Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer
by Moira Anderson Allen
Format: Paperback; 256 pp.; 14usd (Amazon.com)
Publisher: Allworth Press (2003)

What question do aspiring writers ask most often? According to Moira Anderson Allen, who runs the very respected web site for writers, Writing-World.com, it is ‘how do I make it as a freelancer?’ Judging from the number of books on the market which strive to answer this question in a wide variety of ways, Allen is telling the truth. And why not? As Allen mentioned in her own book on this subject, freelance writing offers “the opportunity for independence, creativity, and the occasional moment of fame. It allows you to speak to others--to entertain, to educate, to inspire, to motivate. It gives you a chance to earn an income by doing something you love. It may even give you a chance to change the world, or at least to improve one small corner of it, by giving your readers the tools they need to make their lives better.” (3) Despite the many books on the market which strive to tell writers how to make it as a freelancer, Allen’s book nonetheless fills a very important niche. Firstly, Allen is probably one of the most respected writing how-to editors working on the Internet today. Her website is like a vast and living encyclopaedia of how to write in almost any genre or style, how to break into various markets, how to promote, and how to submit. She has a very thorough understanding of what both beginning and more advanced writers want and need to know in order to make a decent living doing what they really want to do. She also understands the realities, and as an editor, the limitations which writers have to work with; she has a very in-depth understanding (having written another book on the subject, Writing.Com) of how to make use of modern technologies in the context of a writing career.

Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer is primarily pitched at the beginner--those who want to break into freelance writing--starting at the beginning, from obtaining the right equipment to setting specific writing goals, to coming up with ideas for articles, finding markets, querying, dealing with contracts and rights, and writing in different genres. Allen provides a meticulous and thorough guide which is clearly written and inspiring without being unrealistic. The book is broken into six parts which are arranged in linear order beginning with getting started, working through the tasks around the first piece of writing, marketing work, querying and manuscript development, expanding your business, and negotiating the maze of copyright, rights, contracts, and administration. Allen’s writing is entirely free of jargon, and she explains every point in detail, without ever condescending or overly-simplifying. The beginning writer will find this book to be an exceptionally useful guide which will pay for itself many times over. If a new writer is looking to buy just one book, this is probably the one.

More experienced writers will probably not get quite as much value from this guide, but there is still plenty of good material to use as a reference. The later chapters in particular cover topics such as how to ask for more money, dealing with income and expense (which is fairly USA oriented, although record keeping in general will be similar from country to country), and things like how to sell photos, putting together and syndicating a column, writing and selling a nonfiction book. The chapter on setting up commercial writing business, written by expert Peter Bowerman, will all be relevant to even the most experienced writers looking to branch out or increase the amount of writing that they do. Although some of the material comes from other books--much of the chapter of Queries and Submissions re-appears from Allen’s book on The Writer’s Guide to Queries, Pitches, and Proposals, and Bowerman’s material comes from his book The Well Fed Writer--both of these sections contain some of the most clearly written and professional material on the topic, and if readers don’t already have these seminal books (and perhaps even if they do), having these topics covered so succinctly in a readily available format is worthwhile.

The chapter on writing a nonfiction book is fairly rushed, and for writers looking to self-publish, a more in-depth guide like Dan Poynter’s The Self-Publishing Handbook or Writing Nonfiction would probably be of more use, but Allen’s book is not meant to be a specific or very detailed guide; rather, it’s meant to be a good and thorough overview, and it certainly achieves that. It would be hard to find a better guide for people looking to break into the world of freelance writing, and the final chapter on going full-time, although brief, is very informative. Allen states that this is the book she has always wanted to write--the one she wrote to answer the many questions she receives on how to become a freelancer.

Magdalena: You are now considered one of the most well known online personalities in the field of 'how to write.' Tell me how you became immersed in the world of Internet writing help?

