Every now and then I actually get round to reading some of my writing magazines. Today, I got around to reading a portion of the October 2010 issue of “ theWriter.” I started off by reading the debate over blogging article and was unswayed by the “con” side of the argument. Yes, any time I spend writing for here is time I spend not getting paid to write. Yes, I could use a different blogging service that facilitates revolving ads, but those make sites look just plain tacky.
The argument boiled down to the “pro” side wanting to use the blog to establish a base for book sales, and the “con” side from a freelance writer who had never written a book saying it takes away from paid writing. Since I’m on the book selling side, I was more inclined for the “pro” viewpoint, but I did have multiple issues with the “not getting paid” argument.
A “free-lance” writer is basically someone who spends a lot of unpaid time writing “pitch letters” (which are usually email these days) trying to get a paid writing assignment from or re-sell an article to a magazine. Yes, there are a lot of resources out there to stuff email addresses into their spam-bots, but, I’ve never understood how they “make a living.” Many claim to “make a good living”, but when you do the math, their definition of “good living” is about $40K/year and they generally work at least six days per week generating that much. You see, most magazines are broke these days. When you pitch to them and get an assignment you will get paid zero-$250 for the article 90 days after it runs…in most cases. Some magazines are gracious enough to pay upon acceptance, but, very few in this economy. Yes, some of the multi-national magazines pay a few thousand per article, but, if you aren’t Anderson Cooper, or someone of that recognition level, you aren’t getting those gigs.
The one thing I constantly read about is article re-sale. Free-lance writers pitch the same article, with a few tweaks, to non-competing magazines. Given the time investment and low pay, I would think you would need to sell the same article roughly twelve times to make it worth writing the first time. The concept is to write an article like “ Everyday Lung Damage” as a paid assignment for “Men’s Health” or one of the other health magazines out there, then, even saying that the article will be running in the pitch, sell more focused versions of the article to “Popular Science”, “Hot Rod Magazine”, “ DIY Magazine,” etc. basically rewriting the middle few paragraphs to talk about specific lung hazards doing science experiments at home, working on your car in a garage, tearing out drywall in your home, etc. It’s a lot of effort for very little pay. It takes many years to build up the reputation and contact lists to pull it off, and the number of places you can re-market an article depends on your creativity.
On the flip side, mid-high distribution magazines do tend to like to run topic related articles during the same issue month. They aren’t above coordinating it because if they all run an article or three on lung health issues in January, the news media will run some stories on lung health referencing the magazine articles, creating more buz.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that, without re-marketing, a free-lance writer pulls down about a grand a month, if they have enough connections to get an assignment every week. With re-marketing, they can juice their income to $5-$6K for a particular month before sinking back down the following month after getting several non-re-marketable assignments.
If you have a spouse that works, or live in the middle of no-where, $40K isn’t bad. You’ll never buy a nice new car, but, if you live frugally, you could survive. When you go the free-lance route you don’t have a lot of other opportunities to really juice your income. The same is true for a fiction writer. You can sell your book in hard cover, soft cover, trade paperback, eBook, and audio book formats. You can pitch to every movie studio on the face of the planet hoping one will purchase the movie writes. You can pitch to every publisher in every foreign country praying one or more will buy the foreign language rights and you can even arrange for book signings, but your opportunities to juice are severely limited. In the end, the book either sells, or it doesn’t.
Blogging can help increase the Web presence of an author and their titles, but, until you achieve the status of Steven King or some other big name author, it can’t really juice sales…it can completely torpedo them. A significant number of mid-list authors ended their blog sites over the past few years. Why? Because the fans wanted them to blog about their books (especially what they were currently writing) instead of what they were feeling today, which, by definition, was the original point of a blog.
I won’t sit here and tell you that I’ve ever had anyone email me saying they were searching for something on-line, came across my blog, and ended up buying a book or three of mine because of what they read. I will sit here in all honesty and say people who are, or one day became, hiring managers, have found my blog, skimmed through my book sites, and contacted me about doing contract work for them. I suspect other technical writers have had similar experiences.
Some professionals say a blog should have a single focus, such as an industry or a trade. I don’t. One, I wouldn’t want to set up a different blog every few moths. Some professionals say a blog should receive new entries multiple times per day. Well bully for them. I write really long entries when I feel like it rather than waste my time, and a reader’s time, tossing out six 4-line blog entries per day. Some professionals say you need to use a high end blog hosting service which will allow for Google Ads, and give you the opportunity to spew CEO ladened “articles” from places like Demand Studios to increase your search engine presence. Well, what good is a high search engine presence if your customer takes one glance at all the ads and bails?
Once in a while I’m lucky. Once in a while the manager is actually a manager at the time and they call me while they are still reading the article which caught their attention. My question for the “con” article writer then is “Did I get paid only for that article when we sign a consulting contract, or did I get paid for the entire blog?”
