Freelance Writing – Where to Focus?

Freelance writers don’t know where to focus.

Look at the long-term.

Do you want to:

1. Write for someone else the rest of your life?

2. Write for yourself for the rest of your life?

From there it gets really easy what you should be focusing on. I’m going to guess than NOBODY wants to write for someone else the rest of their lives. There are people that do, but they are anomalies and we don’t care about them. We care about us, and WE want to write for ourselves because… well, we’re all sorts of intelligent over here in this camp.

What is the path to being able to write for yourself as a long-term goal?

There are many paths, this is the one I’m suggesting everyone jump on as fast as you can.

1. Take a pulling-no-punches look at yourself. Are you a writer? Can you write? Have others said they LOVE how you write? Have you written something that has been read many times – 1,000? 10,000? 1 million times? Did you get great feedback on it? Or, are you someone that is dedicated to becoming a great writer?

There are writers that have it already, and there are writers that can get it after a lot of work. If you’re not one of those two people, choose another profession.

2. Forget writing articles that you hope to sell. It isn’t scalable. By writing one article and shopping it around, you are wasting heaps of time that you could be spending doing other things that are more productive.

3. Do write articles that get you noticed. Find top bloggers that are in the same niche that you want to write about. Create 5 titles of provocative, new, or cool articles that you offer to the blog owner and ask her if you could write one of them as a guest blogger there. Be ready to show prior articles as samples of your writing. Ideally you’d have your own blog, but not really necessary.

Write the hell out of that article and submit it. Your story will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people over time. And, you’ll get a link back to your website where you can start building a list of email subscribers using Aweber.com’s list-building service.

4. Write your own books. The world of book writing has just changed remarkably. Today I can write a 15,000 word book and sell it for $9.95 at Amazon or $29.95 at Clickbank.com or websites across the world if it’s a groundbreaking book with more information than anyone else has on a small niche topic.

When I say, “Write your own books” – I mean ebooks. Books, paper books, are dead. Don’t write another paper book in your life. Paper books are old, they are too long, they are a waste of paper, time, money, ideas, and they’re not the future. Switch now.

5. Keep writing your own books and selling them. Try hard to know who your customers are so you can send them notices of future books being released – which they may also buy. Build your brand. The more people that hear about you – the better you’ll do. You can do well being an asshole or a saint. You should probably choose which – now.

If you are going to be a writer, write for yourself. There is nothing more rewarding in life – career wise, than producing something unique and having other people that appreciate it – buy it.

Writing your own books and putting them up for sale gives you residual income where you are doing nothing but watching sales come into your email box. It makes for a glorious day when I wake up in the morning after 7 hours of sleep and see 10 book sales in my email. What makes it better is knowing that I’ll continue to get sales for the next couple years off those same books. The rate of sales may increase or decrease – but, I’ll make sales. Also, I know I can do many things to increase the rate of sales… it’s within my power to make myself a winner.

Strive to be a writer for yourself – not for corporations, not for search engines.

Grading Myself Today: A-

I did about 29 things today, and yet the only two questions that really matter are:

How much did I write today?

How well did I write today?

How much? About average, which is maybe 4,000 words. If I write 4,000 words  I give myself an “A”. It matters not whether what I wrote is publishable, for this question the only thing that mattters is quantity. What matters is that I wrote 4,000 words.

So, my average day is an “A” level effort in my own opinion. If you’re shooting for a “C” then you’re not all that into what you’re doing and maybe writing isn’t for you. Maybe you should take up internet marketing like everyone else that can’t write. Format resumes or something. Be honest with yourself. You should be able to regularly come up with “A” grades.

How well did I write today? I wrote some blog posts, some comments, and some email. It’s 7:30 pm and I haven’t written anything for my books yet. So, right now I’m doing OK – but not awesome. I gave myself a “-”.

In my mind this A- isn’t acceptable and now I know I’m going to write some in the books tonight. It’s not OK to go to sleep knowing I’m at an A-. It’s not what I’ve allowed myself to do. I’ve got to put that grade in my Google Calendar if I don’t make it right tonight. I don’t like to see any A- days in the calendar.

If you grade yourself for the day well before you are ready to quit, then you’re able to salvage the day and make it not just a good day, but an awesome day.

Strive for awesome days. Give yourself the motivation to have awesome days. Give yourself the kick in the ass to have awesome days. (Did I use ass yet in this post?) It’s a frustrating obsessive compulsive practice, this getting the ass in every post. Call it a character fault.

How’d you do today – what is your grade based on these two easy questions?

New Writer Advice: Write Your Ass Numb

I could have said, “Write Your Fingers Numb”, “Write Your Butt Numb”, or something else less forceful, right? Would you be surprised to find out forceful works well most times?

Write what you know. Write how you know. Know what you know. Write like you know. And, like what you write.

