Genre

More from a panel of experts on breaking into the seniors market:
What do you typically cover in the pieces you write for the senior market?
DeVore: I write about active seniors i.e. those involved in the community, keeping fit and healthy, staying social with friends and family. And I write about how to recognize scam artists targeting seniors and what the current scams are according to law enforcement i.e. home improvement/repairs, sweepstakes, identity theft. There are so many things to write about that pertain to seniors and at the same time greatly help their family members who may be caretakers such as
nursing homes/assisted living facilities, finances, real estate,
medicare/medicaid, insurance just to name a few important topics.
Tahmincioglu: While I’ve been mainly focused on workplace, leadership and small business in the past few years, I have always tried to find senior angles. For example, I found that many seniors who were not ready to retire where opening up franchise stores because there was less risk involved than starting their own businesses. Also, I have written about long term care insurance. This is again becoming a hot topic as people 50 and up wonder how they’re going to pay for nursing home care in the future. And I’ve written extensively about funerals and how cyber space is changing the way we shop for caskets and burial plots.

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The senior demographic is evolving into a much different demographic than it used to be: just check out any retirement commercial that features rock music. There are plenty of publications that are aimed at and about seniors, which many writers find to be a fulfilling and profitable market.
I know nothing about this genre myself, so I wanted to talk to some freelancers who do. The writers and editors I spoke with who have experience covering senior issues include: Eve Tahmincioglu, who has written for pubs like the St. Petersburg Times, Women’s Wear Daily, Salon, Time, Business Week; Mary Kay DeVore, who has covered senior issues for publications like New York’s The Citizen and Wendy Meyeroff, owner of WM Medical Communications, which provides health information materials/strategies to customers nationwide. She has been writing for and about the senior market since the mid-80′s.
How did you begin writing for/about seniors?Wendy Meyeroff: I had moved from magazine editorial (first a reporter, then an editor) into public relations, and one of my first clients was a company called Futuro. At the time, they were making wheelchairs, crutches, canes, and various home safety products. They were also sponsoring a book called “The Family Caregiver’s Guide”. This was the mid-1980s and caregiving was an almost unheard-of term. It was through this client that I started becoming aware of America’s aging population, the issue of caregiving, and what we were going to be faced with as a society in 20 years–all of which has come true. And it was that which got me started writing about so-called “seniors” issues, like “How to Buy a Cane”.
Mary Kay DeVore: I used to work for a non-profit that had a lot of seniors as volunteers and I wrote some press releases on their volunteer work. Part of my job was to recruit volunteers so I went to a lot of senior centers and senior housing facilities where I became quite familiar with some of the interests and issues that are important to seniors. I was freelancing part-time at the same time and started to write for a local weekly paper on the importance of
senior volunteers in the community, scams that target seniors, and health related topics.

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Having a reputation as being ‘the writer’ in your group of friends or family can cut a lot of different ways, one of them being that you might get called upon to come up with wedding speeches, toasts, or, sadly, eulogies. No matter how good a writer you are, a eulogy is not an easy thing to write or deliver. Thomas Bosch at Absolute Write has some words of advice since he has the dubious distinction of ghost-writing some eulogies himself.
That piece reminded me of something I read in Esquire a few months ago–further advice from Tom Chiarella, which provided not just tips on writing a good eulogy but how to deliver it like a man:

YOU MAY CRY. Accept it. But you should not let yourself be hobbled. A eulogy is not a chance to show off what you feel. Need I say this? It is not about you. That’s why you write it down. That’s why you read it aloud until you feel in yourself every response you might have to every detail. You want to get through the moments that will touch you. When my aunt Jane died, I read a catalog of truths about her in the middle of the eulogy. At one point I said, “She smoked too much.” I had read the thing to my dad in our hotel maybe six times. I’d read it the night before about fifteen more. I’d read it probably seven times that very morning, and I’d barely even noticed the line.
But in the church, on the heels of my father’s brilliant eulogy, with my mother not ten feet away from me, the line simply stopped me cold. I could see my aunt’s hands and the huge glass ashtrays she favored with three or four lipstick-smudged butts cocked in the ashes. I hadn’t expected to feel that. I started to cry. Later on, my brother said he hardly noticed it. Sometimes I think it must have been a gulp, but it felt more like an ax to the sternum.
I can recall, inside that moment, that the way I kept my composure was to say to myself, I owe her this much at least. It was a mantra I made up in advance. I said it to myself twice before I could go on. Make up a mantra to get yourself through those moments. Scratch it out on the top of every page.

Warning: reading advice on writing eulogies may not be the party you’d hoped it would be. But it might come in handy one day.

