We have two very important questions this week.

Scott Cheatham asks,

What would you say is the best first step for someone wanting to enter the world of freelance writing?

There are a lot of first steps that I could suggest for getting started as a freelancer: picking a niche, setting up your bookkeeping… Plenty of things go into being successful. But the most important first step you can take is to pull together your clips. You can land some writing gigs without samples of past work, but they’re not going to be the kind of work that’s worth your while long-term. Instead, to land the type of clients who can actually help you pay your bills, you need a good portfolio.

If you’re lucky, you’ve already got a few published pieces that you can use as samples. It doesn’t matter if you were a full-time employee when you wrote them, as long as they’re solid examples of how well you write. If you don’t have so many pieces that you’re comfortable using, it’s time to start writing some. There are many different ways to build samples — no matter what type of writing you want to do. However, keep in mind, you want to write for someone else to get those portfolio pieces. Most clients aren’t going to be as impressed with a personal blog as with proof that someone else liked your work enough to use it.

Writing a press release for a non-profit or submitting a guest post to another blog can be good ways to start. You may not get paid for those first few clips and, as much as I dislike freelancers writing for free, it’s a fact of life.

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Kathleen O’Connor asks,

What should you consider when drafting a contract? Is there a good template to use?

It’s been my experience that most freelance advice sites recommend that you never ever take on a project without a formal contract. In my opinion, that’s idealistic: most freelance writers aren’t comfortable drawing up their own contracts, but also aren’t in a financial position to have a legal professional draw up a contract either. Using a template can help make the situation manageable.

However, I think it’s important to note that letters of agreement or any other written agreement laying out the terms of your deal with your client (what the work is, when it’s due and so forth) are considered legal contracts, at least under U.S. law. I typically use a letter of agreement with my clients rather than a more formal contract.

That said, I do keep a contract template on hand for use with certain clients. It’s a Word .doc, which I’m making available for you to download. Please note the following disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This contract was not reviewed by a lawyer. I cannot recommend you use this contract as every business agreement is different and it may or may not apply to your project. I’m only providing it as a sample and you should check with a lawyer before using it for your own freelancing.

There are a couple of points that I specifically think are important for a freelance writer to think about when writing or signing a contract:

• Intellectual property: As a writer, you’re creating intellectual property. Make sure your contracts clearly outline who has rights to the project at the end of the day. I’m not telling you to keep all rights — there are definitely financial benefits to choosing to do otherwise — but make sure your contracts say who has what rights.
• Sub-contracting: It’s not absolutely necessary that your contract spells out whether you can sub-contract part of a project. Many clients will want you to remove that clause. If for any reason, however, you may need to sub-contract any part of the contract, make sure that is listed in the contract.
• Indemnification and Waivers: Many clients will try to get you to indemnify them against any damages or loss, as well as waive your right to injunctive relief. You may try to do so in reverse (I throw in that clause with many big corporations, expecting it to be removed before the contract is signed). If you can get your client’s to leave it off, you should — in most cases, it’s not important, but if something goes wrong (like you get sued as a result of your work), those clauses mean that you can’t sue your client.

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If you’ve got a question about the business side of freelance writing, send it my way. We’ll get an answer up next week!

Writing is a creative process. Every client gets a different end result and pays you accordingly for your time. At least, that’s what we like to think. But the truth of the matter is that some certain types of writing can look very similar from client to client. You could even create a template for such pieces and at least start with filling in the blanks.

A good example is a press release. When a client comes to me, asking me to write a press release, I’ve got a form that I ask him to fill out. A lot of it is basic organizational information and standard details I need to know in order to create the press release. But each line on that form corresponds to a line in my press release template. When I get the information back from my client, I just plug it in to the template.

Of course, that doesn’t make for a great press release and I would never send a client a fill-in-the-blank press release. But it gives me a starting point that lets me get my work done a lot faster than starting from scratch each time. It’s like a very detailed outline — you know that you’re going to have to move stuff around, but you know everything you want to get across and you have a general line of thought you want to follow.

