To do great writing, read great reading. Here’s some great writing I’ve been reading this week:

More Roger Ebert – Chris Jones’ profile of film critic Roger Ebert in the latest Esquire has created something of an Ebert frenzy. First, Deadspin’s Will Leitch came out with My Roger Ebert Story, an apologia for a hack job on Ebert that Leitch did earlier in his career, despite the fact that Ebert had once been his mentor (Ebert forgave him via Twitter).  With interest in Ebert picking up, Esquire re-published what Ebert calls the best profile he ever did for the magazine, an interview with actor Lee Marvin that’s as insightful as it is profane and has to be read to be believed. You don’t run into quote machines like Marvin very often, and when Ebert did he was smart enough to turn on his tape recorder and stay the hell out of the way.

My guilty pleasure – I’m a late convert to Project Runway. Never watched it until it landed on Lifetime. Now I’m hooked. I’m also hooked on Brian Moylan’s snarky morning-after recaps on Defamer, Gawker’s Hollywood blog. It’s not the New York Times – and it’s definitely NSFW.* But it is spot-on, and hilarious. I can’t wait to read what he says about Jay’s trash bag leather ensemble.

Speaking of quote machines – I’ll leave you with this quote from the prolific Stephen King: “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” If you only know King from his Gothic fiction, check out On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Part autobiography, part writing primer, it offers a glimpse inside the head – and the writing process – of one of America’s bestselling authors, regardless of genre.

*Not suitable for work

This post marks the debut of an occasional series I’m introducing on WordCount called Back to Basics, short explainers of various nuts and bolts of writing.

Speaking of nuts, we’ll kick things off looking at a little nut with a big impact.

I’m of course talking about the nut graph.

The nut graph is so important, you’d think writers would lavish as much attention on it as they do a story’s lead, opening quote or conclusion.

And yet, nut graphs remain tough nuts to crack, pun definitely intended.

A story without a nut graph is like a walk in the woods without a path: you know you’re going someplace, you’re just not sure where.

The nut graph supplies that direction. It tells readers, ‘This is what this story is about, this is why you should care, this is why you should keep reading.’

Writers’ overall deficiency in this area hit home recently as I’ve been doing more editing work and reading first drafts of stories that lack anything approximating a nut graph.

It’s not just me. A few weeks ago, an editor friend said she’d spent an entire day imagining herself the nut-graph queen – tiara and all – dispensing nut graphs with a tap of the wand and a click of the keyboard to every story that had entered her email inbox.

The nut graph – a term near and dear to the hearts of cranky old newspaper editors worldwide, and a lot of young ones too – is actually a misnomer. It could be an entire paragraph. Or it could be a simple sentence. Especially in short pieces – like blog posts – a nut graph could be a simple declarative sentence spelling out what the writer intends to do in the next 300 or 400 words.

Here’s an example. The big buzz this week is about new smartphones introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, so here’s the 23-word lead of a 266-word Mashable story on a new Motorola phone. In this case, the lead also serves as the story’s nut graph:

Motorola has a new Android smartphone out, and judging by the looks of it, it’s going to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it devices.

After the lead, the story goes on to describe what the phone looks like and what features potential users might like or dislike.

Sometimes, lack of a nut graph signifies a bigger problem. If a writer has trouble figuring out what to say in a nut graph it could be because they haven’t figured out what the story they’re writing is about. A nice trick for solving that an editor once taught me: find someone unfamiliar with the piece you’re working on. Then explain to them, as concisely as you can, what the story is about and why they – or any other potential reader – should care. If you can summarize the piece in a sentence or two, you (a) have a good grasp of the idea and (b) should be able to turn what you just verbalized into a nut graph.

Writers also have trouble deciding where to put a nut graph in a story. In short stories, the lede and the nut graph could be one in the same. In a good old-fashioned inverted-pyramid news piece, the nut graph should follow the opening who, what, where, when and how information and serve as the story’s “why.”

In longer news, news features or feature stories, the nut graph could follow the lede by some distance, but not be buried so deep the reader gives up before figuring out what the heck he or she is reading about. The exact placement depends on the length of the story. In a feature of 1,000 or 1,500 words, the nut graph could follow the lead by five or six paragraphs or even less. But a 10,000-word New Yorker epic might lead with a 1,000-word introduction before the getting around explaining what the story is really about.

