NAIWE Board of Experts

Help! My Source Bailed and I’m on Deadline

Tick, tick, tick.

Sometimes you can almost hear the clock ticking down until your deadline. As much as we try to work ahead, journalists are often in a pinch.

And it really stinks when a source bails at the last minute.

What can you do when a source backs out and you’re on a deadline? Not all hope is lost. Here are a few tips to help when your article—and your job—are on the line.

Breathe—there are other sources. Unless your source is highly specialized, there are other people with expertise that can comment. It’s just a matter of finding them. And once you get a name, you can use your journo skills to make contact.
Use a trade group or private company. Sometimes, the best place to get a source is from a fellow media team. They understand tight deadlines and can often point you in the right direction. When I write medical news, going through a hospital’s communications staff can be perfect because they pinpoint the person needed and tell me who’s available. Let them do some of the work—that’s what they get paid for.
Explore other articles. One of my favorite ways to find sources is to look in articles that have covered similar topics. There, I can often find people who have commented that have the right credentials. Plus, they typically work well with the media because they’ve done so in the past. From there, you can Google the contact and get in touch.
Google away.Speaking of searching for sources, one of my best tricks is to use a few keywords and add the associated credentials. If I need to contact a doctor who specializes in diabetes, I’m using phrases such as “diabetes M.D. contact” or “diabetes M.D. email” and going from there. You could include a certain location or region to narrow things down. Another tip is to use your keyword and “media contacts” in the search form because there are often tip sheets or organizations that have compiled experts in a specific field. So if I want to find a source that knows about groundwater contamination, I could use “environmental groundwater media” or “groundwater contamination media source” or “groundwater contamination expert.” Play with the keywords. You’ll be surprised at what comes up. And if it goes to a journal or report, such as a PDF, dig in there for applicable names.
Go academic.Colleges and universities are great places for sources, and they have highly specialized folks who can deliver a comment in a pinch. Try the school’s media department as well as the individual; if one person is busy, they can likely find another.
Seek a source database. A service like ProfNet or HARO can be a heaven-sent when the clock is ticking. Just look through experts using their search network. These people are familiar with tight deadlines and speaking to the media, which is an added bonus. (The last thing you want on a deadline is to have to explain to someone not familiar with the media about how the media works!)
Think press release.Another place to find awesome sources familiar with a topic and working with the media is via a press release. Use a database such as Businesswire, or type in a few keywords and put “press release” in parentheses and your search will bring up sources who have commented in a press release. From there, grab the name of the source or the public relations person. (I tend to stay away from PR agencies when I’m in a pinch, especially, because they may take longer to find a source or want you to include their product or pitch in the story . . . not cool when you’re looking for an objective comment.)
Be nice.The source that bailed may be useful in the future, so don’t burn the bridge. In turn, inform the new source that you are on deadline up front so you can determine if he or she can meet your timeline.

Kristen Fischer is a copywriter and journalist living at the Jersey Shore. She worked as a reporter and copyeditor for Gannett before launching her full-time freelance business in 2005. Her work has been published in Parents, New Jersey Monthly, Prevention, Woman’s Day, SheKnows, and Healthline.

The Ins of Social Media Marketing

Tuesday, January Post a comment

Are you struggling with how to get readers to notice your books? With many new books, movies, music, and other forms of entertainment released daily, there is a lot of noise happening online. Unfortunately, “Buy my Book” messaging doesn’t cut through it.

Are you frustrated by not only how long it takes to create content to post on social media but also on how to be your authentic author-self when posting online? Maybe you regard social media as a time suck that might not even help with gaining potential sales and reaching new clients.

But I have great news for you: social media is one of the most effective ways to increase your reach to both older and potential new readers. The caveat is that you need to have engaging and valuable content that warms your audience to your message and your brand.

Which Social Media Sites Does Your Ideal Reader Use?

Just like not every book will be for everybody, not every social media site is going to be the ideal site for every author. Please note, you do not need to be on every platform.

The demographics of your ideal reader should determine which social media site you are on. I suggest a max of three social media platforms, but even just being active on one platform is fine. (You can view the demographic information from 2019 for the different platforms at Sprout Social.)

Sites that are great places to begin, with less work and more reach and value, include

Facebook, which allows you to interact with readers on your author page, but even more importantly, in Facebook groups. Facebook remains the heavy-hitter for the social media market share and is used by a majority of Americans amongst all age ranges.
Instagram, which is very photo-centric and requires great images. This is a place where people scroll and search through the use of hashtags. However, a great option is the Instagram Stories. Instagram’s main audience skews younger and is more female-centered.
Pinterest, which is very photo-centric. This social media platform is growing, but this offers a way to lead traffic to your website based on the pins you post. For example: Say that your book is set in Regency England. You’ve done all of this research for your book. You can take that information to create fact-based content and link it to your website. These pins will stay pretty much evergreen.
LinkedIn, which allows you to connect with professionals by providing valuable content. Do you have a business-focused book? Are you writing nonfiction?
Twitter, which has a faithful base. Its strength is that it has a chronological feed. However, what is important to know is that a large portion of its user base is also located outside of the United States. If you are wanting to grow your international reach, Twitter seems to be a great option.

