Planning on flying solo next year? Moving from a full time job to freelancing full-time can be daunting, but I think this advice from 37 Signals about the nervousness of starting a small business can apply to you. Get used to being nervous: if you’re not nervous, you’re not normal.
Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.Want to make sure you’re technologically set up for 2006? Read the best hacks of the month at Lifehacker so you can wake up to a groggy brave new world on the 1st.
When my best friend published her first major feature in a big newspaper, her dad had her lede reprinted on the side of a large novelty pencil. If you’re looking to make a similar celebration or just want to make a big impact, Wonderful Graffiti lets you put temporary words on walls. Or else you can just put words of inspiration in the walls of your office: “GET BACK TO WORK.” In a nice cursive of course.
You might be able to convince your editors at Conde Nast to pay you by the hours instead of the word, but knowing your hourly rate is helpful if you’re doing other freelance work, like for online work or freelance editing. L.L. Star at Writers Weekly has tips on how to make the most out of your time. If you are starting out at a lower rate, make sure to track your time, because if you’re only charging $10 an hour for your first freelance editing gig, you can charge $11 next time.
<img alt="happytomshess.jpg" src="/mbtoolbox/files/original/happytomshess-thumb.jpg" width="92" height="121" align="left"Today is the twenty-fourth in a series of posts by San-Diego-based writer Thomas Shess who has decided to keep a journal on his journey to find a publisher for his novel.
New Year’s Oasis. What’s nice about the holidays is the joy of sharing. A friend tipped me to what she thought was a terrific literary agent’s Web site. I promptly Googled to view Paige Wheeler’s Creative Media Agency site. I immediately checked a sidebar containing advice for the unpublished. Right away, Wheeler’s wit shines in her offering “How to Write a Kick-Ass Query Letter. Now, I know there’s a hyphen between Kick and Ass. Another helpful essay is a piece by Sally Zigmond on “The Top Ten Mistakes New Fiction Authors Make.” Overall, it’s a great site that’s informative and fun to read.
Thriller Buffs. Time magazine was glowing brighter than the Rockefeller Center Christmas Bush this week over Stephen Spielberg’s upcoming historical fiction thriller called “Munich.” Of course, the film will hit the screens as we near the Olympics. Spielberg is quoted saying he wanted to make a statement about peace as part of the screenplay otherwise he’d be simply doing a Charles Bronson…” Now that Chuck is no longer with us, it’s easy to make cracks like that. Budding screenwriters might read Time’s interview with the acclaimed director. He gives insights on how he works with screenwriters.
No Resolutions. I love the holidays, but I’m also happy to see the world without out twinkling lights. At my house, there’s the dreaded January weigh-in. If I stay under a certain weight my wife allows me to take off the “Please do not feed” sign that she puts around my neck after Thanksgiving.
Year End Clearance. Once again, I’d like to remind any publisher and/or literary agent that my first recently completed novel is ready to go. Drop me an e-mail for a pithy synopsis. It’ll make a terrific historical fiction thriller flick.
Late Breaking News. After a bit of networking earlier this Fall, I received an E-mail from a publisher asking to see a synopsis and 50 pages of my novel. Details next week.
* Because it’s a jungle out there.
In case you didn’t know, Jane magazine now features a new editor and a lot more space for freelancers. Paula Orr chatted with Esther Haynes about how to break into the magazine. “The most freelance-accessible spot in the magazine is “The Life,” a new FOB section. It covers all different aspects of a life of a woman in her twenties, Haynes says, so 150-200 word items under headings such as “Sex,” “Home,” “Play,” “Sweat,” and “Breath” all fit here.” Don’t pitch things about pleasing your man or looking thin while pleasing your man and so on. Keep the pitches short, clear and sweet. Email only.
I read this column by Kathleen Parker in the Chicago Tribune this morning, which beseeches readers to “beware and resist the ego-gratifying pack that contributes only snark, sass and destruction.” Well, I’m a blogger. But show me any writer who isn’t ego-gratifying (show me any human that isn’t.) And I might snark and sass sometimes, but the only person I’m going to destroy here is myself, through bad grammar and poor link usage. So, I wrote Ms. Parker the following letter:
Dear Ms. Parker:
I read your column “All about bloggers” with interest. I’m a 26-year-old writer and blogger in Chicago. One of the items that’s perpetually on my ‘to do list’ is to try to put together an article differentiating the various types of blogs. For instance, one of my blogs, MBToolBox.com, serves to provide advice to freelance writers. My other blog, Zulkey.com, usually (tries) to provide literary humor and interviews to its readers. There are blogs that provide book reviews, pictures of cute animals, personal journals, gossip about baseball players and links of interest to graphic designers. Of course on top of this are the gossip and politico-gossip blogs. I have a feeling that the last two were probably what you had in mind when you were writing the column, but I think it would have been interesting and helpful to call out which blogs in particular were on your list, as opposed to blogs in general. Obviously, you are thinking of a particular person and blog when you say ” When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.” But for those still unfamiliar with blogs, when their 12-year-old granddaughter tells them she’s writing a blog for her English class, this frightening vision might be what springs to mind.
