Writers on the Rise

By C. Hope Clark

We all know that writers must have websites and blogs. But what about the age-old tools I call fingertip promotional items? Regardless of how much you write and promote your work online, sooner or later you have to meet face-to-face, shake hands and exchange information. Are you prepared with the tools to make those meetings productive? Business cards, postcards and bookmarks still mean business. These inexpensive promotions can make a big difference.

Business cards are a sign of good common sense and manners. You shake hands with an individual, make conversation and hand her your card as a courtesy. Some will toss them out and others collect them like souvenirs, but one card in the right hand can catapult your career. The key features of a professional card include:

• Standard size of 3.5″ x 2″. Some people collect cards in folders or use card scanners. Unusual sizes often do not fit. Using a standard size makes it easy for people to save your information.
• Basic information. Include your name, website and/or blog URL, phone number, email address and/or postal address. Mine has the FundsforWriters (my business) logo first and foremost, my name, the website URL, email and mailing address.
• Define your role or title. Note briefly on the card what you are or what you do, such as: editor, freelance writer, educational writer, novelist, poet, etc.
• Visual or graphical element. Whether logo, book cover or photo, make sure to include a visual. Using generic graphics doesn’t cut it if you want to be memorable after you pass off the card. I have one business card with just my book cover, the website URL, my name and the ISBN.
• Individuality. For a couple of dollars more, you can get creative with business cards at discount places like Vistaprint. Can you guess how many writers have a card with a pen, pencil, typewriter or generic book on it? If you don’t want to blend in, I’d advise spending a little more to stand out from the crowd.

Postcards are a step up from business cards. At conferences I pass out postcards as well as business cards. Business acquaintances get the business card. Readers, newsletter members and fans get the postcards. Why? The postcard has more information on it, and it’s usable. I also use postcards to mail small reminders or simple requests. I want the post office to know about me, too.

Bookmarks are similar to the postcards. They are usable and large enough to print information and reference material such as where to buy your book–or even include an excerpt. Autograph your bookmark so people will want to save it.

You’ll want to keep a variety of each on hand at all times. I have a business card and postcard for FundsforWriters, my business, as well as for my book The Shy Writer. No matter the correspondence, one or the other goes into the envelope. Who knows who might get their hands on a card and wander to the website or email me about a fabulous opportunity?

TIPS: Most business card companies offer advice on designing a great and effective business card. Great FX Business Card is a good reference site. For a fantastic first impression, place your cards in a custom case from Netique.

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C. Hope Clark is founder and editor of FundsforWriters.com, annually recognized by Writer’s Digest in its poll of 101 Best Web Sites for Writers. She delivers four newsletters each week to thousands with her specialty being grants and income opportunities for writers of all sizes. She’s published over 200 articles on paper and online. Those reluctant to promote their writing cherish her trade paperback The Shy Writer: An Introvert’s Guide to Writing Success. Find more hope for your writing career at www.fundsforwriters.com & www.theshywriter.com.
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By Cindy Hudson

In her 11 years as a freelance writer, Jenna Glatzer has achieved the kind of success that most writers dream of. In addition to the seventeen books and hundreds of magazine articles she’s authored, Glatzer has also ghost written books, as well as penned greeting cards and slogans for bumper stickers and magnets. She founded and is former editor-in-chief of Absolute Write a popular, free online magazine for writers. Glatzer has written three books for writers: Outwitting Writer’s Block and Other Problems of the Pen (The Lyons Press, 2003), Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer (Nomad Press, 2004), and The Street-Smart Writer (Nomad Press, 2006).

Here Glatzer talks about some of the secrets of her success and shares ideas for writers of all types.

How did you get started freelance writing?

I became a freelance writer because I was agoraphobic, and I had to figure out something I could do from home. I was fresh out of college, so I decided to go with what I knew and I queried college-focused magazines, like College Bound and Link (which no longer publishes). For my first real credit I profiled some friends who had started up a web hosting company. From there I built up slowly and started writing for more and more magazines and websites.

How long was it before you made a living as a freelance writer?
For me it took two years but it varies a lot depending on how much work you put into it.