If you are just now considering becoming a writer of books – whatever flavor, you have to write until your ass grows tired of sitting in a chair. Ideally you’ll be writing about things that might make a popular book topic – or one that tweaks your turtle.

If you just start writing books -that is the true ideal. Practice. You learn to write books by writing books. Get one or two under your belt and see whether you think you’ve got what it takes. Ask others if they think you’ve got what it takes.

I know people that think they can write a book that I think have deluded themselves. They’re not good book writers.

Am I going to tell them?

Nope. Is it possible they have a break-through and suddenly can write? Yes, it is possible, but of the 4 people I’m thinking about – a meteor hitting them in the thick of the skull is a much more likely occurrence.

There are book writers and there are… those that do everything else.

If you’re a book writer then start writing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 15 years old or 55, just write. If you can’t force yourself to write exercises that will improve specific skills you’ll need to master, then forget it – just write. Write short stories about something you like. Challenge yourself to write the shortest story ever. Write a journal. Write comments at blogs you read and try to show you’re smart – or, try to piss everyone off.

A writer is a master of communicating something – some idea. The more you write, the more you’re going to understand how to use written words to spark neurons in a reader’s head, leading to reader enlightenment.

What ideas do you want to get across to the world?

Write! For god’s sakes write! Stop reading all these blog posts! lol…

Writing Books as a Small, Home-Based Business

A couple statements from Jim Blasingame of the SBA (Small Business Administration in the USA).

Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.

Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses.

Writing books in a room in your house is a small business that many of you can do, are doing, or will do in the near future.

The year is 2010. A writer is someone that writes. Eventually the idea is to get paid for it, but, you can call yourself a writer well before you get paid for it. Just like a horse trainer that teaches her own horses tricks doesn’t get paid for it until she finds or creates a job for herself getting paid to teach horses tricks.

Van Gogh’s life was painting and yet for a long time he wasn’t paid for his work at all – he finally sold just one painting, the only one he ever sold. Would you call Van Gogh an artist?

This silly notion that you’re only a writer when you’ve sold something needs to be dismissed by anyone serious about the craft. My brother filled many notebooks with original songs, stories, and diary entries, and yet he wouldn’t consider himself a writer. He says he’s a software tester.

So, it’s not automatic… but, if you identify yourself as a writer – you can call yourself a writer to everyone you meet.

Writing books, ebooks, articles, or sales copy can be a small business you can start in your home – in a separate room and call yourself a writer. You can deduct the room for tax purposes if you don’t do anything else there (see IRS for specifics, it’s more involved than that). If you can’t write at home you can deduct hotel visits where you can write, uninterrupted with plenty of air conditioning and relative quiet.

The book world, like the newspaper world is changing dramatically. Paper-based books are going away and being replaced with something infinitely more flexible, more profitable, more instantaneous than waiting for half-a-year for your paperback book to be published with a printing press.

Ebook writers are a dime-a-dozen, but the cream of the crop will rise and make enough to live on.

If you love to write, and have something to say about a topic, or many topics, start writing now and producing ebooks as you go. The experience will help you figure out what topics you can write about successfully. It will teach you about editing. You’ll learn how to call on some force inside – determination – to help you finish each book you start. You’ll start interacting with other writers, authors, and those in the ebook publishing, audio publishing, and vook publishing world.

Start writing ebooks now as an education, preparing you for becoming part of the cream that is rising to the top.

If any of your books have Thailand as a subject, send them to www.ThailandeBooks.com to see if they’ll publish them digitally for you and sell them on their site.

If not, find another digital publisher that can help. I’ll write more about options for self-publishing, born-digital books in a future post. Stay tuned… there are many options to jump on while the jumping is good.

What’s Your Shit:Gold Ratio?

Advice to Writers recently had a post about Hemingway claiming to ‘try’ to throw away 90 pages of shit writing to 1 page of masterpiece. His shit:gold ratio is a claimed 90:1.

I was wondering what mine works out to. I think I must have something like 3:1 because in the course of rewrites and editing I must throw away 3 pages for every one decent. This includes not just whole pages or chapters, but all the words I trash in favor of better ones.

At 3:1 am I not critical enough of my writing? I figure when it goes through an editor there’s another 1 page thrown out per 1 that stays… so, maybe I’m at 4:1 after editing.

What is your shit:gold ratio – is it anything like 90:1?

Was Hemingway not just a brilliant writer, but a masterful bullshitter? I think I’d quit the profession after a 20 or 30:1 ratio! Was Hemingway like a monkey banging away on the typewriter keys? Can you imagine how much paper this guy wasted over the course of his lifetime? Holy shite…

Do you really think, while writing a 300 page book he threw away anywhere near the equivalent of 27,000 pages?

Come on now.

I’m calling BS.