It’s good to meet up with fellow freelancers every once in a while. I found myself thinking about this after meeting up with a writer who was in town on business this week and asked me to coffee. Normally I’m chained to my desk during business hours, but it’s summer, the sun’s shining, what’s wrong […]
Writers can SWOT their way through bad times
With the economy still sputtering and freelance writers complaining about clients taking longer and longer to pay their bills, it seems like a good time for a SWOT. SWOT is the name of a career assessment technique espoused by Grant Plowman, owner of Interactive Media Publishing, a digital media publishing company in southern Oregon. I […]
Lessons learned: WordCount's 100th blog post
What you’re reading marks the 100th post on this blog, WordCount, which I started as an easy and free way to post my resume and clips online where prospective editors could see them. Very quickly it evolved into a continuing examination of how online media is changing the business of freelance writing. I did a […]
Freelance jobs site hosts "Idol" style audition for paid blogger gig
Freelance Writer Jobs is a popular Website for freelancers. Every day Deborah Ng and her staff cull information on new writing gigs from a variety of sources – Craig’s List, Mediabistro.com, other job boards – and post them online, along with a mix of comments and commentary on the freelance writing life. This week, FWJ […]
Go online to get business cards in a hurry
I haven’t carried business cards for years. I normally work from home and when I meet people I ask to exchange email addresses, or to add them to my LinkedIn connections. Business cards just didn’t seem important. But I realized I might need them when I went to a Mediabistro.com media networking party a couple […]
How to handle rewrites without wanting to kill yourself, or your editor
Rewrites aren’t high on my list of favorite work-related activities. The fact is, I hate them. Especially when an editor sits on something for a couple weeks then ships it back with questions. It makes me want to fire off an email saying “That was so five stories ago!” But rewrites are a fact of […]