Free-lance Writing Using E-mail and the Internet:
The Ultimate Portable Career

by Francesca Kelly

Originally presented March 27-28, 2000*

Introduction and a Little Background

Good morning, and welcome to the low-tech, artsy-fartsy portion of the program. I am Francesca Kelly and I am a professional free-lance writer and web publisher. I’d like to talk to you today about how to establish yourself as a free-lance writer from anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection.

Actually, writing as a career is not as artsy-fartsy as you might think: it does involve quite a lot of business and marketing skills. In a 20-minute presentation, I can't tell you how to write; but I can tell you how to get started and how to market yourself as a writer. First, though, let me give you just a little background on how I became a writer, because it's all tied up with being a "women on the move."

My world and my identity changed forever in 1985, when my husband joined the American Foreign Service to be posted abroad as a diplomat. I left a burgeoning career in arts administration as well as a somewhat less promising singing career to become "the wife of." To top things off, I got pregnant at the same time, and thus went from being an independent working woman to wandering barefoot among the packing boxes with a baby on my breast, wondering what the heck had happened. At diplomatic receptions I found that once people learned I was "a dependent spouse," as the State Department called us, they quickly moved on to someone "more important."

Five years, five different cities and another baby later, I began to emerge from my spiritual bunker and try to find myself again.

It started one day in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, as I idly began rewriting the words to the Rodgers and Hart tune, The Lady is a Tramp. Now many of you probably already know this tune: "I never bother with people I hate, etc. That's why the lady is a tramp."

I ended up with this...

I have to bother with people I hate. I can’t be normal without my air freight, I’m a dependent, I guess it’s my fate, That’s ‘cause the lady is a spouse.

I watch the packers destroy my antiques, I host receptions for visiting geeks, I shut my mouth when our President speaks, That’s ‘cause the lady is a spouse.

I go to spouses’ luncheons and teas, Feel ill-at-ease "Have we met? I forget!"

There’s no one listening whenever I grouse, That’s ‘cause the lady is a spouse!

By the time I was done writing the song, I felt as if I'd had my own private therapy session, and I knew I was on to something. I suddenly wanted to write more humor for an audience of people who were going through what I was going through. But who cared about "trailing spouses?"

Other trailing spouses, that's who.

The fact was that there were thousands of spouses, both male and female, who’d left behind interesting careers to follow their mates to all ends of the earth; people who were trying to re-invent themselves wherever they went. Because in our society, you are what you do. And if you don’t know what you do any more, do you still know who you are?

Since there was no magazine or journal specifically for trailing spouses in 1991, I decided to create my own. This is a classic example of what entrepreneurs do, although I didn’t know it yet: fill a hole that needs to be filled, while fulfilling your own need to work for yourself. So, along with another Foreign Service spouse, Fritz Galt, I launched a photocopied rag called the SUN: The Spouses’ Underground Newsletter.

We collected some essays and stories from other spouses, a mixture of irreverent humor and good healthy venting (or unhealthy whining, if you’re a "glass-is-half-empty" type of person). We mailed it out around the world with a letter asking if people were willing to spend a few dollars to get this thing in their mailboxes three times a year. They were.

The SUN's readership increased through word of mouth. Fritz and his family grew and moved, I and my family grew and moved -- but wherever we were, we managed to publish the SUN three times a year, and its content and reputation grew along with us.

When my family and I returned to the States for a Washington assignment in 1994, a SUN subscriber asked me to join her writer's group, made up of the wives of retired diplomats, all of them published writers.

"What do you do in a writers’ group?" I asked her.

"We read our pieces to each other and critique them," she answered.

I was a bit nervous about that.

"We’re all getting too old," she said. "We need some new blood."

I now had four children, having recently added twins to the family mix, and was feeling distinctly old, uncreative and tired. Flattered not only by being thought of as a decent writer but also as "new blood," I decided to give it a try.

"Bring a piece to read at the first meeting," she urged.

That made me even more nervous, but I dug up something I'd written and brought it along. Funny thing is, I never got a chance to read that piece, because one of the more elderly women in the group collapsed a half hour into the meeting, and had to be taken off in an ambulance. When they said they needed "new blood," they meant it!

The subsequent meetings turned out to be more normal. In fact, they were wonderful. With the group's encouragement, I got up the nerve to start submitting articles to magazines. At first, I received nothing but rejection slips. Then Foreign Service Journal published a piece of mine about Leningrad. Another magazine, Welcome Home, accepted a humorous piece about motherhood. And then a call came from Redbook magazine, a large American women’s magazine, offering me $1500 for an essay I’d written on marriage. Suddenly, I felt like a real writer.

