Member's Library

Public Library Shuns Writer

From Publishers’ Weekly:

“YA author Julia Watts has been removed from the slate of authors participating in LitUp, a teen literary festival sponsored by the Knox County (Tenn.) Public Library that was inspired by a teen book festival of the same name launched last year in the Kansas City area. Knoxville’s inaugural LitUp festival is scheduled to take place on October 13 with a full day of programming, including appearances by 10 YA authors, a mix of regional and national names.

“According to Watts, a local indie bookseller who is involved in the LitUp festival’s planning asked her in July to be one of its featured authors. ‘My name and photo went up on the website,’ she said. Last Friday, however, that same bookseller called Watts to tell her that she was no longer slated to appear, as, after Googling her name, a member of the organizing committee had expressed concerns that she has also written erotica.”

I’ve seen this before. When a public organization or non-profit decides they don’t like what an author has written, they withdraw support. In this case, Julia Watts is in every way a “legitimate” writer. While she’s written erotica (which is essentially pornography in print), she was not presenting that content. She was presenting her traditionally published YA/LGBTQ fiction.

This is a case of confusing the author and the art. There is no law against writing pornography. Generally speaking, there is a difference between erotic romance and erotica.

While I don’t allow erotica in my workshops (I tell the writers no worse than R-rated content, please), I have never turned an author away for their content. I wonder if this library would have turned Shel Silversteen away for writing for Playboy? I certainly think not.

Shunning authors for any reason is unacceptable. Content does not maketh the man*. If an author has a catalog that includes works that are essentially illegal, that is one thing. But shunning an author for artistic expression is the worst form of censorship.

The Value and Magic of Networking: How It Can Help You Build Up Your Business

Monday, May Post a comment

We hear about networking all the time, but what is it—and why is it valuable to independent writers and editors? Why do it? How can you do it well? And what shouldn’t you do?

Done right, networking can create credibility and visibility, provide leads to new projects and clients, and bolster your independent business in many other ways.

Networking is simply interacting with colleagues to exchange information, resources, and support. What everyone doesn’t understand is that networking is a two-way process; it goes beyond joining a professional organization or asking questions in a discussion forum. To be effective, networking has to be both two-sided and—a lot like marketing—constant.

In the process of networking with colleagues or prospective clients, you can ask questions and ask for help, but you also have to give something back. If you always take and never give, you aren’t networking; you’re being a leech.

A common misconception of networking is that it means talking up ourselves, but this is not how it works (or not only how it works). Your networking efforts will be far more successful if you take a 180 degree turn and spend your time learning about other people and their services. It can’t be said too often that networking is a two-way process, and it starts with the other person. You want to be seen as someone who knows how to listen and learn from colleagues, and then as someone who can offer advice, resources, and other aspects of helping each other do our work better. You don’t want to be seen as someone who sucks information out of colleagues and never gives anything back in return.

If it’s hard to envision how networking works, two synonyms that might help would be “interacting” and “a two-way process.” Again, the ideal is for you to answer colleagues’ questions as well as ask your own, provide tips, and resources that colleagues will find helpful, and hold or host useful conversations that center on more than what only you want or need.

Networking in the current era

For many colleagues, networking means meeting and interacting in person, usually at local meetings of professional organizations and annual conferences of those organizations. With social distancing now in effect and other restrictions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re seeing some changes in the networking world, although the basic principles remain the same. For the next few months (or longer), networking is going to be more and more “virtual,” with meetings and conferences already having been canceled throughout the spring and into the summer. We’re already seeing events being held electronically, whether through something like Zoom or Skype (where you can see each other) or by teleconference.

If you plan to participate in virtual networking events, remember to present yourself professionally. Just because most of us are working from home for now, we shouldn’t let go of our professionalism. Wear something (at least from the waist up!) that looks like what you would wear to the office or a conference. Make sure your setting—background, noise, interruptions, etc.—is appropriate. Ask questions, and also try to provide relevant experiences or answers to colleagues’ questions.

Some organizations are already breaking up their big events, such as annual meetings, into smaller pieces and offering sessions as webinars, and many are offering those resources at lower costs than full conference registration or even for free. Many colleagues will save money on everything from conference registration to travel to accommodations to meals, which might mean being able to invest in more (online) training or more events next year, once—we hope—our professional lives return to something approaching normal.

