Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

The all important part 2 of writing your eBook is here and is going to be an incredibly important aspect. Not only is this the part where you actually start to commit your ideas to the screen (a profound moment for any project), but it is where you start to see just how much cool stuff there is to talk about.

How Should an Outline Look

Personally, I like an extremely detailed outline – for a couple of reasons. When I used to work on projects, well before I became a freelance writer, I would just wing it. My college papers were done the night before and I didn’t outline anything. I got away with it, but I never quite learned how to balance my ideas and ensure everything was covered.

It's time to start writing

Once I started writing eBooks for my clients, that all changed. I didn’t have the luxury of winging it because someone was paying me money to ensure they got what they wanted. If I did it half-way, I’d probably just cause myself more work. So, I learned very quickly that before I started any project I would need to outline everything I could think of for their book.

With time, I learned that this wasn’t just good for my clients’ peace of mind, but for my own writing process. It makes it sooo much easier to be able to look back and see where I am between days, especially if I take two or three days off of a project and come back to it mid-chapter.

So, I’m going to show you my in-depth outlining process. Keep in mind that you can outline however you like, but to me, this is the best way is to know exactly what you’re going to write in the book from step one.

Create a Basic Outline

Start by creating a list of things that need to be covered in your book. You’ve already done a LOT of research by now (hopefully), so start listing out everything of value related to that research. If you were writing about dog training, you would start with puppy behaviors, clicker training, house training, and so on. Write it all down in one big, messy list.

Once you have that list completed from memory, take a few minutes and start researching elsewhere to make sure you didn’t forget anything. A method I occasionally use is to sift through the table of contents in books on Amazon.com and see what other subject areas I might have missed for the niche. DO NOT steal any ideas from these books – that’s plagiarism. Rather, just see if there was a general topic area that you missed. For example, if you wrote a Dog Training book but forgot to mention leash training, your book would be missing an important part. Never copy an outline from another book. This is why you create your own list first – otherwise the urge to just copy it out would be too great.

Fleshing it Out

Once you have a full list of topics, you should start filling it in. The easiest way to start doing that is to group everything in your list together by category. These categories will be your chapters. Ideally, you should have between 6 and 15 chapters, but no less or more than that. Too few chapters makes a book too bulky. Too many chapters makes it disjointed. Keep things combined for ease of flow.

Then, when the chapters are nice and organized, create a flow chart of what will be included in each chapter. Here is a sample of what an outline for this blog post would be (pretend it’s a chapter in an eBook):

II. Outlining an EBook
A. Introduction to Outlining
B. How Should an Outline Look
C. Creating a Basic Outline
D. Fleshing it Out
E. Creating Notes
F. Some Tips

As you can see, I’ve separated the chapter as number 2, then added each subsection below. You can add additional subsections below that fairly easily. Microsoft Word or Open Office SWriter both have easy features to do this automatically.

Creating Notes

Once you’ve created your organized outline, go through and add a short sentence or set of notes next to each marker to remind yourself for later what will be included in that section. Sometimes it can help you to remember what details are most important in that part of the chapter. Here’s an example:

E. Creating Notes – Describe the need to add notes for each part of a chapter. Show example.

I’ve just told myself exactly what I should write in that section, making the process much easier for me when I am in the middle of a massive writing project.

Some Tips

If the above seems a bit vague to you, it’s on purpose. Everyone’s outline is a little different and you need to find what works for you. But, I want to be sure I give you some parting tips to keep you from being totally lost when you get started:

• Don’t Try to Do Everything – Don’t try to cover everything in your niche. It would be impossible. A good eBook is as long as it needs to be to provide value to your reader. For that reason, aim for between 8 and 10 solid, useful pieces of information, fleshed out into chapters or subchapters as needed. If you write on 20 or 30 different topics, you may never get done.
  

  Never understimate the value of research

• You Can Always Add or Delete Things - Don’t feel like your outline is written in stone. You can always come back later and change anything you want from it at will. I like to keep it open whenever I’m researching or working on a book. That way, if I find a new idea or decide an old one is no longer good, it’s easy to delete or add.
• Do Your Research – Don’t create an outline on only topics you know about. You should be willing and able to go out and do research on things you may not be 100% familiar with. This will add value to both the eBook and your experience.