There are plenty of opportunities to use this sort of template as a starting point:

• Resumes
• Marketing letters
• Some blog posts (like big lists)

I can even think of a way to turn a template into a marketing tool: release it to your customers, free of charge and then let them see why just filling in the blanks doesn’t result in a solid piece of writing. They’ll see that they need you to take their project to the next level. Of course, you’d need to refine the strategy a bit for specific customer bases, bust as templated marketing method, it’s not too bad.

Are there any other ways that you may use templates to speed up your writing? Or have you used templates in other ways to build your business?

In general, there’s very little I will refuse to write. There are certainly types of projects that I prefer to take on. I also know that there are certain kinds of writing that I’m just not particularly good at, so I tend to avoid them. But there aren’t a lot of projects that I simply refuse to take as an entire category. There are only a few things that I won’t even consider.

Essay Mills

Of the writing projects that I’ve been offered over the years, the only one that really hands down made me angry was an offer to write essays for an essay mill that would sell work to students who would then turn it in as their own. It’s not only an unethical practice in my book — it’s downright stupid. At the college level, a student is paying for an education, so why would he want to do anything that would diminish the value of the money he’s spending. There’s also an element of ‘I worked my butt off in school, so you should, too!’ in my refusal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to help students improve their writing: I worked as a tutor in college and still take on the occasional student as long as I know the person. But I’m not about to do any student’s work for them, no matter the price.

Pure SEO Writing

I’m talking about the stuff where you have to hit specific word densities and even include misspelled words on occasion. It’s bad writing, hands down, and I never want to get used to writing that way. I’m pretty sure it will ruin me for just about everything else.

I like writing content for the web in general, and I have no problem working with keywords. But, ultimately, I write for human readers rather than bots. I have no beef with anyone that would rather have machines read their work, though.

Adult Content

There’s nothing wrong in my book with writing content for adult sites. I realize that some writers are against such projects on a moral basis, but if it isn’t a problem for you, there’s decent money to be made. You may want to use a pseudonym in case Grandma is surfing the web, but beyond that, use your own judgment.

Personally, though, I just flat out can’t do it. I can’t take that kind of project seriously and often wind up giggling like a grade schooler just on the basis of project descriptions.

What About You?

Is there any type of writing project that you just won’t do? Something bothers you on an ethical level or something you just can’t wrap your head around?

As a full-time freelancer, I spend most of my days in my house, at my computer, talking to my cats. It can get a bit lonely at times and it doesn’t make for a great environment when I need to work with clients in person — after all, I don’t have a conference room hidden anywhere in here. I’ve been exploring co-working — sharing office space with other freelancers, as well as other business owners who would otherwise work from home. In most cases, you don’t pay anywhere near the full rent for a space — you can pay to work for a day or get a plan that allows you access to the space for a certain number of days each week.

My biggest problem has been that all the great co-working spots in my area require a commute. There are some cool places in both Baltimore and DC, but one of the benefits of freelancing is the fact that I don’t have to drive to either city on a regular basis. A couple of other freelancers I know and I started exploring the option of starting a co-working space closer to where we live — around Howard County, Maryland.

Here’s where you come in. If you’re in the HoCo area and you’d be interested in co-working with us, let me know. We need to fill two more desks in order to start up our space. The plans available are three days per week (for $175 per month) or seven days a week (for $275). We’ll also have drop-in rates, one day per week and one day per month plans once we’re operational, so let me know if you’re interested in those options, as well.

The amenities are great:

• High speed internet
• 24-hour access
• Free parking
• Near restaurants, shops, post office, etc.
• Easy access from I-95, 295 and other main roads

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have, as well.

Today, my new ebook, “Discover Your New Job Online,” goes on sale at Lifehack. While I’d love it if you purchased a copy or passed the news along to someone else interested, this post is really about how I got to this point: what happened to get the ebook ready to go and the decisions that were made about how it is sold.