By knowing what these platforms require for success, you can implement their use in your promotion and content delivery strategy.

What Is an Author Brand?

An author brand is more than the fonts and color scheme used on postings (which should all be consistent), but it is the promise of what you, as an author, bring to your reader. What can your reader expect from your type of stories? From your voice? What are the three things that are the pillars of your voice and writing?

What Are the Keys to Using Social Media Effectively?

Know your brand.

Stay on brand.

Curate your content. For example, if you write sci-fi, you want to post about science, how science is helping, and how it ties into your work.

If you write about mystery, then talk about how crimes are solved, the layers of a criminal investigation, etc.

If you write about love and romance, then depending on your steam level, write about those things (but make it PG-rated so that you don’t get reported and banned from Facebook postings). For romance readers, everything is about the promises of love and romance, and the hot, appealing partner.

Military books, LitRPG, e.g., you can show how you support the military. Talk about facets of the military that fascinate you or quotes from prior generals that inspire you. You could even do a post about tactical precision or share newspaper articles and blogs about neutral military research. If you write about mythology, then dig into that particular mythology, sharing tidbits that people might know, and might not.

Everything that you post is to make it clear to your reader and the potential reader as to what they can expect from you and your writing.

How Often Should You Post?

Post up to three times a day on social media (at the minimum of once a day).

The algorithm on social media encourages postings that do not lead offsite. The more you post on social media, and positive engagement you receive from those posts, the more your natural reach will increase your engagement with readers naturally with your content.

What Is One of the Most Cost-Effective Ways to Communicate with Your Audience?

Social media posting is one of the most cost-effective ways of communicating with your audience.

When you provide your audience with value, and it responds with positive engagement, social media then shares that message further and wider. But what is value? Value comes in the shape of entertainment, knowledge, and inspiration. When posting, ask yourself what the response you want your audience to have from your post is. Is the purpose of the post to increase their awareness of your branding, i.e., are you posting Game of Thrones memes because you write about dragons, sword, and sorcery, or fantasy? Is the quote you’re posting from Thomas Edison on brand or just your personal message of encouragement? Yes, this matters as you want to ensure that your message is on-brand with your content. Although such a quote might inspire, if it does not align with your brand’s message, you might want to find a quote that does align with your author brand.

We’ve talked about why to post and what to post, but now, let’s talk about the percentage of content versus self-promotion.

The social media rule is 80% content, 20% promotion. This rule means that 8 out of 10 times you are posting to your brand’s promises without trying to sell to anyone directly. The other two times, you can post specifically about your books with a buy link.

So, for those eight times, you are posting about topics brand adjacent—things that are connected topic wise to your author brand, as we determined above. The goal of these posts is to build your engagement, get your readers liking, commenting, and talking about these topics that you are so passionate about, as well as make them warmer to your brand’s message.

Social media doesn’t have to be a time suck. By having a content calendar, you can preschedule your social media postings, which will cut down on the time it takes to create new content. Additionally, by having a calendar, you have direction as to what you can post on each day.

Tools available for scheduling include Hootsuite, Buffer, and Tweetdeck. Additionally, Facebook also has an option on its pages that allows you to schedule your post, so you don’t necessarily need an outside tool if you are only posting on Facebook. Social media scheduling tools are more useful if you are using multiple social media sites or want to schedule a post on a site that does not allow scheduling, like Twitter. For example, Twitter doesn’t let you schedule posts, but Hootsuite makes it possible to schedule and then post on Twitter for you.

Actionable Points:

Make a daily post that aligns with your author brand. Use an image with your post. Images get more engagement than plain text. You can create quote graphics with Canva. Make sure that your message is always on-brand. You can find quotes at BrainyQuote. You can copy the quote and paste it onto your image in Canva, and then post it. Use a hashtag, if applicable, in your text when posting it on social media to increase searchability.
Be consistent. If you can’t post daily, schedule your posts for the week.
Engage with your readers, building relationships, making sure to respond to any comment made on your posts.

Want a free tool to help with your content? Download your FREE weekly content calendar, which includes social media post suggestions and potential hashtags. This tool will help spark your ideas for your content creation and help increase your engagement on social media.

Tina Glasneck is a USA Today bestselling author of fantasy and crime fiction. Since 2012, she has created author events, has held online book fairs, and continues to assist authors on their journey. She frequently teaches on the topics of book promotion, author newsletters, as well as the business of publishing. Tina has published more than 20 books in the fantasy, crime fiction, and mystery genres. She persists in her vision and author goals to create a world of wonder through her fantastical tales.

The Best Writing Tip I Ever Received

Wednesday, January Post a comment

After graduating college, I believed I was well prepared for my first real-world editing job at a national magazine. I’d been corrected and coached by wonderful teachers over the years—but somehow, it ratchets things up a notch when you’re being paid to perform a task that was previously a matter of As, Bs, and Cs on a report card.

