How to be a Freelance Writer

Recently I had a student ask me how to get into the business of freelance writing. I tried to give him some basic information, and I figured I would use my second blog post this week to expand on the answer. I’m going to focus on fiction writing since I don’t have any experience selling commercial writing or ad copy.

I usually make the joke that being a freelance fiction writer is a euphemism for being unemployed. The same thing can be said for most people who call themselves actors. Writers spend most of their time writing and submitting their work, hoping that an editor will buy it, while actors spend most of their time auditioning and looking for work.

If you want to be a writer make sure you enjoy spending long periods of time alone, that you actually like the process or writing and editing, and that you can take a great deal of rejection. If you decide you want to make writing your primary job, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of economic uncertainly, unless that is, you have a spouse with a good job or you’re independently wealthy.

You’re going to have to make a choice whether you want to primarily write short fiction or novels. If you want to write for a living then you’re probably better off focusing on novels. Novels take longer to write but they usually pay much better than short fiction. Still, writing short fiction is a great way to start. You’ll create a complete story in a shorter period of time, and then you can send it out and hope for an acceptance or at least some feedback. Just remember it’s not the editor’s job to give you feedback.

Let’s say that you wanted to start out by writing some short fiction. I suggest you start out by searching for fiction markets (print magazines and e-zines) in the genre of your choice. Some good places to start your search would be the Websites Duotrope and Ralan. The tried and true advice is to send your stories to the highest paying markets that take the style of fiction that your write, first. Then, if you get rejected, you would work your way down to the next highest paying, and so on.  Preferably, you would read some of the markets and write stories specifically for them. You would then want to edit your stories and put them in standard manuscript format. Follow the markets submission directions carefully as they may have specific formatting guidelines. And then submit your manuscript to them per their instructions. You’ll want to make a list of markets you submitted to so that you don’t accidently send them the same story twice.

After you have submitted your story, begin on a new story for another market. Take any rejections you get in stride. Rejection is part of the business. Learn from the rejections you can and ignore the rest. If you keep submitting and learning from your mistakes you’ll eventually be published.

I just got word that one of my stories was just accepted for publication in an upcoming anthology. That same story had been rejected many times but I finally found the right market, and an editor who liked it enough to give me money for it and publish it.

Well, that’s it for now. This should be enough to get you started. In the future I may write a Part II to this blog post with information on how to begin the novel writing process. Until then, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. I don’t consider myself an expert but I may be able to point you in the right direction.

The image above was borrowed from stuffjournalistslike.wordpress.com using Google Image.