Among the first websites to offer the “micro-pay format” Helium.com has been one of the more interesting to watch as it has developed. I originally signed up for Helium.com about a year ago when I was researching and testing the various sites on the Internet which claimed to offer pay for writing. Unlike Associated Content, the concept behind Helium was originally based on the forum style writing that so many Internet users were used to.

Upon entering the website, Helium introduces its visitors to a variety of channels and front page content. The articles are listed by a specific title and topic within which multiple actual articles might appear. Writers can choose a topic which already has articles written and write their own “take” on that topic. Other writers and visitors then vote on which of the multiple articles might best represent the article title. Helium is unique in this regard as no other website allows members to compare and vote on paid articles in the same manner.

The money comes in when writers create articles that generate large sums of traffic. Helium places ads throughout their website and on each page. When a visitor clicks on an ad, you get a small percentage of that advertising money. The money adds up depending on the amount of traffic your content generates and how much content you are able to generate. Obviously front page content gets more traffic and occasionally, if you have written a particularly high ranked article, it can hit the front page.

Unfortunately, the main problem with Helium is that the site pays very little for page views. It’s not because they are keeping money for themselves as much as the multiple articles located under the same title do not all show up at once. To really make money on Helium, writers need to consistently rank in the top one or two spaces and hit the front page repeatedly.

Because of an ample advertising campaign, the site has grown to exorbitantly large proportions in recent months and reaching the top can be harder than it once was. To make solid money on Helium, it can take a lot of time and investment.

Of course, the point is not necessarily to make money with these articles. Instead, Helium has now integrated a marketplace that allows writers to make real money. Through the marketplace, companies and magazines will post article requests for writers to fill. Additionally, there are plenty of contests for writers that allow top notch Helium members to make a few extra dollars for their posts.

Ultimately, Helium is a great place to start for anyone wanting to get in contact with writers and practice their craft for a few extra cents every couple days. But, for a freelance writer hoping to make a few extra dollars for their articles, it is definitely not the most viable option. Even sites like Xomba pay a little better as they reimburse writers with all of the adsense payments. However, for a full feature set and a marketplace option. Helium has a slight edge.

The final verdict: when first starting out, check out Helium and write a few articles. When trying to actually make a few extra dollars, start with Associated Content and work your way up.

A lot of people ask me what I do all day. They assume that when I’m not writing, I’m just sitting around staring at the TV and throwing a frayed rope at the dog (they’re only partially right). In truth, writing is only about 60% of the freelance writer’s actual job. There are just too many little details involved in most projects to assume that I can wake up, write for 8 hours, and call it quits. In fact, if I wrote for 8 hours, I would probably lose one or two blood vessels behind my right eye.

No, there are a lot of little things you have to do when you are a freelance writer – the emails, the bidding, the edits from a project you thought you finished four weeks ago, the unsolicited phone calls from some guy in California who thinks he can pay you $200 to write 100 articles. The list is endless. Thankfully, I stopped counting my funds based on how many hours I “write” everyday a long while back.

After all of that though, there is the slight and often times not so slight process of research. It might seem like a given that many jobs require a small bit of research. For the potential freelancers out there, start bookmarking solid resources right away (no, you cannot use Wikipedia for everything). However, there is an entirely different kind of research in the freelance field – something akin to self-education.

You see, no matter how many projects you do and how far you develop in the field, eventually you will need to write something about a topic you have absolutely no clue about. I wrote 40 pages of content about Backgammon two months ago and I had never played the game before in my life. I had no idea what Backgammon was or how it worked. So, I couldn’t just research the different opening moves, I had to step back a few feet and start from the beginning.

None of my articles asked for beginner’s information, but I spent a couple of hours reading it anyways, because I wanted to make sure I understand what I was writing in the other articles. And that is the key to any truly successful freelance project – showing a certain degree of understanding. Anyone can do the research necessary to relay the 15 opening moves in Backgammon. But, the quality of their work will suffer if they think they can write about those moves without any idea what they mean or are for.

It might seem like a bit of extra work to get involved in a project, but think of it this way – you will eventually be incredibly good at Jeopardy. 

The first portfolio you ever build will look a little sparse. Don’t worry about it though. Think of your first portfolio the same as your first resume. It may be bare, but if you can sell it properly no one will notice. Unfortunately, the word itself – portfolio – has become loaded to the point of drumming a certain degree of fear into potential freelance writers when they first start.

I remember the first time I bid on a project and was asked to supply a sample. It took me an hour to dig out the perfect piece and infuse it with just the right amount of editing, tweaking, and care to make it feel presentable. It worked, and a superstition was born that forced me to spend long afternoons tweaking potential samples for potential clients before I ever bid on a project.

