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(Read Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part series online.) 3: Production and publication With the book hitting its crowdfunding target, it was time to look at production and publication. We had a fantastic copyeditor, Hayley, who carried out what Unbound called a developmental edit. She spotted lots of errors, some quite structural, and did a superb job. We had a new editor, and Unbound decided to change the title. They felt Kitten on a Fatberg would be hard to market, and so it became Work in Progress. This was a bit of a wrench, as we were so used to the title (named after one of the character’s eccentric poems). Many supporters were fond of it too. But Unbound was confident in its decision, and we embraced it. With COVID, the publication date was pushed back several months, which worried us as it meant our supporters would have had to wait almost two years for their copies. (They stayed loyal and patient, but apparently people do sometimes ask for their money back.) When the books arrived at last, I received a couple of hundred copies which we had pre-ordered with our article payments. This turned out to be a More

You may not realize it, but I wrote the chapter “How Much Should I Charge?” in the 2022 Writer’s Market this year. It was a humongous assignment, and until I did the research, I didn’t realize how much had changed in the last five years as well as mid- and post-COVID. Freelancers are very much alive and well. Employers have learned to embrace freelancers with a passion. Freelancers tackled social media as marketing tools and learned new methods of landing clients, establishing a brand, and networking. But how much you should charge depends on so many factions: 1) your experience 2) your niche (and sub-niche) 3) your diversity in skills (i.e., more than writing an article) You can get down into the reeds and try to break it down into small sub-factions, but these three major ones pretty much steer your ship and dictate your income. A beginner is usually anyone with 0-3 years of experience, however, you will find the exceptions who leaped in and made six figures within two years. Many others will brag about how much they made in spurts, like four months, but the proof of success manifests itself in how well you can perform over an entire More

(Read Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 of this 3-Part piece at FundsforWriters.com.) 2: Getting the orders in! After getting the book deal signed with Unbound, we now had to raise a five-figure sum in pre-orders to get our manuscript turned into a real book. One of the fun things Unbound does is teach you to offer different levels of pre-orders (pledges). These go all the way from basic ebook and paperback versions up to pricier bespoke levels. We offered book critiques, and various fun items “created” by some of the book’s dotty characters. Some actor friends recorded an audio version of the first few chapters, which we offered exclusively as another pledge. See a list of all our pledges here. The first few weeks of crowdfunding proved easy. Friends and family chipped in generously, and the target ticked over nicely. (Unbound provides dashboards you can obsessively consult.) But then the pace starts to slow, and you start to reach out to former colleagues, school friends, neighbors, ex-neighbours, friends of friends… anyone you think might pre-order a book and not be offended by you asking. This is the hardest part, and, honestly, I’m not sure we performed as well as More

1: Getting started In this series of three articles, I’m going to look at how I crowdfunded my novel, Work in Progress, through Unbound’s unique crowdfunding model. I wrote my book with two pals, Martin and Alex. It was originally called Kitten on a Fatberg, and it tells the story of a group of eccentrics, aspiring writers who form a critique group to offer feedback on each other’s work. We wrote the story in a spontaneous, open-ended way, and somehow it turned into something quite farcical. All the characters are larger than life in a comic sort of way, and there are lots of feuds, misunderstandings, romances, and petty rivalries. We hoped it might be as much fun to read as it was to write. Unbound is an international publisher based in the UK with a different model. It accepts authors from the UK, US and around the world. It’s been covered quite widely in the media in the UK, and I’ve always liked the sound of it. Soon I was on the Unbound site, and looking at how to submit our manuscript. Unbound bills itself as “publishing for the 21st century.” As far as I know, it’s the world’s only book More

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  ~Annie Dillard This quote, from the FundsforWriters newsletter on November 26, 2021, reached me toward the end of a one-month writing residency. Dillard’s words helped me understand why I had found my weeks at the residency so worthwhile: because this brief period of time proved to be the exception to her otherwise true insight. Many of us, including myself, work hard to fit writing around the daily grind. My grind includes a day job, a family, pets, household maintenance, garden maintenance,  friendship maintenance, and self-maintenance. I am not complaining. I love my grind. As a deadline-driven woman, I often find it helpful. If I have a meeting at nine o’clock, for instance, I will get my word count in before that Zoom alert blooms on my screen. Meeting postponed for an hour? Reaching my word count will stretch out until ten a.m. But doing some types of writing requires in-depth, sustained attention rather than the rapid-fire rhythm of deadlines. I have been working on such a project, which I call Asking After Alice. It is the story of someone in my family who spent her whole life institutionalized because she More