I’ll admit to being a bit shaken the first time a story I’d written came back from a grizzled old editor, soaked through the page with red ink. As I read through the comments, though, I realized he was absolutely right. About every darn thing.

The best writing tip this editor gave me sticks with me to this day: In most cases, you can chop the first and maybe even the second paragraph of your first draft. There’s a lot of throat-clearing that tends to go on when you’re first formulating your thoughts. Quite often, all it does is delay your readers from getting to the good stuff.

So, the next time you’re struggling with getting a lede paragraph just right, consider uncapping your red pen instead—and putting your readers right into the action.

Jake Poinier made the leap into freelance writing and editing in 1999 after a decade of positions in the publishing industry, giving him key insights from both sides of the desk. As the founder and owner of Boomvang Creative Group, he has worked with a diverse array of Fortune 500 and small businesses, consumer and trade magazines, and independent authors. Jake is committed to helping freelancers improve their businesses and shares his knowledge and experiences frequently as a speaker at industry conferences, through webinars, and on his blog.

Pricing Your Work

Saturday, January Post a comment

One of the most difficult questions you’ll ever be asked about your work is: “What’s it worth?”

Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the road to becoming a professional writer involves navigating the intricacies and trade-offs of this difficult question and coming up with answers that lead to advancement toward that goal, rather than retreat.

The intricacies of that difficult question involve issues that are practical, economic, competitive, and emotional. Let’s take a look at each of those issues:

Practical Issues

The first set of issues you encounter when setting prices for your work involves practical matters:

How much money do you have on hand?

How much do you spend each month or each year?

How much money is coming in?

The bottom line of all this is simple: How long can you stay in the writing game before you run out of money and must quit writing to put that time and energy toward other means of earning a living?

Pricing is one way to directly change that bottom-line result. If you can adjust your pricing to increase the amount of money coming in, you can stretch out the time remaining in your career as a professional writer. If you can increase the amount of money coming in substantially enough, you can keep writing professionally for the rest of your life.

Most times, to increase your writing income you’ll need to raise your prices. But this calculation can lead you to lower your prices, too. The point is to maximize the income you generate from the combination of two factors: the amount of work you sell and the price you earn from each sale.

For example, suppose you’re now selling ten pieces of writing per month at $100 per piece. That’s $1,000 income per month. If raising your price will not lose too many sales, you might be able to sell eight pieces at month $150 per piece. That would earn you $1,200 per month total income.

On the other hand, if lowering your price will result in extra sales, you might be able to sell 15 pieces per month at $90 per piece. That would bring you $1,350 per month.

A great many factors go into determining the most lucrative price point for each item you sell. Sometimes, you won’t know the best price point until you experiment. But the basic fact is that changing your prices is the first, and often most practical, way to increase your income as a professional writer.

Economic Issues

If you lived in a vacuum, or in a static world, you could raise and lower your prices however you wish and expect to receive a mathematically calculated result. But you live in an economy that has its own ups and downs independent of you and your wishes.

That’s one reason professional writing can often be a case of “feast or famine.” During good economic times, you might sell all the work you can produce at prices you enjoy. During bad economic times, you might struggle to sell any of your work and have no choice but to accept prices you wish were higher.

Your pricing decisions should, therefore, recognize and take into account the current economic climate in which you are operating. You should be alert not only to current economic conditions, but also to upcoming changes in the economic climate. Looking ahead, you can strive to position yourself—by means of pricing changes (and perhaps other ways, as well)—to take maximum advantage of the economic hand you will soon be dealt.

Competitive Issues

Just as you live in an economic climate, you also live in a competitive climate. If you’re the only one capable of writing a particular piece of work—say a Katy Perry song or a best-seller on White House intrigue—you can pretty much write your own ticket as far as income from that work is concerned.

However, if you are cranking out the same kind of boiler plate that’s available from ten thousand other writers, it’s hard to price your work outside of the competitive range the market has established for such work.

This has two implications for professional writers:

Don’t expect to earn more from highly competitive work than the vast majority of your competitors are earning. Your prices and to some extent your income will be tightly constrained by the market.

There are major advantages to stepping out of the competitive rat race and into some niche where competition is relatively scarce and where your natural talents help you become a leader—or even a “one of a kind.” There are lots of genres and markets out there. Which one fits you better and offers you a greater chance to earn the living you want as a professional writer?

Emotional Issues

So far, we’ve covered three practical, objective, external issues that tend to influence how much you can earn from your work. But the most important issues are internal:

If you don’t feel worthy of big bucks for your work, you won’t ask for them. And if the market nevertheless insists on offering you those big bucks, psychology tells us you’ll find ways to screw up, or even to lose hold of those big bucks very quickly after they are forced on you.

If you don’t work at improving your pricing, you’ll set your prices at less than optimum levels. The result: you’ll leave money on the table, money that could have been yours.

