How do you start a writing business? If you’re in the writing business or some other communications-type company right now, you know that the playing field has been leveled–about 30 times since last week. Veterans are having to start over. Newcomers are having to start and then re-start.
The good news: it’s not game over. It’s [...]
The old old question in writing and public speaking is: who is old? My mother always said that old was your own age plus 15. That works reasonably well until you pass the 80-year marker (as my mother has) and you have to admit that may you don’t need to tack on that decade-and-a-half to [...]
Foreign words can be a bit of a puzzler to the writer, but American English is pretty robust in its ability to stretch to accommodate exotic words. Perfumistas may converse about a product’s "sillage" (pronounced see-yage, it refers to the invisible cloud a good perfume forms about a person), while psychologists may ponder a patient’s [...]
If your goal is to get married, you have to court your prospective spouse by following the proper sequence of steps. Although this is not a romantic website with relationship advice, generally speaking, it is a good idea to introduce yourself before grabbing an attractive person and kissing her or him. Many people have had [...]
I have worked freelance for more than 20 years, and while I have seen tremendous almost unbelievable advances in technology in that time span, I have seen virtually no improvement in human nature. In specific, I have observed a very common flaw in freelancers.
This flaw is not unique to writers. Anyone who goes into business [...]
Successful marketing involves knowing more than just the right steps or the right things to do. It also involves knowing the right sequence in which to do them.
In that way, it’s a lot like a man and woman going from a few glances in a crowded room to entering a romantic relationship. I guarantee you [...]
This launches a new series on "sequence" or doing things in the right order. I hit upon this concept because I am plagued by telemarketers. Here is a typical scenario.
I’m crazed in my office. I’ve got deadlines barreling down on me, some urgently needed phone calls with input have to come in, and my Internet [...]
There is a tendency among non-writers to think that writing is easy. Furthermore, there is a perverse streak among the non-writing that seeks to educate writers.
If you write for businesses, you will be revised. Sometimes these revisions are whimsical and capricious. Sometimes they are mean-spirited and are accompanied by personal attacks on your intellect. [...]
Unfortunate circumstances recently forced a creative friend of mine to go freelance. As many before him, he approached the freelance life as some sort of extended vacation to be punctuated by only occasional periods of work, of which he would choose only the assignments to his liking and do them as time permitted.
As you can [...]
You’ve written something glorious. It is a subject about which you are passionate and (if you do say so yourself) exceedingly articulate. You’ve spent hours and weeks and months devoted to this work.
You shop it around and find that some publishers reject you. No sale.
But then you find a publisher that is willing to take [...]
You are a writer or want to be a writer and you’re fresh out of ideas for your career. Lucky for you that you read this blog. Here are 10 cool ideas you can steal, although I guess it’s technically not stealing if I give them to you.
1. Get a blog. A blog is like [...]
People hold the written word to a much higher standard than the spoken word. I learned this when I wrote books for a man who did a lot of presenting. Our goal was to turn his educational presentations into workbooks. I soon found out that he and his team of unholy reviewers were absolute sticklers [...]
Writers do not earn a lot of money.
Wait, let me rephrase that. Some writers don’t earn any money, a very rare few earn a lot of money, and most of us are somewhere on the low end of "in-between."
I recently met a lady who 20 years ago wrote features for some of the prestigious magazines [...]
This woman is a typochondriac.
You know the symptoms. This is the kind of person who sees a typo and goes into anaphylaxis, requiring both a team of paramedics and the National Guard to resuscitate her to a recuperative state. There she lies for months as teams of therapists help her cope with the fragments of [...]
This little Chinese girl reading a book may well soon be a big threat to American writers. Creative people in the United States have seen a precipitous erosion of their fees as more and more jobs go overseas. Want proof? Go to those Ebay-type creative sites (Elance.com, Guru.com, RentACoder.com) and you can see jobs for [...]
Most writers can’t market. That used to be very important and it was probably the main reason many adept and passionate writers were unable to pursue careers as writers.
Today it is crucial. In fact, a writer who can market his or her own work today has unprecedented opportunities. But a writer who cannot or refuses [...]
Writing, particularly online writing, is one of many enterprises not particularly troubled by etiquette. While I don’t wish to supplant Miss Manners here, I think that our global undervaluing of etiquette leads to a great deal of confusion.
The purpose of etiquette has been expressed as never insulting another individual accidentally. That’s terribly profound, in [...]
I don’t actually have anything against Bill Gates, but it seems to me that he and his company have done a lot to ruin writing, design, art work, illustration, photography, and public speaking. Mr. Gates did this by helping to put PCs in every household and then providing tools that he assured them would allow [...]
There is a tendency among certain people to regard typos as a sign of Armageddon.
These people often become indignant upon sight of any sort of typographical error or other error that causes letters on a page or screen to appear in a way they deem improper. Even a gnat smushed on a monitor that might [...]
Even in a small town in South Texas, you see them. People who walk through the grocery store, narrating the products on the shelf to some guiding force who will help them select the appropriate box of cereal from amid a sea of carbohydrate choices. People who text when they are bored, like in church [...]
Is your writing on life support? It happens to the best of us. It usually occurs when you’ve written too much, too fast. But don’t worry, you can get your writing and your writing career back into the pink quickly.
Here are 10 tips to get your writing back on track.
1. Take a day off, if [...]
This is a bit of a how-to article. Let’s say you have a website or blog and you have some keywords. And you are kind of interested in finding out where the people who use this keyword most happen to reside.
You can find that out at trends.Google.com. You type in the keyword and you get [...]
Perry Belcher has something on his Success blog right now (click here) about a fast, easy, systematic way to write a book. Perry proposed this step-by-step process and solicited comments. One of the common comments that came back was the key to writing a book is being passionate.
All of the people who recommended passion were [...]
Revisions are part and parcel of the writer’s life, particularly if said writer works for clients. The very same client who is so woefully unable to put a sentence together that he hires an outside writer suddenly emerges, once text is written, to be so skilled at the art and practice of writing clearly that [...]
I am at my most popular when I go to Internet marketing meetings or conferences and let it drop that I’m a writer. The eyes of site owners get that shiny hopeful look as they inquire whether or not I’d like to write their next book on male pattern baldness or how to live on [...]
The number one question I’m asked by non-writers is always about copyrights. For some reason, most people who do not write well are exceedingly concerned that somebody will steal something they have written. I think that’s extremely amusing, considering that most of the dreadful copy produced by non-writers is highly undesirable. But most non-writers fear [...]
How do you get customers for your writing business? I’m not talking here about how to get people to sign up for your email list or how to get people to buy an ebook. I’m talking about attracting customers for whom you can write. These are people you will actually interact with, often over [...]
I own more computers than I have hands. I like it that way. I spend a great deal of my time engaged on the computer, and it has definitely made the writer’s life much easier. There was a time when every revision to an article meant that you had to retype the whole thing. And [...]
Writing is not really about words. Writing is certainly not about grammar or spelling. Writing isn’t really even about communication. Writing is about structure.
A writer is somebody who packages thought.
To do that, writers use words. And the objective of packaged thought is communication.
But the act of writing is about packaging thought. I think it’s a [...]
OPT stands for “other people’s traffic.” One way to get traffic is to use other people’s traffic. So how do you do that?
First, you have to know what traffic you want. If I have a pitiful website and a mailing list of 22 people, you don’t want my traffic. You want to find leading websites [...]
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
