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Writing Etc. – January 1, 2005 

ISSN: 1545-5580 

Make Your Writing Sparkle. Write Killer Queries, Get Published. 

Join the brightest, most ambitious, and talented group of writers on the ‘net.

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To subscr*ibe to Writing Etc. and receive the fr*e e-book, “Power Queries,” surf here: 

http://filbertpublishing.com 

Forward Writing Etc. to all your friends! They’ll be glad you did. 

For easier reading and red hot links, surf to http://filbertpublishing.com/current.htm 

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In This Issue: 

Notes from Minnesota 

Expensive Experience by Bob Bly 

2005 Action Plan to Jumpstart Your Writing Career

Paying Markets

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This issue is sponsored by:  

Think It’ll Take Forever To Earn A Great Living As A Writer?

Think again. 

With Jumpstart Your Writing Career, you'll discover how easy it is to:

• Think like a writer so you can turn every opportunity into a writing assignment 
• Hone your writing skills until they're razor sharp 
• Tackle the most lucrative branch of writing 
• Learn secrets of fiction to make your story lines sing 
• Organize your nonfiction articles so editors will happily publish your work 
• Write powerful queries that’ll open new doors of opportunity 
• Promote your writing business for little or no money 

Absolute Write calls Jumpstart “a marvelous tool for novice writers and often published authors alike. It’s refreshing, easy to use, and applicable”. 

If you want to jump ahead of the pack and start snagging great paying assignments, read more here:

http://filbertpublishing.com/jumpstart.htm  

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Notes from Minnesota: 

My heart breaks every time another image of the tsunami disaster flashes across the television screen. 

It’s oddly surreal to realize such devastation exists when the view outside my office window stands in such stark contrast to the horrible pictures exiting the Far East. 

Take a moment today to make a contribution to your favorite organization: Red Cross, Red Crescent, UNICEF, Habitat for Humanity, any reputable nonprofit that’s set up to help during this time of crisis. 

And as always, continue praying for everyone in that region. 

Until next time, may the news be brighter this 2005. 

Beth 

P.S. Here’s our updated best seller list… be sure to pick up a copy of each of these titles. They’re awesome. 

1.      Jumpstart Your Writing Career and Snag Paying Assignments by Beth Erickson http://filbertpublishing.com/jumpstart.htm 

2.      Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success: How to Make $100,000 a Year as a Freelance Writer and Have The Time of Your Life Doing It. http://filbertpublishing.com/bob.htm  

3.      Weekly Writes: Exercises in Creative Writing by Shery Ma Belle Arrieta http://filbertpublishing.com/Weekly.htm (You’ll get a ton of fr** writing/freelancing tools direct from Shery at http://WeeklyWrites.com when you order this title!) 

4.      Timecross’d: A Love Story Out Of Time by Sean Thompson http://filbertpublishing.com/timecrossd.htm 

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If you can answer “yes” to that question, you could be in big demand, earning big money, writing just a few hours a day from anywhere you choose to live.  

Beth’s Note: This course is not inexpensive, but it’s worth every penny. Where else can you receive hand-written feedback from successful, working copywriters? This company had a big hand in launching my writing career. Maybe they can do the same for you…. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~ Feature Article ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

The Midwest Book Review says, “[Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success] is an absolute ‘must-have’ for any freelance writer looking to earn a steady living”. 

The Freelance Writer’s Report calls Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success a “good book to start off the new year. With 48 chapters plus the introduction, you would do well to read and follow a chapter a week for the coming year”. 

Here’s an excerpt from this fabulous book: http://filbertpublishing.com/bob.htm 

Introduction 

Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. 

--Mark Twain

I have never had a best seller, despite having written and published more than 50 books. Script writing holds no appeal for me; I’m a print guy.

But I have consistently earned more than $100,000 a year for the last 20 years, and often as much as $500,000 a year by running my freelance writing business as a business. 

 I’ve done nothing else special. Everything I know about making a living as a freelance writer, I learned by trial and error. There isn’t a mistake in the book I didn’t make; not a technique I haven’t tried.

Now you can learn from my “expensive experience” (as writer Dan Kennedy calls it), avoid my costly errors, and achieve financial security in a fraction of the time it took me. Believe me: If I can do it, anyone can.

Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success is a collection of my articles and columns written about writing, for writers, by a full-time freelance writer who makes a very good living at it. It exists for one purpose only: to help you double or even triple your writing income by treating freelance writing as a business, not a hobby or dilettante activity.

How can you achieve a six-figure income as a freelance writer? If you treat your freelance writing as a home-based business and work at it steadily, providing writing services for clients who need them, you can build up a steady base of customers who give you repeat business and lucrative assignments year after year.

According to the National Writer’s Union, freelance article writers who specialize in writing magazine articles typically sell 3,000 to 4,000 words a month, because of the tremendous amount of time spent looking for work – researching and pitching article ideas. At that rate of production, you can make $36,000 to $48,000 a year, provided you are paid $1 a word – a rate most markets no longer come close to.

So the chances of you getting rich writing articles are, at best, slim to none.

Therefore, you must pursue another type of writing, or at least supplement your poetry, fiction, scriptwriting, or article writing habit with it. I call it commercial writing. Commercial writing is any writing that helps a company sell or help sell a product or service, or helps an organization promote an idea or cause. Examples include:

• Advertising Copywriting – magazine and newspaper ads, TV and radio commercials, for everything from software to shampoo. 
• Technical Writing – user manuals, online help, and other instructional materials for using hardware and software. 
• Online Writing – corporations and small businesses alike need tons of content for their company Web sites, not to mention their e-zines (online newsletters). 
• Fundraising – letters to raise money for politicians, political parties, churches, museums, and a variety of other nonprofits. 
• Direct Marketing – direct mail, telemarketing scripts, and other copy to sell products and services by mail. 
• Public Relations – press releases, media kits, and articles for promoting a company, product, or cause in the media. 
• Corporate Communications – assignments can range from ghostwriting a speech for a Fortune 500 CEO to creating multimedia presentations for a company’s annual sales meeting. 
• Ghostwriting – writing speeches, articles, and books for executives, individuals, and organizations to publish under their byline, not yours. 

A couple of writers I know specialize in writing annual reports. Their average paycheck: $10,000 per assignment. Do one annual report a month at this rate, and you will gross $120,000 a year.

Others I know specialize in writing “marcom.” Short for “marketing communications,” marcom writers churn out press releases, product sheets, sales brochures, trade ads, Web pages, and other marketing materials for corporate clients. A good marcom writer can easily surpass the $100,000 a year mark.

Writers handling commercial assignments such as these can make good money, and they can do so with regularity, year after year.

Even if you don’t want to handle commercial assignments, there are ways a freelancer can reach $50,000 a year or in some cases even $100,000 a year without them. To do that, you’ve got to develop work habits that put you in the top 5 percent of writers when it comes to fees, productivity, efficiency, selling, and self-promotion. You’ll find these tips and strategies in this book, too.

You are unlikely to become truly wealthy, but you are likely to become financially secure if you work hard at it, invest your earnings, and live conservatively, well below your means. I became a self-made multi-millionaire while still in my 30s.

To make six figures as a freelance writer, you need a business plan. Fortunately, it’s simple, and looks something like this:

1. SET YOUR ANNUAL INCOME GOAL. How much do you want to earn? Pick a specific number. Start with $100,000 a year.

2. SET YOUR WEEKLY AND DAILY INCOME GOALS. If you want to make $100,000 a year and work 50 weeks a year, you must gross $2,000 a week from your writing. If you work five days a week, you must earn $400 a day.

3. DETERMINE THE WRITING SERVICE YOU WILL OFFER. Can you find something to write that will earn you $400 a day? If you can – and believe me, you can – you are set to earn $100,000 a year as a freelance writer.

To earn this amount of money, you will either have to pursue some type of commercial writing – or double or triple your productivity and profitability from their current level. The areas mentioned earlier in this article – advertising copywriting, technical writing, corporate communications, public relations, online – can all enable you to gross $100,000 a year.

The nice thing is that you can choose to write about subjects that interest you, for organizations that pay you extremely well.

Another key advantage of commercial writing is that clients come to you with assignments they want written, rather than you having to pitch ideas to them. This eliminates the enormous amount of time the conventional freelance writer wastes in formulating ideas with no compensation, making the freelance commercial or business

writing twice as productive and three times more profitable than magazine and newspaper work.