What’s a good way to get clips when you’re just starting out?
Getting those initial clips was more important than anything for me, and as long as it was a respectable publication I didn’t really care about the pay. You just never know where something is going to lead. I’d write this article for some low-paying magazine and some larger editor would find it and hire me to write something better down the line. I also recommend looking at local freebie magazines, like the ones you’ll find at delis and grocery stores. They are often looking for writers who can do local stories.

What other venues do you recommend?

I’ve written greeting cards and slogans for bumper stickers and magnets. And of course there are newspapers, websites, books and screenplays, and copywriting for businesses.

Is it easier to break into writing greeting cards and slogans?
It probably is easier, because there’s a lot of it and not a lot of people who know about those markets.

How do you find out about those markets?

I did a ton of research on my own. Some of the companies are listed in Writer’s Market every year. I wrote to every company I could find to ask if they use freelance material and I put together an ebook about it that has all the markets I could find. It’s a little bit out of date now, but it is available on absolutewrite.com. It’s called, Sell the Fun Stuff.

How important is it for writers to market themselves?

Very important, especially in the beginning. For the first couple of years I wrote more query letters than actual articles. I also wrote lots of articles for low-paying magazines. Once I broke into the national, grocery-store-type magazines, things began to snowball. Now editors come to me with assignments, so for the last six or seven years I’ve had to send out very few query letters. In the early years I also sent out general letters saying, “Hi, here’s who I am and I’m interested in assignments if you have anything available.” Sometimes I got calls years after I sent in samples and wound up with assignments.

Can you make much money selling reprints of articles?

Definitely. There’s one article that was rejected by Family Circle, which is where I wanted to place it. So I decided to try some of the local parenting magazines. Then I realized I didn’t have to stick to my own local parenting magazine, so I queried parenting magazines in other states. I wound up reselling it 18 times to different parenting magazines all across the country, making more in the end than I would have if I had just sold it to Family Circle in the first place. There’s also a market for re-slants. If you think about different angles for the same topic that you’ve already learned about, you can re-slant the article and you’re not starting from ground zero each time. You can use the same interviews and the same research you started with.

Tell me about your books for writers.

When I started absolutewrite.com in 1999, I would hear from writers all the time wanting to know how I became a freelance writer. To give them a step-by-step on what made me successful I had to write a book. Maybe the most important book I’ve ever written is The Street Smart Writer. I got scammed a couple of times at the beginning of my writing career by literary agents who weren’t real literary agents. They took my money and didn’t do anything with my work and didn’t have the ability to sell it. So I wrote this book because I don’t want to see other writers taken like that. It’s now free online at wowio.com. Search for it, and you can read it for free.

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Cindy Hudson writes for national trade magazines, regional magazines, online publications and daily newspapers. Her website and its companion blog, publishes reading lists, book reviews, author interviews and other book club resources. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Portland, Oregon, where she writes weekly for The Oregonian. Visit her online at www.cindyhudson.com.
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By Wendy Burt Thomas

Q: Queries seem to be hit or miss. What’s the best way to keep a steady income as a writer?

A: There’s a difference between gigs and clients. By my definition, gigs are one-time assignments –such as an article that you write for a magazine. Although you can certainly get repeat assignments from editors, they can still be sporadic, and therefore you can’t always count on that income. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t continue sending queries. You should. But consider any assignments you land as supplemental income.

Build your security by obtaining clients. These are people for whom you do regular work–weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annually. Here are a few examples from my own clients:

• Weekly: I do 10 hours of PR a week for a national company. I write and send press releases and articles and do one-on-one media consulting with the franchisees.
• Monthly: I write a regular column for a women’s business magazine.
• Quarterly: I write and edit articles and ad copy for two quarterly magazines.
• Annually: I write and edit articles three to four months out of the year for a national magazine that comes out once a year.

I still send occasional queries and write greeting cards, but I don’t count on that income to pay my bills.

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Wendy Burt-Thomas is a full-time freelance writer, editor, copywriter and PR consultant. Her more than 1,000 published articles, essays and stories have appeared in such varied publications as Family Circle, American Fitness, ePregnancy, NYTimes.com, MSNBC.com, Woman’s World and Home Cooking. Wendy’s columns - on business, marketing, parenting, writing and healthy living – have appeared in countless newspapers and magazines. Wendy’s first two books for McGraw-Hill include Oh, Solo Mia! The Hip Chick’s Guide to Fun for One and Work It, Girl! 101 Tips for the Hip Working Chick. Her third book, The Writer’s Digest Guide to Queries; Landing articles, agents and book deals comes out December 2008. She lives in Colorado Springs with her husband Aaron, toddler Gracie, baby Ben and two black labs.

