AaronTurpen.com

Let’s say you’ve been offered the opportunity or have
been contacted about writing something for someone on a for-hire basis.  No doubt, you found my information in Finding Writing Work to be highly essential and powerful in your search for writing jobs.

Now that you’ve been offered a job or are looking at a project and thinking about bidding on it.. what next?

The bidding process itself, even if you’re just quoting a price for a client, can be confusing and frustrating.  If you begin blind, you will no doubt spend a lot of time kicking yourself for under- or over-bidding the job.  Over-bidding is fine if you actually win the contract, but in the competitive bidding process, a bid that’s too high is sure to get your proposal round-filed.  Even if the customer does accept your bid and you get the job, they will sooner or later find out that they’ve paid too much.  That breeds resentment.

So how do you go about bidding on writing jobs?  What is the “right price” to make the payment fair to both you and your client?

Those are hard to answer questions, as so many things factor into the bidding process, but here is some basic advice and a look at how I bid projects I’m interested in.

Evaluate the Job To Be Done

This is the part where you figure out all of the aspects of the job that will, figuratively, cost you money.  Anything that will require your time or effort will cost you money, so getting a fairly accurate estimate on what those things are – for the job at hand – is essential.  Usually, for writing, this consists of three things:

1. Research (time, possible costs)
2. Writing (the actual penning of the piece(s) for the client)
3. Editing (including proof reading, revisions, etc.)

Each of those requires time and effort and might also cost you some money up front.  For my own work, most of my costs are associated with the first and third aspects.  Most of the time that I find myself complaining that a job is not going to make me any money, it’s because of revisions.  Almost every one of these three things can be controlled, however, with just a little knowledge and professionalism.

Research Time and/or Costs

Before bidding on a job, make sure you’re completely clear on what the client expects of you.  This will tell you how much research will be required on the given subject matter.  Most writing, especially Web content and copy writing, requires little or no references to be included in the work.  For me, this type of work is a straight money-maker if I’m already familiar with the subject matter as I can do most of it off the top of my head, requiring little or no research at all.

Factual pieces, however, require substantiation of every factoid or supposition made in the piece.  These are a lot more research-intensive and will require much more time for research versus the time spent actually writing the finished product.  Before bidding, I recommend doing a little spot-research on the subject to get an idea of how difficult it will be to get that information.  Ten or fifteen minutes with a Google search can tell you,within the first couple of pages of results, what kind of time will be required to find and assimilate all of the information you’ll need.

Use common sense, but assume that most of your costs here will not be words written, but words read.  On average, in a lightly-researched piece, I assume that 50 words will be read for every word I’ve written, so a 1,000-word piece will require 5,000 word’s reading time.

Writing the Piece

If the piece is to be straight forward without a lot of formatting or rules for you to follow, this can help or hinder the writing time required to create the work.  I find, in general, that the less hindered I am by rules or markup/layout requirements in a piece, the better off I am in terms of time.  Free form, I can write much more quickly and easily than if I must conform to a set of rules.  Other writes have told me that they prefer a strong structure to write within.  If they aren’t given one, they’ll choose one of the standard academic layouts given in most College Writing and Business Writing courses.  Those are readily available online, if you’re interested.

The actual process of writing the piece, once research is done, is much easier for me than any of the other three parts to building a complete project for a client.  Most writers likely agree with this and it’s true of most professions.  The build-up to get the job going and the final cleanup required after the bulk of it is done are the real hard parts to any job, whether it be construction, writing, or driving a truck.

Editing, Revisions, Etc.

The proof reading and editing process is inherent in any type of writing.  For most writers, it’s the least enjoyable part of the job.  I gauge the amount of editing to do by two things: what the job is being written for and how well it was written to begin with.

If I did a good job of writing the thing to begin with, then the proof reading probably won’t require much.  I’m a relatively good self-editor during the actual writing itself, but that is not common.  Most writers prefer what I call the “word hose” method.  This is where the words just flow out and spill onto the page and the writer worries about how they look and read later.  The idea is to get all of the information out first, then structure and clean it up later.  Since I’m not good at doing this without automatically hitting backspace or going back to ad or remove a word as I write, this type of stream-of-consciousness writing is not for me.  I suspect it’s why I’m not very good at writing fiction.