In many ways, getting an ebook ready to launch isn’t so different than preparing for a book launch — but in many ways, it’s quite different. The time line can be a lot shorter and what a publisher may or may not do for you can vary greatly.

The Publishing Process

My ebook is exactly the second ebook that Lifehack has brought out. The editor-in-chief of Lifehack, Dustin Wax, has been working on adding an ebook store to the blog for quite a while. The ebook store had a soft launch last month, with Dustin’s ebook, Back to Basics Productivity. Last summer, we decided that I would put together an ebook about how to hunt for a job online — a topic I had written about for Lifehack in the past. We agreed on a length, a due date and a general idea of what the ebook would contain.

I wrote up my manuscript. Having written full-length manuscripts for print, there are a couple of key differences that I noticed. First of all, when you’re dealing with a printed book, there are some standard lengths expected. With an ebook, you can pick a word count out of thin air. I was also able to include far more links, lists and other formats for information beyond the simple paragraphs that print publisher expect (they put lists in as illustrations or figures, typically).

Once I finished writing, I shipped it off to Dustin. He edited it, caught all my typos and generally improved the manuscript. Once I signed off on the edits, it went off to a designer. Because the designer was working on what is essentially a template for all Lifehack ebooks to come, it took a little while to get it ready to go. There was another round of review — think of it as the proofs that a writer receives when working with a printer.

The Selling Process

Having a finished ebook didn’t mean that we were ready to sell. Since Lifehack is only starting to offer ebooks for sale, some infrastructure had to be built before those sales could start happening and some decisions had to be made about how ebooks would be sold.

There are a lot of different ways that an ebook publisher can handle the infrastructure end of things. Some go with custom-built ecommerce sites, others use tools to modify existing website. For my ebook that I released here, Market Your Freelance Writing in 31 Days, I chose E-Junkie because it’s very easy to set up. Lifehack took a similar approach.

Lifehack also chose to set up an affiliate program for the ebooks sold through the site. If you aren’t familiar with affiliate programs, here’s a basic explanation: when you sign up for the program, you’ll receive a special link. As long as you use that special link when talking about the product — here, we’re talking about a specific ebook — you get a cut of the proceeds for anyone that buys the ebook after clicking on that link. That means that you could post a review of the ebook on your blog and if your readers buy it based on that review, you get a certain percentage.

Personally, I think affiliate programs are an excellent choice — but not all ebook publishers agree. Managing an affiliate program requires more time and effort than simply offering an ebook for sale. It also means that the publisher doesn’t make as much money on each copy of the ebook. The trade-off is that, for most products, affiliate programs can drive up sales.

Once all the details were in place, we set a launch date and I set out to build up some buzz ahead of time. In this case, because I’ve written about employment topics in the past, I have some connections among bloggers who routinely cover the topic. I sent out emails, offering review copies and guest posts. Another standard way to promote ebooks is offer a giveaway of once copy — but when you’re working with a publisher, you may not have that option.

Some ebook publishers will take steps to build up buzz themselves, just like some print publishers will have a publicist work with an author. Just the same, though, some publishers don’t do a lot of marketing, relying on a writer’s platform to build sales. Lifehack is a special case because the site already has excellent readership in place, simplifying marketing plans.

The Final Product

All of that culminates in a page offering an ebook for sale. It’s not quite the lengthy process required for a publisher to bring a book to market, but it’s also not quite the same thing as bringing out your own ebook. Got any questions about ebook publishing? Please share them in the comments.

There was a period of time when I thought my notebooks had to be just so; I would only write in a specific type of notebook, with a particular pen. That routine just about did me in as a writer. Rather than offering me a way to be a better writer (no matter how cool I thought my notebooks were), those routines offered me an easy way to procrastinate. If I didn’t have my notebook with me, I couldn’t write.

