Which Niche is for You?

Whether you choose to write in one niche or several, eventually you’ll have to decide exactly what you want to write about. If i were doing it over again, I’d get into niches a lot earlier than I did.

Having a focus (or several) for your carer is the best way to start making more money more quickly. You’ll get to know all the markets (and editors) and the researching and writing processes speed up when the basics of your niche come naturally.

So how do you decide what niche or niches you want to focus on? You’ll want to ask yourself a few questions to help you decide.

What Do You Know About?

Maybe your current or former career can provide you with a niche. If you were a pediatric nurse, for example, you might want to write about health, though you might pick a sub-niche other than kid’s health if you’re burned out on that topic.

Or maybe you have a hobby or passion that you could write about. From sewing to fishing, weight lifting to stamp collecting, there are publications for most pastimes you can think of (though some hobbies might only have one or two paying publications, which is why having more than one niche can come in handy).

What Are You Interested In?

You’ve no doubt heard the advice to write what you know, but I think it’s fine to write about what you’d like to know, too.

I’m sure there are publications that would accept articles from passionate beginners, whether you’re a new mom or a novice at investing in the stock market.

Experts in a field often forget what it’s like to be a beginner, but beginners need advice that’s geared toward them. As long as your article suggestions aren’t too elementary, this can be a great way to learn and earn, and eventually you’ll be an expert, too.

What Fields Do You Have Contacts In?

Do you know someone who’s written a book on a topic you’re interested in or is otherwise considered an expert? Could dropping their name get you an assignment? Could taking them to lunch and talking about what’s new in their field provide you with story ideas?

Don’t discount people you may know only online or who you might have lost touch with in real life but still have a connection to through social networking. These “friends” can be a big help if you ask nicely.

Picking Your Niche

For most people, picking a niche or two comes pretty easily. You’re interested in writing about something and you can find some paying markets for it, so you start writing in that niche. You can always test drive a niche by doing some research into the available markets and sending out some queries.

If you find that you’re successful, this is a good niche for you. If not, you need to decide if you want to keep trying or move on to something else.

Remember, too, that just because you’re writing in a niche now doesn’t mean you always will be. Circumstances change. Your interests can change. And that’s OK. But focusing on a handful of niches at a time is a great way to focus your efforts and potentially boost your writing income.

If I Knew it Then: On Diving into Freelancing

When you’ve been doing something for a while, it’s natural to look back and think about things you might have done differently if you were starting over these days. While we don’t really get the chance to start over, we do have the opportunity to share our experience — and, hopefully, our wisdom — with other people in the hope that they can learn and maybe have success more quickly than we did.

That’s the whole point of this website, in fact. I want to make it easier for people to become freelance writers and make a success of it much more quickly than I was able to.

How I Got Started

When I first started freelancing, I put a huge emphasis on the free part, as in, writing for free. These days I wouldn’t even call that freelancing. It was good practice, of course, and it gave me some confidence to go after paying markets, but I did the free stuff for way too long than was right for me.

(That isn’t to say that doing some writing for free isn’t a good idea, or wouldn’t work for you. Every person and every career is different.)

Once I started seeking out paying markets, I didn’t have a very organized approach (some might say I still don’t, but that’s another story). I’d send a single query to a single market. If they said no, I probably wouldn’t try to send it to another market. I might not even follow up with another idea to the editor who just rejected me.

When I got an assignment I’d work hard and make the editor happy, of course, but, again, I often wasn’t following up with another idea to try to get another assignment. Not the best way in the world to build relationships.

Diving in Smartly

What I should have done was immerse myself more fully in the freelance world. I should have been more engaged with the newsletters I was reading, I should have queried more and sent repeat queries to markets I wanted to break into more often. I should have focused on building relationships both with editors and with other freelancers.

Of course there’s still time for a lot of that, but the number of resources out there for freelancers is so huge these days it’s much, much harder to keep up with than it used to be.

The point is, if I were doing it over again, I’d spend a lot more time networking, and a lot more time actually working than I did in the beginning.

I’d also try to work smarter, paying more attention to building my career, being more aware of where I wanted to go, and just putting more effort into it.

Notice all of the above requires work on your part, work you might not have thought about as being part of building a freelancing career. But it’s not smart to just jump into freelancing blindly. You’ve got to do your research, figure out what you want to write about, where you could write about it, how you’re going to move from your first clips to a more established career.

