How to Become a Freelance Writer

Writing is only part of a freelance writer's career. You must also spend a lot of time marketing yourself and your work, paying careful attention to business details such as quarterly taxes, and staying ahead of ever-changing trends in all areas of publishing. There is also the matter of intense competition from many thousands of other writers, but don't let that stop you.

Difficulty:

Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Cassette Tape Recorders
• Online Career Search

1. Be honest with yourself about the quality of your writing skills. Chances are excellent that a busy editor will not continue to read your submission if she sees lots of grammatical errors.

2. Take a writing course or workshop if you do not have an English, journalism or related degree. You need to hear writing instructors and other writers comment on the quality of your work, and you need the experience of having to write well on deadline.

3. Learn how to write an excellent query letter to an editor. In it you need to briefly propose your idea for an article, give your qualifications and make it all sound as though it is the most wonderful idea ever to cross the editor's desk.

4. Buy the current year's "Writer's Market," shown on this page as the featured book. In addition to listing numerous publishing houses and consumer magazines, it gives integral information that all writers must know - such as how to write a query letter - and an overview of the business end of a writing career.

5. Use Web sites for writers to further develop your writing skills and to peruse freelance job opportunities. A simple search for "writing" or "writers" at a major search engine like Google should get you off to a good start.

6. Contact your local newspaper or magazine and ask if you may submit a completed article "on spec." This means the editor is under no obligation to pay you for your work, but is willing to read it. Make certain you peruse back issues of the publication first to confirm that your idea has not already been covered.

Tips & Warnings

• You need to develop a portfolio of "clips," photocopies of articles that prove you have experience as a professional writer. This is often a catch-22 situation: You need clips to show an assigning editor, but you cannot get a writing assignment unless you have clips to show. Fortunately, you can volunteer your writing services to community publications or organizations and use the resulting clips to build your portfolio.

• Writing for online communities can be a good way to build a strong portfolio. For example, eHow has a section called wikiHow, which is an effort to build the world's largest free source of "how-to" information. Writing for communities like wikiHow on a volunteer basis can help you develop a tangible portfolio which you can show to editors. It can also give you valuable experience with the editing process itself, because your work will be edited by other community members.

• Don't waste your time "chatting" with writer wannabes online. Spend your time studying the field, writing, sending query letters and marketing your work.

• You must expect rejection and develop a thick skin when you experience it.

• Very few freelance writers become wealthy. Many have other jobs to make ends meet.

Resources

• Freelance Writing Jobs