Secrets of a Freelance Writer: How to Make $100,000 a Year or More

ALSO BY ROBERT W. BLY

The Copywriter’s Handbook

Selling Your Services

Business-to-Business Direct Marketing

The Elements of Business Writing

The Elements of Technical Writing

How to Promote Your Own Business

How to Get Your Book Published

Write More, Sell More

Direct Mail Profits

Ads That Sell

Careers for Writers

Creating the Perfect Sales Piece

Targeted Public Relations

Keeping Clients Satisfied

SECRETS OF A FREELANCE WRITER

SECRETS OF A FREELANCE WRITER

THIRD EDITION

How to Make $100,000 a Year or More

Robert W. Bly

Owl Books

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

www.henryholt.com

An Owl Book® and ® are registered trademarks of

Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright © 1988, 1997, 2006 by Robert W. Bly

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bly, Robert W.

Secrets of a freelance writer: how to make $100,000 a year or more / Robert W. Bly.—3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7803-9

ISBN-10: 0-8050-7803-7

1. Authorship. I. Title.

PN151.B63 2006

808′.02—dc22

2005058458

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

Originally published in hardcover in 1988 by Dodd, Mead & Company

First Owl Books Edition 1990

Second Owl Books Edition 1997

Third Owl Books Edition 2006

Designed by Kelly S. Too

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my assistants, advisors, and vendors—Ilise Benun, Peter DeCaro, Fern Dickey, Jon Kauffmann, Wayne Kolb, Paul and Carolyn Mazza, Nurit Mittlefehldt, Stanley Dumanig, Edward Mueller, Brett Ridgeway, and Jodi Van Valkenburg—for helping to run my office so smoothly so I can sit here and do nothing but read, think, and write for our clients

On writing—a matter of exercise. If you work out with weights for 15 minutes a day over the course of ten years, you’re gonna get muscles. If you write for an hour and a half a day for ten years, you’re gonna turn into a good writer.

—Stephen King,

Time, October 6, 1986

No one writes as well as he ought. He is fortunate if he has written as well as he could.

—Bliss Perry,

Bedside Book of Famous British Stories

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

1: An Introduction to High-Profit Writing

2: Tips for Beginners: Getting Started

3: Setting Up Your Freelance Writing Business

4: Tasks of the Freelance Commercial Writer

5: Setting Your Fees

6: Finding Your Markets

7: Prospecting: Generating Sales Leads

8: Self-Promotion: Building Your Reputation and Visibility

9: Creating a Web Site for Your Freelance Writing Business

10: Writing and Publishing Your Own E-zine

11: Closing the Sale

12: Running Your Freelance Writing Business

13: How to Ensure the Client’s Satisfaction with Your Copy

14: Keeping Clients Satisfied

15: Common Problems and How to Handle Them

16: Building Your Freelance Writing Business

17: Becoming a Millionaire through Writing, Saving, and Investing; Parting Advice on Your Career as a Freelance Writer

Appendix A: Sources and Resources

Appendix B: Books, Periodicals, and E-zines

Appendix C: Bob Bly’s Information Kit

Appendix D: Model Documents

Appendix E: Sample Promos

Appendix F: Sample Contracts and Fee Schedules

Appendix G: Typical Fees for Commercial Freelance Writing Projects

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my writer friends and colleagues—freelancers who, over the years, have given me countless ideas on how to build my business, get new clients, expand my services, and increase my income. I won’t name them all here, but they know who they are. Thanks, folks!

Special thanks to Don Hauptman, Richard Armstrong, Milt Pierce, Sig Rosenblum, Roger C. Parker, Joan Harris, David Yale, Dr. Andrew Linick, John Finn, and Bob Kalian—successful writers and marketers whose brains I greedily pick whenever the opportunity arises.

I would also like to thank my editors, Cynthia Vartan and Flora Esterly, for being the best editors an author could have … and the most patient. And Henry Holt, for allowing me to reprint portions of my book Successful Telephone Selling in chapters 14 and 16 of this new edition of Secrets of a Freelance Writer.

Some of the networking tips in chapter 6 are from Carolyn Campbell’s article Networking, which appeared in the April 2005 issue of Freelance Writer’s Report (page 5) and are reprinted with permission.

And, of course, thanks to my assistant, Carolyn Mazza, and my project manager, Ilise Benun, for handling the details of running my office so I can just sit and write. And to my agent, Dominick Abel, for shepherding this book through its many editions and printings.

PREFACE

This book was written to help you make a lot of money as a freelance writer.

To my mind, too many writers spend too many hours laboring over work for which they are paid only a pittance. We live in a society that often forces writers literally to give away their writings, either for free or for wages that, when figured on an hourly basis, are barely competitive with what an unskilled laborer can earn pushing hamburgers in a fast-food restaurant or moving crates in a warehouse.

This book is dedicated to the proposition that writers should be paid a fair dollar for a fair day’s work … and that writing is a professional service worth the fees that other professions command.

Think about the last few articles or stories you sold. Were you satisfied with the pay? If not—if you feel frustrated by editors and publishers who seem to begrudge you every penny when it comes time to negotiate your fee or advance—this book can change your life!

• If you’re tired of being underpaid as a writer, of spending long hours on projects that barely provide a decent living wage, I’m going to show you a different side of freelancing—one that can put you in an income bracket that even a corporate executive, attorney, or physician might envy.

• If you’re a new or established freelancer handling commercial projects for corporate clients, I’ll tell how you can double or triple your writing income, how to get new clients, and how to get more business from current clients—and I’ll give you new ways to market your services and expand your business as never before.

