Secret #26: Cultivate your Garden of Referrals

Anyone who’s been in this business long enough and made a decent living will tell you exactly what I’m about to tell you: when you build up a strong base of people who will refer you clients, you can do away with every other kind of marketing you’ve ever done.  Direct e-mailing to ad agencies?  Gone.  Ads in local publications?  Gone.  Surfing the freelance job boards?  Adios.  When you reach critical mass, you’ll have all the business you can handle and then some without lifting a finger or spending a dime to get your name out there.

But, of course, you’ve got to plant and till that garden of referral heirloom tomatoes, don’t you?  That’s the hard part.  However, it’s SO worth it.  To illustrate, I gross an average of about $120,000 a year as a ghostwriter and book doctor, and I don’t do a single bit of marketing.  My website even stinks.  It’s more out of date than M.C. Hammer’s balloon pants, and it stays that way because I don’t need it.  I have agents, book designers, editor and past authors referring me new work all the time.  Now, I don’t always take the work; sometimes I’m too busy, sometimes it’s not a good fit, and sometimes the author can’t afford me.  But I get enough work via referral to keep me buried and constantly busy—yes, even in this economy.  And I’m going to share you with you the ways to make that happen for yourself.

1. Do stellar work and be ultra-dependable.  Nothing is more important than this.  If you want gold-plated referrals, you need to become a savior to your clients in whatever area of writing you’re practicing.  Deliver superb copy to an ad agency that’s on a tight and desperate deadline.  Pinch hit for an editor with an article to get done, space to fill and a reporter who decided to vanish to Las Vegas.  Step in to rescue a book whose first ghostwriter has botched the job, saving the bacon (and commission) of both the agent and author.  To reach savior status, you’ve got to produce awesome work, hit your deadlines, come through under pressure and be cool about it.
2. Network.  Get out and meet people, and I don’t mean on Facebook.  It’s all well and good to have a Facebook and Twitter presence, but I don’t have a Twitter account at all and barely use Facebook, and I’m always busy.  Nothing is a substitute for face-to-face contact.  Go to conferences, meetings, awards dinners and so on, and hand out cards.  Let people know what you do.  Writing is a scarce skill these days and there is always a need for it.  You want 100 people walking the avenues of commerce and media who know you and can recommend you.
3. Ask for the business.  Let people know you’re always open to referrals and would love it if they would send you some business when it comes along.
4. Reward the ones who refer you great clients.  I always send people who refer me a great new author or project a gift like an Amazon gift card, or I pay them a finder’s fee.  It’s important to say “Thank you” whenever you can, because aside from making your solid-gold referral sources more likely to keep bringing you business, it’s simply the courteous, right thing to do.

It’s demanding to maintain the level of quality and dependability that lead to such a strong referral stream.  But man, is it rewarding.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #25: Blog for a book

Dan Poynter, the self-publishing guru, says that “No one should die with a book inside them.”  Apart from the fact that that sounds more like a problem for the emergency room than a writer’s studio, most people do die with their book inside them.  Finishing a book-length manuscript, not lack of talent or a good idea, is the principal barrier to most folks living their dream of completing a book.  Life gets in the way: work sucks up hours, kids need attention, and so on and so on.  Then, as Pink Floyd says, ten years have got behind you and still no book.

But your faithful writing pro has a solution for you.  It’s one that I’m actually using myself to complete my first book.  Whoa, you say.  First book?  Tim, you’ve written something like 30 books!  Yes, but they were all for other people.  At press time, I have never written a book of my own.  I’m too busy being paid by other people to write theirs.  I’m a whore but a proud whore.

Anyway, I’m finally working on my own book.  As a matter of fact, you’re reading it.  You see, my strategy is to blog for your book.  The trouble with writing a book is that you feel like you’re committed to crashing out massive bricks of text at a time: 3,000 words, 5,000 words.  It’s horribly intimidating.  You think, “My God, there’s no way I can get all that writing done with my schedule.”  So you don’t do it, again and again.  Repeat.  No book.

Instead, write a blog about the subject of your book!  Go to LiveJournal or WordPress or Blogger and start a blog.  Then write it at least three times per week.  Each post can be a chapter or part of a chapter, but the point is you’re writing without feeling the pressure to crank out massive knots of text.  Let’s do the math: if you write three times per week at 500 words per post on average, in one month you’ll have written 6,000 words per month.  In a year, that’s 70,000 words, a full length book.  Voila.