I didn’t do any of that. I just thought “it would be kind of fun to freelance,” and wandered around until I found opportunities I was interested in.

It was a really inefficient way to go about things, and I’m sure it cost me a lot of opportunities, lost money and lost time.

Don’t work the way I did. Make a real plan for your freelancing. Set up systems to help you stay on top of your business (we’ll talk more about that soon). Do something every day to further your business, even though you’re already so busy you’re not sure how you can fit another thing in.

You can and you must if you want to be successful. Go forth and kick butt.

Action Step: A Schedule that Works for You

I’ve talked a lot about my schedule and how lately I’ve managed to free up a couple of good chunks of time to focus on projects I want to work on rather than the day to day work of my business.

This is an ideal that it took me almost two years of working at home full time to achieve. I know not everyone is there yet (at home or in a place where they can take time off regularly), so I want to emphasize that it’s really important to come up with a schedule that works for you and allows you to get the work done that needs to be done while hopefully also working in some time for enjoyable pursuits.

Because my work is creative, a lot of it can feel like play, and a lot of it doesn’t really look like work to other people. Sitting on the couch all afternoon watching a movie and knitting is work for me if I publish the pattern later.

But if you’re in the phase of your career where you’re really busy and working on things you don’t always enjoy, it’s essential to try to work in a little play time. It might not be a whole afternoon yet (especially if you have a day job) but even just a couple of hours can make a huge difference in keeping you sane while you’re working so hard.

This is a big “if I knew then what I know now” moment for me because I just worked and worked with just about every waking moment I had for a couple of years. That helped get me to where I am now, but it wasn’t a lot of fun for me or my husband.

Building your career at the expense of your life is not the way to go. So while you’re planning your schedule, no matter how jam-packed it already seems, see if you can build in just a little bit of time for something fun, too.

You and your family will be glad you did.

The Journey to a Creative Career: Part Three

This week I’ve been sharing a somewhat brief version of my story of going from full-time work outside the home to full-time freelancing. First I talked about how I got started freelancing, then how I started following my passion more in the subjects I was writing about and found that the money really did follow.

When we left the story, I had just started working for About.com (I’m sure that will be the subject of another post in the future, for those who are interested in how that works). It was the end of 2006, and I was starting to get worried that I had too much on my plate.

I worked literally as hard as I could on the “prep” training (where you basically build a sample website over the course of a couple of weeks); at that point I’d decided that I had given it my all and if that wasn’t enough I wasn’t meant to have this site.

But I was accepted, the site went live and I still felt like I needed to work as hard as I possibly could. I was trying to rebuild a site from nothing that just days before had 10 years worth of content on it. That was daunting. It still is, years later.

But knowing that I had this regular and potentially really good source of income (that could also be a huge time drain) really got me started thinking about transitioning to full-time freelancing. With more time to devote to the site, I reasoned, I’d get more traffic and thus more money. And without a full-time outside the house job I’d be able to focus, get more crafting done and also expand the work I was doing for other clients or find some new ones.

Making the Transition

At the turn of the new year in 2007, I resolved that I would be home, working full-time as a freelancer, by the end of the year. At that point I already felt like I had two full-time jobs between my regular work and everything I was doing for, at that point, three pretty big clients (big in the sense that I had a fair bit of work from each of them each week or month, and needed to plug away on it every day).

I was getting stressed out, and burned out when it came to my day job. Book publishing is very seasonal, and I’d find myself without much work to do at work wishing I could just be home working on my freelance stuff (admittedly I did a lot of freelancing from my day job office, which probably isn’t the best idea).

As the summer came along, I was starting to express my discontent to my husband and my immediate boss, both of whom were very understanding. I didn’t have a firm deadline for making my dream a reality, but it was starting to feel more real every day.

Sometime in June I got an e-mail from a book publisher wanting to do a book on knitting and felting. The only catch was the deadline was in December. There was no way I could do it if I had a day job, and I really wanted to do it. Publishing a book had been my dream forever.

Because it was a book that actually offered an advance, I felt like I was justified in saying this was the sign I needed to let go of my day job. The money would provide a cushion if I was earning less from my other clients while working on the book, and quitting was the only possible way I could get the book done.

And it was done, in record time. Picture Yourself Felting Your Knitting came out in January 2008, and I was well on my way as a full-time freelancer.