• If you’re a staff writer employed by a corporation, advertising agency, newspaper, or other organization and you want to quit your job and become a freelancer, I’ll show you how to do it. By following my techniques, you’ll be able to match—or even double—your present salary in your first year of freelancing.

• If you dream of writing the Great American Novel, or short stories, poetry, plays, essays, articles, or other literary forms—great! This book will show you how to get lucrative commercial assignments that pay the rent and free you to pursue more artistic interests.

• If you’re a moonlighter, a part-timer, or you want to expand your regular income, the type of writing described in this book is ideal for you, because you can work as much or as little as you choose. It’s all up to you.

• If you’ve never written for money in your life but you have a hankering to write, or you’re looking for a second career, or to make some money in your spare time working from home, you’ve come to the right place.

When I wrote the first edition of Secrets of a Freelance Writer for Dodd, Mead in 1987, I was thirty years old and had five years’ experience as a freelance commercial writer.

Now it’s nearly two decades later, I’m 48, and I’ve been a freelance corporate writer for twenty-three years. In the eighteen years between editions, I’ve written hundreds of freelance projects for dozens of clients—and I pass along the new tips, techniques, and methods I’ve learned in this new edition.

The question readers of the first and second editions most often ask me is Can you still make $85,000 to $125,000 a year or more doing freelance writing for the business market? The answer is yes, although market conditions have changed over the past two decades. Here are the key differences between then and now.

First, the bad news:

• The recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s—and the uncertain economy of the twenty-first century—put us into a buyer’s market from which we will never recover. There is more competition, and, at the same time, budgets are more limited and clients are more cost-conscious. You can still make $100,000 a year or more as a freelance corporate writer, but it’s more difficult than when I started in 1982—no doubt about it.

• We live in the Age of Now. Deadlines are shorter. Speed, convenience, efficiency, and client service are becoming ever more critical to many buyers of writing services. For some assignments, how fast you can get the copy to the client—and in what file format—seems at times to overshadow the quality of the writing itself.

• There have always been clients who do not care about writing and treat it as a commodity. Such clients have always been and are still a small minority, but their ranks have grown over recent years. You value your craft. Be aware that some buyers do not.

• Downsizing has motivated many downsized corporate workers to try freelancing, flooding the market with new writers. Some stay. Most seem to freelance only until they can find another corporate or ad agency job.

• Clients expect and demand freelance writers to have adequate office technology and be knowledgeable in a variety of programs and computer skills, including Internet access and e-mail. If you are low-tech or computer-phobic, you are far behind the times—and you need to enter the world of modern computing without further delay.

Now, the good news:

• Demand for freelance writing services among businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations has never been higher. Many freelancers are struggling to keep up with the workload and fill orders. There are more than enough assignments to go around. Unlike the book and magazine publishing fields, demand for corporate writing greatly outweighs supply.

• There is still a lot of money to be made. For the first and second editions of Secrets of a Freelance Writer, I picked the subtitle How to Make $85,000 a Year, because that seemed like a lot of money at the time. It’s still a nice income for a freelance writer, but many of my readers report earnings of $100,000 to $175,000 a year—and several make more. One called me the other day to tell me he just hit the $200,000 mark!

• Instead of seeing the Internet and CD-ROM as competition for the printed word, see them for what they are: lucrative markets for writers. Do you prefer print? Writing for the World Wide Web has more in common with writing a brochure than it does with writing a movie. It’s easy for print writers to adapt to and enjoy this medium.

• Downsizing has resulted in more outsourcing by corporations. They no longer have large staffs of writers and editors. Many documents once produced mainly in-house are now routinely outsourced to freelancers like us, often for big bucks.

• Technology lets you get more work done in less time and makes your life easier. With the PC, fax, and e-mail, I can get twice as much work done as I did in the days of the electric typewriter and no fax or e-mail. For the freelance writer, computers and related technology dramatically increase output, which translates directly into greater earnings.

For many writers, freelancing is where it’s at! Freelance writers enjoy significantly greater freedom, flexibility, and—for the most part—more income than writers employed at fulltime jobs. When copywriter Nick Usborne asked subscribers of his online newsletter Excess Voice in late 2004 their work preference, more than six out of ten said they would prefer to be self-employed.

Before we can accumulate riches in great abundance, we must become money-conscious until the desire for money drives us to create definite plans for acquiring it, wrote Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich (Fawcett Crest). Secrets of a Freelance Writer gives you those definite plans for acquiring wealth through freelance commercial writing, saving you the headache of creating those plans for yourself—and the costly trial and error of testing them out.

This new edition of Secrets of a Freelance Writer has been revised and expanded to address today’s new marketplace. It has been reorganized to give you many more tips and strategies for running a successful freelance commercial writing business. It also provides more guidance on using technology, the Web, and e-mail, both as a source for writing assignments and for marketing and self-promotion.

Here’s what you’ll find in this third edition of Secrets of a Freelance Writer:

Chapter 1 defines freelance commercial writing and gives an overview of this lucrative but often overlooked writing opportunity.

Chapter 2 provides special guidance for novices. It was written in response to readers who have asked me, Can you do this if you have no experience? This chapter outlines strategies for those who want to be writers but have limited or no writing experience, as well as for writers who have done journalism, fiction, or poetry but have little or no experience doing corporate work.

Chapter 3 shows how to set up your freelance writing business, including computers, software, e-mail, Internet access, and other recommended equipment for your home office.

Chapter 4 answers the question What will I be writing? It discusses some of the commercial writing assignments you can handle for pay as a corporate freelance writer.