That obsessive compulsive urge to find perfection in a cheap, 500 word article about used RVs was what gave birth to my first portfolio and now I have thousands of samples on any number of topics that I can use at any time without second thought. And luckily, with at least two or three dozen of them polished to the point of quasi-perfection, I don’t need to spend those long afternoons prepping them.

You see, a portfolio is not a thing you create to get jobs. It is a culmination of experience. The word itself has taken on a mystique that makes potential freelancers think of it as an item of first impression, similar to the clothes they wear or how well they comb their hair. If a suit doesn’t look right in a job interview or a stray strand of hair pops up, an interviewee will feel as though they could always have looked better.

A portfolio is not the same thing though. Rather, it is an outline, formed of your work experience, of what you can do as a writer. Your first portfolio doesn’t need to show that you are as good as a freelance writer who is 15 years into the business with a few hundred clients in tow. It only needs to show that you have a talent to write, one that you have yet to fully explore but that has blossomed all the same and will impress anyone willing to give you a chance.

I remember how incredibly nervous I was about sending out samples and creating my first portfolio to upload to article websites and take with me to job interviews. It was hectic and chaotic at best. I realize only now how ridiculous that all was – hopefully you can too. Just show what you can do and your talent will do the talking.

I understand that Harry Potter is essentially the biggest literary event since the first Bible rolled of Guteburg’s press in 1430, but I have yet to understand or come to terms with the shear amount of energy some people put into caring about their favorite little wizard. I understand that some books can be compelling, but the ravenous enegy with which millions have devoured every little detail is impressive if nothing else.

So, when J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay, I was slightly amused at how much of a big deal it seems to have become. First off, it’s a book. Since when do authors come out and explain to their readers the motivations and sexual orientations of their characters. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awesome that Dumbledore was gay - it adds yet another layer of flippancy to the Christian right that has so thoroughly denounced the books because they promoted witchcraft and the like. What better way to preach tolerance than make one of the most likable and interesting characters in the series gay.

I just thought it was amusing how many people have taken up detailed conversations about the gay old wizard. Yes, Dumbledore is gay, but how does that have any effect on how you read the book (unless, of course you’re Pat Robertson…then, well, who knows what horrible plots his repressed mind is cooking up already).

It’s been a couple of years since my last year of college, but I still remember the compelling draw of the lit classes that would take hold just before I was forced to sit inside on a Friday night and read half of a Shakespeare play. That said, I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare and everything I’ve read of his. It’s almost requisite for anyone who wants to spend the better part of four years reading novels and learning how to write well.

Anyways, PlayShakespeare.com caught my eye as they have compiled a nice, complete listing of everything that has anything to do with the bard. A complete listing of all the plays, reviews of recent performances, the films, and every possible news story that has anything to do with the 16th century playwrite. Anyways, anyone interested in a more complete resource than your standard SparkNotes page, this is a great place to start.

Despite its simple nature and essentially non-existent growth in the past decade, About.com has become a very popular source of common knowledge and how-to articles on thousands of topics. With a high page rank and a few dozen quasi-experts in their fields, they consistently show up on the top of search rankings for any number of topics.

With the money About.com makes from those search rankings and the amount of traffic that tends to pour in from Google and the like, they have a bit of capital with which to ensure they hire quality writers to keep up their columns.

Basically, it’s a living, constantly adapting news encyclopedia with real freelance writers operating the switch boards for the topics that you can so easily find at random. Each article has a real name and picture attached to it, unlike so many other amalgamated news sites and for that reason, there needs to be several hundreds writers on staff at any given time.

Because About.com has built up such a steady, repetitive traffic source, it can afford to pay decent dollar to its writers on a regular basis. It doesn’t hurt that the New York Times owns the site now and tries its best to keep the quality of writing as high as possible.

Anyways, the point of all this is that About.com allows freelance writers (or just plain unemployed writers) apply to be guides on their site. In the lower right corner of any About.com page is a link “Be a Guide”. This takes you to a section that lists the available guide positions and the compensation, hiring process, and a few other choice details.

Basically, About.com pays you on a sliding scale for the traffic you generate as a guide. You write a few articles every month, upload links and track changes in a given field and About.com pays you a minimum of $700 a month. The contracts usually span a year at a time and if your page views explode enough you can make much more money eventually – About.com claims some of their guides make as much as $100,000 a year.