But now it was time to move overseas again. How would I manage my new writing career from Ankara, Turkey? I would soon find out...

At the same time, I was wondering how I could reach many more people with the SUN. The web was exploding and e-mail was becoming the main form of communication for people living overseas. How could we best take advantage of this dramatic change in the lives of people living overseas?

In order to reach a larger audience, we changed the name of the Spouses' Underground Newsletter to the Sojourners' Network and created a website with resources and links for all people living overseas. We discontinued the print version of the SUN and launched, in March, 2000, a new web magazine called Tales from a Small Planet.

We now have six highly energetic people working on the webzine and all of our collaboration has been through e-mail. Most of us have not met each other, yet together we just created a magazine. This simply would not have been possible even a decade ago.

 

Writing from Overseas

I have also learned that it’s relatively easy, through e-mail, to manage a free-lance writing career far from home. In fact, writing is one of the most ideal portable careers. It is enhanced, not diminished, by moving around to all ends of the earth. Virtually every adventure you have can be turned into an article. Even those little negative overseas experiences – and you know the ones I mean -- can now be shrugged off by muttering to yourself, "Well, at least this will make a good story." Writing forces you to maintain some sort of objectivity and perspective, because, if you’re making a paying career out of it, you’re writing for an audience, not just scribbling semi-literate sentence fragments into a journal you plan to burn before anyone else reads it. (Don't get me wrong -- I’m all for scribbling semi-literate sentence fragments in a journal. That's kept me sane on more than one occasion.)

More practically speaking, writing is portable because of all the things you don’t need. You don’t need an office. You don’t need a permanent place of residence. And actually, you don’t, technically, need a computer or the internet at all. You can conduct a writing career the old-fashioned way: with paper, pen, typewriter and a nearby post office. William Shakespeare seemed to have managed without Microsoft Word. However, if Shakespeare lived today, I’m pretty sure he’d have a computer. Writing is a lot more competitive these days, and you probably need a computer with a modem to stay in the race.

First Steps as a Writer

How do you get started? First of all, I'm going to assume that you already are hooked up to the internet and have e-mail capabilities, perhaps even a second phone line dedicated just for internet, e-mail and fax. Perhaps you already have a documents file with some things you’ve written, or an ideas file with some thoughts about articles or books, or a few shreds of a promising poem.

There are two things you can do right away. One is to find and join a writers’ group or circle, or to form a group yourself. You can put an announcement in the newsletter of your local women’s club, for example. You can also form your own group online, as I did, or hook up with a group that already exists online.

Why is a writing group important? Because – and I can’t stress this enough – you are never, ever objective about your own writing. There is always something you’ve missed, something that can be deleted, something that isn’t clear. You don’t have to take everyone's suggestion, but you do need to see how your work affects others. And you get tremendous support from a writing group. Don’t ask friends to read your stuff unless they’re writers themselves, or you'll just get your story back with "Great! I loved it!" which, true, will temporarily feed your ego – until it’s rejected by an editor who writes on it, "Sorry! Can’t use it!"

The other thing you need to do is to get yourself a copy of the annual Writers’ Market, a large reference book which lists thousands of magazines, newspapers, publishers and literary agents, and also takes you step by step through the submission process. The Writers’ Market is available through amazon.com – you’ll find it listed on your handout. It's absolutely indispensable for the American magazine markets, and there are more magazines published in America than anywhere else in the world. For international markets, please check the other reference books and websites listed in your handout.

Submitting Your Work for Publication

Now, how do you submit your work for publication? It depends on what you write, and whether you have any publishing credits yet or not. For informational articles such as travel articles and profiles, which require research and quoted sources, most professional writers do not write the article first: they get the assignment first, then they write the article. This saves them a great deal of time and work. How do they get the assignment? They write what is called a query letter.

A query letter is basically an ad in the guise of a letter. You are pitching an idea to an editor, and trying to convince that editor why the magazine needs an article on this idea, and why you are the right person to write that article. This requires a certain amount of knowledge on your part about the magazine you are approaching. In fact, this may be one of the most time-consuming and unacknowledged aspects of being a free-lance writer: that you have to take time to familiarize yourself with your potential markets. That means somehow getting hold of recent issues of a magazine or newspaper, and reading them cover-to-cover. Almost without exception, magazine editors expect you to know their magazine very well, and can tell immediately if you have not done your homework; say, if you’re pitching an article called Ten Ways to Spice Up Your Sex Life to Benedictine Monk Magazine.