If I found myself with a spare hour but without my notebook — well, I wouldn’t be using that hour for writing. You can be sure of that. That writing routine of mine actually was an excuse not to write. I know that I purposely forgot my notebook at times when I could have gotten some good writing in, effectively giving myself permission to slack off and do something else.

Breaking Routines

Today, I write on different computers, type out notes on my phone and scribble notes on any piece of paper left in my vicinity too long. I still prefer using a notebook for hand-written notes and writing, if only because I can’t lose pages as easily as I can lose random notes. That said, the type of notebook certainly doesn’t matter to me.

I didn’t set out to break my routine: I found myself in a position where I was traveling and could only write on my laptop for several months. My notebook suddenly wasn’t an option. So I started working on my computer instead and rapidly realized that my notebook had little affect on the quality of my writing. It just happened to be the place where I was writing.

The Right Kind of Writing Routines

There are some kinds of writing routines that do support us in writing on a regular basis and those routines are well worth cultivating. Simple habits, like writing on a daily basis can get us to the point where we’ve completed books or have successful blogs, just by having a routine of writing every day, no matter what. The hard part is recognizing these routines.

Find the routines that work for you: the ones that support your ability to write on a regular basis and improve your skills. Toss the fancy notebooks and special pens, though, along with anything that is an excuse masquerading as a routine.

Jen asks,

I’m starting into freelance writing (pretty casual, after my 9-5) and in order to build up clips, I contacted a local free newspaper about writing a piece for them.  In the end, I sent in a full piece (450 words) for consideration and the editor said to me it would be run in their January Issue.  (editor’s response: “Thanks. Will run it in January.”)  There was no payment, and I knew that going into it.

I checked the issue today and my piece wasn’t run.  There is, however, a piece on the same subject matter, using some of my ideas.  So, presumably, they’ve re-written my article cherry-picking from my ideas and adding some of their own. There was no credit given to me.

Personally, I don’t think that was appropriate of the paper to do.

Can you offer any insight?  Is this typical?  Is the publication out of line? Do I need to get a thicker skin?

I’d like to write the editor and say that I’m very disappointed her publication would take my article, re-write it, and pass it off as their own content.  Is that out of line?

Writing the editor certainly makes sense in this situation — but I’d suggest trying to get the full story first. Ask why the editor chose not to run the article after saying that he or she would — there may
be a reason you might not expect. I managed one of those free newspapers for quite a while and we made a point of using content that came in (it certainly beat having to write it ourselves), but occasionally pieces got lost in the shuffle or an editor might simply forget that she had an article to run. If that was the case… well, these things happen, especially when an editor doesn’t have to worry
about payment and other details.

That said, if the editor can’t give you a reason why he or she didn’t run your piece, especially after accepting it, it was certainly inappropriate for the paper to run such a similar article rather than yours. At the very least, the editor should have contacted you and told you that your story wasn’t going to run and, if they used ideas out of your article, they should have given you credit for your work. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot that can be done. If there was money involved, I would suggest asking for a kill fee, but the best the editor would be able to offer you would be an apology and perhaps another chance to write for this paper, assuming that you want to work with this editor again.

Once you’ve written to the editor and discovered whether there was a reason your article was dropped, it may be best just to move on. While you can spend time getting an apology out of this editor, that’s time you could be working on bigger and better things. Personally, I’d write this publication off and move on. It’s not necessarily a question of growing a thick skin — it’s perfectly right to be angry if someone takes ideas out of your work and uses them in their own articles without giving you credit. But, in this particular case, getting angry won’t get you anywhere and there are better uses for your time.

Do you have any advice for Jen on dealing with this situation?

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Do you have a question about the business side of freelancing? Ask it in the comments and I’ll answer it next week.

I’m not the biggest fan of kill fees, mostly because they tend to mean that I completed a project to the best of my abilities but my client decided not to pay me the full price for my time. If I’m working on a piece that gets killed, I won’t turn down a kill fee, but I also won’t abandon the piece.

