Most professional writing is not creative (fiction) writing, but instead is usually fact-based journalism, commentary, copy writing, and so forth. While there are some similarities between how the two professions work, they’re very different from one another. Most of my experience is in professional writing and though I have published a few fictional pieces in the past, I do not consider myself a creative (fiction) writer.
Like most writers, of course, I’d like to be a novelist. I think every writer “has a novel in them waiting to get out.” For me, however, fiction writing is hard, hard work. I envy novelists like Stephen King who can pump out 10 pages a day, but that is not for me. For all I know, he envies my ability to churn out thousands of words of non-fiction a day, so we’re probably even.
There are many writers who’ve gone from professional non-fiction such as journalism or even technical writing to the world of fiction. Some of the more successful, who are also some of my favorites, include John Ross and Robert E. Howard. On the flip side, many fiction writers have broken into non-fiction, some of my favorites there include Isaac Asimov (the majority of who’s writing was non-fiction in the end) and Mark Twain (though his career included both types of writing throughout).
So how do you make the transition and get into a new biz?
Most of those who have done so had made names for themselves in their former occupation and made the transition based mostly on their own reputations. Building a career as a writer, no matter your chosen style of writing, requires hard work and dedication. And a thick skin, as well.
Many writers successfully make the jump from one writing type to the other, though. It’s not only possible, but can sometimes be extremely beneficial. Has anyone ever heard of Robert E. Howard the journalist? After a short stint at a local Texas newspaper, Howard began to see his fictional stories get published more regularly and eventually gave up on journalism – for which he had little talent, he claimed.
After a long and extremely successful career as a short-story writer and novelist, Isaac Asimov began writing children’s science books, encyclopedia entries, and many other books and articles of non-fiction and greatly enjoyed it in his later years.
In fact, many well-known writers began their careers or ended them after switching from one style of writing to another. J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic before writing his first novel, The Hobbit, as a children’s story for his son Christopher. John Ross is well-known for his non-fiction political commentary and historical writing and made an extremely successful transition with his first novel, Unintended Consequences.
So if you’re a professional writer of fiction or non-fiction and hoping to switch to the other style, know that it’s been done and that it’s possible for you to do it too!
Whether you realize it or not, business letters likely make up a large portion of your writing. Especially if you’re a freelance writer or business owner. Many of your emails are probably business letters, as are your proposal cover letters, your project bids, and much of your other correspondence when communicating business-to-business.
Effective business letter writing is essential to success in freelancing, especially in the service industry (such as writing). A great business letter will have three basic elements: it will limit its scope to the objective at hand, it will clearly state its purpose at the beginning, and it will be addressed as personal correspondence between two individuals.
The first element is scope and objective. Your objective for your business letter, whether it be a sales letter, a letter of reference, or a project proposal or bid, should be clear, concise, and stated within the first paragraph of the letter (usually the first two sentences). If, for instance, you are writing a bid proposal for a project on a freelance website, clearly state what the bid is for and what it entails in the first paragraph of that bid. For example:
Mr. Langley,
This bid is for eight pages of site copy, written with moderate sales pull and SEO aimed for 3 key phrases throughout. This bid includes two revisions, at your discretion, and is for the complete job, not as a piece rate or hourly charge.
That first paragraph covers what the bid is for, what it will entail, etc. The rest of the proposal would include details such as what constitutes a “page,” what is expected of the buyer in this case, and how communication should take place. Any other details pertinent to the bid would be listed through the rest. That first paragraph, though, focuses on the nitty-gritty to tell Mr. Langley what the bid is for and how much it covers.
Having been on both the buying and selling side of freelancing, I can tell you that bids that are short and to the point, but cover all the important bases, are much more likely to win compared to bids that are verbose and rambling or bids that are too technical or filled with legaleze. Be concise, direct, and state your business right up front and you’ll find yourself better-received by those who are busy running a business and aren’t interested in wasting time reading a too-long proposal.
Whether your business letter is for a bid or to ask for assistance or something else, busy people appreciate cordial directness. It gets the job done and doesn’t waste anyone’s time doing so.
As you can see from the example, both the scope and objective of the letter were spelled out right off and the letter began with a personal greeting (“To Whom It May Concern” doesn’t cut it in today’s information-filled world). That covers all the required bases of a good business letter.
For a last word, I would like to give one more piece of advice: write your letters as if you were speaking to the person. Being too clipped and professional does have a down side, so try to let your voice come through. Stay on target with your objective and scope, but use common words and phrases rather than jargon and “five dollar words” unless it fits with what you’re writing about.
A business letter is a professional correspondence, to be sure, but it is also a personal conversation between you and whomever you’re addressing. Try to be somewhat personable. Also be aware that what you’ve written is permanent. It can be printed, stored, photocopied, etc. Bear that in mind if you’re writing demands or issuing a grievance.
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:
Research (time, possible costs)
Writing (the actual penning of the piece(s) for the client)
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.
Like most writers, of course, I’d like to be a novelist. I think every writer “has a novel in them waiting to get out.” For me, however, fiction writing is hard, hard work. I envy novelists like Stephen King who can pump out 10 pages a day, but that is not for me. For all I know, he envies my ability to churn out thousands of words of non-fiction a day, so we’re probably even.