If it’s impossible for you to read actual copies of the magazine, as it often is when living overseas, do an internet search and see if the magazine has a website. You often can get the magazine’s writers’ guidelines this way and fine-tune your article or your query accordingly.

An editor may think your idea is wonderful but be hesitant to hire you without knowing how good a writer you are. That’s why your letter will give the editor a bit of your personal style and a taste of what the article will be like; it can even contain a catchy lead-in sentence that you will use in the proposed article. Also, professional writers attach something to their query called clips. Clips are simply copies of articles you've already published elsewhere. What if you don't have any clips because you've never been published? It's a bit of a Catch-22, but there are ways around it. You can do two things: one), query a small magazine or webzine, such as Tales from a Small Planet, which doesn't pay writers or pays very little, where you have a much better chance of getting published, therefore getting a nice clip to use with the next query. And, two), you can go ahead and write the whole article and send it along with a dynamite cover letter.

If you write humorous essays, poetry or short stories, you must send the whole manuscript anyway. You really can’t send a query for these types of things, can you? What are you going to say? "I’ve got this really funny idea.– I promise, it’ll be really, really funny. All my friends think it’s funny, too." Nope, you write your funny article, or your pithy poem, or your bizarre short story, and you send it in with a cover letter and a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Please remember: It’s a buyer’s, not a seller’s market. Editors will just throw your stuff right in the trash if it’s the least bit inconvenient for them. That’s why your submission will be typed, double-spaced, with your name and contact information on every page. That’s why, when you send a query letter, it will be brilliant, to the point, and no more than one page long.

Rejection and the Quick Turnaround

Because it’s a buyers' market, and editors are flooded with the work of strangers, writers very quickly learn the character-building phenomenon of rejection. I know my character is quite developed by now, thank you.

Free-lance writing forces you to deal with more rejection than any other career, with the possible exception of being a blues singer, and blues singers don't count because they need to be rejected to keep singing the blues. The best way to deal with rejection is to remember that there are many reasons, most of them not personal, why an editor can’t use your idea or work right now. Pick yourself up and send it to another magazine the same day. If your work is good, you will eventually find a home for it.

Lately, more and more editors are accepting e-mail queries and submissions. When you’re overseas, this saves you a lot of time, and time means money. Although this isn’t the norm, I once got a $2500 assignment via e-mail in one day. I just happened to pitch an idea to the right editor at the right time. I've also been rejected in one day, too. But at least I could get that article out to another magazine a lot faster using e-mail. E-mail queries should be just as formal as snail mail queries, by the way.

Print vs. Electronic Publishing, and Rights

The latest development in the magazine publishing business is online magazine publishing. This is a new ballgame for a lot of writers and editors. One of the issues that has yet to be resolved is whether online publication competes with print publication. If you sell electronic rights to a small online magazine, will that hurt your chances to sell the same article later to a print publication? It's just too early now to tell. When you sell any article, most of the time, you are selling first publication rights, either continental or world-wide; when you are selling a reprint of an article that's appeared in print before, you are selling secondary rights. The main thing is to sell print rights and electronic rights separately in order to best protect your work and bring in the most revenue. One rule many writers follow in general about rights is never, ever to sell all rights to anyone. "All rights" means that article is not yours anymore - it's gone forever. But there are even exceptions to that rule. If Reader’s Digest offers you $10,000 for all rights, you’ll probably happily let that article go and throw in your grandmother too.

Marketing Yourself

How do you market yourself as a writer?

First of all, you're reliable in your dealings with editors. You stick to deadlines. You're happy to do revisions. Editors don't want or need to work with prima donnas. Your reputation as an easy-to-work-with writer is a big part of marketing yourself.

Many editors have never set foot out of their own countries and think that if you’re living in some exotic land you are going to be terribly inconvenient to work with. The onus is on you to convince them otherwise. This is another reason I like e-mail. You often can’t tell from an e-mail address where a person lives, especially if the address is something like compuserve or hotmail. I don't use the phone at all with editors if I can help it. It helps to have a backup plan available, such as a second phone line or a fax machine -- and a generator. Having two e-mail addresses, one a web-based address, is a good idea too. Once you get a contract, try to negotiate the most generous deadline you can, one that's at least one or two weeks later than you think you'd actually be finished writing. You never want to be in a position where you don’t file your story by the deadline because of some technical problem, because anything can happen overseas! That editor doesn't care that all the phone lines were down in Lagos for a week. Even if you live in a third world country, do everything you can to make working with you a first-world experience for your editor.