Moira: I certainly didn't plan on it! Full credit goes to Debbie Ridpath Ohi of Inkspot, which is really where it all began. I decided to get back into freelance writing "full time" around 1996, and discovered Inkspot at about the same time. At the time, I was trying very hard to sell articles to Writer's Digest, with absolutely NO luck. Inkspot, however, was becoming a fairly steady market, and I decided that despite the rather drastic disparity in pay, it made more sense to focus on a market that actually LIKED my stuff rather than continuing to try to batter on a very closed door. So I began to focus more on the types of articles that Debbie needed. One of the early articles I sold to Inkspot was a piece on the Tasini decision. At that point, Debbie mentioned that she was looking for more material that related to the Internet, and how it was affecting writers. It sounded like a niche that needed to be filled, so I started hunting for specifically Internet-related writing topics. I began writing on those topics for Inkspot. Then I pitched a basic freelancing book to Allworth Press. They didn't want it at the time, but they liked my approach, and asked me to come up with three or four other ideas to pitch. I didn't HAVE three or four other ideas -- so I scrambled around frantically trying to think up something that wasn't already being done. I hit upon the idea of a book about the Internet for writers -- something that would talk specifically about how the Internet was affecting the way writers work, interact, conduct research, and so forth. At that point, all the "Internet" books pretty much said the same thing: This is a URL, this is how you use a search engine, this is how to construct a basic website. But there wasn't anything out there that explained how an author could, for example, create a website specifically designed to promote his or her books, or how one could best go about contacting editors by e-mail. So I wrote up a quick "pitch" for a book on writing and the Internet -- and that became the first edition of Writing.com. Meanwhile, my relationship with Inkspot continued to flourish; I had become a regular columnist, then the editor of their short-lived "Global Writers Ink" newsletter, and finally managing editor of Inklings and of the articles section of the site. I stayed with Inkspot when it transferred to Xlibris, but by the end of that year, we knew that the budget was going to be cut and figured that I wasn't going to be with the site much longer. I'd had a smaller site of my own (Tips for Writers) that just linked to my own articles on the Web, and I began to kick around what type of writing site I might develop once I left Inkspot. What we never expected was for Inkspot to be "killed" entirely! So instead of just starting up my own writing site, I had the opportunity to pick up the pieces, including many of the articles that had been on the Inkspot site -- and that's how Writing-World.com was born. Like I said, I certainly didn't plan all this! (By the way, go figure... Four years later, Allworth Press suddenly decided that they DID want a basic freelance book. By that time, I'd written something like 80 columns and articles on the topic, so it was a piece of cake to pull them all together into what became "Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer." But that book wouldn't have been nearly as easy to write, or as complete, if they'd said "yes" when I first proposed it!)

Magdalena: In Writing.com you talk about the changes that have occurred in the 5+ years between the first and second editions. Which of these changes has surprised you most?

Moira: I would say I'm most surprised by the overall failure of electronic markets to thrive. I had really expected electronic markets -- e-zines, e-mail newsletters, and other electronic variations on the print magazine -- to really take off, and to become a lucrative new marketplace for writers. After all, it's so much cheaper to create an online publication than a print publication! I had originally intended to focus the market section of the Writing World newsletter on electronic markets, but I quickly found that this wasn't going to be practical. Not only are there fewer and fewer "new and emerging" electronic markets, but every time I go back to check on my old list of markets, it shrinks. Electronic markets vanish every day, and new ones aren't appearing to take their place. Apparently the revenue never materialized for most electronic publications. One problem is advertising; so many publications tried to use expensive generic advertising (look at Themestream!) as opposed to tailoring ads to the audience. A print magazine sells ad space to products that will appeal to its readership, yet a huge number of web publications never seemed to catch on to the same principle. So while many publications tried to sell ad space to all the wrong people, at the same time, advertisers were finding that they weren't getting much response for the money (partly because ads weren't being tailored to markets), and were no longer investing in online publications. Another problem is that it became almost impossible to make money selling subscriptions to online publications, with so much other information available out there for nothing. Several major publications (and quite a few smaller ones) tried to go the paid subscription route and failed. It's also just about impossible to persuade subscribers who were getting a publication for nothing to start paying for it later. I still believe that the Internet offers opportunities in this area, but it is going to take some editors and publishers with real market savvy to exploit it. It's not enough to just have a "dream" about, say, putting up your own poetry magazine or your own science fiction e-zine. It takes a solid business plan.

Magdalena: There are many who claim that SPAM is ruining e-mail in general and newsletters in particular. Do you agree? Any suggestions?

Moira: I think we've seen just the beginning of the "spam wars" -- which I define as efforts to block spam followed by spammers' efforts to get around the blocks, and so on. I will say that since the most recent legislation against spam went into effect, I've seen a lot less porn spam in my inbox, but I wouldn't say that the overall level has dropped considerably. One thing that I saw becoming a problem was spammers signing onto Yahoo lists and newsletters. It appears that Yahoo is fighting this with the technique of requiring people to be able to type in an encoded keyword before being able to sign onto a list -- thus reducing the ability of spammers to sign on robotically (if that's the right word). Occasionally I take a peek at the messages that are received by the host that handles my newsletter list -- and they are all spam. My newsletter gets hundreds of spam responses every month. I am sure that there are, in fact, hundreds of spammer addresses on the newsletter. Fortunately, all that gets screened out by the Listbox service, so I never have to deal with it. What is hurting newsletters is the increasing efforts by various ISPs to block what they ASSUME are spam messages, based on a number of factors that happen to be common to most e-mail newsletters. For example, most e-mail newsletters use caps to set off article titles or subheads, and this is can trigger spam-blocking software. So can the use of spaces between letters, if you wanted to spread out a word (e.g., W R I T I N G W O R L D). The use of words like "money," "save," "dollar," and so forth trigger spam blockers, as does the dollar sign itself. So if you have a newsletter with headlines in caps, an article about how to save money or make money as a writer, and perhaps a dollar sign somewhere in that article, chances are good that this newsletter is going to get blocked by a number of ISPs. The problem is compounded by the fact that many ISPs do this without informing their users of how to work around the spam-blocking software. So people sign up for newsletters and have no idea why they don't get them. All we can do is try to educate as many of our readers as we can on how to make sure that the newsletter's return address is in their address book, and so forth.

