Making Your Living Online

I have several sides to my self, as we all do. There is the Personal Safety Management side, the eWriter side (with a facet that focuses on the Philippines ) and another that likes it here, among eWriters.

Because so many claim to make a fortune from the Net and yet so few really do make anything approaching a living wage, I feel it is important that somewhere on the Web there is a site dedicated to reality writing. This site is all about what it is really like to be an eWriter and trying to make a living from your writing. I will address many issues relevant to eWriters but feel free to comment and discuss, even suggest topics of debate.

I have to confess I am impressed with the two books I have published through Create Space.com. The quality is very good, but that reflects the hassle they give you to make sure your files are up to snuff. Covers are particularly demanding but that is a good thing. One of the major issues many have with self publishing andPOD is the fear the quality will not be there. Without the editors and publishers and proof readers and all the staff of the big houses it is true a lot of stuff is very poorly put together, but not StreetWise Publications’ books.

Shipping was listed as taking  over a month to get the book to Sydney but both books ordered have arrived in about a week, same time frame as with Lulu. The cost of the books are about half what Lulu charges, a significant saving. The down side is they pay by cheque which costs me $15 to clear and takes 40 days, while lulu pay into PayPal. Time will tell if enough books are sold because the big draw with Create Space is they sell hard copy on Amazon.com.

For us here in Australia it is already past 1pm, 1 January, 2012. This new year will see me changing focus in some ways. The Philippines related books and associated web sites (60 or so at last count) are in the hands of a manager. We hope to develop them and sell off a few. I might sell the books as well and give someone a good little online business to retire there on. I am involved with writing reams of content for a new Internet Safety web site, including eBooks and lots of free downloads. The research has been interesting to say the least and quite enlightening. There are a lot of threats lurking out there in cyberspace for the unwary and unprepared, but nothing you can’t guard against.

I have written a novel, ‘Twenty Severn Seventy’ which is entered into the 2012 Miles-Franklin Award. That was my contribution to NaNoWriMo, quite an experience. I am also writing another novel which will not be written in just 28 days, plus it is going to be double the word count. That novel is the only fiction I plan to write in 2012. I am going to focus on selling the writing that I have on the inventory of StreetWise Publications, focusing on promoting and marketing because that is the end of the business I need to learn more about. StreetWise has several excellent authors and some very good writing on the shelves. Jeff Lassen, John Aalborg, Vivienne Fagan, Aaron David and Jonathon StCyr as well as the Rorschach School of authors and of course my own material. In the four or five days previously sales of Vivienne Fagan’s ‘Hilda Hopkins’ series have gone through the roof thanks to some marketing efforts we targeted. We have proof of concept, now I just need to multiply the efforts over the range of titles we hold.

Writing a great book is only the beginning. Getting it on line, published in print or whatever is the next step. The real mark of success is, of course, selling lots of copies. What is even better as a sign you are doing something right is when you have several books for sale and readers of one buy the rest. Sales of Vivienne Fagan’s books have included several multiple orders of all six in the series as well as the same customer coming back to buy the rest after trying the first couple. Always a great sign. On top of all this, once school goes back I will be tutoring and lecturing. I won’t be writing for any essay writing sites, while WriteRight (Oxbridge) have paid me for my work, it has been in dribs and drabs and always after weeks of waiting past the promised payment date. Not to mention a lot of excuses and promises and I am still waiting for the last $50. I am sure they will pay but I write on time and ‘superbly’ according to the owner, I expect to be paid properly and on time without having to chase them for weeks on end. Then again, I can’t get their web site to load so who knows? So even if you get paid it can be a chore. I will look for more content writing opportunities for 2012 because thanks to the Google Panda slap of 2011, quality content is once again a must have to rank your site highly. I’ll talk more about that and those opportunities during the year.

As the academic year ends I am faced with a hiatus of some six weeks before the students I tutor return to school and nearly eleven weeks before I can expect any income from the next round of tutoring. My community college courses won’t start until early February and it will be one to two months before they bear any fruit, depending which courses run. Providing people sign up for them and they actually eventuate. Book sales are a bit of a mixed metaphor. Any Amazon Kindle income takes 40 days to clear the cheque and costs $15 for the service. I expect 30%US taxes will be withheld from the totals soon, too, making it even less lucrative. My other distributors haven’t gotten around to paying anything on sales to date and my Escape Artist pals in Panama are very hard to pin down for payments. They pay but it takes dozens of emails to make it happen. My WriteRighteam earnings come in sporadically and I am owed several hundred dollars from them and of course Adsense is a ‘who knows how much this month’ affair.