I’ve actually been seeing fewer kill fees of late: while magazines, newspapers and some other publications will offer them to writers when a story is killed, many online publications and other websites do no such thing. That fact makes it even more important to explore alternatives to simply jettisoning a project.

Selling a Killed Story

When one of your articles is killed, all rights should immediately revert to you, which means you can publish the article anywhere you’d like. That offers you a lot of options.

• Pitching it to a competing publication: Just because your article wasn’t right for one editor doesn’t mean that you can’t submit it to another who publishes similar material. Personally, since I almost never submit work on spec, I tend to use articles that haven’t gotten published for one reason or another as a way to break into markets that want to see the first article on spec. Since it’s written already, there’s nothing to lose.
• Submit it to a content site: I have several articles that somehow never managed to get printed up on Constant Content.* I get a solid trickle of money for the articles I have up there, without having to run around finding new publications to submit to. It’s certainly not my largest income source, but it’s useful to me. It’s worth noting that Constant Content is not a content mill — you set the price for people to use your article. You don’t have to worry about page views or anything like that to make money. Evergreen content is the most likely to make you money on Constant Content.
• Use it in your own projects: Hopefully, you have a couple of money-making projects of your own in the works, like a blog or an ebook. If your killed article fits in with the topics of your personal projects, you can use it to move that project along. It’s not the sort of upfront money you’ll make by selling the article, but you may be making money off of it for years to come. You can even use it as a guest post to market your work.

The only thing you shouldn’t do with a killed story is let it sit around gathering dust. If it’s a timely article, you need to get it in another editor’s lap or posted somewhere else before it becomes irrelevant. It can take a little work you weren’t planning to do, but the alternative is receiving no payment for your work, except some fraction of what you expected when you agreed to write the article.

*That’s a referral link. If you sell articles through Constant Content after clicking my link, I get a cut of their commission.

I commented on Twitter earlier this week that I had entirely changed how I organize my email and I got a couple of requests to share how my new system works. It’s been several days and it’s working great, so I’m ready to share how I’m handling emails.

The Setup

There is some technology that I’m specifically using:

• Gmail
• Gist (I’ve written about how I use Gist before)
• OmniFocus

You can use any combination of email client, CRM tool and task management tool you’d like — in fact, Gmail Contacts and ToDo lists may let you skip going outside of Gmail at all, if that’s your preference. I use Gist and OmniFocus because they have more extensive features than Gmail’s integrated options and I’m comfortable with the way they work.

The Organization

I’ve been slowly adding folders (or, as Gmail calls them, labels) for several years now. I had one for every long-term client, different groups I belong to — I had well over 80, which made it almost impossible to use the folders to find something quickly. That lead me to rely on searching for any email I needed to find, which works particularly well in Gmail. Since you can search for senders, keywords and even attachments, it makes sense to rely on that feature, rather than building an elaborate organization system. So I deleted all of those folders and picked a few new ones.

I now have just six folders for my email, meant to let me process new emails faster, while relying on the ability to search for any past emails I need. The folders are meant to hold literally any email I receive — there shouldn’t be a single email in my inbox that doesn’t fit into one of these six folders:

• Bacon: I can’t remember exactly where I picked up using the term ‘bacon’ for a certain class of email, but it works. Bacon is all those emails that you, at one point or another, did agree to receive, like newsletters or mailing lists, but that aren’t a priority to read. It’s not spam, but it’s also not particularly important. It’s a category that, if you’re in a hurry, you can comfortably mark all as read.
• Client Work: The most important category of email I receive has to do with work I’m doing for clients. Anything in this file is the first to be dealt with when I start reading email.
• Personal Projects: My blog and other projects that are important have a folder to themselves. I consider the emails in this folder important, but a step beneath those involving client work.
• Networking: I’m pretty active on several social networking sites, which have a tendency to send out all sorts of updates on a regular basis. All of those get tossed in one folder so that I can just go through and handle tasks like accepting friend requests all in one go.
• Education: I’m still working on my MA, so all emails related to school need a folder. This is probably the smallest folder I have at this point, but I consider it fairly important.
• Home: My last folder is devoted to anything that isn’t a work matter — friends and family all go in this folder, as well as emails about my house, health and other topics.