The impact on organizations of losing a lot of money from having to cancel those conferences remains to be seen. Some might have to cut back on services or staffing to survive. Virtual networking will be more valuable than ever, yet harder to do on a large-scale basis. In turn, networking etiquette is likely to be more important than usual but could be harder to maintain as larger numbers of people seek ways to connect and learn from each other.

However you aim to network, remember that you have something to offer even if you’re new to writing or editing, or to being an independent writer or editor. We’re all here to learn from and support each other. Here’s to keeping those connections growing.

Here are some additional resources:

Ruth Thaler-Carter has been a full-time freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and desktop publisher for more than 30 years. She has been published locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally in, and does writing, editing and proofreading for, publications, associations, nonprofits, websites, service firms, and businesses. She sold her first freelance articles when she was still in high school. Renowned as a skilled networker, Ruth is active in about a dozen professional associations, serving as a newsletter editor, webmaster, publication author, speaker/presenter, blogger, program host or planner, and chapter leader. In 2006, Ruth launched the Communication Central “Be a Better Freelancer” annual conference to help aspiring and established freelancers find greater success and connections with colleagues. Ruth is the owner and editor-in-chief of the An American Editor blog and received the Philip M. Stern Award of Washington (DC) Independent Writers for service to freelancers; the Writers and Books Big Pencil Award for teaching adults and contributions to the literary community; EFfie awards for writing, editing, and newsletters; and the APEX award for feature writing. She was also an IABC/DC Communicator of the Year.

The More Unique and Popular You Are, the More Your Compensation

Sunday, April Post a comment

How much does a writer for your local advertising weekly earn? How much does J.K. Rowling earn?

What’s the reason for the difference?

In my view, there are primarily two reasons.

First, popularity. A lot more people read Rowling than the advertising weekly. It’s only natural she earns more.

The second reason is a little more esoteric: uniqueness. Almost anyone who can string 50 words together can write for the advertiser. Only Rowling was able to deliver more Harry Potter.

If you think about it, this same paradigm is pretty much true of other career paths:

Unique and popular musicians earn more than cover bands.
Unique and popular actors earn more than extras.
Unique and popular visual artists earn more than those who only copy the Great Masters.
Unique and popular historians earn more than high school history teachers.

And so forth.

Let’s be clear here: I’m not telling you what to write. I’ve worked with lots of people and I’ve never told any of them what to work on next. I’m just saying that if I like a certain kind of material, and I can get similar material from a hundred or a thousand different writers, I’m going to pay relatively little for the next installment of that material.

I’m going to pay a lot more for the next installment of material I can get only from one writer.

Is this just another argument for you to find and cultivate your own voice? Absolutely. That’s one of the main reasons I encourage you to strive toward becoming the best version of your creative self that you possibly can be.

Is this another hurdle on the road to success that you have to leap? It doesn’t have to be. Many people I’ve worked with start out fearful that finding and developing their unique voice is a terrible obstacle that’s difficult to overcome. As I’ve coached, mentored, and counseled them, I’ve helped them recognize that it’s really an opportunity. In fact, it’s a privilege and an opportunity.

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.

Keep Your Creativity and Your Business Separate

Sunday, April Post a comment

One of the biggest mistakes that a creative professional can make is to blur the line between creative efforts and business efforts. You don’t expect a doctor to diagnose every person she meets. You don’t expect an auto mechanic to tune up every engine she encounters. You don’t expect a musician to sing every line she utters and never talk.

In the same way, you shouldn’t expect yourself to bring your creativity to every business task you tackle.

It’s Just Business, Not Personal

The brightest line between business and creative activities demarcates the simple fact that lots of people can do business, but only you can do your creative work. That’s why it’s important you learn to recognize when you are doing business, and when you are creating, and that you intentionally bring different traits and skillsets to each of these two categories of activity.

When to Wear Your Creative Hat

Obviously, you’ll want to wear your creative hat when you are fulfilling a creative impulse, or a creative contract. This includes the times when you are actually working, but also such times as when you are

planning the work
contemplating the work
researching or investigating the work
gearing up for the work
polishing the work.

These are among the times when you’ll be drawing on your professional training and experience, tapping into your innate creative resources, and generally letting rip your creative powers. You’ll be in or near—or trying to achieve—a state of flow. You’ll be making your own professional choices and decisions. You’ll be enjoying yourself in what will often become a peak experience.

During these times, you need not—and should not—be thinking about business considerations.

When to Wear Your Business Hat

But at other times, you’ll want to doff your creative hat and put on that more practical, more hard-headed, more logical and material hat that denotes your emphasis on a business frame of mind.