It’s fashionable to poo-poo the need to even have a nut graph in a story. Call me old-school, but I don’t buy it. With so much other information competing for a reader’s attention, it’s up to a writer to make it as easy as possible to figure out what’s happening and why they should care. In this way, it’s different from fiction, where the author can have fun confusing the hell out of the reader before slowly revealing what the story’s about.

Nut graph essentials: weave a reasonably concise explanation of why the story matters into the fabric of a piece up high enough to hook the reader into hanging in there through the rest of the piece.

What writing basics would you like to know more about? Share your request so I can include it in the Back to Basics series.

Goodbye 2009 and good riddance. 2010 can’t get here fast enough.

I’ll weigh in on my picks for the highlights and low points of the freelance business during the past year in the next few days.

But first, a present. I’d just started wondering what to write this week that would get people pumped for the possibilities the new year will bring – and I’m optimist there will be a lot of them. Then I read something that reminded me of an email I got right before Christmas. An old friend had sent me a copy of a free e-book from Internet marketer Seth Godin called What Matters Now. I didn’t have time to read it before. But I today I did – and it’s just what I was looking for.

Godin, who’s written numerous marketing books over the last decade, asked 70 people – writers, thinkers, Internet gurus and more – to come up with one word they want people to think about in 2010 and explain why they picked it.

The 82-page booklet is best read like one of those daily inspiration calendars – a little at a time. Wired Editor Chris Anderson expounds on atoms, management expert Tom Peters on excellence, and money makeover radio show host Dave Ramsey on intensity.

Like it? Share it. It’s free and, as usual, Godin’s doing his best to make sure it goes viral.

Because goodness knows we could all use a little encouragement after the last 12 months.

It had been a while since I read William Zinsser’s classic guide to writing, On Writing Well.

I grabbed it off my bookshelf to share at a writing class I taught at the recent Digital Journalism Camp in Portland – then took it with me on vacation.

I own the book’s fifth edition, which came out in 1994. The only things about it that’s dated is a discussion of the advantage of writing on a computer v. in longhand and a few references to long-dead writers you may or may not have ever read (E.B. White yes, S.J. Perelman, no). The latest 30th anniversary edition, the seventh overall, came out in 2006.

Despite its age, On Writing Well is still relevant as a reference for what to do and what to avoid in many forms of nonfiction: newspaper and magazine articles, travel, sports and humor writing, criticism, memoir – even memos, newsletters and emails you may need to produce for work.

Zinsser’s advice to write tight and bright is especially relevant in a world of shrinking word counts and Internet readers who can’t be bothered to scroll past a story’s opening screen.

If you don’t already have this on your bookshelf, get a copy. Until then, here’s some of my favorite Zinsser advice:

On words – Read your articles out loud to see how they flow. Don’t use words you wouldn’t use in the course of normal conversation. Avoid jargon and cliches. Less is more. Active v. passive.

On the writing process. Writing is hard, even for the pros, the more you do it, the (slightly) easier it gets. Writing is rewriting. Being a writer isn’t about being a certain type of person, it’s about doing the work.

On style – Style is sounding like you on the page, not like anyone else. Zinsser writes:

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it by willpower. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

On interviews – Write questions out beforehand. Use some form of shorthand to take notes even if you’re recording. Get more material than you think you’ll need. Pay attention to detail. I didn’t realize how much of this I’d absorbed until I read his chapter on interviews then looked at the notes I’d made for that Digital Journalism Camp class on conducting interviews – his influence is obvious.

On leads and endings – If the first line of your story doesn’t grab readers, they’ll never read the second. Hook them with the lead and keep the good stuff coming. Even when you’re writing nonfiction, writing has to be entertaining for people to stick around. Pay attention to how you finish things. Don’t just re-state the lead – circle back to an opening anecdote, close with a bang-up quote, or simply finish telling the story.

On tackling science, technology and other complex subjects – Make sure you understand how what you’re writing about works or you’ll never be able to explain it to readers. Avoid jargon. Include people to keep things real.

On editors – Good ones can make decent stories better, and decent writers better too. Bad ones drive writers crazy, by changing style, voice, content, organization, and generally treating them “like hired help.”

