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 writers, artists, designers, and web people where people want high-quality work–and lots of it–for virtually no money. I’ve seen people advertising the glorious fee of $5 for an article or $100 for 100 articles. These aren’t gibberish articles, they are real articles that require research and careful construction.

A former freelance writer told me that 20 years ago, she could get $1 a word from some of the big New York glossy magazines. Today, you may still be able to get $1 a word from that type of magazine, except most of them are gone. But you can get about a penny a word on the big sites.

The weird thing is that the Internet gobbles up content. Most website owners are desperate to get articles, reports, and other types of content. The plethora of new TV and broadcast stations burns through lots of content. But despite the increased demand, the rates are dropping.

That’s because the economy has globalized and many international people are competing for writing jobs. Sometimes they even speak English.

Meanwhile, if you talk to buyers of this content (mostly website owners), they will complain about the low quality of some of these super-cheap writing projects. How incredibly surprising that a 500-word article that cost you $5 would not be Nobel Prize material.

But what do writers do? The reason that people want cheap content is that many of them are involved in marginal enterprises. Most website owners can’t pay top dollar for content because they do not make a lot of money from their sites. Despite what Internet gurus tell you, the profit margin on many websites is razor thin. A website can’t pay $1 a word for content and make money, period.

So let’s come back to creative Americans who are finding that they make less than minimum wage doing their chosen professions (which often require college degrees, special skills, and some home equipment like computers and Internet connections).

1. Sell quality. You can’t beat the low-cost writers when it comes to cost. Many live in countries where $5 for an article is a reasonable payment. So if you can’t beat them for price, you have to emphasize what you can deliver. I’m hoping that thing is quality. The number one complaint I hear from people who buy cheap art and cheap writing is that, "it’s not that good."
2. Find specialized clients. Magazines are in trouble, and there just aren’t many opportunities there. Lots of electronic sources are buying tons of material, but they don’t pay well. Before you mourn this, get mad, or complain … how about using your time to find clients who want high-quality content and are willing to pay for it?
3. Learn some new stuff. One way to make yourself attractive to specialized clients is to get some specialized new knowledge. Financial companies, medical manufacturers, energy companies, charities, and lots of other groups hire writers and have some jobs that pay well. However, you may not be able to get them to train you in their specialty. Learn on your own and bring your credentials.
4. Stay positive. Most people write poorly and more than that dread writing assignments. The world needs good communications. Your job is just to figure out how you can still angle the better jobs. There are good-paying jobs, but you have to get out of the mainstream, a bit, to find them.

More and more creative work is going to be outsourced overseas. That may be regrettable, but we’ve seen this happen with all sorts of manufacturing jobs. Writers didn’t take to the street when factory workers or the automobile industry jobs were lost. Now it’s happening among our ranks.

Some parting advice:

• Think of yourself as a communicator rather than a writer or artist.
• Start to think like a business person and explore businesses as a potential consultant/contributor.
• Learn new skills even if you don’t see an immediate application. You should be constantly learning new things to make you more attractive as a writer, um, I mean communicator.
• If there is an easy job application process, then the job probably does not pay much. Start to talk directly with business people (contact the Marketing department) and see if they have work. For example, call up your local hospital’s marketing department to see if they need some writing help for their website or patient pamphlets; call the marketing department of a major business to see if they need writers or editors for their annual reports or brochures. It helps if you have done your homework and have some relevant work samples to wow them.
• If you need to decide if you want to take a low amount of money for a job, ask yourself this: am I selling "dead time"? If you have zero work and need money, then any money is better than what you’re getting. So if you can’t fill your day with writing or communications projects at your usual rates, you may be better off getting something. On the other hand, if you can get better money for your time, do it.

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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 to market is going to be left behind.

Marketing may sound devious, manipulative, deceptive, or even wicked to you, but it’s none of those things. It’s actually ethical, legal, moral, socially acceptable, and highly beneficial.

Marketing is nothing more than matching your products (your writing) to what people are buying. Salesmanship is the ability to close the deal; marketing is getting you into the conversation where the deal can be discussed.

Years ago, back in the 1980s before there was an Internet, I spoke to a woman who wanted to pursue a career as a freelance writer. She had come to me for some advice and tips after having published a couple of articles on early German immigration to Texas for a couple of historical society newsletters. The articles were good but the publications were the small type that don’t pay. She wanted to go on to bigger and better things.

I thought of other markets: travel magazines, Texana magazines, major newspaper looking for feature stories. Trying to stick with her recent topics, I proposed that she might want to pitch a story about Comfort, Texas (a little town in Texas that joined the Union during the Civil War!) or write about German architectural influences in Texas.

"Oh no," she said very adamantly. (Most writers assume passion is good in all situations.) "I’m only interested in writing about German immigrant to Texas in the 1830s."

Her "marketing," if you could call it that, was totally egocentric. She was saying, "I’m only going to write on exactly what I want to write about, no matter what other opportunities are out there."