If you don’t build up the psychological strength to withstand the inevitable stresses, losses, and—yes—even failures you will experience not only on the road to becoming a professional writer, but more generally in life, you will burn out, quit, or otherwise settle for less. Without sufficient inner resilience, you’ll be far less likely to last long enough to accomplish any of your most important goals.

The road to becoming a professional writer is much easier to travel when you realize that however large and unyielding the external barriers to success may seem, the barriers that are most difficult to surmount are the internal ones.

Having said all this, I recognize and understand that you may not make the same choices on pricing as I make. But I still challenge you to price your work as close as you can to its full value. It’s a difficult challenge to meet, and a continuing one. Yet optimum pricing is a central aspect of becoming a professional writer, and also a key element in earning a good living from your skills and your craft.

Robert Moskowitz is an award-winning independent professional writer who has written and sold millions of words in just about every format over five decades. He instinctively sees the big pictures, breaks each one down into coherent slices, meaningfully prioritizes and sequences those slices, and then executes the tasks inherent in each slice in very productive ways. Put more simply, Robert knows how to succeed as an independent writer, covering all the bases from soliciting assignments to delivering polished work, from pricing jobs to budgeting and managing personal finances, from organizing a conducive office environment to establishing and following sensible guidelines regarding life, work, and productivity. Having done all this, and having paid attention to how he did it, Robert is now in a position to pass along what he knows to others.

AP Stylebook Adopts the % Symbol Instead of the Word

Thursday, December Post a comment

The biggest single change in the 2019 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook (AP Stylebook) is the nixing of the word percent in favor of the symbol that means the same thing.

There are exceptions to the new guidance—the symbol is not used 100% of the time and percent is no longer the default.

The 2019 AP Stylebook, which debuted May 31, is used by news organizations nationwide and by countless marketing and public relations organizations. You read material written in AP Style every day. The AP Stylebook is not the only style guide out there, of course. Many publications rely on other guides, but it has exceptional influence over what we read and write.

The embrace of the symbol instead of the written word is one of the most significant changes we’ve seen. Where lowercasing internet (which AP did in 2016) is an example of AP Stylebook following a trend and acknowledging the ubiquity of the small “i” spelling, adopting % does not seem to have come from popular demand.

The switch grew out of a suggestion at the 2018 annual conference of ACES: The Society for Editing. Each year at the ACES conference, which is held in the early spring, the Stylebook editors present updates and gather feedback. Stylebook Editor Paula Froke recalled that there was widespread agreement in the room that the symbol’s time had come to an end.

“My later scan of usage indicated that indeed, the sign was far more widely used than I realized,” Froke wrote in an email. “I discussed with our team and all were in favor. I discussed with our business news staff, which is one of the biggest users, and they were strongly in favor. They tested on the wire for a week and it went well.”

Joining the $ symbol

Froke said AP likens it to the use of the $ sign. The symbol is the default when we talk about specific dollar amounts, and it’s the only symbol we regularly use that way. AP and the rest of us commonly use cent(s) instead of ¢ and and instead of &. AP Stylebook likes No. for number, not #. We use the @ symbol for social media handles, but not generally in place of the word at.

Journalists and others have been writing out percent as long as they have been following AP Style, though those near retirement age may remember the word was per cent in the early 1970s. British and Canadian English still favor the two-word per cent.

Is AP Stylebook leading change rather than reflecting usage? Maybe. In edited text, use of the symbol vs. the word may depend on the subject matter. In financial or scientific context with heavy use of data, it’s common to see %. In marketing, the symbol may have more impact. In the humanities, though, the written word may be more likely. Searching the Google Books corpus shows both forms are used, and which one is more common depends on how the search is constructed.

But a general Google search for “19 percent” yields 4.5 million hits, while a search for “19%” returns 217 million. The symbol is even more likely in a Google News search.

AP’s new advice is close to that of the Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association: Use the symbol only when it’s preceded by a number. That doesn’t actually say don’t use the word, but it seems implied.

The Chicago Manual of Style has it both ways. It says use a numeral for percentages, but choose the word or the symbol based on the context: “In nontechnical contexts, the word percent is generally used; in scientific and statistical copy, the symbol % is more common.” (9.18)

The MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook also offers a choice based on the type of document. In nonstatistical or nontechnical uses, the number and the word are written out, so you could say, “I am right at least four percent of the time.” In other cases, use the numeral and symbol.

The Yahoo! Style Guide, cutting edge when published in 2010, allows for either word or symbol, but makes two points in support of the symbol: it saves space and in a passage that contains more than one percentage, the symbol stands out, which makes it easier to spot for comparison.

Exceptions to the rule

AP makes an exception for percentages at the start of a sentence, where words are preferred (if rewriting is not the better option). Casual use also calls for the word rather than the symbol. Presumably, you could support about 75% of what the AP Stylebook has to say, or you could be behind it 110 percent. Or there is “a zero percent chance you won’t forget the new rule and spell out percent.”