Fast Forward

Since that time I’ve dropped one major client, scaled back my work with another, kept building the About site and thinking about new books and other publications that I want to offer my crafty skill to.

I spent a long time feeling busy, like there was always more to do than I could possibly ever get done. Now I know that I will never be satisfied with the About site; there will always be more to write about and that’s where the fun is. I’ve opened up a lot more time in my schedule and am having a lot more fun with my work and my not work.

I’ve somewhat taught myself how to crochet and I recently brought out the sewing machine again. And I started this website in the hope of sharing this story, inspiring you and helping you make the same great things happen in your life that have happened in mine.

If you have specific questions about how to get from where you are to where you want to be, I’m always here to help. The world needs more success stories!

The Journey to a Creative Career: Part Two

In part one of this series I talked a bit about how I got started freelancing but didn’t really think of it as something I was planning to do full-time, at least not right away. But that changed for me pretty quickly when I started actually taking long-term assignments that were on subjects I really wanted to write about (imagine that!).

Loving What You Do

I started to write for a couple of different websites on a range of topics, mostly having to do with crafts and health-related issues, but eventually spanning everything from weddings to gardening, teen life to ways to save money.

I had a lot of fun with these projects for a long time, and the pay, while still not amazing, was better than I’d been making. I began to think that maybe it actually was possible to do this full-time, even without writing for big-money magazines (which would be great, but seemed way out of my league).

Eventually I started looking at About.com as a place I wanted to work. The setup seemed awesome: write on a subject you’re passionate about, as much as you want, and get paid for it. Yes, the pay is based on page views and to some extent on ads, rather than the pay for content creation that I’d prefer, but I was hearing generally good things and knew that with a highly trafficked site a good bit of money could be made.

I applied for several different positions over the course of a year or so, including the freelance writing and journalism pages. Finally I was accepted to build a sample site on the subject of knitting in mid 2006.

Rediscovering a Passion

At the time, I didn’t feel like the sort of master knitter they were looking for. I learned to knit when I was relatively young, but I’d stopped during college and had only recently picked it up again. I was replacing someone who’d written the site for 10 years, which didn’t do a lot for my confidence level, either.

But the more I studied and learned about knitting, the more I wrote and connected with the community, I realized this was a great fit for me. I still feel like I’m learning (which I imagine is the case with anyone who delves deeply into a craft, including the craft of writing), but I’m more confident than ever that I can help other knitters and adequately share my passion with others.

And, admittedly, the money isn’t bad. Making money as a crafter is always pretty sketchy, so I appreciate knowing that I’m making a decent monthly income from sharing my craft with others.

But I was still working on the site while working full-time as a book editor. How I finally made the switch to full-time freelancing is the subject of the next installment.

The Journey to a Creative Career: Part One

It may just be the sort of people I hang out with online, coupled with the economy making people nervous but at the same time empowered to make a change in their lives that will hopefully bring about more happiness and less uncertainty, but I’ve been running into a lot of people lately talking about living a creative life and making a living through creativity.

One such person is an awesome yarn designer who recently quit her day job to go about spinning and dyeing fiber full time. Another is a pair of crafty folk who’ve started a blog about having a creative life and still being able to pay the bills.

While both of these have to do with making a crafty living in particular, the worries and motivations are much the same for freelance writers, even those who aren’t in the craft or more creative fields.

In reality, all writing is creative, and we’re all seeking a more creative life, and a life in which we are able to create our destiny.

I thought I’d join this little motivation train by adding my own story about how I came to be living a more creative life and working for myself, largely in a crafty career but doing other things, too.

How My Path to Freelancing Began

When I was younger I didn’t think that I would want to be a freelancer. In college, I was a journalism major and thought that I’d be in newspapers — probably as an editor but maybe as a reporter — for my entire career.

But editing work happens at night, and there are lots of times when you don’t really have any work to do between editions or when the evening’s stories haven’t started pouring in. Not to mention all that free time during the day.

So I started looking into freelancing because I wasn’t writing as part of my job (unless you count headlines and rewrites of some of what passed for reporting where I worked) and I kind of missed it. I wanted to write about creative things — cooking, books, crafts — and things that interested me, like health issues and the craft of writing.

I read a bunch of writing e-newsletters for a long time before I actually took action (though I had been doing a good bit of writing for free to build up my confidence), writing a query to Writers Weekly at the end of 2003. It was accepted and my paid freelancing career began.

