Universal McCann completed a survey of social media recently and discovered something very interesting: despite the problems with the economy, social media is going strong. The numbers of people consuming social media are going up. (More information on the survey itself is here.)

While not all writers are social media gurus — and vice versa — I think this news is fantastic for any writer looking for work. Social media is made up of a variety of opportunities for a freelance writer:

• blogging
• writing scripts for podcasts, web videos, etc.
• copy writing FAQs, About pages and other materials for new websites
• writing advertising copy

Finding your way around social media is well worth your time. Even a relatively inexperienced writer can do well in this rapidly developing market. And ‘relatively inexperienced’ is definitely the key. We’re talking about a market that really didn’t exist a few years ago. You can’t study it in school. The only way to learn is to get out there and get to doing.

As a general rule, I don’t write a lot about fiction around here. It’s not that a successful business can’t focus on fiction, but it is difficult. The pay scale for short stories and even novels is significantly smaller than non-fiction options.

But, if you enjoy writing fiction, I think it’s a reasonable idea to incorporate it into your overall game plan. Personally, I go for a lot of fiction and creative non-fiction writing contests. I like writing responses to specific prompts. I generally will enter any short story contests with a specific prompt and no entry fee. I feel these prompts can really help me stretch my writing wings — expand my horizons and my abilities without having to pay for a creative writing class.

And while the occasional win is nice, I make a point to make the time that goes into ‘losing’ stories worth my while. I may have to do a little editing, but that story gets sent out to various paying markets as soon as the contest results come back.

One benefit I’ve found from having a few fiction stories in your archives is that you can sell reprint rights to fiction with a little more ease than an article. With an article, you might need to update it or tweak it to meet a new market’s focus. Not necessary with a short story. The closest I’ve come is an editor wanting me to pull a few swear words from a story.

Fiction writing isn’t for everyone, but it can be a good way to introduce a little variety into your writing schedule.

I’ve heard of companies looking for permalancers here and there, and I’ve always been a bit intrigued. A permanent freelancing gig? Guaranteed work I don’t have to go chasing down? What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, most permalancing opportunities, when you read a little closer, just aren’t so appealing. Generally, these employers — and trust me, they never qualify as clients — are looking for full-time, contract employees. They aren’t really looking for freelancers.

Employers like full-time, contract employees because they’re cheaper than true employees. If an employer uses a contractor, he doesn’t have to pay any of the following:

• Social Security
• Employment Taxes
• Health Insurance
• Retirement
• Other Benefits

But they do demand the same level of work from a contract employee as they do from a normal employee. Sometimes they demand even more. Contractors can be let go with absolutely no warning, so employers make it clear that it’s in everyone’s best interest to give their job their all.

The government periodically tries to crackdown on permalancers/contract employees, usually under the auspices of the IRS. Gotta get that Social Security money, you know. But employers keep offering these sorts of jobs and freelancers keep taking them. Admittedly, these jobs don’t necessarily pay badly, but they can make your taxes unusually screwy.

If you’re out to make your name as a freelance writer, my recommendation is to skip the never-ending permalancing gigs.

For a while I’ve been sharing the paying markets I run across on the side of this blog — see the line that says “Thursday’s Market Watch”

Well, that feed comes from del.icio.us, a site meant for sharing bookmarks. Since I’ve started using del.icio.us, other bookmarking options have appeared on the horizon. I’m planning to keep using del.icio.us, but I’ve been saving my bookmarks to another site, as well.

I’ve been using diigo for the past week or so for the same purpose as del.icio.us, although hopefully not with quite the same result. The difference between diigo and del.icio.us is that you can easily create groups, to which all members can share bookmarks — or, in this case, markets.

I’m inviting anyone who runs across a market for freelance writers to submit it to the FreelanceWritingMarkets group. For the most part, anything goes — magazines, websites, book publishers — anyone who takes freelance submissions (and pays for them!) is good.

You don’t need to be a member of Diigo, or del.icio.us, to look through markets, but to share bookmarks to the FreelanceWritingMarkets group, you will need to join Diigo. Joining took me maybe ten minutes, and is pretty easy to do. If you do run into trouble, email me — I’d be happy to help you get set up.

