Happy reading!

From the Writing Forums

• How do You Set Your E-book Prices?
• Business Bank Accounts
• What Accounting Software do You Use?
• What Gets You Through Your Work Day?
• How do You Approach Website and Blog Design?

From the Blog

• Freelance Writers: Stand Up for Your Rates – by LaToya Irby
• Messy Subjects and Verbs – by Rebecca Garland

From the Web

• Fair Wages for Freelance Writing – Melanie Brooks at Freelance Switch
• 6 Freelance Writing Fears and How to Overcome Them – Anne Wayman at About Freelance Writing
• You Are a Better Writer Than You Think You Are – Laura Spencer at Writing Thoughts
• Plan a Marketing Strategy for Your Freelance Career – Jake Rocheleau at Freelance Folder
• How the 80-20 Rule Affects Freelance Writers – John Soares at Productive Writers
• 5 Steps to Freelance Awesomeness – Steph Auteri at WordCount
• Putting the Customer Back into Customer Service – Lori Widmer at Words on the Page
• 10 Ways to Ensure No One Will Read Your Blog Content – Ali Luke at Daily Blog Tips

From the Archives

• Free Business Resources for Freelance Writers
• How to Build a Writer Platform and Make Jobs Come to You
• 3 Types of Business Writing That Pay Big Money
• How to Insulate Yourself From Bad Freelance Clients
• Think Twice About Writing for Revenue Share

Are you comfortable with “face to face marketing?” In short, this is the act of marketing your services to potential clients in person. No matter the setting – from conferences to chamber meetings – you need to be comfortable selling and marketing yourself in a face to face environment.

Here are several tips to keep in mind:

1. Rather than brag about your accomplishments, detail your past work and explain how it can benefit the client in the future.

2. Let the other person do the talking. When selling your services, you may have the urge to do all the talking while letting the potential client do nothing more than listen. While there is nothing wrong with carrying your part of the conversation, don’t go over the top. Instead, let the other party speak so that you can better craft your responses.

3. Ask questions. Not only does this open up the conversation to both parties, but it will give you a better idea of what the person is looking for. You can then use these responses to better focus the conversation on the right details as you move forward.

At first, you may be intimidated by marketing your services in a face to face environment. However, once you become confident in yourself this can be a lot of fun.

What sets you apart from other writers? Why should I hire you instead of another freelancer?

These are legitimate questions – and you need to have legitimate answers.

If you are unprepared for the above questions, you may be taken off guard and subsequently lose out on a project. There are several basic answers you can use to address this common concern.

• Experience. Do you have a lot of experience in a particular field? If so, play this up as you negotiate with a potential client. By showing success in their field, you are doing your part in showing how you are better than other writers.
• Rates. This subject can be touchy but it is a definite selling point in many cases. If you know that your rates are lower than some or most of the competition, you can use this to your advantage. Of course, you don’t want to lower your rates beyond acceptable standards just to win a project.
• Communication. Let the client know that you will be available from the start of the project through its completion. This is one area in which many freelance writers suffer. By showing that you excel in this area you can get a leg up on other writers.

Before you are taken by surprise, make sure you know what sets you apart from other writers.

It’s hard to believe it’s another new year already. I usually have my goals and resolutions set by late October or early November. But I’m a bit late to the game this year. In fact, I’ve been somewhat absent here for months. I had a crazy year in 2011. My guy and I started looking for a new place around May. That hunt, move, and settling in dominated the majority of my year and took a lot of time away from other things — mostly the time I could spend on my own sites and projects (hence the absence). I also got engaged. And then the holiday season hit with far too much travel and party hosting. I spent a great deal of my time last week sleeping out of the sheer exhaustion of it all.

Now it’s time to get back on track. And like I do every year, I’m going to share my business goals with you. Here are my 2012 New Year’s resolutions for my business.

1. Get back on schedule with my sites, books, and other projects.

I need to get myself back on a regular posting schedule on my blogs. That starts this week for this blog and a couple of others, and I’ll work my other blogs into that schedule over the next several weeks.