It’s kind of like sneaking up on your own writing goal.  That’s what I’m doing with this blog.  My goal is to write 100 secrets, then turn each into the chapter of a nice long book on making a living as a freelancer.  You can do this with essays, tips, anecdotes, even fiction.  The main thing is to trick yourself into writing a small amount regularly so that over time, you build up a large amount of copy.  It’s like walking three miles for exercise three times a week: over a year, you can lose 15 pounds by doing nothing else.   It’s the slow accumulation model for writing a book, and it can be your salvation if part of your personal goal set has always been to get something between covers besides your significant other.

Now, go start a blog already.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #24: Work like you like

One of the biggest mistakes inexperienced writers make when they try to settle into a regular paying writing routine is shoehorning themselves into a regimen that does work for them.  They feel that if the last pro writer they spoke to said she works for seven hours straight every morning from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., they must do the same thing.  But if that’s not the way your mind works or the way your family works, your writing ain’t gonna work, either.

Writing is hard enough when you’re not stifling your creativity by forcing yourself to work in ways that you’re not comfortable with.  Ideally, you should feel free to work in the manner that makes writing most enjoyable; at the very least, you should work in such a way that you can be productive, even if you’re not leaping for joy at every keystroke.

For example, I have a short attention span and I like to multi-track my mind.  I don’t say multi-task because it’s actually quite rare that people can do more than one thing at a time.  But at any one time on a work day, I might be writing three different chapters in three different books, reading two online newspapers, writing this blog and doing research.  That’s just how I roll.  I’m a “burst worker”: I might write for two hours in the morning, take four hours off, come back and work until dinner, then get my kids to bed and write from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.  It all depends on how I feel.

I might also jump between my detached office, my kitchen and a coffeehouse in the village of Winslow (where I’m writing this now) or Seattle.  I love working in coffeehouses because I like being surrounded by people and activity.  It works for me, though it might not work for everyone.  The point is, I have a chaotic routine that enables me to be productive even when I’m overwhelmed and tired.  You need to develop the same thing.  It might involve the window of time you write, where you write, the surrounding environment or other factors I’m not even thinking about, but it doesn’t matter so long as it works for you.

There is no right way to write.  There is only the routine and environment that empowers you to think clearly, be creative and get a lot of work done fast. Figure out what that is and go for it.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #23: Facebook Yourself

Unless you’ve spent the last five years in a crater on the moon, you know that Facebook is the hottest thing to hit the Web since porn.  Well, and of course there’s Twitter, too.  The two sites seem to be joined at the hip in a kind of social networking/marketing pas de deux, but that’s because they work.  You can use social networking sites to grow your writing business and attract work you might not have pursued otherwise.

Very simply, starting a Facebook page is an instant way to connect with hundreds of people and increase your personal contacts.  I was resistant to it because I don’t have the time to cruise around and play Mafia Wars, but when a client finally nagged me (thank you, Jen!) into Facebooking myself, I reconnected with friends as far back as the sixth grade.  By starting a personal Facebook page, you can let the world know you’re a freelance writer.   This is valuable because there is a great deal of prestige associated with being a professional writer.  It’s one of those things most people wish they could do but can’t or won’t.

An even better way to leverage Facebook is to start a page for your writing business.  This lets you baldly promote yourself and invite people to become fans.  You can link to online portfolio samples, use the page as a temporary business website until you get your site launched, and probably find a lot of key contacts in your field of writing who have pages of their own (Facebook has more than 200 million users, not all of them active).  Into this category also falls Twitter, the 140-character micro-blogging annoyance that, despite my best efforts, has become HUGE.  Why don’t I like it?  Well, because I think it’s inane to share every move of your day with strangers.  I’ve long thought of launching my own spinoff: Shitter, a micro-blog where you could only post while on the toilet.  Seems just as useful; at least you could type sitting down.

But Twitter is a big deal because it’s mobile and quick and easy.  Now, writing is not an especially mobile profession, so it’s not as useful for a writer as for, say, a trucker.  But if you’re in the field doing research, a few Tweets here and there can grab some attention.  I still prefer Facebook, but since Twitter is free, why not?

Finally, get on LinkedIn.  It’s a professional networking site more aimed at businesspeople and business.  People come there all the time trying to connect with colleagues and find vendors.  Again, it’s free and there’s zero downside to having a presence on the top social networking sites.  If nothing else, you show the world that you’re a savvy pro who knows what the latest tools are.  Branding, baby, branding.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #22: Practice Concision

Most writers write too much.  Meaning, they use too many words.  I can be a verbose bugger, but this post will be an example of concision.  That is, use the words you need and no more.  Precise language, short sentences.  Yes, I’m violating grammar rules by writing fragments, but here’s the thing about grammar rules: fuck them.  You want rules, teach English 101 at a community college.  You want to get more work, read.