AP’s entry also reminds us that percent and percentage point are not the same thing. For example, a tax increased from 6% to 7% would be a 1 percentage point increase and a 16.7% increase. There is unlikely to be confusion if someone writes a 1% increase with context, but 16.7% is more accurate and a more useful number for helping the reader understand how much revenue is involved. If something increased from 20% to 40%, it doesn’t go up 20%— it doubles, or increases 100%.

Some other points in the AP Stylebook entry on percent:

For decimal amounts less than 1%, use a zero and a period: 0.4%.

Use decimals not fractions with percentages.

Use percentage, not percent, when the construction is not paired with a number.

For a range of percentages, it’s acceptable to write “12% to 15%, 12%–15%, and between 12% and 15%.”

Expressing percentages with the symbol will take some getting used to, but the dollar analogy is a good one. It seems wordy to write 4 dollars instead of $4. Writing 4 percent may soon seem as excessive.

Mark Allen is an editor, writer, and teacher focused on helping people communicate with clarity and honesty. He has trained hundreds of editors and writers on a variety of topics, including the latest and most important elements in the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style. Mark has led conversations about copyediting and writing at conferences and workshops in Detroit, St. Louis, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, Columbus, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York City, and York, England. He was the first freelancer elected to the executive board of ACES: The Society for Editing, and Mark currently teaches advanced copyediting for UC San Diego Extension’s copyediting certificate program.

AP Stylebook Changes References to Race, Gender, Ethnicity

Friday, December Post a comment

There were a few recent changes announced to the Associated Press’ stylebook. Many of the changes focused on race, gender, and ethnicities.

Here’s a rundown of some of the updates to the 2019 AP stylebook:

No more hyphens that denote dual heritage. Instead of hyphenating “African American,” it will now go unhyphenated. Same for “Asian American” or “Italian American,” and the like. (Note: The Chicago Manual of Style hasn’t suggested using the hyphen in recent years, but The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage uses hyphens in most expressions such as “Italian-American” but not in others such as “Jewish American” or French Canadian.”

“Dropping a hyphen does not appear to be a big deal but it reflects a growing acknowledgment among news organizations that racial and ethnic identities are individual, that the individuals have differing views on how to portray themselves, and that news organization should be aware of those desires,” writes Merrill Perlman in Columbia Journalism Review.

Change to Native American references. Formerly, you could use “Indian” to refer to “Native American” or “American Indian.” The update says the term shouldn’t be used as shorthand for “American Indians.”

People of color. You can say “people of color” but not use “POC” as an abbreviation. The 2006 stylebook featured “African-American” as an entry and said the preferred term was “black.” It said to only use “African-American” (yes, now “African American”) in proper names.

Latino/Latina/Latinx references. The stylebook now calls for “Latino” to be the preferred noun or adjective for people of Spanish heritage. “Latina” is the feminine form of the word, and gender-neutral “Latinx” should be confined to quotations and names of organizations or descriptions of individuals who request it and should be accompanied by a short explanation.

How to Harness the Power of Your Dreams

Friday, December Post a comment

Aside from the actual craft of writing, one of the best ways to improve your work (and generate more personal satisfaction and income as a result) is to harness the power of your dreams.

In this context, let’s use the word “dreams” to include those stories you tell yourself while you’re sleeping, of course, and also your waking daydreams, your fantasies about how life could or should or would be, plus those many “what if” scenarios you dream up in response to real-life situations that strangers helpfully play out in front of you.

All of these ideas, scenes, set pieces, snippets, and snapshots may be sparked by external reality. But they nearly always feed off some of your innermost feelings, drives, and desires. As such, they are normally connected to strong emotions that, when woven into your writings, will tend to attract and captivate others much more powerfully than the relatively dry stuff that spills out from your comparatively cerebral creative processes.

It has often been said that if you are not crying while you are writing, you’re not doing it right. Starting with material from your dreams will make crying—and other high emotions—a more commonplace part of your writing process.

Here are some tips to help you harness the power of your dreams:

Keep Track of Your Dreams

The first step in harnessing the power of your dreams is to capture as much of this raw material as you can. This requires you to keep a “dream journal” in which, every morning on first awakening, you immediately note what you can remember of any dreams you’ve had during the night. At first, you might remember just a few disconnected snippets of your dreams. But as you continue with this practice, you’ll get better and better at remembering the details of what you dreamt the night before.

But don’t stop with nighttime dreams. Carry some kind of note-taking mechanism with you—scrap paper and pencil, a bound journal, your smart phone, a tape recorder, or anything else you can comfortably tote all the time—and use it frequently. Record random thoughts, complete ideas, simple stories you make up during the day, human interactions you witness, and any other fodder for writing that you encounter as you go about your daily business.

Don’t try to vet these items for quality, relevance, or any other virtue. Capture them all as they come to you. Later, you can decide whether a particular note has enough merit or potential to warrant further work.

Brainstorm on Your Dreams

You can think of dreams that pop into your head as “first generation” material, because it comes unbidden to your mind. But equally valuable is the “second generation” material you intentionally manufacture using your “first generation” material as starting points.

There are many rules to aid in brainstorming, the full range of which I won’t bother to discuss here. But I will cover just two: free writing and pyramiding.

