Praise for Getting Started as a Freelance Writer Bob Bly's newest version o f Getting Started as a Freelance Writer is as good as it gets for anybody who is serious about trading words, skill, and imagination in print for a reliable, healthy income. ISBN We use cookies to optimize our website and our service. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
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Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Bly Goodreads Author. This book shows you how to start, run, and build a freelance writing business, doing whatever type of writing you prefer. The book is useful to writers, at every stage of their career. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions 2. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
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Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Getting Started as a Freelance Writer. Feb 25, Tori added it Shelves: What arrogance. I think he gave some great ideas on beginning a freelance career. However, I became exhausted from constantly hearing about how much money he makes and that he has an army of assistants that cater to his every whim.
Good for you, buddy. Now get off of the soapbox. This book should have been entitled, "Getting Started as a Freelance Writer and then becoming pretentious. May 06, Monique rated it liked it. This book has some great general information on getting published and making money writing. The focus on money-making didn't really appeal to me personally, but the author is clearly an expert in this aspect of writing. At times I was annoyed with the repetition of information and examplars.
It felt as though the author took his own advice of recycling his material into different articles and then putting them together to repackage and sell, in this case without a ton of regard for overall effec This book has some great general information on getting published and making money writing. It felt as though the author took his own advice of recycling his material into different articles and then putting them together to repackage and sell, in this case without a ton of regard for overall effect.
There were also quite a few typos, which didn't make it less readable, but felt shoddy given that this is a book on writing. Some of the advice relating to the internet was a little out of date, understandably so, given that this is a edition -- Twitter was just a baby bird! Still, references to MySpace but not Facebook?
The opening to chapter 13 that states "we live in the nanosecond nineties"? Did no one proof this "expanded and revised" edition? Is this the result of too much repackaging and recycling of material? Despite these shortcomings, the nuts-and-bolts of how publishing works was useful information if you have a limited background, and I would still recommend the book for this type of overview.
This book was easy to read, conversational, and kept my interest. The information was helpful and I'll probably be keeping the book as a reference for the future, though some of the money-talk made me cringe, as I'm not really into making a lot of money as much as I am into doing what I love.
However, a lot of it if not all of it was good advice. I felt like an apprentice in a big room of typewriters making writing sounds as people type on them and Bly was showing me the ropes. Bly has a realistic This book was easy to read, conversational, and kept my interest.
And HubSpot has a cool tool you can use to start building your own too. You can use the above image to fill in information about your ideal target audience. This works for both B2C and B2B. These are all examples; if you were into smart homes and that tech, you could probably write at least bullet points for each. You want to build a stair step to success and making good money, and for every client not in your targeted focus, you lose a step.
First, you want to get a website up and running. Your freelance writing website is going to be your home base. You want to use it as a way for potential clients to find out a little bit more about you, check out your writing samples, and hire you.
A lot of people who are trying to get started in freelance writing get stuck at this step. They make the website way more complicated than it needs to be, and that derails them from going anywhere. Anything you put on your website today can be fixed tomorrow.
I schedule time in my calendar to update my website every quarter. Pep talk over. Learn how to think about a freelance portfolio right here. The following sites let you put up free portfolios some of them will limit the number of pieces you can put up for free :. And looking for a good checklist of everything to include on your portfolio website?
Here you go:. Reading more your thing? There are some content sites out there that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You can sign up to them for free, post your pieces, and if your profile dings the special algorithm, then you get matched with a potential client.
Contently and Skyword are some of the most popular sites for this type of thing. The clients are connected with you. It should only take a few minutes to go down this list, identify the platforms that will be a good fit for you, and start signing up for them.
Remember, the more places you get signed up, the better your chances of getting freelance writing work. For the rest, my editor who is awesome, which helps serves as the main point of contact. The negative with these sites is you have to wait to be found. There is no feature for you to go in and search for available jobs. So fire up your Marvel Movies re-watch and see how many movies it takes you have over 21 to go until you get picked by a client.
Another way to go through a middleman is to work directly with agencies. In this case, they do most of the marketing and finding the client and leave you to do the writing. Once you apply to those hop on Google and do a search for agencies and send them some cold emails — follow this checklist before you click submit.
I recently moved to Portland and wanted to connect with some local agencies. I saw on your site that you do work with freelancers, so here I am!
You can find my portfolio here. Take care,. Learn more about writing good emails here. Once you have contacted the agencies in your city or town, spread out to your region, and then the country. There are tens of thousands of agencies in those lists. On the other hand, I do know quite a few writers who see a ton of success on Twitter. This is especially true of writers who focus on writing for magazines, trade publications, and other similar sites.
Lots of freelancers can tap into social media and use it to connect directly with editors, so that is probably something you might want to explore too. LinkedIn is my go-to social media channel for prospecting for new freelance writing clients. We talk a lot, I mean endlessly, about bad pitches and the things you should not do. You can apply all that stuff to LinkedIn and social media in general, too.
Here is an exact example of an introduction I sent recently to the content manager of a site I think is great and falls right in my target niche:. Have a great weekend. I wanted to connect because this person is a good writer on both this blog and a few others I found while I was internet stalking them.
And lucky for me, now they are in charge of content for a good company in my niche. When I take this approach and not slide into their messages all thirsty for work, I get a far better response rate. Part of that, of course, is because I put in the time to research on the front end.
So that means think about what they are looking for when they want to hire a writer i. It also means you need to think about what they are typing into search boxes on Google and LinkedIn and other places. What key terms are they looking for? Make sure you highlight those in all of your profiles. So I feel where you are right now.
You can learn how to embrace marketing.
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