"Get A Freelance Life"

Today's book is “Get A Freelance Life” by Margit Feury Ragland. While not about copywriting, I thought that I might be able to apply some of the lessons in this book. Even if that turns out to be false, it's a good thing to know about other aspects of the writing market because it represents another option.

Relationships

The first and probably the most important thing I learned is that relationships are critical. “Good relationships—with editors, sources, even publicists—make for a good freelance career.” I didn't think this would be true at all, and I imagined writers sending out pitch after pitch to people they didn't know and simply taking what was available. Now I realize that good connections are vital, because repeat business will allow me to spend a lot less time pitching or marketing and a lot more time writing.

Ideas

Finding new ideas for articles seemed like a daunting task to me, but after reading the chapter on finding the next great idea, it seems manageable. I had seen some of the suggestions before, but it takes you through step by step. If I'm going to be doing magazine writing, then I need to have plenty of good ideas, as I expect plenty of rejection notices, much like any writer. With commercial writing, the fact that the subject is decided upon for you can be a positive thing.

What kind of article

This chapter lists thirteen different kinds of articles that you can write. Before reading this book, it seemed to me that my writing career would immediately hit a wall—it's hard enough to generate ideas, much less good ones, and after most of them get rejected I'll only make a bare-bones income from the published articles. But combine the methods in this book, and good ideas quickly accumulate. For each of the idea generation methods above, there are at least thirteen different articles you can write about it, and more if you write them for different publications where the requirements are different.

Getting Work Before You've Been Published

It's always been a dilemma: you can't get work because you have no experience, but you can't get experience without the work. The solution is to do the best job and write the best samples you can, even if you lack the credentials. From hiring people on freelancing sites, I know that many of my competitors will make basic errors that will disqualify them. In fact, most people that responded to my ads had not read or understood my assignment, sent me samples with basic errors in them, or did both even after I had hired someone I thought was good. For magazine writing this book makes some common-sense suggestions:

• Read the publication
• Tailor Your Query to the Publication
• Include Basic Elements of a Query Letter
• Address Your Query to the Right Person

I am sure after this book and my own experience that more than half of pitches will make mistakes that will take them out of the running, and now the competition doesn't seem as daunting.

Types of Contracts

Rights are a lot more complicated in magazine writing than they are in commercial writing—in the latter case, the company owns the rights—but any book on either subject has to cover both, or a lot of writers will be taken advantage of. If they're like me, a lot of writers will have a hard time starting just because they lack confidence in this area. There are nine different contracts in the chapter, and also advice on which you should sign (e.g. First North American rights) and which you should avoid (all rights). Know what standard practice is, and don't let yourself be cheated.

This isn't a basic nuts-and-bolts book on how to write, but if you're confident in that area this book is a great way to get into magazine writing. I learned how important relationships are, how to generate new ideas quickly and pitch them to the right people and publications, and how to get paid fairly for it, all in under 300 pages, and I definitely recommend this book.