I see it in book proposals, ad copy, manuscripts, speeches, you name it—writers using 40 words to say what could be said in ten.  It’s a competitive disadvantage for you as a writer.  Ad copy is always short; the average radio commercial has gone from 60 seconds to 30 seconds to 15 seconds.  Book proposals need to be brief out of respect for a busy editor’s time.  Books are still a long-form product, but even they are getting shorter, and having a contractual commitment to deliver 70,000 words is no excuse for having 20,000 of them be as pointless as male nipples.

Why are most writers not concise?  Because they don’t practice it.  Look at it this way: one of the goals of great writing craft (not to be confused with storytelling, which is a different animal; I’m talking about the technical practice of any kind of writing) should always be stripping down the idea to the minimum number of exquisitely precise words.  It should become a game and a personal challenge: “In how few words can I say this while still having an impact on my reader?”  There is such a thing as too brief as well as too sloppy.  Here’s an example:

Wordy and sloppy: “He pushed the boy, who fell backward to the floor and began to cry.”

Too brief and lacking in reader connection: “He pushed the boy down.”

Just right: “He threw the boy to the floor, where he wept.”

In the first phrase, “who fell backward” is completely unnecessary, as is “began to.”  Much can be implied by the skillful writer.   The second phrase strips away all the power by reducing things to subject, predicate and modifer.  The just-right option adds more propulsive verbs and creates more of a picture in fewer words.

Learning to write well but sparsely will give you an edge in landing all kinds of work, because editors, publishers, creative directors and other decision makers admire the professionalism and craft of someone who can say what needs to be said quickly and precisely.  It makes their jobs easier.  Just don’t charge by the word.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #21: Minimize Your Meetings

Man, it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  Between being under the weather and incredibly busy with deadlines, time and energy have been scarce.  But I’m back in the fray with an important point about making a living: don’t waste time.  Common sense, no?  Well, no, at least not for a lot of people.  One of the things I like best about the freelance writing life is that I have the power to assert my own control over how, when and if I meet with people.  That’s the key: having a choice about meetings.  All too often in corporate life, people substitute meetings for actual productivity.  But when you’re a self-employed writer working at home, you have a lot more discretion over whether or not you meet with someone in person, via phone, via online meeting application like Webex, or not at all.

In general, I’ll make the claim that at least 50% of the meetings in my business are completely unnecessary for me to do my job.  They’re primarily for the client to develop a comfort level with me or feel like they’re in control.  Many times a meeting is worse than a waste: I recently paid for my own travel to meet with a publisher about a book only to discover later that there had been a prior meeting with the author to discuss issues with the book that I wasn’t privy to, and no one told me about it.  So not only did I waste my money traveling but I didn’t get the information I really needed.

My policy regarding 80% of meetings is very simple: I’ll meet in person if it’s a last resort.  It’s kind of like technical support escalating a trouble ticket for your new PC, with me asking a series of binary “if, then” questions:

• Do we really need to meet?
• If yes, then can we exchange the information via e-mail?
• If not, can we do a phone call?
• If not, can you come to me for a meeting?
• If not, then what’s the best way for me to optimize my time in coming to you?

In other words, if I have to travel to your city, can I also schedule meetings with other authors, clients, agents or editors?  Can I do research for another project?  Or can I bring my family and after our meeting, have a mini-vacation?  Most of the time, e-mail and phone calls are enough.  I’ve written at least half a dozen books for people whom I’ve never met face to face.

The other twenty percent of meetings?  Those are the ones I enjoy and want to take: meetings in downtown Seattle where I can just walk on and off the ferry from Bainbridge Island, meetings with people whose company I really enjoy, or just meetings that get me out of the house for a while, which is refreshing.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with meetings.  They’re kind of like bees or politicians: they’re beneficial as long as you don’t let them get out of control.

Secret #20: Track payments on a spreadsheet

Financial management is not the forte for most writers, nor was it mine when I started freelancing.  Heck, it’s still not—something that, as the son of an accountant, I don’t get.  Nevertheless, I’ve had to learn to manage payment and billing data as a matter of survival.  When you’re busy, it’s so incredibly easy to lose track of who owes you what, who’s been billed already and so on.  Keeping track of your billing and cash flow is vital.  As my pal and author Jen Groover says, numbers are the lifeblood of your business.