When you wear your business hat, you’ll almost pretend that your creative side belongs to another person. You’ll stop trying to solve problems in new ways, stop trying to send a message or deliver meaning to an audience, stop trying to draw on those creative talents and innovative ideas that others just don’t have.

Instead, you’ll put into practice some basic, simple functions that reflect a well-defined collection of black-and-white guidelines and practical policies that have been shown to maximize your level of success in the world of business.

These include times when you are

pricing
billing
collecting
marketing
negotiating

Let’s take a closer look at each of these, in turn.

Pricing

As a professional writer, you produce output. This output is worth money. How much money it’s worth depends to a large extent on the value you set for it, and your determination in sticking to that valuation.

Pricing is a purely business function that depends primarily on how much supply you can deliver, how much demand there is for your output, and what range of values the market allows for your work.

For example, if you can crank out a professional-quality piece of work in a day, you’ll probably be satisfied to take less for it than if the same work takes you a week, a month, or a year. What’s more, if you can find only one buyer for your work, you’ll probably be forced to take less for whatever you write than if 25 buyers are clamoring for everything you can produce.

In the same way, the market sets a range of prices for your work based on the number of suppliers, the number of demanders, and other key market factors.

To illustrate: if your competition charges $5,000 to $10,000 for a certain kind of written item, you’ll probably be hard pressed to get $20,000 for something similar that you generate. But you’d almost certainly have an easy time getting $2,000 for it. Pretty much the same situation obtains for work that falls into all different price ranges.

Given all this, the Holy Grail of pricing professional work is to find the price that brings you the most money. This could entail selling lots of material at relatively low prices, selling very few pieces at very high prices, or—for most of us—selling many pieces at prices well within the range established by many other professional writers.

Setting a price entails very little creativity. It is much more like practical experimentation. If buyers are reluctant to accept your price, that’s a signal it may be too high. If buyers snap up your work, that’s a signal you may be pricing it too low. For most of us, the goal is usually to find the “Goldilocks” price that’s just right.

Billing

As a professional writer, you ask for money for your work. This entails not only setting a price, but drawing up an invoice of some kind that states the item you are selling, the buyer of it, and the price you’ve established for the work, along with any relevant conditions such as rights or royalties.

You might also establish other conditions, such as how long you’re giving the buyer to pay, how the money is to be paid, and so forth. Billing also entails communicating this information to your buyer. There’s little or no creativity involved in this work, yet it’s important to do it well, on a timely basis, and to keep track of who you have billed for what.

Collecting

As a professional writer, pricing and billing are only two of the business tasks you’ll need to accomplish in order to receive payment for your work. Collecting is perhaps most important, because without the act of collecting the money you’ve asked for through pricing and billing—particularly when buyers are slow to respond to your routine billing efforts—you may never get paid.

Collecting begins with checking the bills you have sent out and determining your next action on each of them. For relatively fresh bills you’ve just sent out, you’ll probably decide to wait and do nothing extra.

But as a particular bill ages, there will come a time when you’ll want to consider contacting the buyer to see how far along she is in paying your bill, then later perhaps sending the same bill again as a reminder that you’re still waiting to get paid, and eventually taking more drastic steps. These might include cutting off any further deliveries of your work, charging interest on the unpaid balance, asking a professional collector to go and get your money, or taking the buyer to court.

I don’t see any need for creativity here. Do you?

Marketing

As a professional writer, you’re interested in selling your work. Naturally, you can’t sell unless you can find buyers, which automatically brings you into the realm of marketing.

While there may be some creativity involved in marketing efforts, you don’t need to expend any of your own creativity in this area. Very intelligent and creative people have spent many years developing lots of interesting and effective ways to find buyers and to persuade them to buy. All you have to do is study the world of marketing and emulate what the most effective marketers do.

Marketing itself is beyond the scope of this article. But it’s well within my scope to suggest that you include marketing as a prominent part of what you do when you’re wearing your business hat.

Negotiating

As a professional writer, you’ll regularly be making deals with buyers who want to obtain some of your work. As soon as someone expresses interest, you’re a denizen of the world of negotiation. You’ll want to reach an agreement with each buyer on the terms of each purchase, including your obligations to the buyer and the buyer’s obligations to you.

Although there are some industry standards for the sale of professional writing, there remains a great deal of latitude within the areas of rights, promises, remedies for broken promises, deadlines, parameters of the work you’re selling, and more.