A successful writer needs to be savvy about the opportunities that exist and then be aware of what he or she can do. Notice I’m not saying what the writer "wants" to do or "feels like" doing, but rather the kind of writing that person can competently do. Then you play match-maker and see where your talents match the needs of the marketplace.

To be sure, there are some opportunities that are never going to be right for you–either you don’t know a thing about the subject or you lack the credentials or there are working conditions that just do not pan out for you. But there are lots of opportunities to write all kinds of things if you’re a bit more open-minded.

That was back in the 1980s. Now with the Internet, print-on-demand, and other publishing opportunities, we writers can literally circumvent the publisher and produce our own works. You could write a non-fiction book or publish a novel yourself at minimal cost and get it on Amazon (visit CreateSpace.com). You could launch a blog and sell advertising on it. You could write an e-book, publish it, and sell or give it away online.

Never in the history of the world have writers had more opportunities to be their own bosses and steer their own careers. But marketing is now more important than ever–not less.

Here’s how to start thinking like a marketer:

1. Look for opportunity every hour of every day. Never pick up a magazine or search online or read a business report without thinking: who wrote this? Do they hire people to write things like this? How would I get this kind of gig?

2. Spend some time on the Internet to see where the action and commotion is. Check out Google Trends. Are there hot button topics? Can you start contributing to those areas, either as a guest author on a blog or as author of your own blog?

3. Put yourself in the shoes of a magazine or newspaper editor, a blog owner, or a business. What kind of writing would just dazzle them to the point that they would find it irresistible? What are they dying to buy? What kind of writer do they wish would walk in the door?

4. It’s no secret what sells. Read stories in magazines, check out the best-sellers’ lists (there are lots of these for different categories), and read the ads for the biggest movies. Writers were behind all of these things. They sold their stories. You have to learn from their success. What did they do right? What is it that they’re selling? Can you sell something in that same category?

5.Instead of trying to get what you want, figure out ways that you can position yourself as a "solution" to an editor’s or business owner’s problems. If you want to write online, find out what problems certain people have and how you can offer solutions. For instance, you may know a great deal about cooking great food on a tight budget. Do you think there are people struggling with that issue right now? Figure out how you can position yourself to be their solution.

6. Learn from the mistakes of others. Many editors have written for writers’ magazines about things that drive them crazy. Read those stories and study them. Many online marketers regularly write and blog about things that work and don’t work in the online market. Study that stuff. You don’t have time to make all the mistakes yourself!

7. Use everything you’ve got. It is no crime to make yourself look as good as you can, as long as you’re truthful. So if you have a degree in history or you coached a world champion baton twirler or you lived in Barbados for 10 years, use what is relevant to make yourself look good to the people who pay you. Don’t be shy! Just a couple of ground rules: don’t make stuff up and don’t hype it. But if you really used to work as a professional translator and it’s relevant to an article or e-book you want to write, use your background to help leverage the deal.

Thinking like a marketer is fun because it transforms the whole world from a gloomy it’s-all-about-me place (woe is I!) to a world that practically gleams with opportunities. There are millions of opportunities to writers who can market. But it does take a bit of re-thinking.

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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 the wry way that etiquette masters are profound, because what it really means is that with etiquette, when you insult people, they’ll know you meant it.

Etiquette in writing is not the same as political correctness, which is just another way of beating all of the life out of everything you communicate. A writer can be good at writing and incredibly incorrect politically. I’m not sure you can do it in reverse, that is, be excruciatingly correct politically and write well. You may get the grammar all right, but people who are too politically correct simply can’t say anything. So we’re not talking political correctness here, we’re talking about etiquette. Not only are they different animals, they’re different animals who hate each other and snap at each other when they get the chance.

Here are my 7 rules for etiquette for writers.

1. Stop swearing. I know that four-letter words are increasingly common on TV, they’re all over the Internet, and you hear them from the mouths of babes. However, you are a writer. If you want to offend somebody, then you should get good enough at being offensive, objectionable, and insulting that you do not need swear words, which are for amateurs. A real writer should be working from the polysyllabic end of the dictionary, not the words more familiar to the "writers" of graffiti.

2. Do not rage at the typos of others. Every ridiculous diatribe discussion I see on the Internet about the decline of writing is usually written by writers who make grammatical and spelling mistakes in their own missives. If you are sickened, nauseated, offended, and angered by the typos of others, I think that you may be a typo-machine yourself. So buy yourself a manual of style and practice on those lists of commonly misspelled words and forget slamming people who make mistakes. I’d much rather read an insightful, thoughtful, and well crafted article by a writer who occasionally uses some double spaces and misspells a word here or there than read some lunatic ranting that nobody can spell anymur.

(By the way, Babe Ruth, a former "home run king" in baseball, held simultaneous records for most home runs and most strikeouts. Why? He wasn’t schizophrenic, it’s just that he was so good at hitting home runs that he was put up to bat frequently and anybody who gets to bat frequently enough is going to have his fair share of strikeouts. It’s the same with writing. The more you write, the better you’ll get at it, but the higher your error rate.)