Here’s what I recommend: learn to use Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers (if you don’t already) and set up a very basic spreadsheet to track all your billings.  Here are the columns you need to have:

• Client name
• Project (since you could be doing several projects for the same client)
• The deadline
• Your fee for the project
• Terms (50% in advance, 33% in advance, 33% on delivery, 30 days net, etc.)
• First invoice sent (date, invoice number, amount)
• Second invoice sent (date, invoice number, amount)
• Additional invoices sent, which could happen if you were doing a large project like a book (date, invoice number, amount)
• Invoices paid, yes or no?  If paid, what date did you receive a check?
• The unpaid balance still due for the job

I have found that this last column, the unpaid balance, is extremely valuable.  As I wrote in a past column, succeeding as a freelancer in, in part, about managing your cash flow.  When you know how much money you’re likely to have coming in over the next 30 to 45 days, it takes a lot of stress off.  Plus, when you track all this you’re much less likely to forget to bill a client when a job is done.  You’ll also avoid double-billing, which can make clients mad and embarrass the hell out of you.

My other trick with this goes back to the posting about using online calendars.  For each project that has a payment-on-delivery aspect (such as a book editing job where you might receive 1/3 of your money when you deliver the finished first draft), create a calendar alert for the day after the deadline to remind you to bill the client.  Of course, you have to deliver at the deadline, but that’s up to you.

Billing in a timely manner, not double billing and knowing the terms of each job is part of your value proposition for your clients.  Especially if you’re dealing with ad agencies, PR firms, corporate communications departments or periodicals, they are accustomed to working with vendors who bill quickly and accurately.  Doing so adds a professional patina to your relationship, and that’s only going to benefit you.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool?  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #19: Get organized with a calendar

When you juggle as many deadlines as I do (to illustrate, I’m currently handling final revisions for 5 books, writing 3 others and writing one book proposal), staying organized is EVERYTHING.  If I couldn’t do it, I’d be dead.  I’m lucky enough to be a Mac user, so I can use Apple’s awesome iCal application to track all my phone calls, appointments and deadlines.  It’s a godsend.  So today’s secret is, if you want to handle a heavy workload and make the healthy income that comes with it, use some sort of calendar/organizer tool.

If you’re a Mac user, you probably already have iCal as part of OS X.  What, you don’t use iCal?  Do you like pain?  Do you LIKE missing deadlines and flaking on phone appointments?  DO YOU HEAR ME, MAGGOT?  Sorry, started channeling Lou Gossett, Jr. from An Officer and a Gentleman.  Where was I?  Organizers.  If you use a Mac, check out iCal.  It will become your bestest friend.  If you’re on a Windows machine,  Yahoo Calendar and Google Calendar are the cream of the crop here.  They’re free, they’re Web-based so you can access them from anywhere, and they’re rich in features.  Yahoo Calendar integrates contacts and calendar better, while Google Calendar has a much cleaner interface, but they’re both awesome.

Another site that I love is RemembertheMilk.com, which is a task management service that also comes in an iPhone application.  Hell, the name alone makes it worth checking out.  There are a bunch of other free services online like Todoist, Toodledo and Voo2do (the fact that these names exist at all is testimony to how few good URLs are out there anymore), so test drive a bunch and find what works best for you.  These are the qualities I find most lifesaving in a calendar application:

• An interface that lets me create new events quickly
• Multiple options for alerting me that I have an upcoming event, including e-mail, IM and text message, with audio
• Month, week and day views

What makes Apple’s iCal application so great is that if you get your mail through the Mac Mail application and a message comes in that says, “How about we have a phone call at 10:30 Thursday morning?”, you can create a new iCal event with a mouse click.  That rules.

Anyway, if you’re going to be a pro, get pro tools.  An online or computer-based calendar is one of them.  It will save your sanity and probably your ass more than once.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #18: Network, Network, Network

Early in your career, you will probably need to find a decent percentage of your work through the online freelance writing websites I’ve talked about before.  That’s typical.  But as you progress and (hopefully) develop a longer and longer list of happy clients, you’re likely to need to rely on online ads and other sources less and less.  Eventually, you’ll get about 95% of your work from relationships—and the sooner you can get to that point, the better.  That’s why you’ve got to network until you’re blue in the face.

Networking isn’t easy for some writers.  Ours is a solitary profession and some writers—how can I say this politely?—let their social skills slip until they’re basically mumbling trolls with bad haircuts.  Was that diplomatic enough?  Simply put, we get comfortable behind our keyboards and get nervous about stepping out into a social situation to shake hands and give out business cards.  Fine, but if you’re going to make a nice living and enjoy the writing lifestyle, remember the good reasons to network:

1. It’s fun to get out from behind your keyboard and meet people, you hermit.
2. It’s free marketing.
3. It works.
4. Relationships are the absolute best way to get incredible new business.