As with marketing, you don’t need to invent any negotiation techniques. Simply study and learn what the best negotiators do, and add those skills and behaviors to the repertoire you draw on when you’re wearing your business hat.

Networking

As a professional writer, relationships are frequently central to your success. Relationships bring you opportunities to sell your work, to learn new skills, to expand your creative powers, and more. These relationships have to be started and cultivated, which is precisely where networking becomes important.

As with marketing and negotiating, there’s little advantage to you expending your creative energy on developing new and better ways to network. Simply recognize the need for it and use the well-established best practices of networking, which you should do on a regular basis. This is an important task for the times you’re wearing your business hat, and you should consider it so.

Over the years, I’ve found great pleasure in watching talented writers grow from timid souls who feel that the business side of our profession is not their cup of tea to marveling at the raw power and financial benefits these same writers can produce by putting a little elbow grease into the mechanics of business, without ever compromising their inborn creative capacities.

The Dogs Days of August

Sunday, April Post a comment

August has always been an awesome month for me. It’s my birthday month. (Shout out to my fellow Leos.) It’s the month that I experienced my first kiss. It’s the month I survived what should’ve been a life-ending accident. (Got run over by a pickup truck 1,000 miles into an ill-fated cross-country bike trip, when a guy fell asleep at the wheel in broad daylight in the middle of Nowhere, Montana.) It’s the month I finished writing my first book, The Science, Art and Voodoo of Freelance Pricing and Getting Paid. But above all, it’s the month that I quit my final corporate job forever back in 1999 to go into this wild and wacky world of freelancing.

So, while the rest of the world tends to do their State of the Personal Union in January with New Year’s resolutions and all that jazz, for me, it’s August when I think about where I’ve been and where I’m headed. A recent article in the Atlantic, Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, happened to strike just the right note at just the right time. No matter where you are in your career, I highly recommend reading it—it’s a lot more hopeful and thoughtful than you might believe by glancing at its headline.

Being of a, let’s say, particular age, this concept jumped off the page for me: “Vanaprastha . . . whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning ‘retiring’ and ‘into the forest’ . . . is the stage, usually starting around age 50, in which we purposefully focus less on professional ambition, and become more and more devoted to spirituality, service, and wisdom. This doesn’t mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50—something few people can afford to do—only that your life goals should adjust.”

I’m no mountain-top mystic nor am I especially touchy-feely, but this hit my browser at a time when I’d been thinking those same thoughts. I recently started mentoring some younger freelancers. In 2019, I’ve spoken at the ACES and Editorial Freelancers Association conferences, and I’m looking forward to doing the same at the NAIWE Be a Better Freelancer Conference in October.

Sure, I’m as ambitious as ever and not retiring anytime soon. The later I get in my career, however, the more I get a charge out of seeing newer freelancers (of any age) strike out on their own.

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.

Why a Website? Highlights of the Conference Session

Friday, April Post a comment

I’m looking forward to talking about websites for freelancers at “Gateway to Success,” this year’s Be a Better Freelancer conference, coming up October 11–13, 2019, in St. Louis. This topic is always fun to discuss because there’s always something new in the world of creating and managing websites and because it lends itself so well to graphics and illustrations. It’s also kind of fun to share what doesn’t work in a website, alongside what does make an effective site to promote your freelance business.

It’s become common knowledge that freelancers in any skill set need websites to build and support our business efforts. Sure, you can promote your business at LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, but a website is important because:

It’s all yours; no one else controls or limits how it looks and what it presents.
It helps you be found—it comes up when someone searches for the skills and services you provide. That’s especially important for anyone starting out, because unknown freelancers won’t be found by their names.
It gives you a permanent email address.
It’s flexible—you can choose what to post, what and when to update it, the amount of information you provide, etc.
It speaks for you with clients who aren’t local and you aren’t likely to meet them in person to show your work samples. It’s your portfolio in an era when you probably will work with more clients who aren’t in your geographic area than ones who are.

Even if you already have a website for your freelance services, you’ll probably find the insights discussed at this session beneficial. You might gain new resources for making it look or read better and to attract business and educate prospective clients about who you are and how you work.

Think of your website as the base and office of your freelance business. It’s your showroom. It’s your path to being a better freelancer!

To benefit from this session—and many other ones—you will need to register for the conference.

This is the 14th offering of the conference, and the first-ever partnership between Communication Central and NAIWE. We hope to see you there!

