Today I chat with Caroline Tiger, a successful freelancer who published her latest historical nonfiction book in the fall and who has a new etiquette book coming out in the spring. In addition, she teaches magazine writing, so she pretty much is a font of information on everything writing-related.

What would be your advice to other freelancers about establishing themselves as 'experts' within a particular field or genre?
You know, I didn't even think about this until after my first etiquette book, "How To Behave," came out in 2003. My publisher, Quirk, didn't seem to care about platform, so I was lucky enough to be able to use my book to create one. The same went for my second book, "The Long-Distance Relationship Guide," although I think by that point Quirk and the rest of the publishing world was more wrapped up in acquiring books by credentialed experts and/or people who had built up a following. Still, having experienced two long-distance relationships was enough of a platform to satisfy my editor at the time.

So I guess my advice for non-experts would be to get into situations that have universal appeal and haven't been written about very much, such as long-distance relationships or saying "yes" to every man who asks you out in the space of a year and hoping that leads to finding your soulmate.

Okay, back to being serious: My advice to a freelancer would be to pitch magazine and newspaper articles about the topic in order to grow a body of work that lends credibility to your book proposal. If you don't have the clips to convince editors at the national mags to publish you, start smaller and work your way up. (Or make friends with a book editor who works at a publisher you love.)

What do your students seem to have the hardest time mastering in your magazine writing class?
Many things come to mind--magazine writing is much harder than it looks. The first--this is so cliche, but only because it's true-- is learning to "show, don't tell." In every other class, students learn academic, expository writing. Re-training their writing muscles to produce cinematic prose can be a painful process that takes lots of reading and lots of practice.

The second most difficult aspect, not that you asked, is conquering clutter. Strunk & White is my bible for that. And I'll just mention one more thing that seems to whiz past beginners' heads: A gimmick is not an angle, and a topic is not a story idea. This is so tough to learn. When I look back at some of my early pitches...oy.

What's been the toughest challenge you faced with your latest book?
My latest book is called General Howe's Dog. It's historic nonfiction, and it's about George Washington's arch-enemy in the Revolution, William Howe, and a funny incident that happened to them during the Battle of Germantown. When it came out, I was invited to speak at a George Washington symposium at Mt. Vernon. The other speakers, mostly authors, had Ph.D's and were giants in the rarified world of Revolutionary history. I wanted to genuflect at their feet. Instead I had to get up in front of a few hundred people and give a speech. Quite daunting, to say the least.

How did you come to acquire expertise in etiquette?
I know a lot of rude people, and I'm easily pissed off.

How did you decide to organize your website, including your clips?
My super-fantastic designer was the mastermind. (And I'd love to promote him here, but he's no longer designing sites.) He came up with the look, the organization, and the manners quiz. Then he set me up with a program called Contribute, so I could update it myself.

As far as clips, I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't updated the clips on my site since last September, and I have a huge stack of articles sitting on the couch right behind me, waiting to be scanned. But I'm actually in the middle of rethinking the arrangement of the clips to better reflect what I'm most interested in writing. I think partly because I started out as a staffer for a general-interest pub, my outlook when I left to freelance three years ago was to write about anything and everything that interests me. But it's an ongoing process. As I go along, I winnow out certain types of articles--and certain types of editors!