The ideal outline is one that will prepare you for the writing process. It will create an organized timeline by which you can write your eBook without getting too overwhelmed with potential topics. If you can do that, you’ll be set when it comes time to start writing.

Next Time

In the next post, we’re going to discuss how to conduct research and gather information for your book. It may be dull, but it’s the backbone of all good content.

Writing Guides ebooks, freelance writing, how to write an ebook, internet marketing, Writing Guides

So, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this site for a while now. I even bought a new domain name (anthonychatfield.com), but I took a look back through the old web stats and it seems like it would be a bit of a waste to move everything over when I have a decent page rank and a whole lot of links (however old they may be). So, I’m going to stick with the good old goofy domain name and see what can be done with it.

Up to now, it’s been a jumble of just about everything you can imagine having to do with me. I’m going to give it a bit of a jump start in the coming weeks, mainly because I’ve been spending so much time lately working on my career and all things writing.

Hopefully I can offer some halfway decent insights about writing, freelancing, and marketing in general (at least from my semi-newbie point of view).

Observations and Thoughts freelance writing, Freelancing

One of the number one things I get asked by people wondering how I got involved in the copywriting field is what I studied in College to get here. To be fair, I’ll admit up front that I was a Creative Writing Major with a focus in fiction and exposition. I wrote a lot and I have a degree to back it all up. It doesn’t really support my argument that you don’t need any formal training to do what I’m doing, but let’s just forget for a moment that degree and take a closer look at the things you really need to be effective as a copywriter. These are only a few of the things that go into writing. I have a few more that I’ll add in future posts. 

A Keen Eye for Language

While I won’t say that you need any kind of formal training to be a writer online, I will say that you need a keen eye for what makes language work and how an English sentence is formed. If you don’t read very often, haven’t written anything since high school and often have a hard time writing the memos on your checks, this job might be a bit hard for you.

But, even then don’t let it get you down. To develop a keen eye for the language, you need only to spend a bit of time understanding how sentences work, how words flow together and what is attractive to the human eye. It might not seem like it, but words are just as visually pleasing as a picture of the sunset or the vase your nephew made for you.

One of the number one things I tell people to do when they start writing for the first time is to read their first couple of articles out loud. This was an exercise I learned in Middle School and it quickly taught me to listen for things as I write. If you practice enough, you don’t have to read outloud anymore and your brain will start recognizing patterns that are effective without having to hear them. We’ll go into a bit more detail on how online copy needs to be structured for the Internet reader later, but things like cadence, white space, sentence length, word choice, and use of punctuation are all vital aspects of the flow of language that you’ll need to master.

Typing Skills

This is just plain simple and is something that anyone can improve upon very quickly. But, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to type quickly. Not only must you type quickly, you must type accurately, and consistently. In any given day, I might type between 8,000 and 15,000 words. That amount of text will take me between two and a half and six hours of hard typing. It might seem like a lot, but you’ll build up to it over time. When I first started, I might be lucky to write up 4,000 words in a day and 1,500 words an hour.

Not only do your fingers learn to start keeping pace, your brain will start learning how to develop thoughts and put them into position as you write. I’ll discuss this more later but it all comes down to practice, practice, practice. Most of what you learn and become better at in this job is intangible. But, trust me when I say that if you practice you will get better.

Ability to Focus and Self Motivate

If you want to work at home and write for a living, you need to be able to focus on what you are doing and above and beyond anything else, you need to be able to self motivate yourself. You cannot be effective at writing for a living if you spend your time watching the Simpsons or walking your dog, or doing chores around the house during your allotted work hours.

It’s hard to hear that because half of the allure of working at home is having the freedom to take breaks, adjust your schedule and move around at will rather than being stuck in an office for 8 hours a day every day. But, especially when you get started, you need to be able to maintain a steady schedule. The easier you make it for yourself to slack off, the harder it will be to get up to a point where you’re doing a job and not trying out a new hobby.

For the first six months I always recommend setting aside incrementally larger amounts of time every day. This is vital because if you start out trying to work 8 hours a day, you’ll burn out quickly, especially when learning. However, if you start out with 2 or 3 hours a day in the first week and build up to 8 hours a day by the fifth or sixth week, your mind and your body will be working full time before you know it.

Ultimately, this is the kind of job that you can do for 4-5 hours a day, 4-5 days a week and make $40,000 a year doing, but it is going to take anywhere up to a year to get to that point. It takes time to get higher paying jobs; it takes time to build up your stamina in typing (and thinking that much) and it takes time to build up your resolve enough to spend that much time working in your own home every day. 

