Any writer with a blog has faced this dilemma: when a juicy tidbit or great story comes your way, do you blog about it or save it for a query?
Freelance writer and blogger Michelle Goodman tackles this question in a recent entry to her blog, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide. Goodman wisely suggests saving your most brilliant ideas for pitches that can actually earn you cash money. Amen to that. On the other hand, Goodman says, if the idea fits into a single paragraph and despite your best efforts you can’t figure out any way to stretch it into a longer, more marketable, piece, then you might be better off keeping it as a blog post.
I’ll add a couple thoughts to Goodman’s advice. Sometimes the process works in reverse: you can start off writing blog posts about a subject and after tackling it a number of times accumulate enough information or research that it makes sense to turn it into something larger, like a magazine article.
And if you blog about an entirely different subject than the topic or topics you normally write about, you can avoid this situation in the first place. But the longer you blog on a topic, the more ideas you generate that could be spun off into paid work, whether that’s magazine articles, books, newsletters or something else entirely.
If you freelance and have a blog, I’d love to know how you handled this.