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By Sage Cohen

Because I write poetry, for most of my life I thought of myself as a poet. And because poets don’t make a living simply writing and publishing poetry (even the most famous ones supplement their income with teaching, speaking and lecturing), I resigned myself to a fate of scribbling poems in the margins of my life while I got paid to do other things.

Then a few years ago, I took Christina Katz’s platform-building class where it dawned on me that the scraps of margins I’d been filling year after year added up to pages, even books. Through the exercises in that class, I discovered that somehow under my own nose I had already built the framework of a platform; I just didn’t know it. And I certainly hadn’t claimed it.

As it turns out, my primary love of writing poetry was fueling many secondary activities and accomplishments: publication, awards, writing residencies, teaching, public speaking and running a reading series. For the first time, I also understood that the marketing communications business I’d founded more than a decade ago-the one that pays the bills-is also a part of my poetic process. Being paid to write in the corporate sphere has honed my ear and kept my pencil sharp.

In short, I discovered that “poet” was far too limiting of a descriptor for what I do. “Writing the life poetic” felt more inclusive of how I live and work; I claimed this phrase as the umbrella platform of my writing life. By stretching my own self-definition, I started to see the work I was doing in my community through a new lens. Suddenly, so much more seemed possible and within reach. Within months of this realization, I was circulating a newsletter, had updated my website, had been invited to read and speak at several conferences and events, and had pitched a book. A year later, I’m putting the finishing touches on my book Writing the Life Poetic, forthcoming from Writer’s Digest Books. The old idea that being a poet doesn’t pay has been kicked to the curb.

What I learned from this experience is that the name we assign to our writing work and our writing life can be a cage or a limitless field of potential, depending on what kind of lens we’re looking through. How have you named your writing life and your role in it? Might you be seeing yourself too small-and as a result selling yourself too short? What if you were to take a wide-angle view and give yourself a little more room to move and grow? You just might find that as your identity expands, your writing repertoire and audience will expand proportionately along with it.

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Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic, forthcoming from Writer’s Digest Books, and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. Her poetry and essays appear in journals and anthologies including Cup of Comfort for Writers, Oregon Literary Review, Greater Good and VoiceCatcher. In 2006, she won first prize in the Ghost Road Press annual poetry contest. Sage holds an MA in creative writing from New York University where she was awarded a New York Times Foundation fellowship. Sage teaches Poetry for the People and Personal Essays That Get Published.

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Next Available: For the August 20th Writing & Publishing The Short Stuff Class.

Watch The Writer Mama Riffs Blog for details:

WM Blog

Writing and Publishing The Short Stuff
Especially For Moms (But Not Only for Moms)!
Next Class Begins on August 20th
Prerequisites: None
Finally, a writing workshop that fits into the busy lives of moms! You will learn how to create short, easy-to-write articles-a skill that will make it easier to move up to longer, more time-consuming articles when you’re ready. Try your pen at tips, fillers, short interviews, list articles, how-tos, and short personal essays-all within six weeks. Now includes markets!
Cost: $199.00. [August Class Almost Full.]
Register at Writers on the Rise

Personal Essays that Get Published with Abigail Green
Next Class Begins on August 20th
Prerequisites: None
The popularity of reality shows, blogs, and tell-all books proves that it pays to get personal these days. Whether you want to write introspective essays, short humor pieces, or first-person reported stories, your life is a goldmine of rich material that all kinds of publications are pining for. Personal Essays that Get Published will teach you how to get your personal experiences down on the page and get them published. Students will learn how to find ideas, hone their voice, craft solid leads and endings, reslant their work for different markets, and submit their essays for publication.
Cost: $199.00
Register at Writers on the Rise


Platform Building 101: Discover your Specialty
(Formerly “Targeting Your Best Writing Markets”)
Next Class Begins on August 20th
Prerequisites: None
Identifying your writing specialty is one of the trickiest and most necessary steps in launching a writing career today. This class will help you find your best audiences, cultivate your expertise, manage your ideas, develop marketing skills, claim your path, serve editors and become portfolio-minded. You’ll learn how to become the professional you’ve always wanted to be and, most importantly, how to take your writing career more seriously. This class is discounted so that anyone who wants to take Platform Development 102 in October will take advantage of this important preparation stage.
Cost: $175.00. [Last time at this price. And last time in 2008.]
Register at Writers on the Rise
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Are you lighting some fireworks under your writing career? For me, summer has always been a good time to create excitement about my work. And this summer is no exception. Read on for lots of news.