Some of his closing words are a freelance writer’s anthem:

…The purposes that writers serve must be their own. What you write is yours and nobody else’s. Take your talent as far as you can and guard it with your life. Only you know how far that is: no editor knows. Writing well means believing in your writing and believing in yourself, taking risks, daring to be different, pushing yourself to excel. You will write only as well as you make yourself write.

I came late to Harry Potter. I’d seen the movies but hadn’t picked up the books. That is, not until May when my 8-year-old started reading them. I figured I should too, to help him with the scary parts.

I got hooked. I read at lunch. I read instead of watching TV at night. When I finished a book late one night I sneaked into my son’s room to get the next one, so anxious to keep reading I couldn’t make it until the next day.

After two months of total Harry Potter immersion, I finished all seven in the series, then found myself scouring author J.K. Rowling’s official website and blog, and fan sites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron and watching documentaries to learn more about the woman behind the story and the publishing phenomenon.

Rowling’s success isn’t news to Harry Potter fans. Even before I read the books I knew the highlights: poor single mom gets inspired, sells first book, goes on to become one of the most-published authors ever, and possibly the richest. But I didn’t know much about Rowling’s writing process, which is worth sharing with anyone who makes a living with their words.

Here’s what Rowling and my Harry Potter experience taught me about writing:

1. Persistence counts. Rowling got the idea for the Harry Potter in 1990 and spent the next 17 years working on it before finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007. Seventeen years – that’s as long as it takes a kid to go from kindergarten through high school.
The takeaway: You may start out loving a project but the day may come – days, weeks or months into it – you’re so bored, frustrated or fed up you want to scream or put it away forever. But look what can happen if you gut it out.

2. Think things through. Rowling wrote in the biography on her website that she was on a train when the idea for Harry Potter “fell into my head.” She didn’t have paper or pen, so for the four-hour train ride all she could do was think. She says her forced rumination could have saved the series: “I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.”
The take away: Don’t be too quick to get something down on paper. Think about the structure, the concepts, the conclusions and the way you want something to play out before committing it to paper.

J.K. Rowling. Photo: EPA

3. If the story’s good enough, the writing can be secondary. Face it, Rowling isn’t Hemingway. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone isn’t Beowulf. The writing in the first books in the series was downright pedestrian. But with that story, who could resist? I couldn’t.
The takeaway: Got a good story to tell? Tell it. If you write enough, you’ll get better on your own. Rowling did in her later books.

4. Go for it. Rowling was a struggling single mom when she started Harry Potter. She had no clips, no publishing industry connections, no platform.
The takeaway: It takes persistence, passion and a little Harry Potter-style bravura to believe in yourself enough to take on the publishing world as an novice writer – which may explain why many beginning writers flock sell themselves short by working for a pittance for less-than stellar publishers and websites. Could someone replicate Rowling’s rise to author stardom given what it takes to get a book published today? I’d like to hope so.

5. Write when you’re on. Rowling likes to write through the night, or in cafes with just enough people and music to get lost in. When she was finishing “Deathly Hallows” she checked into a hotel room so she could write the ending with no distractions.
The takeaway: You might not be able to afford a hotel room or pull an all nighter, especially if you have kids to get off to school the next morning. But you can structure your work day so you’re writing during your peak energy time, whenever that happens to be.

6. Don’t be afraid to make things complicated. The Harry Potter series is a thicket of characters, subplots and themes – all in what are supposed to be children’s fantasy novels.
The takeaway: Give your readers – even young ones – credit for their intelligence. Don’t dumb down your ideas, or your writing.

7. Leave stuff out. In 2007 British documentary on Rowling that re-aired earlier this month when movie version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened, the author shares about details of her characters that never made it into the books, including back stories and what happens in their lives after the books ends.  The tidbits either didn’t fit into the plot or weren’t interesting enough to be included (although fans live for this kind of stuff).
The takeaway: Pick the most telling details, the juiciest quotes, the most spot-on examples to tell your story and leave the rest out, especially if – unlike Rowling – you’re writing to a specific word count.

8. Write what you love. Rowling obvious loves her Harry Potter universe – she wouldn’t have drawn up the family tree that British TV documentary shows with details of who Harry, Ron and Hermione go on to marry after the conclusion of the books.
The takeaway: Enjoy what you do and how you do it, otherwise, why do it at all?

