Gather Ye Building Blocks

Today, people put a lot of stock into experience. You can get college credit for it when pursuing a degree. You can get a better job because of it. And as a freelance writer, experience can help you climb to the next market level.

Job applications and HR (Human Resource people—although at times they may seem more resource and less human) lead people to think that only the experiences they’ve had in a particular area related to the job are important. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. And in freelance writing, all types of experience count—not just writing experiences but life experiences as well.

Perhaps you began your career as a worker delivering prescriptions for a mom-and-pop pharmacy. Think of all the people you came in contact with. Then think of all the situations you needed to grapple with while doing your job—grumpy people, old, sickly people, angry people, strange people, and those that were just plain nuts. Think of the weather conditions you had to endure to get those prescriptions out to them. How you coped with them and the situations is your experience.

You say, “What does that have to do with freelance writing?” Believe it or not, a lot.

Every job you’ve had, every life experience leads to another. All the information gets stored in your brain for future use. Your mind uses all your experiences as resources to help cope with future ones. So the experience you gained dealing with all those people should eventually help you in dealing with editors—grumpy editors, old editors, angry editors, strange editors, and those that are just plain nuts.

Let’s look at the flow of experiences for a particular writer. Let’s call him Joe. Joe started his writing career working on the staff of his high school yearbook. When he went to college, he joined the staff of his college paper. While working on the college paper, Joe started writing reviews of movies, a favorite interest of his. An editor at the local town newspaper saw Joe’s reviews and asked him if he’d do some for her. While the pay wasn’t that great, it was a start.

Joe’s interest in movies led to a broader interest in media. After college, he wrote reviews of not only films, but of other forms of media. All the while, Joe continued to improve his writing. He eventually got a job on the staff of a small pop culture magazine. But the pay wasn’t enough to live on, so Joe pursued his studied area of expertise, business management, and eventually became the manager of a large regional office for a big corporation.

And while he enjoyed his daily work, his heart longed for the time when he could spend hours sitting at his home computer writing.

The trick to making your experiences work for you is to first identify them. Most people never really look at all the experiences they’ve had up to the present time in their lives. You’ve got to network those experiences and make them work for you.

While writing media reviews, Joe became friends with a movie producer. A few years later, the producer introduced Joe to some public relations people who promoted movies and videos. It was then that Joe learned about the movie business in depth. This led to a short gig as a movie columnist for a regional magazine.

Once he had his foot in the door, the rest, as they say, is history. Joe began to get assignments from editors of a variety of magazines. They were looking for someone who knew what went on in the movie biz. Then Joe hit the big time with an article in the Chicago Tribune. That led to more assignments.

So whether your experience is in writing, itself, or in the subject areas you write about, you need to always seek better assignments. You need to climb the ladder to freelance writing success one experience at a time.

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.

Spinning Your Way to Profits

Too many writers move from one new project to the other.  They never consider all the work researching each one and literally close the book on each as they finish it. That’s such a waste of time and potential resources. Back in April of 2010, I wrote about doing spin-offs in this blog. I concentrated on using research over and over again, but this time I’d like to show you some other ways you can spin your way to profits.

Remember the old saying, “It takes money to make money.” Spin-offs—making your material work in a number of ways—allow you to make your money earn money. While you may not have any control of how much interest your bank pays you to let them “use” your money, you do have lots of control when it comes to using accumulated materials, as well as actual articles and stories, if you own the rights to them. So let’s start there.

Unless you’ve sold an article or story for all rights, you still own secondary rights. If you’ve sold articles to newspapers, you’ve most likely sold them First Serial Rights for their market. That means you can sell that same article to any other newspaper in the country. The big papers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are exceptions to this since they often buy exclusive or all rights, but they also pay the most. If you can find newspapers buying articles these days, you may have a treasure of articles just waiting to be used. And while smaller papers don’t pay as much, selling the same article over and over can reap big rewards for practically no work.

You can also rework previously published articles by updating them or changing their focus. You may only need to change the beginning and end of an article to enable you to sell the re-vamped piece elsewhere for secondary rights. Many markets will gladly buy secondary rights. There are quite a few markets out there that pay only five cents a word or even $35 total. While that may not seem like much, if you can find five or ten like that, you’re on your way to self-syndication.

Another way to use spin-off material is to sell the same magazine article to a number of specialty magazines. If you’ve written on a general enough subject, you can tailor the article to fit different markets just by changing the slant. An article about display techniques could be sold to magazines dealing with retail sales, antiques, home decoration, even collecting. It just takes some creative imagination on your part. If the magazine is in the lower end of the pay scale, don't bother to query the editor. Instead, just send the article, attached to an Email, explaining that you’re sending the article to see if that editor might be interested in publishing it. If your article covers a topic of universal interest, the editor will most likely purchase it.
 
Not only can you write spin-off material, you can also sell reprints of what you've published to specialized markets and databases. For instance, an article on stress management, reprinted separately, might be of interest to corporate managers who want to see that their management trainees have a copy. Companies and associations also buy material to distribute to their customers via newsletters.

Spin-offs do two things: They add a little more revenue to your bank account while spreading  the word about your expertise.

But cultivate your sources carefully. Take time to rework the same ones. For example, to get information for an article on the ten questions investment brokers are asked most, a writer who specializes in writing about investing might contact some of the stable of resources he or she has built up over the years. Plus, with a specialty, you’ll already have a backlog of material at hand, so most of your research will already be completed.

Finally, to create financially successful spin-offs, you need to have at least 90 percent of the research material already in hand, and you have to be a fast writer. Try not to spend more than two days on a spin-off piece. If it takes more time than that, you’ll be losing money. Also, try to have your major markets pay for all the research costs by doing more research than necessary in the beginning. That way the cost won’t come out of your pocket later if you need a little more material for your spin-offs.