Teri Cettina was frustrated by the vagaries of freelance life – assignments coming in one month but not the next, checks arriving whenever a publisher decides to send them. There’s got to be something I can do to help even things out, the Portland freelance writer thought.
Not long after, Cettina met up with two other freelancer friends at a writer’s conference who’d had similar thoughts. Coincidentally, all three wrote for parenting magazines. What, they asked each other, if we pooled our resources and came up with a money-making venture we could do together.
With that, the idea for Cash in on Your Kids: Parenting Queries that Worked was born. The e-book, written by Cettina, Kris Bordessa and Jeannette Moninger is a collection of 16 queries that landed the three assignments with national magazines such as Real Simple, Parenting, Parents and Redbook.
In addition to queries, the 61-page e-book includes information on getting started in freelancing and other tricks of the trade aspiring parenting writers might find helpful.
Currently, the three writers are busy marketing the $14.95 e-book through a website and other channels.
WordCount talked to Cettina, a long-time freelancer based in Portland, Oregon, recently about how the e-book came together, working with co-authors and more. Read on:
How did you connect with your partners on this project?
We were in a query challenge group where we’d email each other every day, then we created a Google group and then we met in person at the Freelance Success conference last October in Florida. We hit it off in person.
How did you come up with the idea of re-selling your queries?
I’ve downloaded query packets from places like Renegade Writer, which shares a packet of actual queries they sold to publications. Six or seven years ago, I bought a packet of queries from an editor who had compiled queries from five or six nationally known magazine writers. That was a way to get inside information on how much detail they put into their queries, how they’d gotten theirs ideas, and how much money they made. I thought, why can’t I do this for parenting markets? I could pitch queries to newbie mom writers, woman who were mommy bloggers and thinking about moving into querying magazines.
What made you decide to do this as an e-book through Lulu.com, the print on demand publisher?
Kris had done some e-books and she said it sounded like something we could do as an e-book. She’s worked with Lulu.com. It’s a great low-risk way to try your idea. You don’t pay anything to have the product up, only when you sell, they take a percentage.
How did you decide which queries to include?
We pulled our queries together, shared the ones we thought were best and made sure we have diversity of markets and topics. We included queries for short and long assignments, and then came up with the queries we wanted to offer. We decided we needed to add some introductory information on how to get started as a freelance parenting writer and what a query is.
What information is included?
The e-book has 16 queries that netted us up to $3,600 a piece, some were shorts where we maybe made $300 and a lot were features. We shared what we made on each, which is part of the draw for people, understanding that they could make decent money at this. We shared a little about how we came up with the idea, changes we made and how we found sources.
How long did it take?
It took a few months to put the whole thing together, learn about working together and how to create a .pdf. We hired a graphic designer to do a cover. It’s been out 6 or 8 weeks and now we’re figuring out how to market it. Just by word of mouth we’ve sold copies, less than 100, but we’re just getting started and haven’t done intensive marketing yet.
What are your marketing plans?
We started with simple stuff, like the website. We’ve added our e-book reference to our email signatures, which seems like a small thing but we’ve gotten a few people who’ve noticed it from that. We’re mentioning it on writer’s websites and mommy blog websites. We’re doing a mass mailing of free tips from our book to regional parenting publications. I’ve also been playing around with doing a Google AdWords campaign. One thing I learned from a friend in the computer business, if you can get on Craigslist it boosts your Google search results, so we put the e-book on in a couple markets to see what would happen. But Craigslist people don’t like e-books, they don’t feel they’re tangible products, so we got complaints that it wasn’t the right place. And it was hard to place. I was putting it under babies and kids items for sale, but that wasn’t an exact fit. We’re just learning about marketing, none of us have done direct marketing before.
How do you split the proceeds on Lulu.com?
One person is the banker and they pay expenses, like the graphic designer, and distribute money to the others. So far that’s worked out fine. It’s not like we’re making money yet, but we’re figuring out how we’ll do it on an ongoing basis. We hope it will be successful so you have to figure out how it’ll be managed. Probably we’ll do a partnership agreement and the partnership will get the proceeds and then we’ll do a distribution once a quarter.
What’s the investment been on your part?
Time only. The queries were written. It took a little time to find them because some of them were a couple years old. Creating the intro and the materials took time. But we were re-purposing what we had, so it was worth a try.
[...] like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes. Learned how to be better at following through on queries, communications and [...]