How Writers Make Money

Updated on October 4, 2016 Marcy Goodfleisch moreA professional career coach, Marcy has helped hundreds refine their resumes, improve their interviewing skills, and advance their careers. Want to be a Freelance Writer? If you’re reading his, you probably want to succeed as a writer. Maybe you’d like to publish a book (or two, or three), or be a regular columnist for an online news site. Or perhaps you’d like to market your pieces to well-known publication. But you can shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t follow a few guidelines to help you become known, get a following, be adored by your editors and, best of all, earn money as a writer. Freelancing, by nature, implies you sell your work to a variety of publications or through more than one outlet. Getting the assignment is one hurdle, but pleasing editors and giving them writing they will love is another.

You need to build your reputation well, and keep it on a professional level. Here are a few unwritten rules to follow. Some are easy and some less so, but all are important tips to help you build a solid, well-paying career as a professional freelance writer. The first rule to becoming a successful writer is to work well with your editors. Learn to take their comments and criticisms as lessons in how you can improve your craft. Freelancers and staff writers all have editors. If you’re blogging or writing on a host site, you are your own editor, which puts you at a handicap, because writers truly do need those extra eyes to help improve their work. Your editor will catch errors you missed, or that you didn’t even recognize were mistakes. Ideally, you should make corrections yourself, because you’ll learn that way. If you habitually use it’s rather than its to show possession, a good editor can help you break that habit by catching it and having you enter the changes.

More than likely, though, an editor will make changes electronically and you’ll never notice them. If you want to learn, and you want to get on their good side, pay attention to edits made in your documents and learn from them. Editors will often change sentence structure; this is another place to learn. See if the change makes the sentence flow better or changes it from passive voice to active voice. Does the sentence suddenly have more impact or clarity as a result of the edits? You can learn from this. Some editors (the good ones) will change a word or two and substitute one that helps bring out your meaning. This is a good opportunity to see how the first-line reader (the editor) reacted to your work and improved it to make the ultimate reader understand it more fully. Editors are generally not known for being nice and polite. Usually, they’re rushed and on deadline, with multiple priorities tugging at them.

If your editor sounds blunt or abrupt, just detach from the tone of voice and listen to the content of what he or she is saying. They have a job to do, and you’re part of the means to get the job done. If you want to see some traditional ‘editor’ personalities, watch All the President’s Men, which is one of the best movies I’ve seen about the relationship between writers and editors. In almost every scene involving editors, there’s sarcasm, abruptness, impatience and many other sterling qualities editors sometimes display. But the end product (in the movie and in real life) is a far better piece of writing than if the editor weren’t in the picture. It’s called a deadline for a good reason. You’re dead if you don’t meet it. If you’ve accepted an assignment to turn in a story by next Monday, get it in on time, if not before.