Check out “Dear Christina” my first podcast
The first one might be a little bumpy but they will definitely get better. One thing is certain, I will not run out of my former student’s success stories any time soon. They just keep rolling in! So I thought, why not feature them in a series of short podcasts? And now I am. I hope they inspire you as much as they inspire me.

July 20th: Deadline for Applications for the Fall Writer Mama Scholarship
The next available Writer Mama Scholarship is coming up for the August 20th Writing & Publishing The Short Stuff Class. Applications will only be accepted from Saturday, July 12th - Sunday, July 20th. One full scholarship will be granted with a value of $199.00. The scholarship application will be posted on Friday, July 11th in the Writer Mama Riffs Blog. Please feel free to post the badge in your blog or e-zine with a link to the Writer Mama blog so others can take advantage of this opportunity. (If you are planning on signing up for an August class, I wouldn’t dally. They are filling up!)

September 1 - 30: The Writer Mama Back-to-School Giveaway
This giveaway was a huge success last year. You don’t have to be a mama, just a writer. This year we’ll have more books to give away and more thought-provoking career questions for you to answer to qualify to win. Participants last year commented on how much they learned both from answering the questions as well as from each other. Don’t miss it! Please share the WM Back to School Giveaway badge with all your friends with a link to the Writer Mama blog!

September 22: Get Known Before the Book Deal Amazon spike on the first day of Fall
Order Get Known Before the Book Deal from Amazon on the Autumn Equinox and receive a great platform-development freebie! Details coming in the September issue. Please mark your calendar and tell all your friends. (More about why authors do stuff like this in September too, in case you are curious.)

October 22: Publication Date for Get Known Before the Book Deal
Lots of books talk about what to do once you become an author. No other books go into as much depth about how to position yourself to become an author before you have a book and even before you have a book deal! If you are local, I’ll be speaking at the Wilsonville Public Library on November 16th. I’ll also  be speaking about at the Willamette Writers Monthly Meeting in Portland on Tuesday, December 2nd. Final tour dates TBA in The Writer Mama blog.)

Purchase Writer Mama & Receive a Free List of Markets
But wait! Before we move on to my second book, Writer Mama is still selling strong. In fact, I  appreciate all the word-of mouth you  can put behind it, whether that means suggesting Writer Mama to your friends, your writing association, your writing conference bookseller or your local library. For the months of July and August only, there are two ways to get the list of free markets (because I know many of you own Writer Mama already): you can either purchase the book and e-mail me a copy of the receipt or you can  act on any of the word-of-mouth suggestions above. Let me know that you have helped spread the word and that you already own Writer Mama, and I’ll send you the list of markets. Send all request e-mails on this topic to writermama2@earthlink.net.

That’s enough about me. Shooting off some fireworks of her own lately, columnist Gigi Rosenberg is now writing for Parenting Magazine, among other national publicaitons. She has also been recently published in the Seal Press Anthology, The Maternal is Political, Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong. Congratulations, Gigi! (You can order a copy of the book by clicking on it.)

Cindy Hudson will have some exciting news about her writing career in September. And don’t forget, former columnist Abigail Green, now a columnist over at The Writer Mama e-zine, has stepped up to teach Personal Essays That Get Published. Abby is a skillful and widely published essayist and I know that anyone who takes her class is going to be so glad they did. (More info below or stop by Abby’s blog Diary of a New Mom.)

There is a time to go into your cave and get your work done and then there is a time to crank up the excitement factor and reach out to others. Are you cranking up some excitement for your writing career? I sure hope so! If not, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of summer left.

In the writing-for-publication spirit,

Christina Katz
Editor and Publisher

P.S. You can always refer back to the Writers on the Rise blog, where these articles will be archived over the course of the upcoming month.
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The Northwest Author Series Call for Presenters for the 2008-2009 Season
Deadline Extended to Friday, July 18th

The Northwest Author Series is a literary speaker series sponsored by The Wilsonville Public Library, The Wilsonville Friends of the Library and the Wilsonville Arts & Culture Council. The series is created, publicized and hosted by Wilsonville author Christina Katz. We are now scheduling our next season.