So if the piece appears to be written well as you go through your writing, the editing probably won’t take too long.  Then you’re faced with revisions.

This part is the worst, to me.  In my mind, I’ve written a great piece, it’s grammatically correct and editorially awesome and yet, the client wants changes.  It’s part of the job, but for me, it’s the worst part.  This is why I’ve gravitated towards clients who are more interested in my work as I have produced it than I am towards clients who want me to write as if I were them.

When ghost-writing, if the client has a “voice” they’ve established through written work they’ve already produced, be prepared to spend a lot of time learning to copy that before ghost-writing for them.  On the other hand, I have one client I’ve created a voice for (he had never written anything of merit before hiring me) and others who are only interested in looking smart, which I can provide as a ghost-writer.  These are my preferred clients.

Clients to Avoid

I’m about to say something that will sound sexist, but it’s not meant to be so: avoid writing for “girlie” clients.

By this, I don’t mean to avoid women, I mean to avoid those clients who appear to have too-clear a vision of how they want things to be and who have too-obvious tastes when you review their website, project descriptions, etc.  These clients will never be happy with anything you’ve produced and will nit-pick everything, killing your bottom line on the project.  I’ve literally told clients to keep their money and go somewhere else after the 8000th revision on something I expected to take two hours of my time.  It can be hard on you and you’ll think it will destroy your reputation, but sometimes letting someone go is easier and better for you than staying on and taking the loss.  Trust me.

The other type of client to avoid are the over-communicative ones.  These are the clients who will call you daily (or more), send you masses of emails or “spot research” information to “help” you along, and so forth.  Every time you communicate with your client, it costs you money.  This is because not only are you spending your time answering their communique, but you’re probably revising the project in the process.  Once the bid is in, you should be left free to do your thing.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, as some projects require a lot of client interaction, but most of the time, it’s not.  So avoid it.  One trick is to leave their emails until the end of the day and then answer them all at once.  If they’re really annoying, just tell them that you need space to concentrate and get the job done right and they’ll probably understand.

Final Conclusions

The bidding process is not the easiest thing in the world, but it’s something that all professionals have to learn.   Most of it is common sense and experience.  As a writer, expect to lose your shirt on the first few projects you bid on and then be happily surprised if you don’t.

You will invariably make mistakes in the beginning, but it’s part of the learning process.  Note what you did right and wrong, then repeat and avoid as necessary in the future.  It doesn’t take long to get to the point where you can bid on most jobs in a few minutes and wait for the winning results.  After a while, you’ll learn to judge your prospective clients quickly and to know how to bid their job (or when not to bid at all) with confidence.

For most, including myself, the bidding process was the hardest thing to learn and the most confusing aspect of professional writing.  It’s fundamental to the business of writing, however, so it must be learned.

I’ve had a couple of people approach me with questions about how writing for the Web differs from writing for print.  The difference boils down to one thing: how people read online versus with paper and ink in their hands.

Print publications, such as magazines and even some newspapers, often have their writers create two versions of an article: one for print, one for the Internet.  Or the editor simply pares down the print version to include it on the Web.  In either case, they’re doing it for one reason: readability.

Reading Habits Offline and On

Our reading habits when we’re sitting in a comfortable chair with a magazine in hand and a fresh beverage at our elbow are very different than those we have when sitting in an office chair looking at a computer screen.  In the comfy chair, we’ll take our time, read all of the information and absorb it slowly.  For most, this type of reading is as much for pleasure as it is for information.

When in the office chair in front of the monitor, however, our reading tends to be more about business.  Most readers of online material scan, rather than reading each word and sentence.  As with a newspaper, readers are likely to read only the first paragraph or two, hit the bullet points or otherwise highlighted text, and be done with it.

There are exceptions to this, as with anything else, of course.  Fiction and poetry are obvious exceptions, as a rule.

Writing for Those Habits

So if you’re writing for online publication versus print, this will change how your audience interacts with your work.  Writing using the general upturned-pyramid, as discussed in last week’s Associated Press Style article, is important, whether you’re writing news or not.

