In 2006, I was spending my weekend sitting in a cubicle with four elderly women arguing about the proper step-by-step process every representative should be trained…
Just as train tracks cross so can your interests intersect with those of many other “lines” in the publishing world. You must make the connection!
Most of my life I’ve worked in high powered executive jobs. Power dressing, power speaking and power working – all of which came with a powerful lot of stress. I was in my mid thirties, sitting in another corporate office, beavering away for a six-figure salary I was never going to have the time to enjoy. I wanted freedom, freedom like I’d never had. Freedom from the grind of daily life, freedom from slaving away to pay the bills and, most of all, freedom to enjoy some of my time before I completely ran out of time to enjoy!
The recent Writers Weekly article, Great Writing Gig Or A Scam?, got me thinking about all the deadbeat editors I’ve met in my long freelancing career and how I’ve answered some of their “scams.”
As writers, many of us feel the same things as we try to get the attention of the editors we believe would be a perfect fit for our submissions. As someone who’s been doing this for more than 20 years, and has also worked as an editor on occasion, I’d like to offer a little perspective…
Niche never crossed my mind in the ICU waiting room. At the time, I could barely understand what had happened. Old people had strokes, not 49-year-old, otherwise healthy men, and certainly not my husband. Whatever had just happened, I told myself, it was a temporary thing. He would heal and we would go on with our lives.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened…
In my 40-plus year career as an income tax preparer, all too often I would find that clients who were trying to earn money as self-employed, or as freelancers, but were not successful did not realize that they could deduct their expenses (losses) against their other income…
Writers are dealt a tough hand. We see little early correlation between effort, talent, and profit; we slave over details until our eyes water, just to expose ourselves to criticism. Small wonder that Googling “writers as masochists” returned more than 3 million results.
But, are you more of a masochist than necessary? Are you criticizing yourself more than the critics, demanding more of yourself than any editor would?
I’ve been freelancing for more than thirty years. I’ve replied with job applications to hundreds of ads for writers posted online. Over the last decade and a half, I’ve nailed freelance jobs with AOL, Arthur Andersen, Forbes Investopedia, and many more print and online publications.
Some of the editors at those publications told me that hundreds of qualified writers applied for those gigs. Why was I selected for the job rather than some other writer?
I was told they hired me because they liked my cover letter, clips and resume…
It’s a problem that plagues a lot of new freelancer writers and many are unsure about how to tackle it. Fortunately, there are ways to deal with an unresponsive editor.