Freelancing freelance writing, make money online, writing for money

A blog is a great tool for prospective online writers because it is free, easy, and great practice. The number one thing you can do for yourself when attempting to get into a freelancing career is write regularly. That means you need to find something to write about (or someone to pay you).

Since thinking of things to write out of thin air is not the easiest thing in the world and because you’re not going to be able to get people to pay you just yet (we’re still assuming you have no references), blogging is your best bet. Here are a few things that blogging does for a prospective writer:

Builds a Portfolio

When you first start out, you have absolutely nothing to work with. You won’t have any work to draw upon except for some old high school or college papers and if you’re older, you may not have written anything in years. A blog addresses these things by providing you with an outlet to build a portfolio. For this reason, you need to watch what you write about (no profanity and always write with the idea that a potential client might read it someday), and make sure to write constantly – if you write a post a day for three months you’ll have 90 posts to draw from for inspiration and samples later on.

Creates an Audience

When you blog regularly, people will eventually start to read what you write. They will stumble upon your blog through search engines, blog databases, and readers and will either be intrigued or bored by what you say. Either way, their feedback will help you develop your writing style and engage an active audience about your writing.

Develops a Style

If you have not been writing for a few years, blogging can be an invaluable tool to help reestablish your writing style. Many people don’t spend much time writing in their careers and if they do it’s too dry to count as a style. Writing blog posts and articles will require a certain flare and style that will become uniquely yours.

Fine Tunes Grammar and Spelling

If you haven’t been writing or even if you have and haven’t had to sell or submit anything for review, fine tuning your fundamentals is an essential part of the process. Learning the ins and outs of grammar and spelling will save you a ton of time and energy when you start submitting your work for money.

Develops Contacts

Having connections is a huge part of being a successful freelance writer. Clients will recommend you to other clients, give you repeat work and help you find new clients if you develop a working relationship with them early. Start taking down email addresses, developing contacts and getting to know people online through your blog – you never know when those contacts will come in handy.

Builds Up Typing Speed and Efficiency

By getting yourself to type a certain amount of text every day you will quickly build up a more efficient, higher quality typing speed and efficiency that will allow you to make more money, turn around projects faster and maintain higher quality that will make clients happier. Less edits and fast turnaround equals lots of repeat business and the ability to ask for higher rates.

Freelancing freelance tips, freelance writing, make money online

I’m taking a break from my “informational” posts and the novel I’m working on because I don’t feel like delving into anything too deep right now. My computer got a virus last night and shredded by files to little pieces. Luckily, when I was bored a few weeks ago, I took the time to back everything up properly and now perform regular backups simply because I often get bored and I might as well keep it up to date. I didn’t lose any files this time around and I was

Not quite melted, but that Trojan did a number

amused by the fact that it was merely because I was bored – seems like an odd reason for my computer to remain intact, but I’ll take it. 

 

I suppose, that’s what working at home comes down to though. Last month was incredibly boring – I had zero work for about 16 days in a row leading into the week after Christmas and technically I had nothing to do because of it. However, instead of sitting around and playing Halo 3 (which was mighty tempting), I organized my files, backed everything up (saving my computer yesterday in the process), did my taxes, cleaned the house, and performed a half dozen other chores that I never would have done otherwise. It worked out pretty well. It’s all about the self motivation – something that can plague any good freelancer if they get sloppy. 

I wasn’t supposed to be going on about freelancing though, so I’ll leave you with that. I’ll be back tomorrow with another exciting segment in my ongoing web-novel: sounds goofy doesn’t it. Oh well, it’s fun to write.

Freelance Lifestyle being bored at home, computer problems, freelance writing, working at home

If you’ve been working in this business for a while, you know a few things – first of all, you can never count on there being work for any definitive period of time. Freelancers are nervous people. We tend to ebb and flow with the surges of work as best we can. Ideally there is some money set aside for those times – no one wants to be broke in hard times.

Second, we begin to learn when the business gets lean and when it surges. For example, this year December was the slowest month I’ve seen since I started this business. That’s not to say there wasn’t some work out there, but it wasn’t the right kind of work. People were asking for the moon while paying peanuts and while I’m not above scaling back my operations and taking lower paying jobs when the times are tough, no one is going to get my services for $5/article. I did my penance at the bottom of the pile, taking those rates, and there’s no reason to go back to it. 