We’ve all done it: we’ll find a site that promises to publish our short articles and pay us either a small flat fee or from some sort of advertising scheme. These sites are content with 400 word articles and don’t care too much about style, as long as there aren’t obvious typos. Some can even provide fairly solid income streams — not millions of dollars but checks every week.

Are these sites bad?

I wouldn’t want to rely on any of these sites for a full time living. Even if I could just crank out repetitive articles, all day, every day, I wouldn’t really want to. And I’ve run into lots of issues of plagiarism that makes me wonder if content sites are really going to be around for the long haul.

A lot of the payment schemes give me hives, too. “Post your article, and if someone likes it, maybe they’ll give you a nice shiny nickel.” And a share of the advertising revenue? That’s just a fast way to make no money at all.

Are these sites good? 

My complaints aside, working for some of these sites can be a good thing. Some offer flat fees for your articles, and while they might only be $10, if you can crank out 400 words fairly quickly, you can make it worthwhile. It can be nice to have some reliable income, as well, to augment larger but less frequent paychecks from your freelancing career.

In my opinion, content sites can offer freelance writers a starting point to start earning some money, but for freelancers with a little experience and a few clips, it can be better to chase bigger jobs.

…if you expand your skill set. Just like I keep saying, the more you can do, the better your payoff will be. If you can submit good photos, you’ve got an edge. But other skills are rapidly becoming more important. Folio announced this morning that, in the last year, digital initiatives are up 33 percent.

Magazines announcing digital initiatives—video, content sharing partnerships, integrated marketing, social networking and anything other buzzy product related to Web 2.0—increased by more than 33 percent in 2007, according to year-end data by the Magazine Publishers of America scheduled to be released later this morning.

You don’t need to learn how to code software to be a successful freelance writer, but you do need to know how social marketing works, how to link to video content, and generally how to interact with a Web 2.0 world. These aren’t skills you’ll get in an MFA program or by working in an office. You have to go out into the wilds of the web and start trying stuff. Sign up for an account on LinkedIn. Create a blog of your own. Install widgets. Add to wikis. It will pay off in the end.

And writing for all these digital initiatives? It pays! You just have to be able to take on new types of projects and write for new audiences.

I’ve showed you a couple of the sites I use to find markets and freelance work of various types. But knowing where to find work, and organizing those opportunities are two very different things.

Personally, I find markets easier to track than other opportunities. You’ve all seen my tracking method over in the side bar. I use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site to keep track of all the markets I run across. There’s one key feature that makes it a perfect organizer: tags. I tag each market that I book mark with the topics it covers, as well as the type of material (short stories, poetry, etc.). Then, when I have a story on a specific topic, I just click on the appropriate tag to check which publications might be interested. The drawbacks to my method? I’ve got at least one or two markets that have changed focus (or paying status) since I last saw them. Ideally, I’d have some way of automatically updating my list without any effort on my part. Unfortunately, technology has not found the perfect solution to my problem yet.

When it comes to contests and other opportunities that I must address in a timely manner, I rely entirely on Google Calendar and GMail. Say that I’m looking at an opportunity for a short-term contract. I paste the necessary information into an appointment form for Google Calendar, for the day that I intend to handle all the details of landing that gig. It may be today or it may be tomorrow, but it goes on the calendar. Secondly, I run all of my email through GMail — including emails that I send to myself. Because I can search my older emails, without having to sort through them, trying to remember when I sent an email, I don’t need to worry about filing information or putting it all together in one document.

From what I’ve heard, David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous really addresses this approach well. However, I’ve yet to have the time to sit down with a copy and find out for myself. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your comments.

How do you keep track of your opportunities? I’ve known plenty of freelancers who rely on printing out information and filing it, and I’ve known others who rely on elaborate t0-do lists. Where do you fit in?

No writer wants to spend hours a day sorting through Craigslist ads offering tiny compensation for big projects. But there are plenty of places that do a lot of the work for you, and make a freelance writer’s life so much easier.