Steven Pressfield (the author of The War of Art) speaks about the difficulty of pushing through and reaching THE END of whatever you are writing. It could be a poetry chapbook. It could be a memoir. It could be fiction of any genre or any word count. It could be a how-to on cabinetmaking or a children’s picture book. A lot of writers struggle with perfecting an effort and reaching THE END. Why? Because that is the point where you let others read it . . . and get feedback. That is when you submit for publication . . . and get feedback. The feedback is the thrill and the agony of writing, and sometimes we feel safer just saying we’re still writing it, because that is the world in which we feel safest. What are we afraid of? -Being told it’s just okay. Or worse, that it’s bad, but frankly, once we hear it’s okay the meaning is the same. -Prematurely releasing your darling in the world. But who’s to say when it’s premature? -Learning after all that time invested that we really do not know what we are doing. It’s called being a phony. Look across social media. When an author More

As writers, we tend to carve out a niche for ourselves and stick to writing what we know best. We get comfortable writing in our genre. It fits us much like a pair of old pajamas. Even if the money isn’t coming in like we’d hoped, we don’t want to take those flannel pants off, because then we’d have to find something else to wear that might not be as soft or warm. But if the royalties are sputtering, full-time writers can’t just throw their hands up in the air helplessly. The better angle is deciding it’s time to get proactive and take some of those old eggs out of the basket. As writers, we have skills and talents that can be put to use beyond the pages of a book. Most of those ways are lucrative. Maybe not Jay Z-lucrative, but they’ll keep the wolf away from the door. Let’s study some of the ways to boost your income before you return to the grind of a 9-5 job. Articles. Articles. Articles I can’t emphasize this one enough. Writing nonfiction is different, but your talent can be shaped into bites of 600-1,000 words that will pay considerably well. The More

I just saw another crowdfunding campaign where the author is asking for money to be able to do what they love to do…write. These types of campaigns are usually not successful, and this is why: 1) Everyone has a dream. Why should the world pay for your dream? 2) A lot of people, millions as a matter of fact, wish they could write and publish a book. 3) A lot of people, millions as a matter of fact, ARE writing and publishing books without asking for money. 4) There are ways to publish without paying to publish. I’m known for suggesting to fledgling authors who intend to self-publish (paying to publish) or hybrid publishing (paying most of the publishing cost), that they consider a crowdfunding campaign. But: 1) Most don’t want to pour their heart into the campaign. 2) Most post a campaign and do not work it. 3) Most write the campaign about themselves instead of the mission of the book/magazine/anthology they need money for. Crowdfunding is not about you. Most err in asking for money for themselves, and that’s not very palatable to the people out there who wish they had money, too. Crowdfunding is about funding a More

There are almost 31 million small businesses in the United States, and a freelance writer who understands how to serve and communicate with small businesses—and their special needs and restrictions—can open up a whole new world of opportunities, relationships, and steady income. As a small business owner, advocate, and consultant, someone who has worked on both sides of this equation for over three decades, here are ten tips for working with us. 1.     Know that small businesses need writing help (templates, letters, newsletters, website content, blog posts, social media posts, press releases, marketing materials, manuals, books, and more), but we likely don’t know it. How will it help us? How much will it cost? Will it save me time and money and bring in new business? 2.     I’ll say it again: 31 million. That translates into an endless stream of potential clients for any one writer. We are not being contacted as often as you’d think by freelancers (rarely, in fact)—and not with compelling offers that speak our language. Fix this and you’re ahead of the minimal proactive competition. 3.     We are everywhere, starting with outside your front door and in the personal networks More

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.   ~James Joyce I grinned at this quote. Do you remember in English Lit class when the teacher spent days dissecting a novel on what the author really meant between the lines? What were the hidden meanings? What was the symbolism? What metaphors spoke to the issues of the time? Even as a fifteen-year-old tenth grader, I found it audacious and pretentious of a school teacher to claim to understand what a creative mind thought when alone at a table penning a tale. And when a teacher deemed a student off-the-mark in their interpretation, well, the less I thought of the teacher. Who knows what an author meant but the author? Of course some stories are clear in their intentions, such as Orwell’s 1984 or his satirical allegorical novella Animal Farm. His intentions were in-your-face and purposeful. Others, however, are just telling a deeply felt story. I once attended a book club where they discussed Murder on Edisto, the first in the Edisto Island Mysteries, and an outspoken member More