That said, December was full of Project Managers with no budget left at the end of the year looking for people to write things at a slashed prices. I don’t know what kind of quality they ended up getting for that kind of money, but I’m not guessing all that much. 

Which of course brings me to my point. There are always slow times out there – anytime a holiday rears up (almost any holiday btw), your clients will start ignoring your emails or disappearing for a few days at a time. Toss in the end of the year and you’re going to get low paying jobs in between poor communication and lean work. But, if you know this is going to happen you can plan for it. Most of all though, you need to remain confident that when that time is over, you’ll be able to find work again. It comes back – it almost always come back. Being a freelancer on the Internet is like working for the largest corporation on the planet – there’s always something to do, you just need to keep at it. The work will come to you if you’re there to take it and do the footwork to find it. 

I did my job though – kept from complaining about how slow things have been and even offered a bit of sage advice (if I do say so myself) in the process. Here’s to a prosperous New Year and some new jobs in the not so distant future.

Freelance Lifestyle bad times for writers, freelance writing, getting work online, slow freelancing, writing online for money

Every now and then someone asks me where I find my work. I usually tell them “Elance” even though I actually get about 75% of my own work from repeat clients at this point. But my partner gets most of his work through Elance and if I’m out of work for any reason I start bidding too. 

So, what is it about Elance that makes me willing to pay $40 a month and almost 10% in project transaction fees (that’s more than sales tax almost everywhere)? It’s a necessatiy. No matter how you look at it, if you’re a freelance writer who makes their money on the Internet, you need this website to survive. You might go three or four weeks without using it at a time, but when you need it, you really need it. 

The nature of writing freelance (or programming, designing, or translating for Elance’s many other users) is that you never know for sure that the next month is going to bring in enough work to pay your bills. You could line up more work for the next six weeks than you’ve ever seen in your life and you could still end up broke a month or two later. It’s just how the job works – you never really get to relax. So, having a profile on a website where you’re trusted, respected, and have plenty of experience is an absolute must. Think of it like your safety net – you hope you never need it, but you damn well better make sure it’s there.

And while there are other websites out there that offer services very similar to what Elance provides, none of them do it quite so well. In any given week, the Writing and Translation section alone will have more than 8,000 unique jobs. That’s a huge volume of content. If you have a good profile and bid realistically, you can usually expect to land around 15% of your bids – you’re going to get work. If you just sit back and wait for repeat clients, craigslist ads, and poorly posted projects to get back to you from the other websites, you might be so lucky to get enough work to pay your bills.

It’s expensive, it’s a bit confusing (they redesign that site every other month it seems) and it can be incredibly frustrating to outlast the underbids from overseas or the project listers who think Elance is a place to get where they can get $1 articles, but the site will keep you afloat when you need it. If nothing else, it’s just nice to have a security blanket of sorts to keep you semi-comfortable with your work because there’s nothing more frustrating than constantly having to worry if you’ll be able to pay your bills or not.

Freelance Sites elance, freelance career, freelance writing, online writing sources, writing for money

I have wanted to be a writer for a while now. Not “since I was a little kid” while, but a good long time nonetheless. Of course, when I had these visions of literary wonder, I was going to be sitting around a massive house with a few hundred words a day to write for a major magazine, newspaper, or novel. Of course, it’s not the same thing as what I’m actually doing – that is being a pen for hire, the guy who does all the dirty work for websites across the globe. 

I’m not complaining about my job of course – being a freelance writer is probably the best job I’ve ever had or will ever have and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. That said, there ends up being a huge difference between writing because you love it and writing because you have to do it to pay your rent and keep the Simpsons DVDs up to date. 

When I wrote in college, I wrote because I loved it. That’s about all you get out of it when you’re paying thousands of dollars for someone to “teach” you how to produce a short story. Right now, I write because it pays the bills – all sorts of bills by the way; more than I ever thought would be possible. This isn’t a new realization by any means. I have seen the effects of work in action many times before. When I was a kid, there was nothing I wanted more than to ride the lawnmower around the yard – I’ll bet you can guess how that turned out. 