Free writing is a simple exercise designed to uncover lots of ideas that your native internal editor would normally try to keep hidden. It consists of starting with an item of first-generation dream material and then writing whatever comes to mind, without stopping or thinking or editing, for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. If you have nothing to say, just write “I have nothing to say” over and over again until you do have something to say. The result of this free writing exercise is to “clear the pipes” and uncover subconscious material that often reveals additional thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas tied in with your strong emotions.

Pyramiding is a more conscious process in which you start with an item of first-generation dream material, then intentionally and logically build on it. Say you originally dreamt of an umbrella. You might pyramid on that idea by thinking of umbrella uses, such as shielding a person from rain or sun. You might think of other items that are reminiscent of or associated with umbrellas, such as awnings, tarps, tents, and porch roofs. If you start with an item of clothing, you might build to whole outfits or trending fashions. If you start with a snippet of human interaction, you might pyramid from there toward an entire play.

The discipline and practice of brainstorming applied to your first-generation dream material is helpful because it produces further raw material on the basis of which you may later write something wonderful.

Refine Your Dream Material

Although your first- and second-generation dream material provides the valuable ore containing hints of golden promise, you extract the most value from this raw material when you refine it into ingots of first-rate creative expression.

To do this, sift through your dream material in search of nuggets, grains, or even flecks of worthwhile story material. Look for elements like a great line of dialog or description, a powerful conflict, a memorable character, a captivating visual, an exciting journey, an enthralling plot, or something better.

Collect and organize these as the basis for the most “writerly” part of this process.

Edit Your Dream Material into Story Ideas

Here’s another place where we separate the “wannabes” from the professional writers. Anybody can think of a great line of dialog or an enthralling plot. It takes a professional to craft such elements into a complete idea for a story.

Take, for example, Proof of Life. It’s a compelling film based on a magazine article prompted by the actual practice of gaining freedom for hostages taken by terrorists. Lots of people knew about the practice; thousands more read the magazine article. The raw material was sitting out there in public view, just waiting for a professional writer to do the work necessary to wrangle the raw idea into a story.

Steps one through three, above, will regularly provide you with a treasure trove of raw dream material chocked full of powerful elements from your own life, mind, and unconscious.

From that point on, you will have endless opportunities to use your writing chops to crank out a great story. Or more than one.

Just What Is Fair Use?

Friday, December Post a comment

Sometimes, when you’re creating a work, you find just the right quote, passage, or photo that you want to use that will underscore your point or bring something special to your work. Seeking permission to reuse that material might seem an onerous task. Should you just rely on Fair Use and insert that third-party material into your work? What steps can you take to protect yourself from infringement?

As you already may know, U.S. Copyright Law exists to help promote creativity and innovation by providing a framework for protecting a creator’s interest in (and all benefits from) their work. It is a creator’s sole right to sell, distribute, or create derivatives of their work. Thus, infringement occurs when another party uses, represents, or adapts another person’s intellectual property as their own without proper permission.

That said, a statutory framework called Fair Use (in section 107 of the Copyright Act) exists as part of U.S. Copyright Law. This provision provides for reuse of materials without permission under certain specific circumstances, but particularly in cases of news reporting, criticism, teaching, scholarship, and research. The Fair Use doctrine requires the evaluation of four factors in determining whether a particular usage is “fair” or not. These factors are:

The Purpose and Character of the Use (The main consideration here is whether the use of the existing material is commercial or for education, as well as whether the new work is transformative. This factor is usually weighed along with the other factors below.)
The Nature of the Copyrighted Work (Or, how the new work relates to the original. Here, a more creative work is less likely to enjoy protection under fair use than a factual work. Further, using an unpublished work is less likely to be considered “fair.”)
Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Used in Relation to the Whole (In this case, courts consider the literal amount of the work taken as well as whether the “heart” of a copyrighted work was taken by the new work.)
Effect of the Use on the Potential Market or Value of the Original (In this case, whether the new work might “take away” sales or perceived value from the original work now or in the future.)

So, what does all of this mean for the work you’re creating with third-party content?

You should consider Fair Use when creating your new work and use these factors as guidelines for how a judge might decide an infringement suit against you. Although all four factors are considered together, the first and fourth factors tend to be weighed more heavily. However, each judge will use previously decided cases to inform their decisions. One thing to keep in mind is that if your work is meant to be sold for a profit (and in reality, many of us are rightly interested in profiting from our work), and your work might also compete against the original work in some way, then it’s entirely possible that you might be found guilty of infringement.

Unfortunately, there have not been any bright-line rules that you can apply to Fair Use in terms of number of words or amount of a work (cropping, alteration, etc.). Fair Use becomes particularly difficult to decide when the original work is a song or a poem, which is by nature a much smaller composition with more at its essential “heart” that, if borrowed, could be considered infringing.

All of this said, the U.S. Copyright Office has now created a Fair Use Index, which provides a convenient way to review case law and help courts (and the public in general) understand the current thoughts on reuse of material under the Fair Use doctrine.