9. Be good to your people. Rowling blogged during and after writing Deathly Hallows so readers could find out more about her and the books. Besides book signing and official appearances, she also did Q&As with the people who run her fan sites.
The takeaway: We live in an age of interactive media. If you’re writing you need some kind of relationship with your readers, whether it’s on a blog, Twitter, book signings or all of the above. Depending on what you do, you can use the interaction to shape what you write, or build an audience for your next project.

10. It’s OK to goof off. After she gave up cigarettes, Rowling took up Minesweeper, the game Microsoft bundles with Windows, when she needed a writing break. She got so good she even brags on her blog about her expert-level times.
The takeaway: If Rowling can play mindless computer games for a little mental R&R, it’s OK if you check Twitter or Facebook during the work day.

I live and work in Portland, Oregon, and this weekend’s Best of WordCount is dedicated to the area’s burgeoning media community:

• Can the techies save the news? – If  the scene at the recent BarCampPortland III meet up was any indication, that could very well be the case.
• The Smalltown News – Small newspapers are in a better shape than big ones to survive the recession and changing news business, according to this story I did for Oregon Business magazine.
• Room to write – No office space at home but hate working in coffee shops? Portland’s got plenty of communal workspaces for writers, part of a nationwide trend of shared workplaces.
• WordPress user group forms - The more writers take to blogging, the more call there is for places they can go for training, and this group is one of them.
• Portland is for word lovers – It only follows that the city with the country’s best independent book store and most active public library system would host a rockin’ annual book festival. Wordstock is it.
• City debates whether bloggers are reporters – In a scene that’s starting to repeat itself across the country, the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego debates whether to allow a local blogger into city meetings.
• While other papers sink, the Oregonian swims – I wrote this before the paper’s latest rounds of job cuts and salary reductions. But Portland’s daily is still publishing seven days a week, isn’t in bankruptcy and has managed to keep some of the country’s top feature writers and sports columnists – these days, that’s saying a lot.

Leah Ingram takes a no nonsense approach to her freelance writing business. So it comes as no surprise that when the Pennsylvania writer got the contract for her latest book, “Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier & Healthier for Less,” she went straight to work. Eight weeks later, Ingram had the book written and delivered – while continuing her regular magazine writing and Suddenly Frugal blog and without neglecting her husband and kids. How’d she do it? Read on.

Briefly describe your background as a freelance writer.
I have been a full-time, freelance writer since 1993. However, I started querying magazines when I was still in high school (about 10 years earlier), and knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer. I got a degree in journalism from NYU, then a job working on staff as a magazine editor, and quickly realized that I’d be happier and likely more successful if I was working for myself as a freelancer. I haven’t looked back since going out on my own some 16 years ago. Since going freelance I’ve published 13 books – soon to be 14- and written for many regional, national and custom magazines.

How did your book deal come about?
My agent Adam Chromy of Artists and Artisans pulled for me and promoted the heck out of me, and I continued to feed my Suddenly Frugal blog so that I had the platform and chops to prove that I could turn a blog into a book.

What role did your blog play in getting a book deal?
It was the whole reason for the book deal. I’d proven to Adams Media, my publisher, that I had a sustainable topic to write about, the media chops to promote the book and a built-in audience who would want to read the book. I get about 15,000 unique visitors a month at the blog. Wish it were 15,000 a day but I’m working on that.

How much of a head start did the blog give you in researching and writing the book? What material did you reuse?
I started the blog in May 2007. I got my book deal in January 2009. I’ve written, on average, five posts a week for the past 18 months. That meant I had plenty of material to get started. However, I did not reuse much from the blog. If all I was doing was cutting and pasting blog posts into a book, where’s the incentive to buy the book when readers could get my content for free on the blog? I did revisit a lot of the same topics I’d covered on the blog in new and different ways. For example, most of my blog postings are 400 to 600 words long. But the chapters were about 4,000 words long. So I was able to expand on many topics and bring in new information I hadn’t suggested in blog posts. Probably the only items I reused verbatim were a couple of my Suddenly Frugal Seal of Approval award winners, which I’d highlighted in the blog first.