I agree with you that bloggers overall are held to a lower standard of journalistic integrity than newspaper writers: that’s why it’s so much easier for me to put a post on my blog than to get a piece into the Chicago Tribune. However, I’d say that overall they are less influential and less mean-spirited than you paint them as a whole. Meanwhile, most blog fans know that the information they receive from Gawker.com is probably not as rock solid as what they get in the New York Times, or even CNN.com.
Meanwhile, for those who are dedicated, blogging can be a great outlet for good writers. While I am also a freelance journalist who has contributed to the Chicago Tribune and who has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, it was my blog that has gotten me exposure on NPR and in the New Yorker. For someone who has put in 5 days of free work for over three years, that is a good reward. You never know: today’s blogger could be tomorrow’s newspaper columnist, given the proper chance.
Hopefully if I get around to differentiating the blogs (perhaps the ‘arts’ blogs from the ‘silly’ blogs from the ‘gossip’ blogs, etc), their critics can be more specific. But to generalize about blogs in general does a disservice to a medium that is exciting and valuable as it is immature and sloppy.
Thanks for your time,
Claire Zulkey
I’m not posting this to get my blogging brethren to rise up and defend ourselves. We are too lazy for that. I’m asking my blogging and writing brethren though to send me any feedback you do have on how to officially differentiate the different blogs. What kind of category does MBToolBox fit into? What about Coudal? TVNewser? Bookslut? FishbowlNY? Cute Overload? These are all very different types of blogs, or so it would seem, so shouldn’t we be able to sort them out more effectively? If you have any thoughts on classifications, drop me a line. Or else I will destroy you.
Usually, I’m wary of writing exercises, because I’m a crabby and impatient writer who likes to get down to brass tacks and thinks that such things are silly and overly artsy-fartsy. So I almost passed over these tips from Dr. Erika Dreifus for fiction writers. She recommends them for use when you’ve got writers block. For me, I am currently working on a manuscript that’s now in the editing stages but I think giving these a try can help me flesh out my characters better–good especially for those who know their manuscript needs work but are too exhausted to think of how to do it.
“I am a single mom, and I always wonder whether to mention this fact during a job interview. If I do, I may not get the job because of the employer’s concerns about child care. If I don’t, they may feel that they should have known about my obligations later when this information comes out. What do you advise?” See the answer here (via WorldWit.)
In late October, mediabistro.com hosted its third annual Women’s Magazine Editor Dinner at The Four Seasons. Co-hosts Brandon Holley (Jane), Cindi Leive (Glamour), Isobel McKenzie-Price (All You), Janice Min (Us Weekly), Mandi Norwood (Shop Etc.), and Kate White (Cosmopolitan) were delightful and delivered the goods on the panel. During dinner, the 80 women’s magazine editors (yes, men can be women’s mag editors, too!) discussed everything from “How the Internet affects magazines’ content” to “Magazines’ celebrity addiction.”
Question: I’m wondering about the role of publicists in how it’s affected journalism and whether you feel the need to cater to what the publicists want, versus the desire too be truthful and accurate with what you see. This is probably drifted more to Janice, but to everyone else and how you think the publicists have sort of thrown it back to the editorial world?
Janice Min: I that one of the reasons Us succeeded was that it did stop being beholden to the whole publicity machine. That as a monthly you are, for better or worse, slaves to these people. When it comes to booking the covers. Because they have all the control over whether they are going to give you Lindsay or Cameron, and you know they can make all sorts of demands because you need them. For Us, we have the luxury of having cooperation or NOT having cooperation, and I think that, you know, we’ve definitely—it’s interesting, the publicists have definitely turned around a lot on the whole weekly category. You know, I know when we worked at People you just couldn’t get anyone to cooperate. They thought weeklies were just too icky to cooperate with. I think as the category’s grown, publicists began to play ball. It’s not so much necessarily that they think they’re going to get a cover that’s akin to a monthly cover, but they want to be able to have some role in controlling the perception of their clients.
A lot of them will go off the record with you to talk about a news story, a lot of them will give you a lot of background information. They might put the celebrity on the phone for 10 minutes to talk about a news event that happened to them if they want to help try to control it. Obviously, I think that we’ve seen how the world of celebrity has grown in so many ways. If somebody has a birthday party, it’s probably paid for by a club who wants to have it mentioned in a weekly, because, you know, it gets so much press for them and the celebrity will carry a bag or wear an outfit that’s paid for. I think the whole industry of celebrity and amount of money that can be made is so huge now that the immediacy of a weekly is important to the publicity machine in that way. But in terms of being beholden to them, I mean, we do plenty of new stories that if we know something is true and a publicist denies it, we will still do it.
More here.
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