Here’s the best part: If you dream of writing the Great American Novel or an epic poem, you don’t have to give up that dream. As a freelance commercial writer, you largely set your own schedule. After a hard day of writing direct mail packages, I often like to put in a pleasant hour or two writing a magazine article or working on one of my books.

In these articles, I show you what types of projects you can write to earn $100,000 a year as a freelance writer, how to find clients, how to get them to hire you, how to be super-productive, how to write better and faster, and how to excel so they come back to hire you for additional assignments again and again.

I do have one favor to ask. If you have an idea you’ve used to make money as a freelance writer, why not tell me about it so I can share your success with readers of the next edition of this book? You will receive full credit, of course. Just e-mail me at rwbly@bly.com.

You can also find out more about me at my primary Web site www.bly.com. And you can get personal one-on-one coaching from me to help start or jump-start your freelance writing career at www.selling-yourself.com.

Good luck!

http://filbertpublishing.com/bob.htm  

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Master Copywriter Vicky Heron and Copywriter/Publisher Beth
Erickson prove that when you put two Copywriting Masterminds
together... powerful things happen and you get to reap the benefits!

Recently Vicky and Beth got together at the Filbert Publishing headquarters in Kandiyohi,
Minnesota to work on the new book they're co-creating when something far out happened...

You see, they were taping conversations to include in their book when they started getting
way off track. Suddenly they found themselves talking about copywriting, getting clients,
building their E-zines.  When they played the conversations back they discovered they had… 

Click this link to read more: 

http://filbertpublishing.com/copy.htm 

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2005 Action Plan to Jumpstart Your Writing Career 

I can always tell when I stray from my morning schedule. 

If I stray from my schedule in any way shape or form, my day suffers, my creativity wanes, and life in general becomes uncomfortable. 

Here’s what I always… usually… do to begin my day: 

The minute Peder (my dear son) is off to school, I enter my office and sit. I proceed to spend a minimum of 20 minutes reading. 

What do I read? Boy, I don’t know any writer who doesn’t have a huge cache of books waiting for their turn in the reading spotlight. I’m sure you have a ton of books waiting to be devoured…. 

I pick up my book… and in doing so ignite my creativity. Ideas begin to flow freely. 

But most importantly, I begin to believe, deep in my heart, that I am indeed a writer. 

And a not-too-bad one at that. 

And the productivity that rises from that confidence propels my day forward in a meaningful direction. 

This week, begin each day by reading. 

And have fun doing so. 

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Paying Markets 

Gettysburg Review

http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/gettysburg_review/sbmssns.html

Granta

http://www.granta.com/guidelines

Iowa Review

http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/guidelines.html

Indiana Review

http://www.indiana.edu/~inreview/general/guidelines.html

Descant

http://www.descant.on.ca/submis.cfm

Doubletake

http://www.doubletakemagazine.org/mag/html/editorial.php

Downstate Story

http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfgeh/dss/guidelines.html

Event

http://event.douglas.bc.ca/submit.html

Georgia Review

http://www.uga.edu/garev/submissions.htm

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We Recommend: 

Writing For Dollars! The FREE ezine for writers featuring tips, tricks and ideas for selling what you write. Receive the FREE ebook, 83 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY WRITING when you subscribe. Email to subscribe@writingfordollars.com -*- http://www.WritingForDollars.com

WRITERS FIND MARKETS EASILY - Worldwide Freelance has a NEW fully-searchable Markets Database. Discover writing markets from North America, Europe, Australia and other places. It's free, so come and try it out here: http://www.worldwidefreelance.com

Are You Ready To Find Your True Calling?  Discover exactly what it takes to create a more satisfying and balanced life doing work that feeds your soul. Learn how you can replace your job with work you really love... and gain the freedom, flexibility, and quality of life you deserve. http://www.ChangingCourse.com

Instantly Download Jumpstart Your Writing Career and Snag Paying Assignments Here: 

http://booklocker.com/bookpages/jumpstart.html 

Don’t Forget to pick up your copy of The Almach. Reviewers are calling it “Haunting,” and “A Great Read.” http://filbertpublishing.com/Almach.htm

E-Mag And Web Site Owners! Did you know that Filbert Publishing has an entire cache of articles you can use FREE. Copy and paste these articles straight into your web site or publication. Here’s the URL: http://filbertpublishing.com/articles.htm 

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Writing Etc. 

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© 2005 Filbert Publishing