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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If you look for opportunities on Craigslist, I’m sure you’ve waded through gig after gig for brand new magazines. All of these publications seem to be started with no capital whatsoever — all of them offer money ‘eventually’, ‘when we get paid’, ‘after the first issue’, or flat out not at all. Some even have the temerity to offer writers exposure — leaving out any arguments about the value of writing for exposure, consider this: if no one’s ever heard of a magazine, exposure in their pages is worth absolutely nothing. Ninety percent of these new magazines will never see a second issue. Their owners don’t understand a thing about the magazine business and will fail miserably. It’s only good sense to avoid them entirely.

But what happens when a friend comes to you — someone you trust to do right by you — and asks you to help out on his new magazine. It’s relevant to your interests, there seems to be a good probability of success, but there just isn’t enough money up front to pay you. What do you do?

Admittedly, it depends on the situation, but there is often a way to make the arrangement more equitable. After all, it is the rare writer who can afford to work for free, although many seem to anyhow. Consider the options:

• Can you resell the article to another market, if this magazine falls through?
• Can you offer up reprints of older work, rather than investing a lot of time in this publication?
• Can you get a trade, rather than payment, such as an ad space in the publication?
• Can you take on another role in the publication that is more likely to pay? (Editing, ad sales, design — there are a plethora of potential positions.)

If you can’t come up with a way to make the proposition beneficial, you have only two options. You can either tell your friend no, or you can treat the article as a gift, given without any expectation of payment. If you really want to help a friend out, there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but you cannot expect the situation to turn into a paying gig down the line.

There are a slew of reasons that high school students may look for part time jobs: extra cash, resume builders for college applications, preparing themselves for after graduation. If you think about it, freelance writing can offer opportunities for each of those.

Consider it this way: for college applications, you absolutely have to have a good writing sample. A freelance writer quickly learns the difference between good samples and bad. And if higher education isn’t the right path for you, a good file of clips can give you a head start on a career path.

There is no lower limit for freelancing, unlike working for a salary. Labor laws don’t cover the scenario. The only relevant law that a teenager needs to be aware of is contract law — minors may not be bound by contracts. However, a writer does not generally need to disclose his or her age when conducting business.

There are plenty of opportunities for young writers, especially in markets targeted at the teenage demographic. After all, who knows that age group best?

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You’re a freelance writer, right? You spend all day chasing after contracts and jobs, which can be fun in it’s own way, but isn’t perfectly stable.  I’ve talked before about passive income, but today I want to try thinking outside of the box for ways to make money off our writing.

How can we use our writing skills to help us make more money?

A lot of freelancers feel the entrepreneurship drive, but want to expand a little beyond what they’re doing. Here are the first couple of ideas that came to mind, and I want all of your opinions, too!

• Become a publisher of content, as well as a creator. I’m not suggesting that you try to compete with the local daily paper, but what about creating a website or blog if you see a niche?
• Teach a class. There are plenty of aspiring writers out there, and if you write about a specific niche, you might be able to teach about that, as well.
• Work with an agent. Agents don’t just need writers — they need readers to help decide on a manuscript, assistants for office work, etc.

Help me add to this list in the comments.

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I bet you didn’t even know that there was a freelance resume conundrum, did you? It’s pretty basic – the typical resume format of objective, skills and as much employment history as you can come up with just doesn’t work for freelancers.

Say Betty is a freelancer – she has a regular gig writing for a local magazine, and another one blogging. On top of that, she’s always querying magazines and she has a fair number of clips. Now, in theory, it would be nice if Betty could get jobs based solely on those clips, because your writing abilities should be more important than how long you wrote for Regional Auto Magazine.

But a lot of editors want to see a resume, especially if you’re querying out of the blue. So, how can we give them a resume that doesn’t make us look like flakes that jump from publication to publication?

How about a template better suited to our needs?

• List your name, email address and phone number.
• Throw out the objective. If you’ve written an excellent query letter, you shouldn’t need an objective.
• List publications your material has recently appeared in. A bulleted list should do well here. Think CV here, rather than resume. You can also list projects, such as PR campaigns here.
• Your skill set should include styles you’re familiar with (AP, Chicago, etc.), topics you can write about effectively and any other related skills.
• Include relevant work history, but don’t clutter it up. If you were a technical writer in corporate America, include it. If you flipped burgers, don’t.
• Education is, of course, required. I’d recommend including internships and certifications under education, rather than giving them their own section.
• You can list any affiliations you hold, such as the Freelancer’s Union or the Association of Women in Communication. It’s not necessary, though.

That sounds a lot less stressful than making Betty wonder if she should include that month she spent as a contractor with the local public relations agency under her work history.*

Make sure that you have good clips to send out with your resume, however. Examples of the excellence of your writing are more valuable than the most polished of resumes.

Honest to god freelance writing assignment I found on a jobs listing board:

Looking for a writer to write 2 essay papers 7-10 pages long for college ethics class.  You can have 6 topics to choose from.  Each paper pays $50.00.  Send in details of your experience in writing college papers and your grades for them.  When you inquire I will send you the topics you have to choose from.  Must be able to accept payment through pay pal.

Email to ***@yahoo.com

I’m not quite cruel enough to link to the listing itself, but it’s somewhere on http://www.online-writing-jobs.com.

I’d like to note that I’ve heard plenty of jokes about cheating on ethics essays, but never  actually thought it really happened.