Once you publish just one article, your foot is in the door. Look upon this not just as getting published, but also as an opportunity to establish a working relationship with an editor. Keep in touch with editors who have published your work in the past, so they don't forget you. To be considerate, remind them anyway who you are. Here's a typical e-mail message I might send to an editor I worked with recently.

"Dear So-and-So, It was great working with you on my article, How Not To Go Insane In A Foreign Country, which you'll recall was published in the June '99 issue of Practical Traveler Magazine. I've got a new idea about How To Get A Good Night's Sleep in Any Airport in the World Using Tools You Probably Have In Your Suitcase..." and then you launch into your query. Don't wait for them to give you assignments. Write fairly frequently to editors who've published your work. At the same time, you don't want to pester them. You just want to keep pitching great ideas, and to stay in their heads, so that when the next assignment comes up, they think of you first.

Get business cards that say "free-lance writer" on them and give them to everyone. (Oh, yeah, don't forget your name, too.) If you move around a lot, get one e-mail address such as hotmail or bigfoot that can move with you, and put that on your business card.

Keep abreast of new magazines and publishers by subscribing to writers' magazines or by regular perusal of writers' websites. Websites such as writersdigest.com and inkspot.com have free e-zines to which you can subscribe, offering advice and the latest news about new publications. Send out as many query letters as you can to as many different editors as you can, and keep on looking for new markets to send your ideas and articles to. Being a successful free-lancer means keeping a lot of balls in the air, and looking for opportunities everywhere.

The Prism Effect - Taking one Ray of an Idea and Splintering it into Many Colors

Being a successful free-lancer also means taking one idea and turning it into several different articles for different markets. Let me give you an example. There's a monthly flea market in Ankara, Turkey, where I live. It has absolutely no atmosphere, hardly anyone knows about it, there are lots of people selling all kinds of junk, yet going there is like going on a monthly treasure hunt. I'm currently working on a short blurb for a travel magazine, about 100 words, just informing people about it. These very short one-paragraph pieces are a good way to break into travel magazines, by the way. I'm also planning a longer article aimed at the Sunday travel section of a newspaper, called something like Treasure Hunting in Ankara, Turkey. I'll offer or include photographs with that one. I'm also going to write about how I bought a piece of embroidery there from the hope chest of an 80-year-old Turkish woman who had never married. That could be turned into several articles: one about the tradition of hope chests in Turkey or around the world, one about Turkish embroidery, and it could even be used as a poignant illustration of how a generation of Turkish men lost their lives in the war and therefore many women of that generation never married. The possibilities are almost limitless.

The Ultimate Marketing Tool: Yourself on the Web

The ultimate 21st century marketing tool for a writer is to have her own web page, where editors can see her resume and online clips. Keep in mind, though, that many editors of print magazines are not yet comfortable with this phenomenon, and snail mail is still the way to approach them. Those of us who are web magazine editors, however, will find accessing your web page a convenient way to preview your work. Huw Francis' excellent article about marketing yourself globally, called Ten Ways to Improve Your Global Image, includes information on getting your own website. You can currently read this article at Global Writers' Ink: http://www.inkspot.com/global/articles/Francis.html

 

Do You Need An Agent?

What if your free-lance writing career takes off and you’re getting regular assignments? Do you need an agent? Probably not – most magazines and newspapers do not pay enough to justify turning a percentage over to an agent. If you can break into one magazine and establish a good working relationship with an editor there, chances are you will be able to use that leverage to break into other magazines.

If you are writing a book, however, it’s completely different, at least in the States. You almost always need an agent to publish a book. Many book publishers will not look at un-agented manuscripts, in fact. The big publishers' book editors cultivate relationships with agents, and the agents represent the writers. So – you need to write your book, then find an agent, which is a bit like singing an audition. Most agents want to see the synopsis and the first three chapters. It’s a many-stepped, difficult process to get a book published in America, but it's not impossible. Jeff Herman's book about book publishing, which is listed in your handout**, can tell you more about this process. There is also a small but growing collection of smaller online publishers such as iUniverse.com, to whom you pay a small fee to publish your book without going through agents and editors. Marketing the book is mostly up to the writer, although some publishers are able to list your books in the big internet bookstores such as amazon.com. The verdict is not in yet on this new phenomenon -- but you can be sure the publishing world is paying close attention.