These are the very real issues a freelance writer/publisher/lecturer/tutor puts up with for the love of his craft and the ability to write for a living. Christmas is upon us and for many it is a time of not so good cheer as so much pressure seems to be brought to bear to have a good time, to eat and drink to excess and to buy presents galore. On top of that the unneeded extras such as Christmas crackers that are a waste of time and space on the table; I mean, who wears the silly paper hats anyway? Or keeps the rubbish plastic thing inside with the lame joke and what have you. I am so over that as my 13 year old daughter would colloquialise.

Six weeks of five kids at home means they will need airing from time to time and that costs money. You can only walk to the local park so often before even the dog says ’nuff! Going anywhere costs money, either for fuel and parking or train fares and often it is cheaper to drive and pay for parking than pay for seven train tickets. You have to be switched on and only travel on the Sunday Funday discount fare, pick free but fun destinations and take your own food and drink. It requires more thought, more planning and more preparation, in all, more effort and that is something we have been weaned off of in this day and age. Which is all thanks to those who make their money flogging all the effort saving stuff that costs so much. Sadly, too many have bought into the belief you need to spend ‘that much’, it is what things cost today and so on. You need to spend money otherwise you are depriving your kids.

Rubbish! Your kids want your time and your attention far more than a ride on a $2 roundabout or a new plastic made in China toy to add to the hundreds they already have littering their bedroom floor. Not so long ago people knew they were not rich and even not really middle class and they had values and standards and did the best they could with what they had and they had a fun time doing it. It wasn’t always easy but they survived and times got better but then we all fell for the advertising con, that we deserved to live the middle class lifestyle even if we had to go into debt to do it. In fact, we were failures if we didn’t have tons of credit.

We live credit card free and our only debt is out mortgage, the rest are expenses we can cut out as and when we need to. We are working class and proud of that, even though I have a Masters degree, we have a mortgage, private health insurance, own two old cars and a block of land in the country. We just don’t see the need to pretend we are what we aren’t, nor do we feel any shame in not being huge ‘successes’ with the big house, new cars and all the stress and worry of losing one or both incomes. My wife gets to stay home with the kids while they are young and once they are in school, she will work and her income will be a bonus we never had before, so we don’t plan to spend more like most but rather save it and make better use of the windfall.

Orwell wrote of the biggest fear of the middle class being that they would fall into the working class below them, but the reality was that they had nothing to lose ‘but their aitches’. In other words, the stress of trying to maintain a lifestyle because of peer pressure when the income didn’t allow it was phenomenal. The working class, on the other hand, were already down there and had nothing to lose, nowhere to go but up and thus none of the stress. Of course they had their own worries but in modern, 21st century Australia, we will neither starve nor want for medical care and we are very grateful for this. The worst that could happen is having to go to the Church Free Dinner Night on Wednesdays. That is a very well patronised charity project in my neighbourhood and lots of poor in our community avail of this generous and very Christian act. I know because when I drive past, the car park is always packed! How poor are we really if we can drive to the soup kitchens?

I sent off the seven copies of ‘Twenty Seven Seventy’ along with a money order for $75, the entry fee to the Miles-Franklin Award for 2012. The die is cast, the rest is in the lap of the gods, or the judges. If I had it to do all over again I would do what so many writers say one should do with a manuscript once you finish it. Put it in a drawer and leave it for a few weeks, then come back to it. W.Somerset Maugham, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway all said to do that and no doubt so have many others. Just reading the book in print at last instead of onscreen I have seen so many things I would like to change but it is too late. I can change the text but not the printed copies that need to be submitted. So it will remain as it is and it will be a lesson to be remembered. Next year I will probably write my NaNoWriMo entrant in as short a time but then spend a lot longer on the editing and re-writing stage. Maybe print a copy to hold in my hand and work with that because as soon as it is printed, the bad things leap off the page at you like they never do on screen. This is the beautiful thing about eWriting. The technology allows us to do so much more and to edit, proof and change as we like. In the not so olden days it was a heck of a lot more work, a lot longer process. Perhaps though, that wasn’t altogether a bad thing.