On the recommendation of Sharon Hurley Hall, I recently upgraded my version of Dragon, Naturally Speaking. I didn’t use it before because the accuracy was pretty terrible for me. But 11.5 seems to have fixed those issues. Even with just moderate training the accuracy is great. I’ve already used it to speed up some article writing for clients, and I’m hoping it will keep me more productive with my own blog posts as well.

My book manuscripts also took a back seat last year, which was incredibly frustrating. I’m looking forward to diving back into them shortly — editing the Query-Free Freelancer manuscript and finishing the first novel in my Murder Scripts murder mystery series.

2. See a Minimum 20% Increase in Gross Income

I screwed up in 2011. With all of the moving and other distractions, something had to give. Like I said, it was my own sites and projects. Income on that side of my business dropped dramatically last year, and it made 2011 my first year where my overall income dropped. Not much, but a decrease. Fortunately, my business expenses also dropped quite a bit, so my net income wasn’t affected very much. But it’s still disappointing.

As a result, I’m setting a goal of at least a 20% gross increase. That would get me back in line with past earnings increases. That said, I’ll certainly try for even more than that.

3. Finalize My Business Name Change

As announced last year, my base business is changing. The name will be changing from J.H. Mattern Communications to 3BeatMedia. My websites and freelance writing services will fall under the primary business name. A publishing-oriented division name of 3BeatBooks will be used for branding my books and e-books a little later this year.

This won’t take long to finish up, but I still need to put time into the new websites and then incorporating the new branding on all of my sites. Expansion to two other divisions is planned, but probably not in 2012.

4. Finish Setting Up My New Office Space

Even though we moved in mid-October, my new office space still isn’t completely set up and unpacked. It’s not a comfortable work environment, and getting this finished is a priority for me. In fact, I expect to reach this goal by this time next week at the latest. I have three work areas there — my desk, a standing desk setup, and a large chair with ottoman for longer writing sessions such as manuscript work. I can’t wait to finally be able to use them all on a regular basis.

5. Publish at Least 5 Short E-books

My longer projects this year will be the print book manuscripts. So for e-books I’m going to keep things short. I’m planning to release five shorter, lower-cost e-books (mostly released here through All Freelance Writing). Outlining will be finished this week, and the first should be out before the end of January.

6. Finish Editing the Query-Free Freelancer Manuscript

I mentioned this one previously, but it’s a big enough goal that I think it deserves to stand on its own.

7. Finish Drafting the First Murder Scripts Novel

This one is another big goal I mentioned before, but it also deserves its own spot here. This is the project I’m most excited to work on — the first under my Aria Klein pen name.

8. Release the First Murder Scripts Game

The Murder Scripts series has a natural tie-in to games. And I plan to release a few of them as ancillary products to this novel series. While I hope to release a few this year, it’s a completely new experience for me so I’m setting a goal of just releasing the first.

9. Get to $500 per Month Earnings on my Genealogy Site

Last year I started a genealogy site called Climb Your Family Tree. I originally intended to keep it quiet here and use it as an experiment to show earnings for a new site. But yet again, life distractions got in the way. That experiment is obviously off (for this site at least). But I fully intend to grow it and focus on increasing its earnings.

That will include a new design, new resources (some free and some for sale), building affiliate relationships for products I’ll review, and more. Genealogy is a huge passion of mine, and I’m excited to have it take a more prominent place in my work. I consider this to be one of the best parts of working for myself — being able to integrate passions and hobbies into my business.

10. Find Uses for at Least 3 of my Unused Domain Names

I have quite a few unused domain names — over a dozen at least. I have plans for several of them, but I haven’t had time to do the development work. But those domains aren’t earning me any money just sitting there. Even if it means setting up a few starter sites until I can pursue some of the larger projects, I’d like to get at least three of those domains in-use and earning money for the business. Ideally I’d like to have this done in the first quarter, but I’ll be happy just getting them set up this year.