I worked on articles during the day (and, admittedly, sometimes at night) as I worked to build my clip file and my skills. I wrote a lot of those little articles that only pay $5 or so a pop, but I figured that was better than nothing and fine for on top of what I was making at my job.

Eventually I got married to the guy I’d been with all this time, and I got really sick of never seeing him. I found myself a day job editing books, and kept up with the freelancing, slowly building over time.

The first year I did any freelance writing, I made $50. The next year was about $500, and probably about $5,000 the year after that. I still wasn’t really thinking about it as a full-time career, at least not any time soon.

I had this dream that one day if we decided we wanted kids I could work from home when I had time, bringing in a little extra money but taking care of our kids at the same time. It would be the best of both worlds.

But how I actually got to that place wasn’t in any way what I expected. Stay tuned for that part of the story.

The Working Lunch

When I was trying to build my freelancing career, I did freelance work almost every day during lunch while sitting at my desk. On days when work was slow or nonexistent, or when my boss was away, I’d often spend a lot of time doing freelance work on the clock.

I’m not at all suggesting that as a good idea, but it is one way to make more time to build your freelancing career without also working every waking moment outside of your day job. But there are certainly problems with doing freelance work at the day job you’ll want to consider:

• What if your boss/coworkers catch you? How will you explain what you’re doing?
• What if you get a freelance related call during working hours?
• Are you able to focus on day-job work when it’s there? Are you still giving your all to day-job assignments?
• Have you signed a contract that indicates that the company you work for owns all work you produce? That’s a sticky legal situation if you’re working for someone else on their time.
• Can you manage your time and energy properly so that no part of your work suffers?
• Are you doing similar work as a freelancer to what you’re doing in your day job? That too could pose problems.

I was lucky enough to have a boss who also freelanced (though usually not at work, he would take freelance-related calls at the office) and understood what I was trying to do, and at least pretended to look the other way if he caught me working on my lunch break.

If I were doing it again today, and if I didn’t work for someone so understanding, I think I’d pack a lunch and a notebook (the kind with paper) and find a quiet place away from the office to eat and work on my lunch break. It’s not as efficient as doing work on the computer directly, but it’s also a lot less likely to get you into trouble.

Why Not Going to J-School May be a Good Thing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my time in journalism school and what it would be like if I were there now. I think I’d be pretty darn scared about my prospects for getting a job.

When I graduated back in 2000, things were pretty easy for new j-school grads who had actually picked up a skill in school. I completed a somewhat high-profile internship after graduation, came home, sent an inquiry letter to a paper I’d interned with before, they just happened to have an opening on the design desk and I was on my way.

These days I’m sure it would be a lot more difficult to find a decent job, let alone a job that just happened to be in my hometown at a paper that knew me.

J-Schools Still Seeing Jumps in Applications

You’d think the current state of the newspaper business would scare people away from the industry, but there are reports all over the place of rising applications for journalism schools.

If I were about to go to college right now, I don’t know that I’d make the same choices I did back then. Originally I was going to be a history teacher — at least education is a business that always seems to be growing. But I’ve gotten so much out of my journalism education (and there’s no good way to work for yourself as a teacher) I don’t know if I’d be willing to pass that up.

I don’t know what kids today are getting out of their time in j-school, but I’d guess the classes aren’t geared toward working in the new journalism environment any more than they were when I was in school. I keep wondering if the students are learning about blogging, social media, freelancing, ways to make a living even if they can’t get a job with a big-time (or even small-town) newspaper or television station.

Is J-school Even Worth It?

Then there are the people who argue that a journalism education was never necessary for being a success in the business. I agree with that; that’s why I’m out here supporting people who want to be freelancers, regardless of their background.

If you can write well, it doesn’t matter if you went to college or what you studied while you were there. You have to have a passion for your subject and a drive to succeed, creativity to try different markets and media that you might not have considered when you were thinking about becoming a freelancer and the tenacity to keep trying even when things look awful.

Unfortunately, they don’t teach any of that in journalism school.

5 Reasons to Say No to Work

In these economic times, especially if you’re new to freelancing, it may be difficult to envision a time when you’d want to say no to an assignment. I completely understand that: when I first started out I had what I called “the year of yes,” where I accepted almost every assignment and opportunity that came my way.

It got me a lot of experience and a decent boost in income from the year before, but the next year became my “year of no” because I had spent so much time and energy on projects that weren’t right for me.