Ruth Thaler-Carter has been a full-time freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and desktop publisher for more than 30 years. She has been published locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally in, and does writing, editing and proofreading for, publications, associations, nonprofits, websites, service firms, and businesses. She sold her first freelance articles when she was still in high school. Renowned as a skilled networker, Ruth is active in about a dozen professional associations, serving as a newsletter editor, webmaster, publication author, speaker/presenter, blogger, program host or planner, and chapter leader. In 2006, Ruth launched the Communication Central “Be a Better Freelancer”® annual conference to help aspiring and established freelancers find greater success and connections with colleagues. Ruth is the owner and editor-in-chief of the An American Editor blog and received the Philip M. Stern Award of Washington (DC) Independent Writers for service to freelancers; the Writers and Books Big Pencil Award for teaching adults and contributions to the literary community; EFfie awards for writing, editing, and newsletters; and the APEX award for feature writing. She was also an IABC/DC Communicator of the Year.

Negotiating Techniques for Writers

Wednesday, April Post a comment

You can’t negotiate your birthday. But pretty much everything else is susceptible to discussion and change, provided you’re open to such a conversation and you know how to proceed.

What Is Negotiation?

Negotiation is very simply a method people of good will often use to discuss their differences of opinion or choice and—under certain circumstances—to determine a way forward that all parties are willing to accept.

Since (as a writer) you generally have little or no power over your subjects, your sources, your collaborators, your publishers, your clients, or anyone else involved in your professional projects, negotiation is one of the primary tools you have available to try to produce the outcomes you want.

While negotiation sometimes produces a deal that’s far less advantageous than you may have hoped, it can also produce an acceptable deal in a situation that at some point seemed hopeless.

Important Notes

Fundamentally, negotiation is the process of reaching an agreeable way forward (often through compromise or consensus, two very different things) without the use of force. In other words, when we negotiate, we all choose to participate and we all choose to abide by the result. If one party needs or uses force to get another party to comply, it’s no longer negotiation.

Negotiation works only among people of good will. If you’re dealing with someone who isn’t willing to be fair or isn’t willing to abide by a negotiated agreement, there’s no point in trying to negotiate.

Just for the record: I doubt I can motivate you in this short article to want to negotiate for more than you think you deserve, but I know for certain I can help you—as I have helped many others—improve your chances of getting all you want through negotiation.

How Do You Start Negotiating?

The best way to begin negotiating is for both sides to make a plain statement of what they want. In the best-case scenario, there may be no need for negotiation because each side wants something the other side can easily and willingly provide.

If there are important differences in desired outcomes, and also a willingness to negotiate, it’s helpful for each side to supplement their plain statement of what they want by specifying more detailed “must haves” and “would like to haves” in rank order.

In other words, if I make a plain statement that I want you to write a million words for $100, maybe I will supplement that with a “must have” of half a million words rather than a million. If you make a plain statement that you want a million dollars for a million words, maybe you will supplement that with a “must have” of half a million dollars.

Now we’re getting somewhere, because if we both feel okay with these fall back positions, there’s a neat and natural point of agreement: I’ll be willing to pay half a million dollars and you’ll be willing to write half a million words.

The negotiation is complete. Congratulations.

But if there is no immediately neat and natural point of agreement, we can nevertheless continue to negotiate our way through our differences, which can fruitfully be viewed as some combination of obstacles and resistance.

How Do You Negotiate Through Obstacles and Resistance?

Obstacles are best thought of as relatively non-negotiable differences in the agendas and goals of the negotiating parties. I need to get half a million words. You need to get half a million dollars. As the negotiation continues, we may find ways to get past those obstacles or ways to accept those obstacles and move on.

Resistance is best thought of as a relatively negotiable difference in the agendas and goals of the negotiating parties. For example, I may be resistant to working with a writer I don’t know very well, particularly if I’m asked to pay an advance. You may be resistant to working on a project without getting half the payment up front, particularly if you’re working for a client whose track record on payments you can’t ascertain. We are far apart, but we may be able to negotiate through these points of resistance.

One of the first steps in completing a successful negotiation is to establish and build a relationship of trust with the other party. You can start doing this, even during preliminary phases of the negotiation, by such actions as

talking on the phone or in person and getting to know more about each other
making and keeping commitments, such as to exchange documents or share information
asking for and giving personal or professional references from reliable people
negotiating the small stuff, such as the meeting place for the serious negotiations, the shape of the negotiating table, and the number and qualifications of other people who will be in the room for the negotiations
fully and honestly stating what you want, what you must have, and what you would like to have from the negotiation.