In the end, Fair Use is a personal assessment of risk. You should consult your legal counsel for their opinion on your usage if you are unsure. Considering the penalties for infringement can result in damages that range from $200 to $150,000 per instance, your best practice may be to either seek permission for the material or find a suitable replacement.

For more information on Fair Use, review the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use Index or check out this article from the Association of Research Libraries.

Legal note: This article is provided as educational reference material only and does not constitute formal legal advice. You must consult your own legal counsel to determine whether any of this material is appropriate for your needs.

Mary Jo (“MJ”) Courchesne is the owner and principal consultant of Gryphon Publishing Consulting. A publishing veteran with more than 20 years of experience in trade, academic, and direct-response publishing, she has spent the last 18 years specializing in licensing, subsidiary rights, and permissions. MJ is a polished presenter on copyright, and she firmly believes that everyone from authors to publishers to corporations should know their rights when it comes to intellectual property. To that end, MJ served as adjunct professor in the George Washington University’s Masters in Publishing program for 11 years, instructing a course titled Editorial Content, Rights, and Permissions. She has also presented sessions on rights at the Independent Book Publishers Association annual conference and is a member of IBPA as well as other publishing organizations such as the American Society of Picture Professionals, the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, and Washington Publishers.

Earn More While Working Less

Friday, December Post a comment

I don’t know about you, but while I greatly enjoy writing, and I love to re-read my finished work (plus I metaphorically glow every time I hear the occasional “you changed my life”), I have never forgotten that under the capitalist system there’s always the component of money.

As a result, I have spent a good deal of my professional time and effort thinking about, and finding ways to increase, my income from writing.

Here are some of the methods I have used to accomplish this important element of writing:

Raise Your Rates

This is fundamental to increasing your income. In part, I’ve always thought of this process as a simple scenario: Suppose you’re in a room or on the phone with a relative stranger, and you ask them to give you $10. Chances are, they’ll scoff and brush you off with a forceful “no.” That’s a natural reaction. But when you are in a room or on the phone with someone who is negotiating to buy your work, you can ask them for that same $10 (extra) with a much greater likelihood they’ll say “yes.”

That’s one big reason I’m routinely exploring how much more I can get for every word I write.

Asking for more is the basic tool for earning more. If I’m getting $1.00 a word from most of my clients, I’m likely to quote a slightly higher rate to my next prospective client. If she balks, I can always change my tune and offer the lower rate that I’m already getting from so many others.

Of course, you don’t want to appear avaricious, nor do you want to queer a deal by behaving too greedily or money-grubbing. But there’s nothing wrong with considering the total earnout from a piece of your work and trying to maximize it.

Aside from outright asking for more, there are a couple of other considerations to keep in mind when trying to raise your rates.

First, part of the process of kicking up your rates is to establish and maintain a minimum rate, under which you will not work. If you don’t have such a minimum, it’ll be extra difficult to resist the inevitable capitalist pressures on you to work cheaper and cheaper. Naturally, you’ll want to keep raising this floor as you cement your ability to get higher and higher rates for your work.

Second, calculate how much you “should” earn, and how much you “want to” earn by summing up your living expenses for the year and dividing by the number of hours you generally work. If you spend $100,000 a year and work 2,000 hours (40 hours times 50 weeks), you should earn $50 per hour to meet your expenses. If you want to earn $120,000 next year, you’ll have to find ways to get $60 per hour.

Since inflation eats away at the value of your dollars, this calculation contains a built-in incentive for you to keep raising your rates.

Of course, you can always work more hours or spend less money, but that’s for a different discussion.

Specialize and Become an Expert

Most writers should choose between specializing on a single field of knowledge or writing on a variety of topics.

Aside from any other considerations, however, choosing to specialize can bring you more income. This is because

you’ll tend to establish yourself as an expert
you’ll be writing on a topic that few others can cover as well as you
you’ll be writing for a narrower audience of people who may feel more willing to pay well for good information
you may uncover ancillary sources of income such as speaking, teaching, editing, researching, or something else.

Work More Efficiently

We’ve already touched on the number of hours you can work in a year and the amount you can earn each hour. Reading those ideas, you may have realized that another way to earn more is to produce more output per hour.

This brings you into the world of productivity and efficiency.

Back in 1980, I found a great way to increase my income by switching from an electric typewriter to a word processing computer. I not only cranked out more material on the computer, every line read better because I could craft it more meticulously.

At this late date in the computer revolution, there are probably very few changes you can make that offer a comparable productivity advantage. But you might want to think about

speech-to-text software instead of typing
auto-correcting software to reduce the time needed to clean up your work
automatic formatting software to facilitate writing scripts and plays
mind mapping software to help you develop complex characters and plots.

You could also pull a “James Patterson” and simply supervise as others do your writing for you. But that’s a topic for another post.

Self-Publish Your Best Material

During the gold rush, it wasn’t the prospectors who tended to make a fortune. It was the prospectors buying equipment and supplies who made many shopkeepers rich.