Here are some reasons you might consider saying no to a project or assignment.

Low Pay or No Pay

This is, of course, a controversial topic among freelancers, but if your goal is to make money from your writing — whether a little bit or enough to live on — you don’t want to accept projects that are only going to pay you a couple of bucks a piece.

I did some work like this when I got stated — I think it was 500 word articles for $2 or $3 each — and even though I could belt out several an hour it just wasn’t worth it when I could make $15 or $20 or more for a piece of the same length elsewhere.

Low Pay Per Hour

Going hand in hand with low pay in general is the problem of low pay when you consider how long it will take you to complete a project. My first book review for a big national review publication that I still write for was for a more than 800 page book. I got paid $20 for the review. If I made a buck an hour for my time, I’d be impressed.

But it was a book I wanted to read and a market I wanted to crack, so I took the job. I don’t know if I would today, given that I’m so much busier.

Assignments You’ll Hate

If it had been an 800-page book I didn’t think I would like, I probably would have turned it down, even if it paid a lot more. There’s no use in wasting your time on subjects you don’t want to write about, ideas that don’t really interest you or clients you don’t like to work with.

I want to say life’s too short to not enjoy what you’re doing, but people don’t listen to cliches, even when they’re true. Instead let me say you’ll be even more enthusiastic about your chosen career if you are only doing work you really enjoy.

Work You Can’t Finish

Sometimes a job that would otherwise be great is just too big or has a deadline that’s too tight for you to reasonably be able to finish. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You’ll just annoy people and build yourself a bad reputation.

Instead, be honest with the client or editor. Say “I’d really love to do this for you, but my schedule is already pretty tight for this month. Could you take it a week later?” Of course be honest with this new projected deadline as well, and make sure you meet it, with time to spare if you can.

When It Doesn’t Feel Right

Sometimes you’ll just get a bad feeling about a project. Maybe you don’t hear from someone who contacted you about work for months and suddenly they have a project that has to be done right now and that makes you suspicious. Maybe they want you to do a huge project with no payment in advance. Maybe they make big promises that seem too good to be true.

Whatever it is, trust your instincts when a client sets off your alarm bells. Do your research so you can avoid scams uncovered by other freelancers, and be willing to walk away form a situation that doesn’t make you feel comfortable. You’ll probably be glad you did.

Do you have any reasons of your own that you have said no or would say no to work? I’d love to hear them.

If I Knew Then: On Blogging as a New Freelancer

Not too long ago I came across a blogger writing a series of “If I knew then what I knew now…” posts dealing with starting out as a researcher trying to get published. There are probably enough if I knew then stories in my head to fill a book (maybe I’ll get to that one someday) but one of the biggest ones is that if I were starting over again today I’d start a blog, probably on the first day I was thinking about starting my career as a freelancer.

When I started freelancing back in 2003, I didn’t even consider starting a blog. I’m sure people had them, or something like them, but it wasn’t something I really thought about as being useful to me as a new writer. People just starting out these days are often told to get a blog, but I don’t know if they always know why they’re being given that advice.

Why You Need a Professional Blog

First off, it’s worth noting that I don’t mean you need a blog where you post pictures of your kids and tell stories about your cats. You need what you might think of as a professional blog, where you write about topics that you might like to get paid to write about.

My first blog, since abandoned, was about books and publishing because I wanted to get paid for writing book reviews. I wrote some reviews on the site and kept up with book news (as well as occasionally throwing in stories about my cats). I don’t know if it really helped me get more book review business, but it did give me a place I could direct potential clients and editors who wanted to see what my writing was like.

What a Blog Does for You

If you’re completely new to freelance writing, having a blog like this gives you practice writing about the topics you want to write about and gives you something to show editors when you don’t have clips (once you do have clips, of course you’ll add links to your blog).

When editors ask for clips they aren’t always that interested in where you’ve been published before, but they do want to know that you can write correctly and coherently and make a logical argument. Showing them well written blog posts does that.

What a Blog Doesn’t Do

Of course editors are also interested in knowing that you can work with an editor, meet a deadline and hopefully take editorial direction. That’s what clips from other publications show them. So once you have published clips you definitely want those to shine in a prominent location on your blog and in your contact with editors, but in the meantime having a decent blog, especially if you have good traffic and people who comment regularly, will go a long way toward convincing an editor to take a chance on you.