Tag Archives: #writerwednesdays

Four cheap, green ways to research new magazine markets

Posted on by
1

It’s easy to spend a lot of time and money researching the magazines you want to pitch, especially when you’re first starting out. You feel like you need to read a million back issues cover to cover before you can even think about pitching an editor.

Research can become a crutch, something this post by Linda Formichelli hints at. You’re afraid to put your idea out there. You’re afraid you’re going to get rejected. And so you overcompensate in the research department, trying to dig up every little crumb of information about a particular market. Linda has some great workarounds in her Bust My Excuse post.

Here are four tips and tools of my own that I use to cut the time, expense and carbon footprint of researching new markets:

1. Prioritize your reading by focusing first of relevant sections and then skimming the rest. For example, I’m interested in writing international stories for a women’s consumer magazine. Knowing how they cover new skin care trends is nifty but the time I spend doing that isn’t going to add that much value to my pitch, based on the kind of queries I usually write.

2. Search consumer and trade publications in database archives like Gale Infotrac, which are accessible through many local and university libraries.

3. Sign up for Feedly or other online content aggregator. A lot of magazines repackage their print content for online readers. Get the RSS feed for whatever section you want to pitch (or whatever section is closest—it’s not always a one-to-one correspondence). Sometimes I also add the general RSS so I can skim other sections. After a week of reading this feed, you’ve done 90% of your market research, painlessly. (While you’re at it, subscribe to the RSS feed for your own website or blog so you can, say, make sure it still works!)

4. Ask your friends and family for their old magazines. As a green writer, I’m really trying to be mindful of my paper use. Getting old magazines from friends and family is a great way to recycle. It’s also a fantastic way to get magazines you want to pitch but not necessarily subscribe to. For example, I got a stack of wonderful travel and lifestyle magazines from my stepmom who lives in Minnesota, markets I considered pitching because I travel to the Minn frequently.

Hey, fellow freelancers, what time-/money-/planet-saving tips do you have for researching new magazine markets?

Photo by thebittenword.com

Two nifty tools for freelance writers

Posted on by
Reply

Even though I’ve been writing for years, I often have trouble visualizing how long a story needs to be. Because editors—unlike Harry Potter’s Hogwarts professors who assign homework in parchment inches—tend to assign numbers of words, I’ve started using this nifty lorem ipsum generator to get an idea of how many pages of writing I need to do.

Graphic artists and typsetters have been using lorem ipsum placeholder text for years— according to the generator site, since the 1500s—and it regained popularity in the 1960s. Today, programs like In Design allow you to autofill text boxes with it, so you can see the layout without having to compose actual text. So if you need a more visual placeholder than “TK“—industry parlance for “to come”—or the “XXXX” and “Blah Blah Blah” one of my old bosses used to pepper her reports with, then lorem ipsum will serve you well.

When editors point out an online article they’d like me to model, but don’t assign a word count, I’ll copy and paste it into the text into this word count tool to get an idea of how many words I should be shooting for. Line and paragraph breaks vary greatly, depending on in-house style, so instead of guestimating I just plug the text into this tool for an accurate count.

Featured image by pkwahme
Photo by bburky

How Myers-Briggs changed my freelance writing business

Posted on by
14

From biological anthropologist Helen Fischer’s Why Him? Why Her? to 5 Love Languages, I love a good personality test. 

But my all-time favorite is Myers-Briggs. I first took the official version of the test in college at age 15, and my results have stayed consistent for 15 years.

In fact, Myers-Briggs completely changed my career.

You see, in 2010 I revisited the ole’ M-B when I was considering the freelance switch. I was surprised to find that my personality profile confirmed my choice. Turns out all the things that didn’t work for me at work—structure, boredom, office politics—didn’t mean I was a bad employee.

They were clues to the kind of job and work environment that I thrive in.

I could finally stop beating myself up—classic ENFP behavior—because I never got used to getting up early, going to seemingly pointless meetings and sitting for eight hours straight, and start directing that wasted energy toward building a freelance business.

Fast forward two years… After about a month in Carol Tice’s Freelance Writers Den, I’ve realized that we writers are quite a mixed bag—especially when it comes to what motivates us.

Some writers are motivated by acclaim, so the prospect of one day breaking into the glossies keeps them going. Others are motivated by competition, challenging themselves to set ever higher goals. Higher pay, task completion and upping ROI are also powerful motivators—unless, of course, you happen to be me.

These days, the Myers-Briggs test is helping me zero in on what motivates me, which ultimately helps my business.

First and foremost, I am motivated by The New—new ideas, experiences, people, places, foods, technologies… On a related note, learning, problem-solving, brainstorming and creating win-win situations also get me going.

Sounds fun and it usually makes for good writing, but from a business perspective…? Recipe for disaster. For example, because I’m more motivated by exciting new experiences than cold hard cash, I gravitate toward start-ups, new media outlets and nonprofits—groups that often have more passion than budget. I also need an extremely high level of stimulation or I get bored. After boredom comes paralysis which makes it hard to finish outstanding projects, write solid copy or market my business—much less do stuff like bookkeeping or tax prep.

But this is where knowing personality type comes in handy: coming up with workarounds. Because I get swept up in the enthusiasm of passionate people, I avoid face time with prospective clients (especially from nonprofits) until after we’ve traded a few emails about their project, budget and expectations. I’ve stopped trying to schedule my work day and started scheduling my breaks to keep myself from getting bored.

To be fair, Myers-Briggs may resonate more with some personality types—ENFPs love this sort of thing—than others (folks with “T” in their type). Still, if you’re a freelance writer struggling to determine what marketing strategy is right for you, how to be more productive or even just where to start, Myers-Briggs might help. It certainly won’t hurt, so take a free version of the test here, and then find more about your type here. And don’t forget to report back!

What have you learned about yourself from personality assessments and how has that affected how you run your freelance writing business?

Image ᔥ owlex_k
I published a shorter version on this post during the 2011 WordCount Blogathon. Hence the comments below.