Along the same lines, it isn’t the writers who tend to make most of the money available from crafting the written word. More often, it’s the publishers who do.

Fortunately, self-publishing has become much easier than ever before.

The techniques of self-publishing are topics for a different discussion, but there’s no shortage of information and advice on how to do it. In fact, by one reckoning, many of the most successful self-published books unabashedly cover the topic of how to self-publish.

Of course, that’s not the only topic that works as self-published material. Look into it. You’ll discover that when you are keeping 100% of the sales income, you don’t have to sell very much to earn more than what you might receive from a project that pays you only a small fraction of the total sales or, even worse, only a flat fee.

Negotiate for a Piece of the Action

One of the nice things about TV, film, and music is that the writer can reasonably expect to get paid not just an upfront fee, but a portion of all the revenue the work generates.

You can gain increased income from this simple principle by trying to write for industries that offer such ongoing payments.

I’m not telling you to abandon your principles and your passion to write pot-boilers for network television. I’m simply saying that if you’re looking to harvest apples, you’ll do better in an apple orchard than in a fallow field.

To a lesser extent, you can also try to gain more revenue by negotiating a piece of the action from the kind of writing you already do for other projects and purposes.

Stop Getting Screwed

Perhaps the most difficult, yet important, avenue for earning more income is to stop signing contracts or accepting assignments that allow others to take advantage of you. I’ve done lots of work for people that resulted in limited—even zero—income for me. I’m not proud of it. I don’t like to talk about it. It really galls me. But it motivates me to avoid making the same kinds of mistakes in the future.

I therefore suggest that you make one of your professional mottos the following: “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.”

Working to increase your income from writing is different from, but related to learning the craft of writing. Based on my own career, as well as those of people I have helped to succeed as professional writers, I can tell you that half a loaf is better than none, and being able to afford to buy a full loaf is even better than that.

Proofreading and Editing Recommendations

Thursday, November Post a comment

While my company does a technical proof of the layout as part of the formatting service we offer, we don’t do copyediting/proofing. The danger in proofing someone else’s work is that oftentimes, what may appear wrong to me is exactly what the author intended, so as a practice we never change what format or convert. Here’s what I suggest (which is always in flux based on client feedback).

One thing most writers agree on is that you can’t be trusted to edit your own work.

Editing is a very subjective role, and I’ve found that one author will love an editor that another author hated. The workload an editor has, as well as the deadline to complete the work, will often impact the quality of work.

I find that Word, Google Docs, and Grammarly all catch different errors and you may find it a worthwhile effort try all three just to see the difference.

Writer’s Digestoffers a service through their pool of editors at $2/page.
You might also want to check out the Hemingway
A client told me about WhiteSmoke, but I haven’t used it yet.

Some Final Thoughts

Proofreading can’t be rushed! If you rush an editor, the quality of the work will be affected.
When you advertise for an editor, often the only responses you get will be people who are available, and you have to ask yourself, if they are good, why are they available? Referrals are always the best way to go.
You can always release your second edition at a later date, but always put your best work out first, because you run the risk of a bad review that will stick with the book even after you fix the problem. You may have great content to offer, but lack of editing may become an obstacle to many readers.
I always recommend an author get a printed proof because so many errors don’t become evident until you see it in print, I believe it really has to do with how the brain works.

Grammarly

Grammarly is quickly becoming an indispensable technology for all writers—I can’t imagine the hours of rework that we could have avoided if every author used Grammarly before sending us their manuscript to format!

Here’s a video I made for a client to show it in action.

There’s also an MS Word Add-in (if you are on a PC), but only use it when you go into final proofing because it removes the undo function!

If you are on a Mac, you’ll need to copy and paste into their web editor to use the MS Word Add-in.

Hope that helps!

Authorpreneur Brian Schwartz is the creator of the award-winning 50 Interviews series. More than 500 authors have trusted Brian and his team to publish their work. The mission of Brian’s practice is “to bridge the gap between self-publishers and traditional publishing by applying the proven strategies and techniques of successful independent publishers.” To meet this objective, Brian launched AuthorDock in 2016 to provide authors an all-in-one secure portfolio management tool to manage deadlines, extended teams, and critical resources. Brian is also the developer of PubWriter, a click-to-publish publishing platform used by authors to create their own web hubs for publishing, promotion, and sales.

Help! My Source Bailed and I’m on Deadline

The Best Writing Tip I Ever Received

Pricing Your Work

AP Stylebook Adopts the % Symbol Instead of the Word

AP Stylebook Changes References to Race, Gender, Ethnicity

How to Harness the Power of Your Dreams

Just What Is Fair Use?

Earn More While Working Less

Proofreading and Editing Recommendations

Latest Posts

Build a Brand That Google Trusts: The New Reality of Search

Beyond Writing: How Expanding Your Services Can Strengthen Your Freelance Business

Am I a Writer or Not?

Be Prepared for That Crisis Moment When You Need Business Backup

Stick with Your System

In a Pricing Rut? Try These 3 Strategies

Contact Us