3. Take advantage of the small courtesies. It is not a sign of political weakness to use terms like "please" or "thank you" or "I appreciate your help" when corresponding with others. When writing articles, these noble sentiments can be expressed indirectly  by writing things that interest people and giving them a payoff for their spending time with you. In other words, write stuff that has value, is clear, has been well thought out, and does not seem too terribly self-serving.

4. If you have to annoy people, do not do it through typography. There is a common convention in emails that states that all capital letters is the equivalent of shouting. All capital letters can make anything hard to read, too. So can too-small fonts, silly fonts, or fonts that do not contrast sufficiently with the background. For instance, if you’re writing an online text on a white background, black is going to give you great contrast. So will a navy blue or dark grey. Light grey, not so much. Right now there is a trend among packagers of cosmetic products to use light type on a similar but only marginally darker background in very tiny (4 or 5 point) type. If you have something to say, give a reader a fighting chance at being able to see it.

5. Resist the short police.  Right now, there are people who constantly scream that everything written should be shorter, briefer, more succinct. The "Twitter" rage is about capturing your innermost thoughts in 140 characters or fewer. While brevity may indeed be the soul of wit, some things require more lengthy discussion. Some people actually want to read book-length manuscripts about history or art or business and not just inane tweets. There really is no way to write a manual about considerations for physicians in prescribing narcotic medications in 25 words. You can’t write the history of American art in two 500-word articles. Be free and let your writing’s content and intention dictate its length. Most people on the short police hate to read and should really not be evaluating written works anyway.

6. Empathize. Write from the point of view of your reader. If you are writing about pacemakers for people who just found out they need one, do not explain that the venous incision during implant will likely be subclavian rather than jugular, although jugular vein incisions are sometimes required. That text is true, by the way, but it contains just enough words an ordinary person will understand (cut-the-jugular-vein) to panic him without giving him any useful information. Good writers never dumb-down their texts but they do write with an awareness of what their readers are most likely to know and understand. If that is below the writer’s own level of expertise, the writer adjusts. That’s the key: you, as the writer, adjust rather than demanding that your audience adjust to you.

7. Use your gift.  One obligation writers have is to write well, but to that I would add: write often. Writers ought to be writing letters to the editors, blog comments, setting up their own websites and blogs; writers ought to be crafting novels and screenplays; we ought to be sending out queries to leading magazines and trying to get our own newspaper columns. And once you have your soap box, you need to use it responsibly and use it for good and not evil. The world is full of lawyers and lawyerly types who say things like "this may work" or "this could happen" or "it may be that…" We need some writers who have the guts to say, "This is wrong" or "This is right." Take a stand and make your viewpoint clear. That’s why you have the gift of writing!

Etiquette means that you only offend people when you mean it and, if you’re a good writer, in a way that they will know. And, as writers, it is our duty and responsibility to write well, often, and clearly about the things that we know and care about. As we practice our writing to get increasingly more skillful and on-target, we should be using our talents and energy to express our viewpoints. Most writers are good thinkers; writing well and thinking logically go hand-in-hand.

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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 them to write, design, edit, and produce printed pieces, websites, presentations, and all manner of creative enterprises. He is an artful marketing and he persuaded the whole world of PC users that just owning PhotoShop meant you were a artist and owning Word was enough to make you a writer and a designer.

Furthermore, even people who never mastered these programs felt that somehow writing and art work were "easy," now that there were "tools" that made it very simple to do.

I recently worked for a client who wanted me to format some text and photographs in a Word document. I’m a writer so while I’m adept enough at formatting (that is, skilled but not really talented), I agreed. Then I was told to send the file off to the printer because they were printing from the Word document. In my entire career (and that’s more than two decades) I have never sent Word files to a printer.

The newbie at the client company just told me, "That’s how we do it all of the time." I’m sure it is, but it’s wrong. It results in amateurish-looking materials. A great printed piece just be carefully laid out. Photographs need to be, well, I don’t know exactly, but you can’t just plop in some digital images from sixteen different sources (like I did) and expect to get a nice-looking brochure.

When the brochure turned out to be just a little bit north of hideous, the client supposed (I am certain) that it was my ineptitude.

Really and truly, writing is hard. Design is hard. You need a certain amount of education to do these things, and then a certain amount of training and experience. On top of that, you should have some talent, I would rather work with a great writer who knew what she was doing and did not own a computer than work with the latest hire of a big company, straight from business school, who was expert on the PC and thought she could write. The computer isn’t a secret font of writing ability. True, a good writer who can use a computer has a great tool at her disposal. But a person who can’t write, can’t spell, and has no grasp of sequential thought (huh?) will still never be able to write well even if she had the greatest computer on earth.

And that’s how Bill Gates plus American style overblown self-esteem ("I’m great at everything I do!") ruined writing.

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