An important aspect of negotiation is to be clear about your own bottom line. For example, if you are absolutely dead set on not writing a word until you have received some money in advance, then you will find it easier to cut through the chatter and understand whether the negotiation is advancing or at a standstill.

This kind of clarity helps the negotiations in three ways:

Your clarity helps you understand in detail what you must have from this negotiation, and it saves you the time and trouble of negotiating further once it’s clear you’re not going to get it.
Your clarity helps communicate your must haves to the other party and—more often than you might suspect—provides extra motivation for them to relent on some obstacle or resistance that has been standing in the way of negotiation progress.
Your clarity fuels a unique technique: It cues you when to walk away from the negotiation. Physically departing from the negotiation creates an immediate sense of loss in the other party and possibly confusion, too. You’re sending a very strong message that you’re not going to agree to their demands, and this may cause them to back down and demand less.

The good thing about walking away is that you don’t have to mean it: there’s nothing to stop you from turning around and walking right back into the negotiations if you wish. But you’ll often find walking away is a powerful negotiating technique that can break a negotiation log jam.

Another proven negotiating technique is simple compromise. You want a million dollars, but you’ll accept half a million. I want a million words, but I can make do with half a million. Let’s compromise on three quarters of a million—both words and dollars. “Let’s meet in the middle” is a rallying cry that has forged acceptable ways forward through what many have perceived as negotiation dead ends. Offered judiciously, a compromise can exert great power.

Perhaps the most important technique that helps in negotiating a satisfactory way forward is to listen carefully to the other party. You can do this by letting them talk at length, by repeating what they say back to them in different words, and by a willingness to modify your demands to accommodate some of their positions. For example, I may be insisting on a full million words, but I may also be open to you delivering those million words over a 12-month period or allowing a large number of those words to be repeated many times, effectively cutting back on the work I’m actually requiring.

I’m not going to give more examples here because that’s outside the scope of this article. But the point is simply that by actively listening to the other party and thinking hard about what they really seem to want instead of what they are literally saying, you can often find a way forward that cuts through seemingly insurmountable obstacles and resistances.

How Do You Complete Negotiations?

There are many techniques that top negotiators use to push through all the obstacles and resistances and to hammer out a satisfactory way forward for all parties. They can include any combination of

charm and charisma
logical argument
emotional persuasion
bartering (I’ll accept your specific terms on one item if you’ll accept my specific terms on some other item)
establishing a deadline for completing the negotiations
shortening the term of the proposed agreement (automatically making it less onerous than a longer lasting agreement)
calling for a “cooling off” period (temporarily halting negotiations and resuming later).

In addition to these, one technique I often use is to start with the least important difference and try to get it resolved, then move on to negotiating a slightly more important difference, and so on. This approach has four distinct advantages:

The least important item to negotiate is often the easiest to resolve. You want to write those million words on a Mac instead of the PC I asked for? Sure, no problem. Let’s move on.
Eliminating one item of disagreement simplifies the rest of the negotiations.
Resolving one item helps build additional trust and rapport between the negotiating parties.
Completing a discrete piece of the negotiating agenda establishes a point of common ground, effectively strengthening the parties’ emotional and practical commitments to completing the rest of the negotiation.

(In addition, as a writer, I just plain feel good memorializing each completed item I’m negotiating.)

Of course, there’s a lot more to successful negotiation than I can cover in this short piece. Nevertheless, I’ve found these tools and ideas generally provide writers with lasting motivation to develop their negotiating skills and use them to improve the results they’re getting as professional writers.

Seeking a Source? Turn to SEO

Friday, March Post a comment

Like many of you, I belong to a number of writing communities online. I often see posts from fellow writers asking other writers for sources. That could be fruitful, but there are plenty of other ways to find sources. And if you’re on deadline, the last thing you want to do is wait on a community of other writers who may respond with some vague connection to a potential source.

Case in point: Recently, a writer in a forum I follow asked the other writers if they had any sources that had some pretty specific expertise. She mentioned she needed the source ASAP to meet a deadline.

I thought, Why waste valuable time? Her request was so specific. By the time others saw it, her deadline may be over. And I doubted many of them had the connection to a source with the specialized background she sought.

Though there are many ways to find sources, one of your best bets may be as simple as using Google.