‘TWENTY SEVEN SEVENTY’ was written, proofed, edited, formatted and published in 30 days and so far the people who kindly helped to proof and edit as I wrote it are all saying how much they like it. Perhaps it’s a little too early to say but it is indicative that you don’t have to agonize over every comma and preposition to write a readable novel. I also like the short novel length, 50,173 and hope to see more offerings instead of the seemingly mandatory mega length books that are really just the size they are because of set up costs and buyer perception of value. I think if a story can be told well in x number of words, why try to drag it out just to justify the economics of the exercise? Easy to say when you run your own publishing imprint as I do (StreetWise Publications). That is the true power of the internet. It has allowed writers to regain authority over their work and, provided they are willing to invest the time and effort to promote their books, the chance to actually make some money from their writing.

I have just finished David Morrell’s ‘The Successful Novelist’ and I recommend it to all writers. He makes it clear there is an awful lot of work for the author once the writing is done to help sell the book I personally see little value in not doing it yourself. For now, check it out at smashwords.com or by clicking the link below for the paperback version from lulu.com

It is my birthday today, I am 50 years old. While that is not much of an achievement for those much older, given I was dead for 8 minutes 28 months ago, I think it is worth celebrating. I was placed in an induced coma and given a 20% chance of surviving. Well, here I am and I plan to stay around for quite a while longer. So what about those who never made it to 50? George Orwell died at 47, just as the fame that had eluded him all his life finally caught up. Jane Austen never made it to fifty, either. Anne and Emily Bronte and Sylvia Plath passed away young, as did Anne Frank. Shelly, Byron, Keats and Kerouac as well as Stephen Crane. Hemingway did himself in with a shotgun at 63 but W.Somerset Maugham was in his 90s. Speaking of fossils, there are still a couple of great writers aging away as I speak including Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

So what is age and what does it give the writer other than a lot of material and a certain smugness to know you made it this far? When I was a young bloke I knew I wanted to write fiction but I decided I would wait until I was 40, then I felt I had something to write about. I was 35 at the time so I got started the next day, no point waiting. I haven’t written much inthe way of fiction of late, too busy with the stuff that (hopefully) pays money but this month I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I have thoroughly enjoyed crafting ‘Twenty Seven Seventy’ and I plan on writing more about this post code in the future. This is where I live and the people int he story, as will be those in the short story collection to follow, are the people I share this community with.

Where I live is a low socio economic area in western Sydney and it has a reputation as being rough. Well there are plenty of rough people here but there are many who are good and decent and appreciate art and literature, too. We just got a terrific new library here in Mt Druitt and it is the equal of any in the upscale, money suburbs. It gets used a lot too and that has to tell you something. So why shouldn’t I write about where I live, the stories here are as rich as those anywhere in the world. It’s how you tell them!

It is the second day of NaNoWriMo and so far I have written 8318 words and am well ahead of the average required. At this rate, according to the Stats page of my NaNoWriMo.org account I will have it written by the 12th. I won’t because on that day there is a 50th birthday party I must attend, right after I tech one of my courses at the local community college. As it is my birthday party I will be attending and at the end of it probably in no fit state to write coherent passages.

So how did I manage so many words in so little time. Part of the reason is that I planned the novel before I started writing. The other secret is that the 1st of November started in Australia many hours before it began in the USA where the contest is managed from. A bit of a head start you might say. The big secret though was the pre planning. I had the idea all sorted including characters, plot, structure, setting, conflict and theme, all written down before the start. That meant I had time to write a few sample paragraphs and get my voice sorted out and clear up a few issues. Not that I have ever been one for writer’s block, just doesn’t happen to me. If I can’t think of something to write about topic X, I write about topic Y instead. By the time I finish or get bored with Y, something has come to me for X.

I also don;t have any paying clients at the moment other than my own Internet Safety Essentials web project where I am providing the content and writing the units of learning for the online writing course. Those I do one week at a time so that the students don’t get swamped ahead of time (my excuse) and as work is down and it is the worst time of the year (more bills than income opportunities) I need to spend time marketing my business.