You had 8 weeks after your book proposal was approved to turn in a finished manuscript. That’s amazingly fast. How did you do it?
Discipline, plain and simple. Truth is I’ve written books in six weeks before. I am a very fast writer and hard worker. Right before I got the book deal, I decided to write a young-adult novel. My goal was to bang out a 50,000 words before the month of January was over. To do so, I had to write 1,667 words every day. I ended up with a 58,000-word novel by the end of January.
I applied a similar word-count rule to writing Suddenly Frugal. My book was due to the publisher April 1, and my goal was to finish it by March 15 so I would have plenty of time to proof and edit it. I made all of my goals, including handing the book in on April 1. I just got word that the manuscript was officially accepted. The cover is now up on my blog and I made it my Twitter avatar for the time being.

You continued working on magazine stories while you wrote the book. How did you juggle both?
I have a very regimented work schedule that I adhere to. Though I tend to procrastinate at times like many writers do, I’m actually more productive when I’m juggling multiple assignments. Since I only have five to six hours a day to work – I work when my children are at school – I carve out specific periods of time during my work day and assign different tasks to them. If I’m working on a magazine article or three, plus the book, I’ll assign 30 or 60 minute slots of time devoted to a specific project. When that time is up, I move on to the next task in the time slot. I don’t always finish entire projects in a day, but I’m always making progress. I’ve used this time-block system since I was in college and was juggling a full course load, an internship and a part-time job.

You’re married and have kids. How did you work on a book and freelance work without sacrificing family time – or did you?
Here’s where that regimented work schedule helps me out. Also, I exercise every morning, right after my kids leave for school, and that is my “me” time. I’m up at 6:30, have time in the morning with my husband and two daughters before they all leave at 7:30, then by 7:45 I’m out the door to walk the dog. We walk for an hour, then it’s home to shower, get dressed and be at my desk by 9:30 or 10 . And it’s right to work, with time, of course, in between to email, go on Twitter, work on my blog, etc. In fact, I make working on my blog part of my regimented work day. Though I don’t get paid to write my blog posts, they have become an important part of my work portfolio. So those posts have a priority standing on my to-do list just like paying gigs do.

What advice do you have for other freelancers who’d like to write a book?
These days you really have to develop a specialty that gives you a solid platform. Also, you have to promote yourself constantly and get the media to pick up on what you’re doing so you have those kinds of clips to show publishers that you’re media worthy. If you aren’t already subscribing to HARO that’s a must. It’s thanks to HARO that my family and I ended up as the lead story in a BusinessWeek cover piece on the New Frugality, and I’ve also been able to promote my unique sense of frugality on TV, in newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Christian Science Monitor, and many other places as well. If you’re camera shy or don’t like being the subject of interviews, I’m not sure you can be a successful author.

Given how the economy’s changing traditional freelance markets, is this a good time to market book proposals and other types of work?
If you want to write a book and you don’t have a TV show, I don’t think that you can expect to get a big advance. My advance for Suddenly Frugal was the smallest I’d received for any of my 14 books but that’s OK – I’ve got a feeling that with this down economy, people are going to snap up a book on living more on less. I know publishers are buying fewer books these days so if you want your proposal to stand out, you’ve really got to find a topic that stands out. Originally, back in 2007, we were going to sell Suddenly Frugal with a green bent, because, you know, green is the new black. Although the mainstream media is just jumping on the green bandwagon now, back in 2007 publishers were telling my agent and me we’d totally missed the green gravy train. So we started back at square one, and then when the economy started to tank in mid-2008, we revamped the book proposal to be all frugal, all the time, and that worked for us.

Anything else you’d like to add?
I treat my freelance writing like a business. I know many other writers are amazed at my discipline and work structure. But if I were running any other kind of business that was perhaps more visible and not so virtual, I would be open for business and producing just as much as I am now with my words. I hate to be cliche but you know that old saying ‘Find something you love and you’ll never work another day in your life’? Well, I love what I do, and I can’t imagine doing anything else to earn a living – expect maybe hosting a TV show, I love being on camera. But the bottom line is this: I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am professionally. I do work every day, but that’s OK with me, because I truly love what I’m doing so sometimes it really doesn’t feel like work at all.

Corinne McKay is something of a miser, so when she decided to write a book, she studied all the options before picking the one she thought would make the most money.

McKay, a freelance translator who lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and 6-year-old daughter, ultimately opted to self publish. Not only that, she picked a print-on-demand publisher to minimize the upfront costs of getting a book into circulation.

It worked. Since McKay’s book, How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, appeared in May 2006, she’s sold 2,500 copies and netted $12,000. Although modest by bestseller standards, McKay reckons it’s more than she would have made in royalties from a traditional publishing house. She also estimates that based on what she’s earned to date and how many hours she spent on the book, she doubled what she would have made using the same time to do her regular French-to-English translation work.