Use Quotes, Add Titles

There are different tools you can use on Google, and my best tip is to befriend quotes. And titles.

For instance, if you’re looking for an expert that specializes in treating broken bones in children, you may want to type something like M.D. “pediatric orthopedic.” In doing that, you’re keeping targeted words together, and you’ll probably pick up a few links of doctors who have researched or specialize in working with children who have orthopedic issues.

Don’t be afraid of trying “broken bones” M.D. either, or adding a geographic location. Sometimes when I want leading medical experts, I type in a big city name—Houston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—because they tend to have specialists in big cities.

Of course you could go through some sort of trade association or ask the hospital PR rep who you’ve worked with before if you’re trying to find a medical source. But in finding the source directly, you can look up their expertise and then contact them directly. (Really in a pinch on time? Try the direct route by contacting the source and also hitting up his or her communications team.)

Looking for a non-expert? Why not type in a few keywords—again grouping those that imply specifics—using quotation marks? Seeking a cancer survivor to share their story about BRCA testing? Try “cancer survivor” BRCA or “my BRCA test” cancer. Sometimes, adding the word blog or blogger into a search is a great way to find a personal source.

As journalists, we have to be a little SEO-savvy to find sources, even when we are not in a huge rush. Befriending search engines can connect you to specific sources that can add valuable expertise and perspective. It’s come in handy when I’ve had to interview someone who has researched something pretty specific.

Search in a Cinch

Next time the clock is ticking and you’re tempted to ask your writer friends for help, you may want to rethink it. Do your friends really know a psychologist who specializes in geriatric depression, or an obstetrician who only treats high-risk patients with multiple pregnancies? Finding a specific source requires a specific search. Your colleagues may very well have these connections, but you don’t want to rest all of your time betting that they do—especially if your name is on the line.

While there’s no harm in asking around, be sure to maximize your time by hitting up a variety of avenues. And make sure one of them is Dr. Google.

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.

Surviving as a Freelance Journalist

Tuesday, March Post a comment

My webinar for NAIWE on surviving as a freelance journalist is today. The PowerPoint is ready, I’m about to get caffeined up, and I’m thinking. What did I miss in my outline? Nothing really.

But it’s more of the intangible things I’m ruminating over. I’m thinking about what survival means.

I think you have to go through times of surviving. For those doing this as a career—and those who need the money—you go through bouts when you’ll write just about anything to pay the bills.

Then you go through periods of thriving.

But somehow, when you’re on your own—independent, self-employed, what have you—it always comes back to survival. Even decades in.

Why survival?

Because if you stop working at it, there’s no cushion to save you.

Some people in traditional jobs may not mentally show up every day, but they still go and their job is still there. Their company is still there. There are other companies to go to if one doesn’t work out.

For the journalist, if you stop doing it, there’s no other company to go to if you want to be self-employed . . . you’re it.

I am nearly 15 years in. Sure, I don’t go through times of no work, but I have gone through lean times. When I felt like I was surviving. Or starving like I was 15 years ago. This is okay. (If nothing else, it keeps you on your feet so you know where you want to head next with your business.)

So don’t think that if you’re feeling like you are in survival mode that you are a failure . . . especially if you’re experienced. We all have to keep hustling to stay in business, and self-employed businesses ebb and flow. You’ll start hustling again. And if you are and nothing is happening, it will.

Just by sticking with it, so long as this is what you want to be doing, you’re surviving.

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.

Should You Earn More by Working Longer Hours?

Sunday, March Post a comment

There came a time, early in my career, when I was faced with a difficult situation: I needed to earn more money. But since I generated my income from publishers and others, there was no simple way I could get them to pay me more for the same volume of work I was already doing.

My choices seemed to boil down to the following:

Work longer hours
Leverage the work of others
Lower my professional standards to spend less time on each piece
Automate my work to produce more material in less time
Speed up the internal processes involved in writing.

I spent many weeks contemplating the details and ramifications of each strategy and came up with the following thoughts and conclusions.

Work Longer Hours

At first blush, this seemed the simplest answer to my problem. If I could earn (in the old days) $100 working an eight-hour day, simple math told me I could earn $125 by working a ten-hour day. What could possibly go wrong?

But as I dug into the details and implications, I began to see some of the problems this strategy would entail.

For example, I was already working as many hours a day as I comfortably could. Working longer hours would reduce the time I could spend with my wife and child. I wasn’t sure it was worth the extra money to cut back on the most important parts of the life I was working to build.