The real key, however, is the first paragraph.  You need to hook your audience quickly and that first paragraph is where it needs to happen.  If done well, this can eliminate most skimming.

The other option is to use the hook, but include a lot of bullet points, highlighted lists, or bold text to convey the basic information in a few choice words and phrases throughout the piece.

Either approach works and both of them combined can do a lot for reader retention and interaction.

As an example, if you go through past posts here on AaronTurpen.com, you’ll see that most of my articles have short paragraphs, have headings to break them up into sections for the reader, etc.  This is what helps the reader’s flow.  Short paragraphs make the text look more airy and thus easier to read, removing the stigma of an over-academic appearance.  The headings breaking up the articles into sections make it easier to digest and gives the reader’s eyes something to focus on to gather the general subject matter in that portion of the article.

All of this means better readership, more reader retention, and a higher acceptance for your writing.

When I began this blog, I wrote a sort of overview of the various types of writing and the differences between them.  One of those I mentioned was the Associated Press (AP) style.  It gets its name, of course, from the AP and is the basic presentation most journalistic writing uses.

Whole university courses are dedicated to teaching the AP style, but most of it can be congealed to a few hundred words.  After that, it’s a matter of practice to master it.  For me, this style of writing is a constant struggle – I have a tendency to ramble.

Every so often, the Associated Press releases a new edition of The Associated Press Stylebook, which began publication in 1977.  This contains the guidelines for writing in the AP style and is the handbook from which all of the aforementioned university courses and editors guide their teaching.

The Core of AP Style

Most of the style hinges on the general format and layout of your piece.  You may have heard of the Inverted Pyramid (pictured here) for conveying information.  That is the basis for nearly all of today’s news reporting.

In this method, all of the most important information for your article appears in the first couple of paragraphs.  The lead sentence for the article encapsulates the “why” for the reader to get engaged in the story while the first paragraph contains all of the pertinent “who, what, when, where, how” (the “Ws”).  The second and possibly third paragraph convey the rest of the pertinent facts and information to complete the Ws.

From that point on, the rest of the article is merely filling in the information to substantiate and explain the first couple of paragraphs.  It is important to remember two things that drive all news reporting: newsprint readers generally read the headline (title) and the first two to three paragraphs – about 200 words – of a story.  Few readers read beyond that point.  That, for the reporter, means that everything needs to be concisely crammed into the first couple of hundred words (or less).

This is the very core of the Associated Press style of writing.  It is the basic news reporting style that has been used, fundamentally, since journalism began.  For most writers, it is the hardest part of the AP style to master.

Other AP Style Considerations

The rest of the style considerations for AP news are mostly to guide standardizations for abbreviations, punctuation, and so forth.  Unless you’re writing for a syndicated AP-affiliated news outlet, however, these are less important than mastering the inverted pyramid.  They are, however, considered conventional for most journalism, even online, so they are worth a quick mention.

Numbers are probably the most-often confused aspect of the AP Style.  The rule is fairly simple, though: any number up to ten is spelled out (one, two, three, four, five.. nine), after that, use Arabics (10, 11, 12..).  The rest are detailed semantics.

Abbreviations are also often confusing to the writer.  Most of the abbreviations used in AP writing are nations, states, and so forth.  These require no explanation to the reader, so printing U.S. (never “US”) doesn’t need to be qualified before using the abbreviation.  So in the following, the two abbreviations are correct:

In the U.S., the Department of Transportation (DOT) is..

States, on the other hand, do not use the Postal Service two-letter abbreviation, but instead use the common shorthand abbreviation.  So Arizona becomes “Ariz.” and South Dakota becomes “S.D.”  States with one word names are abbreviated to three or four characters while states with two word names are abbreviated to two letters with periods between (and no spaces).

The rest of the style details are concerned with specifics such as how to handle dates, times, punctuation, and titles for both people and publications.  Much of this will likely be handled by the editor and copy layout people at the publication rather than the writer.  There are a lot of details here and they make up the majority of the AP’s Stylebook.