I asked McKay to share her self-publishing experiences with WordCount readers to shed light on the process for other freelancers who might be considering it as a new income stream to make up for newspaper and magazine work lost to the recession.

According to McKay, getting a book started was easy. The one-time high school French teacher was already teaching an online course on the subject, so course materials made up the first half of the 141-page book. To finish the rest, McKay set a goal to write something every day, even if it was just a sentence.

Picking an on-demand publisher was easy too. Once McKay crunched the numbers and decided to self publish with an on-demand service, she turned to her software-savvy husband for input. He steered her to Lulu.com, an on-demand publisher based in Morrisville, North Carolina, that handles printing and fulfillment for about 98,000 new titles a year.

Here’s how she made it happen:

How did you pick a topic?
When I looked at what I struggled with, it was running the business: how to find clients, how to write a resume when you have minimum experience but strong language skills, if you should work through an agency. There was a huge lack of info, even if you were willing to pay for it. The class had been really successful. I’ve now done 12 to 15 sessions. The capitalist in me thought, if people who don’t know me will spend $350 for an online course they’d spend $20 on a book.

How long did it take?
About 6 months. Once I decided to do it, I resolved to work on it every day. Some days when I was really busy, I did write just one sentence. Other times I’d write 10 pages in one day. You have to accept that unless you’re independently wealthy, that big block of time to write your book is never going to come. You have to set a schedule that works into what you’re already doing, whether it’s saying every Wednesday will be book day or every day from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. is book time.

How did you decide to self publish?
I’m in a freelance group called Boulder Media Women that was a great resource. I talked to people who’d been published the traditional route, done regular self publishing and print-on-demand publishing. Talking to them I realized if your book has a really targeted market you would do as well or better publishing it yourself.

Why’s that?
Small publishers working with first-time authors expect the author to do most of the marketing. So if I’m going to be promoting this book myself would I rather get 5 or 10 percent royalties or 50 percent royalties by self publishing? Also, part of reason I’m successful is I’m a maniacal perfectionist about my work. It was hard to think about giving that up. I know people who’ve had terrible experiences with traditional publishers where they felt the manuscript they’d poured themselves into was unrecognizable. The combination of those two was a gamble I was comfortable accepting.

How did you decide on an on-demand publisher?
My husband had seen in the geek news that Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat (the open source software company), had started a print-on-demand company and he thought on-demand was the future of publishing, with zero waste, no inventory sitting around and meeting demand for books that are purchased so information doesn’t go out of date as quickly.

How did it work?
I wrote the book in OpenOffice and used a program called Lyx to create a .pdf of the book. Lyx is a free book layout program. If you use Lyx, it helps you create a copyright page, table of contents, index and chapter headings, everything that make it look like a standard book. That’s important because you have to have a standard book if you want to sell it to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or special order through bookstores. If you don’t want something that looks like a professional book, Lulu will publish that too. Anything you can upload as a .pdf they’ll publish.

What did you do for a cover?
I considered using a cover designer from Lulu but in the end my husband designed the cover. We found an illuminated manuscript that featured a story about a translator at the Yale University library that was in the public domain and got permission and used it for free.

When did you see the first copy?
If you use Lulu’s global distribution network you first order a proof copy. It’s like the best Christmas ever seeing the proof copy of your book. Once we saw it we corrected some errors, made a new .pdf file, uploaded it to Lulu and that was it.

Who determines the cover price?
With Lulu, you set pricing yourself. My book is $19.99 and if someone buys a copy from Lulu I make $10. If they buy a copy through a retail channel like Amazon, I make $4.50. Lulu handles order fulfillment. With traditional self publishing, unless you outsource order fulfillment, you’re taking books to the post office and paying for shipping. When someone buys my book from Lulu I don’t see anything but the profit. If I want to buy copies of the book to sell myself, which I do a lot, Lulu has a creator price of $5 to $7 per copy depending on what sale they have at the time. They just had a sale and I bought 100 books for $4.90 each. With a traditional self publisher you could get them cheaper but that wouldn’t cover fulfillment.