The word “relationships” is key.  That’s all networking is: meeting people, letting them get to know you, coming through for them when they need you, turning them into fans who want you to do well and letting that affinity for you drive them to refer you to new clients.  So you don’t have to go out and be a slick self-marketer.  A perpetual self-promoter is about as popular as a fart in church.  Just get into environments where people who are in the industry for which you want to write will be gathering, hand out business cards, give people a brief (very brief) precis of who you are and what you do, and for God’s sake, do a lot of listening.

Of course, what makes networking into an income-generating monster is performance.  Once you meet an ad agency creative director, when she calls you to write a radio campaign, you’ve got to deliver incredible work right on the deadline.  Just like a plumber, chiropractor or pet sitter, you’re a problem solver, only you do it with words instead of an adjustable pipe wrench.  If you come through repeatedly for your contacts, they will love you and refer you to others.

I can attest to this personally.  These days, I have relationships with four literary agents, about 30 past authors, a dozen editors and several book designers, all of whom constantly refer me potential projects or just flat out bring me books that already have publishers and need a ghostwriter.  I turn away work all the time because of this, and because my network has talked me up so positively, I have multiple authors right now who are putting their projects on hold until my schedule opens up so I can write their book for them.  That’s not boasting.  It’s just an illustration of how powerful a network can be.

How to network?  Find out about the events that relate to your favorite or most lucrative type of writing in your area.  If you’re writing books, go to writer’s conferences, trade shows like Book Expo America and publishing events. If you’re writing ad copy, attend meetings of your local ad club and advertising awards.  Search Meetup.com for meetings of writers in your region.  And just go to social events like symphony opening nights, charity auctions and such so you can meet people who know people.  I’ve landed five-figure books at events that had nothing to do with writing just because I met a guy who knew a CEO who wanted to write his biography (ego, how do I love thee, let me count the dollar signs?).

Try writer and media professional websites like MediaBistro.com and of course, Facebook.  There are a million ways to connect with people who can bring you business.  Just get out of your chair and make it happen.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.

Secret #17: Know which clients to turn away

Early in my freelance career, I didn’t feel as though I had the luxury of turning away any business.  I would say yes to every prospective client because I worried about getting enough work to pay my bills.  As a result, I worked with some people and companies who were a real pain in the ass, including a furniture and cabinet company that was the single most joyless, stressed out, doom-and-gloom organization I’ve ever seen.  But as time went along and I gained a strong network of happy clients and became more confident that I could always create or find more work, I started turning away clients I didn’t want to work with.

I immediately found my working life improving.  I was working with fewer people and companies that didn’t pay me on time, made unreasonable demands or gave me useless feedback.  I was working with fewer assholes.  I was spending less time on pointless revisions and in meetings that should never have been held (including the time I was in the process of traveling 100 miles in rush hour traffic into Los Angeles for a meeting with the client of one of my ad agency clients—an abusive company that treated the agency like a dog—when the CEO called in mid-trip and canceled for the third time that day, asking us to reschedule for the next day; I refused).  I had more time to enjoy the writing life.

So one of the major keys to making a great living as a writer and enjoying the life has got to be knowing which prospective clients to send packing.  Give them a referral, say you’re too busy, lie through your teeth if it makes you feel better, but once you get to a certain point in your career, you must start saying “No.”  What are the reasons to turn down clients?  These are the best ones I’ve run across:

• The person or company seems unpleasant and rude
• They balk at your fair fee quote
• They don’t respect what you do
• They won’t work with you to come up with a fair deadline
• They have a reputation for screwing writers
• They won’t pay you an advance

Basically, if someone I talk to about writing a book is evasive, tries to “sell” me on how wonderful the deal will be for me, won’t shut up or is egotistical, I’ll generally pass on the work.  I’ll do it politely, because there’s no excuse for being rude even if someone is rude to you.  I’ll provide a referral if they ask for one, but then I’ll quietly alert the person I’m referring them to and let them know what the prospect is like, so they can make up their own mind.  But I’m always firm about it.  No means no.

You’ll never regret this.  If your gut says the prospective client is going to waste your time, drive you crazy, call you at home at 6 a.m. and act like they own you, shine them on.  You’ll make more money and have more fun doing work for people who appreciate the value of your writing, respect your time and who you genuinely like.

Hate this?  Love it?  Cool.  Tell me at tim@pacificwhim.com.