record figures on this sheet, you'll have to tally up those petty-cash slips you've collected. Keeping an account of each expense as it occurs will help you tremendously in following a budget plan.

Count in the current inflation rate when you're setting up your future budget pages, saving yourself from too many unpleasant surprises when new costs arise. For instance, is your phone/Internet plan slated to increase next year? What about your health insurance premium?

By keeping an accurate tally of your income and expenses, you’ll be able to tell when you may possibly be getting into hot water. If you don’t, you may find yourself reaching for that life preserver all too soon.

Developing a PR Plan

It used to be if you were an author, your publishing house would promote you and your books. Today, with tight budgets and the competition from ebooks, many publishing houses leave the promotion of books up to you, the writer. And if you’re going the ebook route, then promotion is all up to you. Whether you’re a book author or another type of freelance writer, you’ll have to come up with a public relations plan if you want to make your books and such a success.

Developing your own public relations (PR) plan is an important ingredient in your total marketing mix. It helps expand your reach into other areas, reinforcing any advertising you may have done or are planning to do. Your PR plan doesn’t have to be complicated, but it should lay out some basic directions for you to follow.

A PR plan should be a well-developed part of your ongoing work as a freelancer. Good public relations requires organization, discovering who your target market is—in other words, the public in your public relations—, and how you can be of benefit your target, and how you can best tell them about what you have to offer. Your target will shift depending on what you’re trying to promote. If you’re promoting your work as a magazine writer, then your target will be magazine editors. However, if you’re promoting a new ebook, then your target will be your readers since you’re offering your book direct to them.

Use your own enthusiasm and energy to not only create your plan but keep it together.  The first step is brainstorming. Think of all the usual groups that you might approach—college students and teachers, teenagers, religious groups, art groups, service clubs, social service agencies, etc. You’ll no doubt come up with many others, such as government officials, Chambers of Commerce, social groups, study clubs, senior citizens, ethnic groups, professional organizations, even friends of your local library. After you've made a list of targets, combine them with your objectives to develop your own unique strategy.

Basically, any thoughtful campaign you use to make your abilities known to a new market or to remind an editor of your talents, will have three objectives: promoting good will, supporting ongoing  publicity about yourself and your skills, and obtaining new and better assignments.

Examine the situation as you would any writing project. First, analyze what you think would best suit your objectives. Once you know that, research your markets for overlooked areas and contacts. Thoroughly check details and statistics involved before you make your pitch. And finally, consider your resources and how best to apply them. Naturally, your objectives must be geared to the results you wish to obtain and how much you can afford to spend in time and money to get them.

If you’re promoting yourself to magazine editors, for example, create a schedule for reminding them that you're still available. You know the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.”  Occasionally, send a copy of  an article you've published to other editors simply for their enjoyment. You never know when one of them may ask for permission to reprint it. Create a “What’s New” page on your Web site and send out E-mail announcements with a link to it.

If you’re writing and publishing books, try to get your book reviewed—hopefully, a positive one—and send the review to editors or other interested parties. Stories about you in newspapers and in online blogs are a great form of free PR. The same goes for speaking engagements. Keep copies of letters or emails thanking you for your good work at conferences or other speaking venues. Also post them on your Web site, so visitors can read what others are saying about you.

Keep up-to-date background material about your work circulating everywhere. Never assume information about you gets to the right or helpful source without your guidance.

And finally, a PR plan is only as good as its effectiveness.  Note what works and what doesn’t, then adjust your plan accordingly.

Taking Stock

For many writers, the New Year means a chance for a new beginning. For others, it offers a time to reflect on what happened during the past year. Whichever one it is for you, the New Year offers a time to set new goals and analyze your situation. Just as retailers set aside the month of January to take stock of their inventory, so should you take stock of not only what you wrote and published in the last year, but accomplishments you achieved and problems you need to solve.

To move forward, you have to plan ahead. Recognize problems early on—set down goals you want to reach, obstacles you need to overcome, and the resources you have at your disposal. Doing all of these things is almost as good as solving the problems, themselves.

No general ever goes into battle without some sort of plan. Military commanders need a map marked with all their troop units’ positions and weapons in order to make fast and effective decisions in the heat of battle. You need to do the same in order to assess your situation and draw on the resources or ideas best suited for each situation.

First, write down the problem or direction you’d like to take, followed by the goals you need to achieve to solve that problem or get started in your new direction. Together these are known as a situation summary.

Although you can use a situation summary at any time to resolve difficult business decisions, writing up one or more of them at the beginning of the year will set you off on the right foot.

A common problem facing many freelance writers is upgrading their markets. Perhaps you’ve published several articles or short stories in local newspapers or small regional magazines, none of which pay you enough to make a living. You want to continue freelancing but to do that you’ll have to sell to more reliable, higher-paying markets. This is where a situation summary can work wonders.

To begin, jot down a short concise statement of what you’d like to do. Next you need to write down your goals—both long and short term—as well as actions you’ll need to take to reach them. Be specific. Lay out a detailed plan, including relevant dates and resources required. For each goal, write down three actions.

Following your goals and actions, you should write down the benefits of the actions you’ll be taking. Will they increase your financial bottom line, increase your work schedule flexibility, or give you peace of mind—or all three?

How much time or money will be required to achieve your goals? Will you have to spend additional time writing and marketing that might be spent with your family? Will you need to purchase new or additional computer equipment and programs? Or will you need to do a good deal of research to go in-depth with a subject?

What if what you’ve got planned doesn’t work out? List some alternative solutions and why you should stick to your main plan. Some call this “Plan B.” However, often these alternatives present other problems that make reaching your goals for the new year doubly hard.

If you’re seeking to improve your markets, you must allow a block of time to study what’s out there. Are there editors out there that you know that might help you advance your plan? List anyone and everyone who may be able to help you. Can you build on what you’re doing now? Perhaps you can spin off a new specialty from a subject that you’ve written a lot about?

Lastly, set a date to review your actions—say in a month or two. And set a date to review your short-term goals to see if you’ve reached one or all of them, most likely at the end of the first or second quarter.

A situation summary, like a business plan, should be flexible and able to be adjusted as you go. Keep an open mind. Look for the positive side of whatever develops and build on it. And if you do, you’ll definitely have a Happy New Year.