Magdalena: In Writing.com you talk about the dangers of a web site to consume a writer's writing time. A busy writer oriented one like Writing-World.com would compound that danger. How do you keep focused on the long term important projects like writing books, in the! face of the short term but urgent demands from the web site?

Moira: I don't.... Well, that's the easy answer, but it often happens to be true. I find that I will set out to do ONE thing on the website -- update one page, for example -- and then I find something else that needs to be tweaked, and oh, while I'm at it, there's another section that could do with a change... Next thing I know, I've spent a couple of hours on the site when I only meant to spend a few minutes. I haven't really found a good answer for this. Or rather, I think the answer is to have a "webmaster" who is someone OTHER than me. But given the total amount of time that is actually needed to keep the site running, that isn't economically feasible at the moment, so I'm still working on the issue of time management. What I have done most recently is hire someone (Darcy Lewis, who is doing a GREAT job) to screen my e-mail and handle most of the basic administrative work. She is also my first screener of articles. This has reduced my time involvement with the site considerably already. And Peggy Tibbetts handles 90% or more of the newsletter work, which is another huge load off my shoulders. One of my projects this summer is to work out ways to better "compartmentalize" my time, so that I don't get distracted by one task when I should be working on another. One technique I tried that DOES work, however, is to literally have two computers. I have one computer that is hooked up to the Internet -- I use it for surfing, e-mail, web work, and any other "business". I also use it for my basic writing, such as columns for The Writer. My laptop, however, is not only NOT connected to the Internet, but is in a completely different room. This is my "creative writing" computer. The idea is that when I get on that computer, I am not at risk of being distracted by the temptation to just check my e-mail one more time, or look up some little thing online. (We won't talk about the temptation of Tetris...) It works. When I want to sit down and just concentrate on WRITING, particularly creative writing, I use the laptop. It's also a psychological advantage; I'm not in my "working" office, but in my "fun" room (it's also my craft room), so my mind is focusing on a different path.

Magdalena: How did you find the experts you use in Writing.com?

Moira: I already knew most of them through their writing; they had written either for Inkspot or for Writing-World.com, or both. So it was just a matter of asking, "Who do I know who knows about X?"

Magdalena: Tell me about Starting your Career as a Freelance Writer. You say in the introduction that this is the book you've always wanted to write. Why is that?

Moira: As I said earlier, I went back into full-time freelance writing in 1996. The reason I did so, by the way, was because my husband was getting a bit intrigued by Amway, and we had listened to the spiel and watched some of the motivational videos and so on. We agreed to sample a few products. And I began to look at this and think, "OK, if the issue here is to make some extra household income, do I want to do it by selling soap to people who don't really need it, or do I want to do something that MEANS something to me?" I don't want to have it written on my tombstone that I sold a lot of soap. So I committed to getting back into freelancing (which I'd been neglecting for awhile). In addition to actually writing, I started to teach a couple of freelance writing classes at a local community college. I had collected a number of good "how-to" articles that I used as handouts, but I had never been able to find what I considered the "perfect" how-to-get-started book. I had read a number of books, but many tended to be more personal accounts of how the author got started, and others just went nowhere. Nothing spelled out, in a step-by-step fashion, what to do first, what to do next, and so forth. No book covered the topics that I was teaching. So I really wanted to write the book that would answer all the questions that new and would-be writers ask when they think about starting out. I had a pretty good idea of what those questions were, since I was answering them for Inkspot all the time. I also had a structure in mind based on teaching the class. Plus, I felt that my magazine-editing experience would bring something "extra" to the book -- an insider's perspective on the other side of the desk, so to speak. As a writer, I could explain how to craft a good query -- but as an editor, I could explain EXACTLY what an editor is looking for in that query. Most of all, I wanted the book to be practical. I didn't want it to be about "me," about how I became a writer. I wanted it to be a book that anyone could pick up and follow. Since Allworth Press had repeatedly said "no" to this project, I finally decided to go ahead and do the book myself, and perhaps go POD with it. So I had actually gotten to the point of gathering together all the articles and columns I'd written and had organized them into a preliminary manuscript -- when Allworth suddenly e-mailed me out of the blue and asked if I'd like to write a "basic freelancing" book! When they asked, it was already half-done! I don't believe anything happens purely by coincidence.

