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 […]
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Use Wordle to create a word picture of your blog
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. So today, for your viewing enjoyment, here’s a picture of this blog. The image comes courtesy of Wordle, a Website that creates word clouds from text that you give it, or in this instance, of all of the words I’ve ever written in this blog. You can […]
11 favorite online activities for taking a writing break
Why is it that when I have the biggest deadlines, I have the strongest urge to take breaks and troll around the Web. It probably the brain’s way of relieving the mental strain. Someone has to come up with a name for this, like the Freelancer’s Law of Inversely Proportional Leisure Activity. When I need […]
LinkedIn's Companies directory best tool yet for freelancers
LinkedIn just unwrapped a new feature that may be the social network’s best tool yet for freelance writers – a comprehensive company directory. The Companies feature is a database of LinkedIn’s 26 million members that can be searched by company, geography or industry. Freelancers can use it to look up editors at umpteen publishers of […]
Freelancers should just say no to assignments, gigs that aren't a good fit
Can you tell when a freelance gig isn’t a good fit? Susan Johnston’s got some great tips for determining whether you should take a freelance job on her blog, The Urban Muse, in a post called 5 signs that this isn’t the gig for you. My favorite: when an editor sends your story back with […]
Use WordPress enhanced stats to improve your writing blog
The business reporter in me loves numbers, so I was pretty jazzed a couple weeks ago when I was deciding how to pre-write a bunch of blog posts to cover my vacation and noticed some statistics on WordPress.com I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t just me. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the hosted […]