Tamara Berry has a fantastic post over at eMoms at Home about where we writerly types can find some profitable avenues for our talents. Give it a read.
Specializing
Tamara said it best. The more experience you have in any one specialty, the better your chances of charging more for your services. I specialize. I’m able to get that $100/hr., and I’m able to land tough-to-fill assignments because of it. What’s more, articles in my particular field are paying me $1/word right now. Mind you, that’s not always the case, as magazines are often limited in budget, but it’s great work when you can get it.
Print
That brings me to another point Tamara brought up. Writing for print. We are so used to the lazy search – go out on the Internet, look for work and hey, it’s all Internet-based or something quite akin to working in a more free-formed fashion. But when was the last time we did it the old-fashioned way? When did we scour the market guides and magazine racks to spark our creative imaginations? Hmm? When was the last time we wrote an actually snail-mail query?
There’s something to be said for the speed of email. If editors are open to it, you can get your ideas in front of them instantly. So can everyone else. How the devil are you to compete with anyone and everyone sporting the very same Internet connection? Simple. Put it on paper and mail it. Hard copies are a bit more time-consuming, and yes, you do look like a bit of a rebel to editors, but guess what? The hard copy is harder to ignore. There’s your proposal. There are your clips. They’re there in a more formal manner, which raises the level of response a bit. Sure, you may still be rejected, but your editor is now going to pause long enough to mail that rejection back in the SASE you’ve included.
If you’re sick to death of the lousy ads on the Internet and scrapping with thousands of other writers and wanna-be writers for those gigs, try taking one or more of the suggestions in that article to heart. Look where others aren’t looking, and build a reputation as a specialist. You won’t regret it.