Magdalena: Starting your Career covers a very large number of topics related to freelance writing, any of which could be (and probably have been) the subject of an entire book. Was it hard to keep the book to 250 or so pages? Did any of the topics threaten to get out of hand?

Moira: Oh, yes! When I put together that first draft I mentioned above, it was at least 500 pages. Since I was thinking about going POD, I realized that I was going to have to do some serious cutting, or this was going to be a $35 book! However, I found that it was fairly easy to cut and condense -- some topics just didn't make it into the book at all, and others could be combined, and so on. So paring it down wasn't as painful as I had expected. (But yes, there is a lot that didn't make it in!)

Magdalena: Tell me about your book writing process. Do you structure the whole >thing in advance (eg build it, Poynter style), or work through the chapters ad hoc and pull it all together later?

Moira: It depends on the book. When all the material is more or less "there," as with this one, it is easier to look at the material and decide where it goes. I could say, OK, I need a chapter on finances and a chapter on rights, and a chapter on interviews, and so on, and here's the material that will go THERE, etc. For a book that isn't, in a sense, prewritten, however, I do tend to start at the beginning and work through the chapters one by one. I may go back and reorganize later, but I am not as likely to outline the whole thing in advance. I have found that when I do, I tend to make a lot of changes to the preliminary outline based on information that turns up during the writing process. For example, when I set out to do the second edition of Writing.com, I really thought this would be a piece of cake -- just check to see how some of the issues in the first edition had changed over time. I finally ended up writing an almost entirely new book, and pulling in chapters from other writers that I would never had anticipated if I'd just worked with an outline based on the first edition. So overall, I tend to prefer to start writing and researching, and see where it takes me, rather than to try to plan too carefully at the beginning.

Magdalena: Tell me about the promotional process you've gone through for both books (it must have been quite a buzz to have two books released in a single year). Any unusual anecdotes or surprisingly effective/unusual >promotional strategies that you can share?

Moira: I really haven't invested a great deal of effort into promotion this time around, I'm ashamed to say. The reason both books were released in the same year was mainly because I was able to produce the freelancing book so quickly; normally I take about a year to put a book together, but I did "Freelancing" in three months. Actually, I have to say that for both books, my main anecdotes are about what went WRONG with promotion. For example, when Writing.com II came out, I had author copies in my hand -- but the book was nowhere to be found! It wasn't on Amazon, it wasn't on the Allworth website; finally it showed up on the Barnes and Noble website. I contacted the publisher and their attitude was that basically this was up to the distributor. So I couldn't even begin to promote the book until it actually got out there where people could buy it, which took another month or so! When "Freelancing" came out, the book was available -- but somehow, no review copies ever got sent out. I kept checking for reviews -- nothing! Then, gradually, the people on my review list began contacting ME to ask whether they were going to get a copy. I'd ask the publisher, and the publisher would assure me that review copies had been sent. Finally I e-mailed ALL my reviewers (at least, all those for whom I had e-mails) and asked them if they'd gotten copies. None of them had. By this time, the book had been out more than six months! Armed with this info, I sent a rather terse e-mail to the publisher, who finally admitted that they'd had quite a turnover in that department and it was just possible that the review copies had slipped through the cracks. So most people didn't get this book to review until spring. Normally I spend a fair amount of time trying to get excerpts out into the various writing newsletters, but this time, I've been so busy with other stuff that I never really got around to it. So I have to admit, again, that I have not been nearly as diligent about promoting these books as I had been for the first two.

Magdalena: Now that youíve written the book youíve always wanted to write, have >you pulled together a new wish list or a new set of book goals? Do you have a secret desire to do some fiction or put out a poetry chapbook? Or are you thinking of putting out another non-fiction book?

Moira: Actually, having written "the book I always wanted to write," I really do feel that I've said most of what I want to say in the area of writing. I'm still doing a bimonthly column for The Writer, and the occasional feature article, but my interest in churning out more and more "how-to" articles on writing has definitely waned. Instead, yes, I do plan to cultivate my not-so-secret desire to write fiction. I have a romance novel on the laptop that has been languishing from neglect for quite some time. (It's also languishing because I need to do a bunch of research.) And I have a few short stories I'd like to tackle -- I have a great "fantasy detective" character that I'd like to explore further, particularly as a story with that character has been my only fiction sale to date! I'm also going to be working on another website that ISN'T about writing (though it will need writers), but this is still in the hush-hush top secret development stage, so I won't say any more about that! Suffice it to say that it relates to another of my not-so-secret passions, and should be VERY cool and exciting once it's finished. But it's going to be a lot of work, and I don't expect to launch before January 2005. "Watch this space!"

Magdalena Ball is Editor of The Compulsive Reader at http://www.compulsivereader.com/html and Preschool Entertainment at http://www.preschoolentertainment.com/html, and is the author of The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything. Her fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, and essays have appeared in a wide range of on-line and print publications.