How does Lulu pay you?
I have a Lulu account that’s linked to my PayPal account. Book sales show up on my monthly Lulu account statement. Amazon sales show up in my Lulu account as a lump sum every month. Lulu has a deal with PayPal so I don’t pay commissions to PayPal on Lulu royalties. Any royalties I transfer into my business checking account or keep them on PayPal to buy stuff online.

How did you market the book?
I have not marketed the book as aggressively as I could have. I sent out press releases and review copies for the first 3 months. I do some passive marketing, my blog, Thoughts on Translation, is a soft marketing tool. I also have some affiliate deals. The American Translators Association sells it from their Website, and they sell a lot of books.

How has publishing a book helped your business?
You can’t underestimate how much having a book adds to your credibility. It’s been a great promotion for the course I teach and I’ve gotten a lot more requests for speaking engagements and interviews as an expert on business practices for freelance translators.

Any plans for second book?
I’m working on the second edition that I hope to have out in 2009. It will have a bigger focus on using Web 2.0 tools like Facebook and Twitter both as resources and for marketing. So far, the translation industry in my specialties seems unaffected by the economic downturn, Q4 was my most profitable. I’d like a forced work slowdown so I could work on the second edition without feeling guilty. I’m not going to complain, but it is hard to have my translation work volume to be high and work on the book.

CubeSpacePDX

The first time I worked as a freelance writer I shared an apartment with a roommate and had my office in my bedroom. Between working and sleeping I probably spent 18 hours a day in that 12 x 12 room. A few years and several full-time jobs later I once again found myself temporarily working from a desk just a few feet away from my bed. In either case, it was not an ideal set up.

Now I live in a house big enough to have a dedicated home office, and for that I am grateful. But I know a lot of work-at-home writers – freelance or otherwise – who work out of a bedroom, whether it’s theirs or a guest room that doubles as an office.

That kind of a set up might be OK most days. But sometimes you need a change of scenery – especially if you share your living-working quarters with roommates or family members, or if you’re cramming to meet a major deadline.

That’s where writer’s rooms come in. Writer’s rooms are communal work spaces that have desks and Internet access that writers can use on an ad hoc, part-time or full-time basis.

Writers’ rooms aren’t new. The Writers Room in New York City’s Greenwich Village opened in 1978. The trend has slowly worked its way across the country until now writers’ rooms can be found in many major and not so major U.S. cities.

Here in Portland, I know of no less than three separate work spaces writers can rent by the day or longer if they can’t or don’t want to work at home. Some of them offer classes or host regular writers’ groups.

If you’ve used a writer’s work space before, I’d love to hear about the experience. And if you’re looking, here’s a list of spaces for writers in Portland, as well as a list for finding writers’ rooms in other cities:

The Attic, a Haven for Writers – The Attic, located in the Hawthorne district in S.E. Portland, offers a variety of services for writers including classes, private consultations and use of private work spaces that are rented for three or six months. Visit the Website for more details, or read this
Q & A about The Attic from PDX Writer Daily, a blog for Portland writers.

Portland Writers’ Dojo This North Portland workspace just celebrated its first anniversary. Writers can pay $10/day or $120/mo and need to apply to join; for a tour, visit the Website or call (503) 706-0509.

Colony House

Oregon Writers Colony – This 25-year-old non-profit organization holds workshops, retreats, conferences and author readings, but might be most well-known for running Colony House, a log cabin at the beach in Rockaway that’s available to members only. Contact the group for details.

About.com writers’ rooms list – List of mostly urban writers’ rooms.

Do you know of a writers’ retreat in your city or state? If so, please send me a link and I’ll compile a complete listing to post at a future date.

I went to Portland’s Wordstock book festival over the weekend. John Hodgman, the PC in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, was one of the stars of a weekend that was filled with signings, readings, writing workshops and other book-related activities. In case you missed it, I wrote this guest post about Wordstock for my friends Donna Wares and Kate Cohen’s book blog, CaliforniaAuthors.

Freelance writers who aren’t familiar with Wordstock will be interested in knowing that the festival included about two dozen, one-hour writing workshops. The workshops covered all genres of writing, including fiction, nonfiction, screenplays and poetry. I signed up for a class on techniques for improving non-fiction storytelling taught by Eric Nuzum, a writing coach at NPR – he was terrific, I already used some of the things he talked about in a story I finished this morning. I’ll blog more about what I learned in the workshop in coming days. I’d definitely recommend signing up for the writing workshops next year.