marketing day

It was Marketing/Administration day yesterday (Marketing Day, calloo, callay...). I got the "once-a-week catch-up on finances and market research/query day" idea from an excellent article that author Kathryn Lay wrote for Inklings a while back. Entered and reconciled receipts in Quicken, did some market research, crafted and then sent out four electronic queries. Within a few hours, two magazines wrote back and said they wanted to see the articles, woohoo! I love the Internet.

Woohoo for now, anyway...in my fantasy writers' life I had imagined having dozens of queries circulating at a time. I guess (even in my fantasy) I didn't expect them to actually start saying "yes". :-) One even wrote back saying that yes, they'd like to see the article, but also added that I had a great query.

Highly encouraging, especially considering that I got pretty much zero response when I tried dipping my toe into the realm of magazine writing years ago, so was discouraged. I think the difference now is that I've had more nonfiction writing and editing experience, even if not all of it generated direct income (e.g. I wasn't paid directly for anything I wrote for my own publication :-)).

Which leads me to conclude that there's a lot to be said for just focussing on writing in the beginning of a freelance writing career, rather than just writing for income. The latter is a necessity, of course, if one wants to become a fulltime freelancer but as with any profession, there has to be a "training" period; in freelance writing, this would be a time where you concentrate on improving your writing and writing habits.

I'm spending a lot of time picking markets I know I could write for and writing queries tailored exactly for that market. I remember how much I hated getting sloppy queries as editor of Inkspot, where it was pretty obvious that the writer hadn't spent much time on the proposal and was likely sending off a hundred similar queries to any other electronic publications he/she could find.

If anyone else is interested in freelance writing for magazines, by the way, I highly recommend Moira Allen's The Writer's Guide To Queries, Pitches & Proposals.

I'm willing to take on some non-paying assignments to help build up my clippings file, but want to focus mostly on paying markets. Right now I have three articles to write (for pay) and four queries still circulating. My goal is to send out three new queries a week.

Meanwhile, I'm not forgetting about my true passion, my children's writing! :-) I'm staying on schedule with that so far, still plan to have two books completed by the end of the year. I do find it's still hard to switch mental writing gears when I go from my fiction writing to nonfiction, and vice versa. Any other writers out there who have a similar experience? I still haven't decided whether it's better to split each day between fiction and nonfiction, or divide days in the week (Monday is novel-writing, Tuesday is magazine-writing, etc.).

I'm still figuring this out as I go along; wish me luck. :-)

Blatherpics

Ruth and me, at Reid's cottage during a get-together of our university friends about 15 years ago (I'm on the left, Ruth's on the right). My hair was a LOT longer back then. :-)