Freelance Writing

Writing: A Career Scope

Writing as a career has no boundaries. An affinity for writing is something those who wish to begin their career as a writer should have. Other necessary traits include the ability to express ideas clearly in writing, self motivation, creativity and curiosity to know more and write more.

To begin with, editors and authors are generally first choice when it comes to choosing a career, but writers with a technical background can also specialize as a technical writer. A technical writer develops technical materials, such as equipment manuals or operating and maintenance instructions. Most technical writers work with engineers or other techie professionals on technical subject matters to prepare written interpretations for general readership.

A creative writer, a poet, a lyricist, a novelist and a screenwriter, create original work—such as prose, poems, plays and song lyrics; most of these are either for performance or for publication.

As a writer of non-fiction, you will have to put a lot of hard work into research of the specific topic that you have been given to write about. Information has to be gathered through the internet, newspapers, magazines and other print media, personal observation, interviews and most importantly the library.
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Asserting Your Rights Over Your Document

words in a book in old style written English Copyright is literally “the right to copy” and the laws that govern the reproduction of material. Reproduction of your work without your knowledge is a violation of copyright law. Copyrights may subsist in a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms or “works”. They include poems, plays, paintings, sculptures, photographs, musical compositions and other forms of literary work. The authority of selling, renting or copying the work is restricted to the owner, manufacturer or the creator of the work.

Although there are laws regarding copyright, one can actually take approximately 300 words from a book or any other lengthy work of writing and use it, or you can quote 150 words from a magazine article. If you wanted you could also use 50 words from a newspaper article (generally considered fair-use), without a fee. Even if you’ve taken some words/material from the document(s), then this should be mentioned in the bibliography/references/acknowledgements section; this commonly referred to as ‘fair dealing’.
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Winning Business As a Freelance Writer

Plain Business Etiquette

I’ve mentioned previously that I have been spreading my wings and venturing into new areas looking for business. Primarily this has been based around the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) knowledge I’ve been accumulating, but it has brought home to me a reminder of my very first weeks writing for pay. Making initial approaches for work and how to handle queries and the assignment itself are probably more important than what you actually produce at this stage.

When making an initial approach for an assignment don’t pussy foot around. Ask for the work; spell out your idea, or how you will deal with the subject matter and most importantly how you will manage the work and what can be expected.

Below is a real bid I made for ten articles recently:

Hi – this supplements my bid of $60 for 10 x 400 word (min) articles. The articles will be delivered within 24 hours of receipt of instruction. They will:

1. be 100% original and Copyscape tested prior to submission;
2. in US English or British English as you specify;
3. grammatically correct and free of typos;
4. optimized with the keyword/phrase to your specification;
5. written by me – a native English speaker who splits his time between the US and UK.
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Going Off At a Tangent

Twisting ideas to promote your client

By now, if you have been reading my posts, you will have gathered that I am not a so-called “creative writer”. I do not produce literature. I have no burning desire to write a novel, unless it’s guaranteed to be a bestseller ,which will keep me in the style to which I sincerely wish to become accustomed. I am a commercial animal, I write for pay and I look at writing as a means to earn my living and to form the bedrock of a business I am building.

That said, it does not mean that I am not imaginative nor creative with the ideas that flow and am used to delivering work products for my clients. It certainly does not follow that I am in any way less passionate about what I am doing, while I also have a fierce pride in my work, and delivering the very best I can provide for clients. Some of my work is “mindless pap” as I often say to enquiring friends and family and in my honest opinion it is just that – advertising and promotional rubbish. Nevertheless, it is good advertising rubbish and I can say that because it performs the task that my clients wish to achieve and I get paid for producing it.

Today, my work for the most part is not “mindless pap” as my clients and the projects have become more interesting. Writing assignments has started to exercise my mind and imagination to a greater extent, than figuring out how to get 800 words on a paper dealing with Japanese “Geta” shoes, or producing a dumbed down series of articles on alternatives to Viagra. Even when you are confronted with a topic that readily lends itself to a simple churning out of some more advertising rubbish you can exercise your imagination and tackle the subject from a different perspective. I firmly believe that the confidence I have acquired in two years of commercial writing has encouraged me to take alternative approaches to handling a client topic.

Earlier this week I had to write a series of blog posts for a site called Your Health Reporter which promotes alternative therapies, amongst which is the use of a slimming pill derived from a cactus in the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia Gordonii. Your Health Reporter, is a relatively new client for me and initially I started off with the “Lose the keg and get a 6 pack” style of posts for the slimming and fitness products that are being promoted. Last week I altered the style and that produced some incredible results.

The Importance of Creating Paraphernalia of Your Hobbies and Interests

a book and a rose — Know what you love to write.

There are many ways with which we can fuel our interests and writing. For instance, we all have our favorite hobbies and tastes. Let us take them one by one and research them. Whether it is chocolate, dogs, sports cars or butterflies, let us dig deep into our objects of adoration and find everything we can in our exploration. This work will include looking into encyclopedias, documentaries, journals, collecting articles, interesting representative mementos, collecting photographs, recording video and audio snippets….anything and everything.

Generally, we cannot conduct research of this kind during our daily schedule. Divide your time into two parts – the first being the research and the second on the different kinds of write-ups that you will be doing later.

Online Writing Showcases

Squidoo & Zimbio

There are so many writing resources online that you can’t shake a stick at them all. When it comes to getting yourself noticed there are some online tools that are invaluable but they will take some time and effort for you to acquaint yourself. There are two sites that I’m going to deal with in this post – Zimbio and Squidoo. I use both of these sites frequently to promote articles and clients because they deliver traffic to the sites and blogs my writing is promoting in turn. Better still, both of these sites are completely free, indeed with Squidoo there is the opportunity to actually make passive revenue from the site.

Zimbio provides an article and wiki showcase where you can post up an article, edit the presentation to include headers and footers with hyperlinks to other web pages, such as your client web landing page or blog post. Zimbio provides a platform for submitting articles and blog posts, which are then blended in with “real” journalism and media while allowing for syndication of your work. Here you will find news and media output from recognised writers, TV, newspapers and magazines running alongside bloggers, active writers and non-professional sources, while readers are able to rate content and help good work gain wider exposure.
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