1. Freelance Writing Gigs. I know I mentioned yesterday that Deb Ng’s site is one of the best, and I stand by that. Deb avoids low paying jobs and posts new job leads daily.
2. The Golden Pencil.  Anne Wayman runs a great blog for freelance writers and, on a daily basis, she posts a long list of job leads, including a few for translators — if your freelance writing runs in that direction, Anne’s site should be your first stop.
3. Freelance Switch. This site recently switched its job listings over to a new arrangement: employers can post jobs for free, but for full contact information, freelancers have to pay a small monthly fee. That said, it’s the only job listing site that I’m willing to pay for access to. As a rule, the jobs are solid.
4. WOW! Women on Writing. You don’t have to be female to apply for the jobs on this board, you know. And they regularly have some jobs that don’t show up on any other lists.
5. Craigslist. As much as I bash on Craigslist, I do check the writers’ listings for several areas each day. Which places do I check? The two big cities that I live in the middle of and my home town (I can occasionally take on projects for areas I know well without being physically present). I also check in on NYC’s listings, although I rarely find anything worth my while.

You’re a freelance writer, right? What would any one ask you to consult about?

A surprising number of things, actually. If a company is working on putting together some sort of publication, your knowledge might be worth a lot to them — after all, as a professional writer, one might expect you to be something of an expert on the topic of writing.

Furthermore, if you have some sort of niche — maybe you write solely about health topics, or maybe you write primarily for teenage readerships — your audience or topics may give you the credentials for consulting.

What does consulting take?

Honestly, consultants do such a wide variety of tasks that it’s pretty hard to nail down. A potential client might want to simply present you with an idea and get feedback relating to your niche. Or, a client might need you to take them through the process of preparing material for a particular audience.

How much does consulting pay?

As a consultant, you set your own rates, and you can set them pretty high. Think of it this way, your fee should include the amount of money you’re losing by not being at your desk writing, as well as the cost to get to the work site, your meal for the day, any necessary supplies and a little extra for profit. There are consultants whose time is worth quite a bit.

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I absolutely love working with the same editors over and over. I love not having to spend half my week querying and scoring big assignments. I devote a bit of time to making sure that my favorite editors consider me a sure thing — I consider it worth just as much as if I spent that time querying. Here are a couple of the super secret methods I use to keep editors thinking of me:

1. Suggest new ideas. Every time I turn in a story, I try to email the editor of the publication in question with an idea for the next edition. It might sit in her inbox until she’s finished sorting out the current edition, but when she’s ready to start planning, I’ve already made her job easier.
2. Be polite. All those manners Grandma beat into me? They come in handy. I’m polite, whether I’m talking on the phone or sending out emails. My invoices even say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’
3. Turn in material a little early. If you’ve had a month to work on an assignment, it’s downright classy to turn it in a day or two early, and make an editor’s life that much easier. It’s not always easy to be early, but it’s worth it.
4. Make yourself available. I’m not suggesting answer emails and phone calls as soon as they come in — after all, many freelance writers do have day jobs. But try to get back to your editor on the same day, even if it’s just to play phone tag. Making the effort is enough.
5. Offer supplemental material. Photos, charts, sidebars: I haven’t met an editor who didn’t like supplemental material. I have met editors willing to cut down my beautiful prose to add in an adequate photo, but that’s life.
6. Don’t check back every day to see if your money has been mailed. I’ve heard a thousand horror stories about nagging writers who want to get paid now! If your contract states a specific date of payment, you are officially banned from worrying about your payment until that date. You are allowed to nag if that date passes and no check appears. If your contract does not specify a date of payment, consider getting a new contract.
7. Run spellcheck, for the love of Heaven! Can you tell that I’m spending this week working on a major business document that no one ever bothered to spellcheck? Seriously, though, while an editor’s job is to improve your writing, if she has to go through a stack of errors even a machine can catch, your odds of getting more work from her go down very quickly.
8. Stay in touch. If you don’t hear back from an editor, especially if you submitted an idea along with a story, check back. You may have gotten lost in the shuffle — but you’ll never make it out of the shuffle, if you don’t bring your idea back to the editor’s attention.
9. Don’t get into trouble. It should go without saying, but stupid crap from poor citing of sources down to not returning phone calls will land you directly on an editor’s personal blacklist.

All this said, if an editor doesn’t pay on time, is problematic to work with or just plain makes your life difficult, it’s okay to let your name slip to the bottom of their stack of writers. If it isn’t working, just let it go.

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