As a freelance opportunity, About.com borders on being a part time job more than anything. You must apply to work with them, complete a 2 week prep course and write sample materials. However, if you get chosen (they usually have around 30-50 open topics at any given time) you can essentially cover half of your monthly workload with a single job – a nice touch of security in the frantic life of a freelance writer.

I’m a huge Booker Prize fan, so I thought I’d reprint this post from Amazon.com’s Book Blog.

The bookies, and the bettors, were once again confounded, as the judges for the 2007 Man Booker Prize selected neither Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, the initial bookies’ favorite, nor Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, which the betting drove to the top odds by the time of today’s award announcement. Instead, they chose Irish writer Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which had been largely ignored by both bettors and commentators alike. Our own Anne (Bartholomew), however, just read

The Gathering and had told us to watch out–it’s a good one. She’ll chime in later on the blog with her own take.
In further Booker notes: two of the six nominees did not have US publishers when the shortlist was announced, but have since been signed. Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, gigantic and audacious (by all reports), will be published by HarperPerennial in November, while Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, based on the 1984 Bhopal disaster, will come out in spring 2008 from Simon & Schuster

With just two short weeks left, NaNoWriMo is about to commence, so I made sure to sit down and start thinking about what I would do for my book. I have been so busy in the last few weeks on vacation, getting caught up on my work (still getting caught up on my work….dealing with pain in…well, you get it…customers) and trying to get a little rest.

So, now I can start working on my NaNo planning. Luckily, I had an idea from about a year and a half ago that is ripe for the picking. To be honest, I had to dig through a dozen different lists of story ideas, half finished short stories and partially postulated novels. But, I finally uncovered the perfect story idea.

With the freelance writing taking so much of my valuable arthritis inducing time at the keyboard up, I decided I needed a story idea that would be easy to write, straightforward to plot, and preferrably incredibly simple to finish. That story idea was a hybrid science fiction novel. It sounds a bit nerdy sure, but it will be much more fun than the last two I wrote, which became so convoluted and confusing that when the 50,000 words were done I was confused out of my mind and had to step back for long enough to forget about it.

Anyways, the NaNoWriMo idea, before I forget to actually outline here is the following:

Boy meets girl
They fall in love
She disappears, leaves him a locket (he can’t open it)
20 years later - He is a pilot,  engaged, about to start training at NASA
enter Sci-Fi
The moon disappears (yes, our moon)
The locket opens, the pilot goes blind, and all hell breaks loose.

That’s the rough idea. I don’t want to throw the ending out just yet (mainly because I don’t know what it is yet), but that should show you just how campy and out there I’m aiming to go with this novel. It is only 30 days right? Why not shore it up with an easy, fun idea.

For the potential freelance writers among you - and I know there are a few - get used to the idea of a schedule that has no rhyme or reason. It’s just the way things will be. Sure, everyone will be jealous of your schedule and the fact that you never have to wake up early or that you have the luxury of taking a certain day off whenever you need to.

Don’t forget a couple of things though - you’re going to need to work a lot of times when you don’t want to. It’s a vicarious balance you need to reach and when you finally do, it’s not going to be very fun the first weekend on which you have a massive deadline looming. But it will happen, so get used to the idea now.

When you first stat writing in your free time or after work to see how well a freelance writing career will actually work, you won’t need to work on weekends, holidays or the occasional late night because you won’t be writing all that much.

Fast forward a few months and you can guarantee that your off weeks will be dull and result in poor months and that your busy weeks will be incredibly busy, stealing your free time sneakily out from under you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when it happens.

I’ve written a lot of books on a lot of topics in the last few months - most of them less interesting than you would expect. So, as you can probably guess, I know all sorts of useless information now that I probably would never have bothered with if I had not been commissioned to write about it. Ah, the life of a freelance writer.

After writing so many articles about so many random, non-sequential topics though, I feel as though I have knowledge rattling around inside me that needs to be used…or forgotten - I haven’t decided which is more important. Whichever way I decide to to go, writing an EBook is a big process and should mean something, right?

Tack on the added fact that when I write a book for a few hundred dollars and a clever marketer turns it into a multi-thousand dollar a month business venture, I get a little down.

And thus, eventually the energetic freelance writer turns into the bored, antsy EBook writer. And I decide to write my own books. Here’s the thought though for any freelance writers out there with an EBook in mind. It isn’t because I want all of the money from these jobs. I understand that I write as a ghost writer and that my work makes other people more money.

But, when you throw in all of the bonus information I now have flittering around in my head about AdWords and traffic building, I feel as though I should do something substantial besides writing books for other people - plus I can write about whatever I want. So, the new goal = write an EBook and make money off of it by myself. If that fails, write more EBooks for other people - whichever comes first.