And in the last two years or so, I’ve had plenty of jobs that I thought would be a lot of fun, but the longer I worked on them, the less fun they became. Writing guides for video games? That should be awesome right? Turns out that when you start looking at everything in a game as a sequence in a technical manual, it’s pretty dull. Eating out and writing reviews? Well, it could be fun if A) the food was good everytime or B) you didn’t have to think of new and exciting ways to describe the word “spicy”. 

Again, I’m not complaining. My job is great and if you’re getting into freelance writing, I can guarantee that you’ll be happy with your new lifestyle. But, if you’re getting into it for the love of writing, you’re going to be pretty crestfallen pretty quickly. 

My advice – get a really relaxing, mindless hobby. It helps to balance out how much you use your brain when writing all day and allows you to clear the slate so you can work on private projects – things like short stories or that great american novel. I like to read cheesy fantasy novels and play guitar hero. My brain gets to shut down for an hour or two and I don’t feel like writing more is only another chore when it is really something I dream about doing most every day. 

You’re going to have enough trouble already separating your personal life from your work if you start working freelance – create barriers and good ways to wind down and you can avoid feeling like the writing you do for the love of writing is the same as all that other stuff you scribble out to pay your gas bill.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, make money online, writing career, writing for money

Freelance writing is, by definition, anything but a business. You scavenge for work, pander to your clients, and spend more time worrying about how you’ll pay your bills than actually doing work to pay said bills. That said, if you are moderately successful at all that juggling, it will eventually turn into a business, whether you want it to or not. 

When does that fateful moment occur though – that your long time hobby, and short-time means of feeding yourself grows into something more substantial. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. First off, the goal is almost always to make more money so that your freelancing career isn’t so hard to maintain. When you manage to pull that off, you’re halfway there anyways. You have the clients, you have the drive, now just comes the fun part – all of the finances and paperwork. 

We’ll skip that part for now though. I don’t much want to relive the terrorizing part where I spent so much of my time this last year, but I will say that eventually it just makes good financial sense to upgrade your resources. It saves time on taxes, helps you find new clients in your area, and makes it much easier to find help with your work when you get a bit behind. 

Keep an eye on things though if you’re looking to keep your freelancing as a side hobby. If you get too good at what you do, it will balloon into something much more in no time.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, make money online

Running a business is a trust game – if someone doesn’t trust you, they sure as heck are not interested in giving you their money for your products or services. Would you go into an electronics store where every item was sold out of box for retail price? Probably not. But, building trust offline is entirely different from doing it online – you don’t have a store front to put a face to your business. You have a website – and websites are notoriously bad at conveying any kind of emotion or human face of your business. That’s why you hear constant reminders to do the little things. Put peoples’ pictures on your site, write a blog in a casual tone and send out personal emails to stay on a friendly tone with people.

It’s all part of the way in which people deal think about what they’re going to buy. So, what does this all have to do with the post title, or freelance writing for that matter? When you start talking about freelancers, you have a very interesting dilemma.

First. freelancers are by nature floaters. They go from project to project building reputation and using that reputation to get bigger, better projects. They don’t have a solid location or image to cling to – they are amorphous – it’s how they survive. 

But, people don’t trust the amorphous. They want stability, experience, and quality all at once. So, how do you convey those qualities without actually opening a store front or plopping down a few thousand dollars on websites, advertising and everything else a good “stable” business needs. 

You start by creating the “image” of a stable business. A few months ago, I worked on a project for a client that needed a book about local search. I create a fake plumber and added his name to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Live Local, and a half dozen yellow page and directory sites so I could take snapshots of everything. Of course, you need a phone number to verify those listings and I had to use one I could answer. Suffice it to say that in the three days before I turned all of those accounts off, I received 54 phone calls for my imaginary plumber all based on the illusion of a stable business. People see an address and a profile that appears in multiple locations and they assume you are worth trusting. 

Toss up a Google Maps location, add yourself to local directories, and put as many business references as you can up online and you will get more business – I can almost guarantee that. If someone sees “Joe’s Writing Services” and Google’s the name to find 14 listings in YellowPages, Yahoo! Local, and Citysearch among many others, they assume you’re legit…even though you wrote them all yourself. 

Quality writing doesn’t always get the job done for freelancers in these economic times, so you’ve got to think outside the box – build up your profile across the next in multiple niches and be where your potential clients will look for you.

Freelance Lifestyle business planning, freelance writing, growing business, make money online