One of the questions I asked Anneliese is what the best bets, venue-wise, recipe writers can look to when it comes to selling their wares. Unfortunately, this is a question easier asked than answered. Anneliese didn’t have a quick response, possibly because there is none. I asked the same question of Chris O’Hara, vp of sales here at mediabistro who’s also written a few cooking-type books of his own:

When it comes to selling recipes, which types of venues tend to be the most profitable?
Interesting question which, unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to. As far as my own personal experience, my book contracts give me a licensing royalty for any content, including recipes that are re-published in periodicals. That is the only example I can find which relates to recipe “sales.” Obviously, from the financial point of view there is very little (if any) money to be made from selling a recipe-unless you are selling some type of secret formula to Betty Crocker or something. In terms of monetizing one’s recipes, I would offer the following (very obvious) advice:
· Build a story around recipes. Most magazines won’t buy single recipes (I believe many food magazines develop recipes in their own test kitchens with in-house staff), but they do buy articles. It’s probably easier to sell an article like “The Perfect Thanksgiving” with an entire meal plan, than to sell the recipes themselves.
· Write a cookbook. Unfortunately, this is almost impossible for an unknown chef to do, and not very profitable either. But a series of recipes organized around a theme (the narrower the better) can open doors into the specialty stores, such as Williams Sonoma, who produces their own cookbooks, but looks to add food-related gift books that are based on a single subject that their in-house books don’t cover.
I hate to say it, but recipe writing is one tough way to make a buck. There is a huge cottage industry out there of publications who advise people how they can sell their recipes online, or through classified advertising. As you will note, most of these ideas run you right the old pyramid scheme operators…

I had an email conversation with Anneliese Doyle, A’Guild member and author of The Mix-and-match Menu Cookbook: More than 124,000 Creative Appetizer, Entree, and Dessert Combinations for Sensational Meals. I wanted to ask her about how aspiring food writers can break into the market of selling their recipes.
What reference is the best for new recipe writers when it comes to the formatting, organization, etc of recipe writing?
The one reference I can’t work without is ‘The Recipe Writer’s Handbook’ by Ostmann and Baker. It’s the book I grab for when I’m wondering things like whether “mozzarella” should be capitalized, what the measurements of a standard lasagna pan are, and whether the correct spelling of those big, lovely mushrooms is “portabella” or “portabello.” When I’m stuck on the writing of a cooking preparation, I turn to some of my favorite cookbooks for inspiration. For example, how do the masters describe how to toast nuts or how to trim asparagus? It’s helpful to compare your own descriptions to those of other writers, to make sure that your descriptions are as clear, if not better, than those already out there.

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James Othmer, ex-Young & Rubicam art director and also a novelist has some additional advice for copywriters aiming to build a nice portfolio. “The sad truth is that having a great book means that sooner or later you will need to collaborate with another human being. This will probably involve talking, possibly being in the same room together, often listening to ideas and disturbing personal issues not entirely your own and maybe even liking some of them.
“I used to be fairly open to crudely drawn ads by a writer if the concepts were strong enough (probably because I did the same thing with humiliating results many many years ago). But today even entry level, just out of fancy ad school books contain nothing like the (soon to be obsolete word) ‘comps’ that were once acceptable. Everything looks ready to run.
“However, there are several ways, I think, for a writer to dimensionalize an otherwise tasty looking book — but only if it makes total sense for the product. For instance, you can’t hide a flawed strategy with small space print-driven ads or teasers or web-specific concepts, from banners. If someone makes me laugh and see a strategic thought there, I’m usually impressed. Also the awards books are filled great headline driven outdoor or guerilla stuff. Also, if a copywriter’s book was filled with phenomenal visuals I would often suggest that she think about doing a long copy or headline driven campaign, just to prove that she has some conceptual versatility and can really, really write (and that her partner wasn’t doing all the heavy conceptual lifting). Body copy, long copy and radio (which still eats up almost half of most media budgets yet for some reason remains a portfolio no-no) are often an afterthought in books, but there are a lot of big agencies today with tons of talented creatives yet only a handful who can craft the provocative, funny, informative and compelling longer copy ads their clients need.
“Finally, and maybe this is a horrible idea for a book piece, but since everyone is trying to figure out how to do long format or episodic webisodes that actually make people want to buy or know more about a product, why not give it a shot? If you can come up with a short treatment (not sure if I’d lead with this, but if it’s breakthrough enough and the recruiter/cd is looking for more…) it could only help.
“Of course a nice biproduct of doing all this copy intensive work is that if any of it is good enough there’s a good chance it will catch the eye of some smart art director who suddenly may find the time to make it look like a real advertising.”