So the NaNoWriMo is actually recreational writing for me, even though I fully intend to publish and sell the finished product. I like the way you have a word target to reach within a set time period and you know there are many others out there also writing away. I have several other writing projects in various stages of undress I need to address. One is an autobiography, the others are novels/novellas. I used to write a lot more short stories until I started writing for a living. Now, like a mechanic with a clapped out car, my writing tends to be factual for clients more than fictional for my pleasure. Now, all I need is that six figure advance and I can turn my hand to novel writing full time!

I signed up for NaNoWriMo, or the National Novel Writing Month world wide event that kicks off 1 November. Get a 50,000 word novel written in 30 days. Sure, why not? It will be a bit of motivation. I plan on 2,000 words a day over 25 days with the last five for editing.

The novel is titled ‘Twenty Seven Seventy’ which is the postcode for the area I live in, one of Sydney’s toughest according to some. We have our share of dross, but also some good people and I plan to let the novel demonstrate that through looking at five main characters who are drawn together by a single event that changes all their lives. Lives that are pretty typical of the mix of people we have in this post code.

I haven’t done any fiction writing for a while, too flat out with paying stuff so it’s time to write a bit for myself. I have other projects I could apply to the event but I would rather start fresh on 1 November, and keep in the spirit of things. I’m not sure if you win anything other than being a part of a great literary event around the world and getting a novel written (hopefully).

I’ll keep you apprised and I hope I get some feedback from the organizers. I got nothing at all from that Writer’s Digest writing competition I entered a year ago, not even a sorry you didn’t place email. Paid my money but then heard no more which I think is what happens with most of these competitions. I might hold one of my own and see how much I can make in entry fees! The NaNoWriMo is free, by the way. You gotta love that.

While my other site, ‘The eWriter Project‘ is cleared of hackers and robots, I will post this here for now. I was involved in a thread on LinkedIn Group ‘The Freelance Writer’s Connection’ that devolved into discussing the need for a degree to get some online writing jobs. I am going to develop a qualification for eWriters because there isn’t one I can find so far, to date. Not only that, many experienced and talented writers, without degrees (as I was until 2009) or the wherewithal to get one are missing out on writing work because of this lack of a piece of paper. as highly as I rate my MA(Writing) as an achievement and know it has improved my writing considerably, I was still pretty good before that and made a living from my words nevertheless.

This will be another part of my ongoing mission in life, The eWriter Project. I think I can contribute to writing and writers by helping them use this amazing gift we have, the Internet, to improve their lives and add value to the lives of those who read what they write. I hold the alphabet, language (particularly my own, English language, a true world language) and the ability to communicate in so many ways in the esteem of gifts from the Gods, or God if that is your deity. Knowledge not shared, not put to some practical use, even if this turns out not to be a success, is wasted. I haven’t any time to waste. I will never forget I died in 2009 and came back from the brink and as Louis L’Amour said, we might not know the hour of our going, but we can do something about the way in which we go. And the way we live before that hour.

Back in the olden days, when electric typewriters had golf balls or daisy wheels and the Wang girl was the only person in the office who knew exactly what a word processor was… we had to work a little harder for our clients. By that, I mean finding them, not actually working for them. That hasn’t changed and if anything, might even be a little more involved as the market is currently flooded with laid off American professionals whose only flaw is their spelling (that’s a little Aussie humour, so smile Yanks, your colleagues in the English writing world feel your pain and our time is yet to come, no doubt).

We have gone global in a big way thanks to the Internet and while it has created many new opportunities, it has slammed a fair few doors well and truly shut also. Print media is feeling the pain and so too the thousands of journalists laid off as news media corporations seek new revenue streams other than print media advertising. All of these educated, experienced and talented professionals now have to compete with the barely literate looking for ‘content’ for their junk web sites. These ‘clients’ jumped on the SEO bandwagon that believed lots of ‘content’ with tons of keywords and backlinks would rank their web sites higher than everyone else, many even used software to ‘spin’ dozens of versions of an original piece to spread the love even wider.