Working longer hours on paid writing projects would also leave me less time and energy for the unpaid writing projects that were dear to my heart and possibly stepping stones to a better career.

Even worse, working longer hours would require more effort, and that would tend to leave me even more tired at the end of the day. If not immediately, then eventually this additional fatigue would cause me to think and write less well. I would inadvertently begin to allow more errors—not just typos, but errors in thinking and in factual accuracy and depth—to creep into my writing. Perhaps my stylistic flair and creativity would degrade as well.

I wanted none of this to intrude into my professional life.

Leverage the Work of Others

This approach is the basis of success in the world of business. After all, Henry Ford did not build Model-Ts with his own hands. Nor does Elon Musk actually construct the cars, rockets, satellites, and other products that are the foundation of his businesses—and his incomes.

In the old days, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and other Great Masters relied on students and apprentices to do much of the work required to move their masterpieces a long way toward completion, and today writers like James Patterson do much the same with the written work they crank out.

So it made sense for me to try to hire other writers to do at least the initial parts of some writing projects that publishers and others wanted to buy from me.

However, this strategy never worked for me, partly because I could rarely find suitably talented or skilled trainees and apprentices to work for me. But even when I did, I invariably felt that supervising their work took more of my time and effort than simply doing that same work myself.

Because leveraging others didn’t pencil out for me, I stopped thinking of this as a viable way forward (although I have continued to hope I’d find someone suitable).

Lower My Professional Standards to Spend Less Time on Each Piece

This is one of the classic approaches to success in American business: lower production costs as a means to increasing profits.

However, lowering my standards was something that proved hard for me to abide. This is probably because—at least to me—writing professionally is only partly a business. It’s equally—perhaps more so—an art form, a product of my creative energies, and even a reflection of my personality.

Delivering work that is only “B” quality when I could have pumped it up to “A” quality not only conflicts with my personal values, but also causes me emotional and psychic pain. For whatever reasons, I feel deeply there’s a minimum standard of writing that satisfies me, and when my work fails to meet or exceed it, I just feel bad.

Automate My Work to Produce More Material in Less Time

Back in the 1970s, I hung around with people who were experimenting with hobbyist computers. I was hoping that these early computers could provide a degree of automation to my writing that would reduce the total time required for me to complete at least some of the work I had on my professional plate.

But that was a pipe dream—at least until 1979, when I discovered that dedicated word processors were on the market, and for the most part, they worked pretty well. Later, I found that home computers could run word processing software powerful and reliable enough to help me write better and faster than ever before.

I jumped on that bandwagon and have never looked back.

Speed Up the Internal Processes Involved in Writing

Logically, this is a sensible way to try to earn more. Because of the way my mind works (I’m always looking for ways to do things faster, better, and easier), this approach has long been in either the back or the front of my mind. Why not apply this same brand of thinking to the internal processes of writing?

The problem was—and remains—I don’t really know how to do this. I’m pretty certain that I have done it, but I don’t know how.

I have some thoughts and feelings on how I manage to write much faster today than I did in years gone by, but I can’t swear they are true, or that—if true—they will work for anyone else. However, I offer them here:

I research what I am writing. The less I know about a subject, the more hesitant my writing becomes. Pounding away at research eventually gives me the confidence—and the knowledge—to write freely and quickly.

Having fed the process through research, I allow what I’ve learned to ripen in my mind. I don’t try to force my writing. The best way for me to write faster is to hold off until I feel ready to write. I’ve become confident that when I’m ready the words will gush out of me quickly and well. So far, I’ve been right about this.

I get a first draft done. Some writers claim they agonize over every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page. They can’t move on to the next word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page until every word they have already written is perfect. This has never worked for me. My method has been to write all the way through the end—using whatever words seem okay at the time to get the thoughts out of my head and onto paper (or screen). I’m going to polish the material anyway, so I find little value in holding up the flow of thoughts just because my first attempt is not perfect. My writing mantra is essentially: “We’ll fix it in post.”

I have several projects in mind and in progress at once. When I bog down on one, I simply switch over and try pushing forward on a second one. Or a third. I trust my subconscious to be working on my projects 24/7 without my awareness. It’s another angle on number 2 above.

So while my title to this piece about earning more from writing asked whether to work longer hours, my answer is firmly “no.” Once I’m working as many hours as I comfortably can, I have found it’s better for me not to try to increase my income by throwing more hours at my projects. It’s better to find some other way.

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