Our presenters last season included Marc Acito, Heather Sharfeddin, Cynthia Whitcomb, Shelly Lipkin, Sage Cohen, Susan Fletcher and Elizabeth Rusch. The series takes place the third Sunday of each month during the school year and features writing professionals who have a desire to share what they have learned with our growing suburban literary community.

The theme for the upcoming season is How To Write Literary Forms. Presenters are encouraged to engage the audience in exercises or brainstorming throughout their 90-minute presentations. In your pitch, please convey how others might learn writing and publishing strategies you have mastered.

Final selections will be made by July 18, 2008 for the 08-09 season. We will contact those selected at that time to set a presentation date. Presenter pitches should follow our sample format.

For all the information to submit your pitch, please visit our blog and download our sample pitch: http://northwestauthorseries.wordpress.com/

By Kristin Bair O’Keeffe

Today you’re looking online for a market where you can submit that kinda longish essay you wrote about your uncle’s factory accident-the one that doesn’t quite fit the submission guidelines of any of the magazines to which you usually submit.

You read and nod, read and nod.

Then you catch sight of the online search entry about Phillip Lopate’s compilation, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present and you stop. “Hhhhmmm,” you say. You click on it.

Seconds later, you’re at the amazon.com page that describes (and yes, sells) the anthology. Words like excellent and essay authority and smorgasbord are splashed all over the screen.

Smorgasbord?

Whoo-hoo! You love smorgasbords! You order the book.

A few days later (or a few weeks, if you happen to live in China and have to wait obscenely long periods of time for books to be delivered), you’re sprawled on your couch practically eating Lopate’s collection. You read Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I” and Scott Russell Sanders’ “Under the Influence.” You’re wowed, floored, speechless, and hungry for more.

You read Plutarch’s “Consolation to His Wife,” which makes you sob, even though Plutarch died way back in 125 A.D.

After wiping away the tears, you try to figure out what’s different about these essays than the ones you’ve been writing and submitting to magazines and newspapers over the past few months.

The most obvious difference? They’re much longer. Heck, “Under the Influence” goes on for almost 12 pages.

You get excited, and though you wouldn’t dare to compare your essay to Plutarch’s (I mean, come on, he was Plutarch!), you do realize that the essay you wrote about your uncle’s accident fits into the same genre-the literary personal essay (also known in the writing world as creative nonfiction).

The more subtle differences? These essays don’t hurry the reader to a conclusion. They wander and purposefully meander. They even take tangents that sometimes veer way, WAY off the path.

“Ah,” you say, “these essays have room to breathe.”

Of course, after a bit more research, you realize two things:

1.    the biggest market for this type of essay is literary magazines (magazines like The Cimarron Review and Creative Nonfiction)
2.    most literary magazines pay not in dollars, but in copies of the magazine

Now off on your own tangent, you wonder if the local grocery store will let you barter a copy of The Gettysburg Review for a bag of apples and a jug of detergent.

Probably not, but publishing in a literary magazine looks great on your writer resume and will catch the eye of an agent when it’s time to sell your collection of essays.

So get out that essay about your uncle and get busy. It’s time to submit!

(Warning: Now don’t go nuts on me, thinking that you can write an essay that’s 900,230 words and submit it to any literary magazine out there. Like commercial magazines, literary magazines have guidelines. Before submitting, read them!)

Good luck!

Personal Essay Marketplace: If you’re interested in submitting to a literary magazine, check out New Pages. It gives links and information for dozens and dozens of spectacular literary magazines-online and print.

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Kristin Bair O’Keeffe moved to Shanghai, China, in April 2006 and has been writing about this incredible country ever since. Her blog, “Shanghai Adventures of a Trailing Spouse,” chronicles her adventures (and misadventures) in Shanghai and garners the attention of readers all around the world. Her essays about the China experience can be found in The Baltimore Review and To Shanghai With Love (forthcoming). As a respected writing instructor, she has taught hundreds of writers over the past fourteen years and is currently teaching both fiction and nonfiction writing in Shanghai.

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