 

Why do you want to write? A few words on writing and validation...

There are many people saying these days that using the world wide web to do business is potentially a gold mine if you know what you are doing. For many businesses, I believe that's true. For most genres of writing, however, it's the same old deal: most writers aren't going to get rich, internet or not. There are two exceptions to that: one is publishing a series of blockbuster novels, and believe me, when I figure out how to do that, I'll tell you all about it. The other is technical and business writing, for which there is a high demand. That's the only writers' market I know about that's a seller's market. Some of the resources listed on your handout are specifically for business and internet writers.

For many of us, though, writing isn't going to be financially lucrative. It is possible to support yourself as a free-lance writer, but that requires doing pretty much nothing else but scrambling for assignments, researching those assignments, writing the articles, and scrambling for more assignments. Using the web will help with that, of course - the more avenues for work, the better. But you can't go into writing with the idea that you're going to make a lot of money.

Therefore, before we finish, I'd like you to take a moment to ask yourself, "Why do I want to write?" There could be any number of answers to this. There's the undeniable urge, the physical need to write, of course. Many writers claim that there's simply no way they could ever NOT write. There's the need to create something original, something good. The desire for recognition, for an audience. A way to reach people, to communicate something to them, to move them. And there's self-validation. If you're like me -- someone who has followed someone else's job overseas, self-validation is a big issue.

It used to be, for previous generations of women, that being a mother and a housewife was validating enough. Then along came Women's Liberation and feminism, and suddenly we expected a lot more than our mothers did. We expected to be able to pull off everything: career, motherhood, self-fulfillment.

This was a very, very good thing. But it also hurt women in a small, almost unnoticeable way, too, because trying to have and do everything is really, really exhausting. We expect so much of ourselves, and we're disappointed in ourselves if we don't achieve six goals at once.

For many trailing spouses, especially women, the world is turned on its end when we follow our husbands overseas. Suddenly we're not only letting ourselves down, but also letting down our whole generation, who told us we could and should compete in the traditionally white-male dominated business world and find equality there. I know I felt this way.

But gradually, it dawned on me that in a weird way, by allowing that pressure to affect me so greatly - that pressure to be somebody besides a wife and mother -- I was being just as sexist as generations long ago. Here I had a golden opportunity laid out before me: the opportunity to discover strange new worlds, boldly go where no man or woman had gone before, if you will -- and then write about it, and see my writing published. Not to mention the very great luxury of being home with my children, of being able to set my own hours. I just had to get over the idea that I was, at least temporarily, dependent on someone else's income -- a man's income! Yikes! -- and realize how many others would give almost anything to be able to pursue their creativity without having to worry about where the money was coming from. I could break free of gender stereotypes and society's expectations, and begin a journey of self-discovery. After all, most new businesses require financing. Perhaps the trade-off for following my husband overseas was getting "financing" -- and time -- to pursue my writing career.

The ironic thing is that once you are able to stop conforming to your own previous high standards of earning money and having an identity through a job, your sense of who you are grows, and affects others, and affects your writing. And suddenly, you are making money and calling this writing thing a career. It's true of a lot of other aspects of our lives, as well -- when we stop worrying about what the world thinks, and just figure out who we are, and that we are who we are regardless of where we are or what we do, the "what we do" part seems to fall in our laps like a beautiful gift.

So while saying "I'm a writer," and collecting a check for something we wrote is highly validating, and very rewarding, in fact in the bigger picture it is not the writing that validates us, but we who validate the writing. There are rich rewards that come from that, and not always in the sort of foreign currency we expect.

© 2000 Francesca Huemer Kelly

* This paper was delivered as part of a panel presentation called Marketing Your Business Using the Web, which took place at the Women on the Move 2000 Conference, March 27-28, 2000 in London. For more information about the Women on the Move conferences, which are held every two years in either London, Paris or Brussels (next one is in Brussels), please contact:

FOCUS Career Services rue Lesbrousaart 23 1050 Brussels Belgium Tel. 32 02 646 65 30 FAX 32 2 646 96 02 email focus@focusbelgium.org web page-- www.focusbelgium.org

**Please note: the handout referred to in this speech is a 3-page list of essential resources for writers. You can link to that list by clicking here.