This worked for a while but this year Google sent the Panda after them and slapped the sass out of the SEO world. Now quality content seems to be back on the top of the agenda. The damage, however, has been done. Many writers with English as a second language (L2) were able to fill their rice bowls by writing tons of rubbish for a buck a ton. Writers from India, Pakistan and the Philippines in the main were able to get the work on offer and produce a product acceptable to the clients who were able to beat down the price simply because it is a lot cheaper to live in the third world than the first or the new. Fair enough. But now the online writing employment sources such as Elance and Odesk are flooded with writers willing to write for the cost of a chapatti and the thrill of eating for another day. I don’t blame them. If I were one in a billion competing for space, food, air and everything else I would do whatever I had to do to survive and feed my family. So I am not bashing the L2 writer, or even their clients who expect everyone to write for such low reward. Blame is a waste of emotion and energy let alone time and my time is worth more than the $2-5 an hour they seem to think it is.

So back to the thrust of this post. In the old days, I had a boss called Henry. Henry was a likeable rogue and above all else, a survivor. He once told me (in fact he said it many times) that there are two kinds of people in business. Finders and Grinders. Finders find the work and the Grinders grind it out. Finders make more money than Grinders and they never get dirty but it isn’t as easy as just doing the work. If it were there would be more Finders than Grinders and that is not the case, never was, never will be. He spoke the truth.

If you can find the work, you can find the Grinders to do it. Better to take a share of ten jobs than to grind your way through just one in the same amount of time. To get to that position though you need to be able to find enough work for you to grind and keep your nose above water. So on your way to becoming the Finder of the century in your chosen profession, how do you actually find work? Once again, we go back to the olden days. Back when only cars had mobile phones and whenever we were not in our car we had pagers or beepers.In those days not every telephone in the office had numbers to punch, sometimes you got stuck with the old dial phone and that could wear a finger down if you had more than just a few calls to make. That’s why pencils had those little rubber things you could stick on the end and use to dial the number… oh the good old days!

In those days of yore I had two techniques for finding work. The first required a telephone directory, the Yellow Pages. I would choose a category and then ring everyone, one after the other, and make my pitch. I used a script to begin with to keep things consistent and to keep me on track. The objective was not to get work but to get an appointment. Today, with the Yellow Pages online and the speed and ease of email, too many people use that method but try and rush for the jugular. As everything has sped up many tend to think you have to Find at the same speed when the reality is a lot of clients need to be wooed, courted and given time to get their head around the idea of a cold call having value for them.

In those days people got so many cold calls just getting through to the decision maker was an art in itself. Today they get tons of SPAM and the problem remains, albeit slightly adjusted for the 21st Century. The other method that worked a treat and got me out of the office was to pick an area, either an office tower in the CBD or an industrial area and then work it. You would approach the receptionist and let her know you were looking for clients and ask who would be the person to speak to who could make a buying decision and would they be so kind as to give you their name and number and you would be happy to call back and make an appointment. If you got that far you would then say that since you were here would there be any chance So and So is available for a moment so you could pass on your card and let them put a face to the voice that will be calling them officially in a day or two? I had several variations on this to make it interesting for me and to cover any twists in the plot that might happen while you were in motion.

The bottom line is that it worked. It was slow, laborious and labour intensive, or if I were an American, labor intensive, but effective. Above all else it gave me a chance to see the client’s premises and make first contact with the gate keeper. I always treat everyone with respect but especially those who have some influence in whether I eat or not. I made it my business to be nice without being patronising and to learn their preferred name, use it and involve them in my business. Funny how people move around in any business or industry and over the years I would run into the same gate keepers and the same decision makers from time to time though working for new firms. Now and then I would change industry and revisit them with new services or products and it was an easy start.

You can apply these ideas to your freelance writing business. You don’t have to write for the world, or someone on the other side of it, just because you can. Why not reach out to the local business community and see how you can add value to them. Put your face in front of theirs and give them what nobody else can, especially not over the internet; your personal attention. People buy based on emotion and relationships and the internet has alienated us from our clients in a big way. It might seem more efficient but in the long run it is not conducive to building a relationship that will last. It is easier to drop a faceless contractor you have never met in person than one you have and when the crunch comes, you need every advantage you can lever to stay in business. Remember two things:

1. There are Finders and there are Grinders and if you can’t Find for yourself let alone others, you can’t Grind.

2. This is it, your life. It is not a dry run or dress rehearsal, this is the real deal and you only get the one crack at it.