A Freelancer’s Guide To Meeting Project Deadlines

When it comes to meeting deadlines, one way to manage your timetable effectively is to divide the large jobs and farm them out to several freelancers.

Let’s say you’ve been awarded a writing job to write an e-book on childcare with 10 chapters for $2,000 over a 45 day period of time. Bid out each chapter separately among 10 freelancers and allocate, say, $100 for each chapter over a 25 day period. This way you don’t have to worry about the deadline because you’ve given you…

All About Freelance Writing

Do you love to write? Do you have a knack for making words come alive on a page? You may want to consider freelance writing as a way to make a good living from home.

Freelance writers write anything from newspaper columns to web content and even ebooks.

Getting Started

Before you go looking for freelance jobs, you should build up a portfolio of articles. You can write for your own website or blog, offer to write free articles for friends, or contact your local pape…

About Writing: Just Get Started!

Do you have writer’s block? Are you not sure where to start? Simply start writing and you are one step closer to finishing.

A Work In Context – The Paradigm

A paradigm has been described as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.”

Each writer comes at their work with a certain paradigm at work. Each writer will write with a set of assumptions about the world around them, they will subconsciously include concepts and values they find imperative. In the broadest perspective possible each writer will express their worldview in some form o…

A Secret To Getting Published

When Warner Books, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, published my first book, The Angry Clam, back in 1998, the most common question I was asked was, “What were you smoking when you wrote this book?” This was quickly followed by the second most common question, “How in the world did a 40-page, hand-written book with bad drawings of a clam get published?”

The answer to the first question was easy – pure Turkish Hashish – just kidding. (Actually, I awoke in th…

A Geek Groundswell

One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot to do, but I didn’t want to do any of it), I decided to play the Google game. This is the one where you input your own name or something else into the field in quotes to see how many search results you get. Because my most recent book, Queen Geeks in Love, was coming out soon, I decided to search the term “geek.” What I found astounded me.

I got more nearly 70 million hits from the word “geek.”

That’s million…

5 Writing Myths Busted

Don’t let your writing fall victim to these five myths about writing.

Write in Chunks to Write Effectively

Professional writers are often admired or envied for the end products they create. Yet, few look at the process of writing as an exciting career choice. And, for good reason. Don’t try to get your entire message written at once – especially if it’s an important message. Instead, think of writing as a series of intense moments broken up by longer periods spent doing something else.

For example, if you need to write an important memo, think about the chunks involved in creating it. Let’s say your memo will start with an objective, in which you outline the problem that needs to be addressed. In the second section you outline the options for addressing the problem.

8 Steps To Writing A Great Children’s Book Manuscript

Let’s face it: some kids just don’t like to read. Increasingly, parents, teachers, librarians, and editors are looking for books that will appeal to reluctant readers. When I was writing The Best Books for Kids Who (Think They) Hate to Read (Random House), I read hundreds of children’s books, old and new, that I thought would fit the bill. I discovered that there are eight qualities possessed by great books for reluctant readers, and to my surprise some of my childhood favori…

Blogging: A Writer’s Journal

A novel way for a writer to keep prospects and fans in the loop on their progress as a writer is through the use of a web log or ‘Blog’.

“This notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail.” – Eric Schmidt

This online tool has allowed many writers to share thoughts, humor, politics, and more with any and all who would visit. Si…