Business

Are You Backing Up Your Computer?

A computer that isn’t regularly backed up is a problem waiting to happen — especially when you’re a freelancer and every bit of your professional life is on that laptop or desktop. IT pro Robert Granholm has put together resources for getting the best back up systems in place for entrepreneurs, freelancers and the rest [...]

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Review Copies: What to Do With Them After You’ve Written the Review

One of the perks of writing articles for various publications is that you can wind up with review products. If you write about cooking, you can wind up with pots and pans. If you write about technology, you can wind up with software. And if you write about anything, well… through review copies, I’ve learned [...]

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Ask Me Anything: Payment for Blogging Gigs

An anonymous writer asks, I was recommended for this blogging gig for a brand-new site (it launched about 2 weeks ago). I finally talked to the company president last week to discuss content, focus, all of those things. I asked him about pay. He said they’re still working on the best way to go about [...]

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Literary Agent Secrets — Query Letter Do’s and Don’ts from Laura Cross

Today, we have a guest post from Laura Cross, the author behind The Complete Guide to Hiring a Literary Agent. Agents review thousands of queries each year searching for talented writers and material to present to publishers. Yet agents say they reject 99% of the pitches they receive because the writers fail to: Show the [...]

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Are You Tracking Your Time? 5 Reasons Every Writer Should

I think in terms of how much I make per article or per word most of the time, rather than about how much I make per hour. That can prove to be a problem, though. Since most articles aren’t automatically a matter of working a certain number of hours to complete, it’s very easy to [...]

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Ask Me Anything: Handling Missing Stories

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 [...]

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Ask Me Anything: Keeping Email Under Control

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 [...]

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Sometimes, You Just Can’t Catch Up…

I started out the month of November a little bit behind. I spent the end of October focused on buying a house and moving, which is more distracting than I had hoped for. We got settled in and just as I was starting to get back into my routine, I got clobbered by some sort [...]

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Why Writers Need CRM — And Why I Use Gist

I mentioned Gist in my list of online tools that can help writers. I’ve gotten a couple of responses that make me think that most writers think that customer relationship management software can’t help them — maybe if they work with a long list of clients, it can make sense, but what does a fiction [...]

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Freelancing: The Gateway Drug to Entrepreneurship

Many freelancers start out just thinking that they’re going to make a few dollars on the side: they’ll work their day job and just put in a couple of hours writing articles on the weekend. But freelancing can tempt you to keep moving forward. You can earn a little more if you dedicate a few [...]

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