Another person I asked for advice on how copywriters can build the best portfolios possible is Jennifer Solow, former managing partner and creative director of Kirshenbaum Bond and author of the book The Booster. “The best way I know how (and the only way actually) is to team up with a like-minded art director (or more than one if you want) and create spec ads or do real ads for small, creatively inspiring clients.
Years ago (while at Ogilvy & Mather) one of my good friends and his partner (fresh out of Art Center) did home-made commercials for a little unknown gym in the village called Crunch. Those ads shot for a few bucks made them famous, the ads famous, and put the gym on the path to glory.
I also know a now-famous and successful copywriter who created a HYSTERICALLY FUNNY pencil-drawn writer’s portfolio complete with stick figures and all. The portfolio became a cult classic-everyone wanted to see the guy who had the balls to do it. Needless to say he was snapped up by Wieden & Kennedy. He worked for a radio production company. He got coffee for people. His writing was brilliant. He needed nothing more than this.
I went about it in a stupid, expensive, sanity-busting way that lead to misery, job change and divorce: As a career art director (closet copywriter) no one EVER believed I could write (like even on my very last day in advertising my boss said, “it wasn’t like you were a real writer.”) The way I did it was to claw my way up the ranks until I could give myself the writing assignments. I also married a great art director—so I had a built-in partner for all my writer-ly ideas (thus the eventual divorce). I also spent every penny I had publishing a magazine and did all the writing. Then I quit after 20 years and wrote a novel…I think there are easier-slash-more-efficient ways of going about it.
The great copywriter is usually one of a great two-person team. Bosses LOVE strong teams who can stay up late together and get the job done. Pick an art director you could share a bottle of scotch with and forge a loyal team. Stay up late. Play haunting Indie music or possibly the Circle Jerks and eke out a fine portfolio. Send it to W & K and move to Amsterdam. And don’t marry them.”

Writer and editor Jennifer Weiss shares her first pair of pitches to The New York Times City section, showing how a well-crafted initial pitch lays the groundwork for a future assignment. A graduate journalism student at Columbia when she initially queried, Weiss is now an associate editor at New Jersey Monthly. The first story she sent the Times was rejected, but she secured an assignment with her effective follow-up pitch, and reports, “I’ve written 10 or so freelance pieces for the Times since my piece on the ballroom dancer.” MB analyzes how both her queries helped make it happen (you can read her pitch here.)

My first job out of college was a copywriter for a small firm in Chicago. It was pretty awful and I wanted out, badly–but I had no idea how to showcase my writing skills. I had taken no advertising courses in college and didn’t know how to display my writing other than the journalism clips I had accrued. In advertising, how can you show off your writing in an attractive way if you don’t have any design skills? I’d have no chance next to other copywriters who knew their way around Illustrator.
Several years later, I still don’t know how to put together a copywriting portfolio, but it’s OK since I’m done with advertising. But some of you might be stuck in crappy ad jobs, writing newsletters for a second-rate Indiana riverboat casino (is there such a thing as a first-rate one?) So I asked some advertising pros I know for their advice to copywriters on how to build a pretty portfolio.
A friend of mine, art director Lisa Leone, who has held the role of creative director at firms like BBDO, J Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett USA, recommends taking a portfolio class. Otherwise, “the only advice is to befriend art directors and graphic designers. because yes, the look does matter. but, we’re bitchy and picky and won’t do something unless a) it also makes our book better, b) we are paid or c) there’s fair trade/free shit involved.”
“It’s my opinion that for advertising, a writer NEEDS to put together a book with an art director,” agrees Ernie Schenck, cofounder of the acclaimed advertising agency Pagano Schenck and Kay and author of The Houdini Solution. Writing for advertising isn’t like any other kind. It’s as much about the concept as it is about the actual writing. More so now than ever. Personally, if a prospective writer comes to me with nothing more than a bunch of writing, I can’t take that person seriously. If you want to work in advertising, team up with an art director. ”
Another friend, hunky marketing copywriter working in Chicago Dave Reidy, has some suggestions for portolio schools. “They get you a chance to work with an art director, make some business connections, and build your book. Sort of the codified version of working with a designer friend to come up with some ads. The best of these ads, produced with an art director either inside or outside school, will take into account the realities of their medium and the clients they would serve while still innovating. Otherwise these fake ads look just that–fake. You don’t want the person looking at them thinking that they could never be produced, or thinking that they are examples of your naivete. Maybe a piece or two in your portfolio can really blow up convention, but the rest should innovate within the framework of some standard expectations.”
I got so much good advice that I didn’t want to create one huge super-post, so I’ll be scattering these through the morning. Stay tuned for even more advice from even more ad vets.

When I was in copywriting I was psyched the first chance I got to write a TV ad, until I realized I had no idea what I was doing. How do you format it? How do you cram a lot of information into just 30 seconds? And how do you make that mildly entertaining?
I found a few resources on writing television spots for you newbies. About Advertising has 10 Essentials to an Effective TV Commercial. From a school handout (really) a few suggestions on what messages to include in your spot–very basic, but then again it has a helpful rundown of approximately how many words are in 10, 20, 30, and 60-second spots. And finally, probably the most practically helpful, how to format the durn thing.