I’ve also made use of Gmail’s filters to make the process as automatic as possible. Just about every newsletter I receive is automatically labeled ‘Bacon’, while each email from a client is automatically labeled ‘Client Work.’ If you’re a Gmail user but not familiar with filters, you can create a new filter by selecting an email and choosing “Filter messages like these” under ‘More Actions”. You can also create filters in Outlook and other email tools.

The Workflow

Each morning, I sit down at my computer and open up my email. I make sure that every email in my inbox has a label connecting it to one of my six folders. I start by reading any new emails in my ‘Client Work’ folder. Unless I can respond to an email in under a minute, I don’t take actions on anything. Instead, I note the appropriate tasks, like ‘Email John Doe regarding edits’ or ‘Research article on marketing tactics’ to my task list in OmniFocus. Side note: I love OmniFocus because I can create a new task using keyboard shortcuts without leaving Firefox.

I go through each folder in the same way. It’s rare that I’ll leave any emails unread, although I may mark bacon emails as read without looking at them if I’m in a hurry. After I read an email and create any appropriate tasks, I archive each email. I’ve discovered that if I leave read emails in my inbox, they tend to distract me every time I log in. If my inbox is empty, I have a much easier time focusing on whatever I’m there to do.

I check my email a couple of times a day, although my goal is to check it once in the morning and once in the evening. I’m working on it, but I’m not too confident that I’ll ever entirely get to that point.

Once I’m done checking my email, I get to work. When I’m working and need to send an email, I actually start in Gist, instead of Gmail. I’ll search for the person I need to contact in Gist, which automatically imports my emails from Gmail. I can see at a glance the emails we’ve exchanged, as well as information like my contact’s recent blog posts and any notes I’ve made for emailing him. I then click on the email link in my contact’s profile, which takes me directly to a new email in Gmail, with my contact’s address already in it.

Why It Works For Me

I know my email methods may seem a little unusual but I had one main goal when I put this system into place: spend less time organizing my email. It’s a matter of seconds now and I’ve got a clean inbox. It used to take me significantly longer to go through my email every day, because I had a lot more folders to try to deal with, or I would get distracted by read emails that were still in my inbox. I’m not saying this approach would work for everyone, though.

If you have an email system of your own, I’d love to hear how you got it set up and what about it makes handling your email easier. Just leave a comment below to share.

I’ve recommended credit cards in the past as a simple way to manage freelancing expenses. I got the chance to interview the CPA who I send my taxes to, Travis Raml, for another article not too long ago and something he said stuck with me.

Travis explained that you can actually minimize your taxes for 2009 with a credit card: “One of the easiest ways to minimize taxes is expense acceleration. Most small business owners are on the cash basis of accounting and thus can deduct expenses when paid. So with the year’s end on the horizon, if you have expenses you know you’re going to pay in the next month or so, it’s probably sensible to make the purchase or payment now versus waiting until the next calender year.”

You can put those expenses on your business credit card now and get the tax deduction for 2009. Travis added, “…if you pay via credit card the expense is deductible in the year the purchase is made, not when you make the payment to the credit card company. This strategy can also be used billing clients as you only record the income when the cash is received. If you delay billing clients for a couple weeks towards the end of the year, it is more likely the payment will not come in until January or February at which point it would become taxable the next calender year.”

Of course, you’ll want to talk to your own tax preparer to make sure that you handle your taxes appropriately, but with just a few days until 2010, it may be worth taking a look at any expenses you’re expecting for January.