What are your goals in the New Year? Are you hoping to reach new clients? Earn more money? Branch out beyond freelancing, perhaps by writing your first book? Share your goals with us in the comments below and see what your fellow freelancers are hoping to achieve.

Once you have a freelance writing specialty in mind,  it’s time to move on to the next steps — market research and creating your marketing plan.

Market Research for Freelance Writers

Freelancers are notorious for jumping into work without realizing that freelancing is really running a business. Many freelancers fail because they don’t have a realistic plan in place or because they don’t understand the competition (like assuming extremely low rate writers are your competition when they have nothing to do with markets you should be targeting). But you can’t come up with that plan if you don’t conduct basic market research first.

What is Market Research?

As a writer you’re likely intimately familiar with research in general. Market research is much like researching a story. You’re digging for background information to help you determine the most important things to consider (in planning a business in this case rather than what to cover in an article).

Market research involves figuring out who your target market includes. Hint: it’s not everybody. It’s not everybody hiring writers. It’s not even everybody within a vague group (like newspapers).

Example: You want to be a professional blogger.

Bad target market: People who own blogs. Even “businesses that own blogs” is a bad target market.

Better target market: Owners of blogs covering a specific niche or reaching a specific audience, with a particular audience size, in a particular region of the world, with an adequate budget to cover a professional blogger’s rates for at least X posts per month

Market research goes beyond identifying your target market. It also helps you research your competition and set appropriate freelance writing rates. We’ve talked about setting your rates extensively here before, so rather than repeat myself I’m going to link you to an article that will walk you through the process.

How to Set Your Freelance Writing Rates the Right Way

Below you’ll also find a link to our free online freelance writing rate calculator. It features a basic mode and advanced mode to give you some flexibility in how you can use it. These two resources will help you set realistic target rates. Don’t be surprised when considering all important factors leads to higher target rates than you might have expected. This is exactly why undercharging is such a problem for so many freelance writers.

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

You can find other free tools and calculators by exploring our additional exclusive free stuff for writers.

How to Conduct Market Research

How can you actually conduct this kind of research, learning more about opportunities available in different markets and how your competition behaves in each? This can vary greatly depending on your specialty area. For example, you would learn a lot about magazine markets and what they’re looking for by reading the magazines themselves.

With business writing, you would research things a bit differently. For example, if you wanted to write white papers for small B2B software companies you could search online to create a master list of those companies and then sort them by which ones already use white papers and which don’t. Each group has different opportunities where a white paper writer might come in handy.

Competition can be easier to research, especially if you already have a strong network. You already know your colleagues. If you know writers who share your specialty, review their websites. What specific services do they offer? What do they charge? What kinds of clients are represented in their portfolios? Do they work with small businesses or larger corporate clients for example? How much experience do they have compared to yours?

Even if you don’t have a large writer network yet, you can find other specialists with a simple online search. Get a better feel for other options your prospects have. If you don’t know what competition exists, you can’t come up with a value proposition that convinces clients to choose you over them.

Here is another article from our archives that gives further information on conducting market research:

4 Tips for Better Understanding Your Target Market

When you find information about the competition, it’s a good idea to complete a SWOT analysis to look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the current market. Here is a free downloadable template you can use to do that:

Free SWOT Analysis Worksheet for Freelance Writers

After you’ve conducted some basic market research, it’s time to put together a freelance marketing plan.

Freelance Writing Marketing Plans

Your marketing plan will serve as a road map for growing your freelance writing business. This is another step many freelancers skip. If you feel like you’re wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what’s next, you need to step back and come up with a plan.

While you would ideally create a comprehensive business and marketing plan, I know many freelancers won’t. With that in mind, I created some simplified planning templates to help you out. Below is a link to my one page marketing plan template.

One Page Marketing Plan Template

You can also find a one page business plan template on our Freebies page if you’d like one.

As you can see, this abbreviated marketing plan serves as a snapshot. You’ll list some of your biggest competitors, industry trends that will affect your business, your goals and strategies for achieving them, and larger marketing tactics you’ll use throughout the year.

If you want a guide to help you fill out that marketing plan template, you can find one at my small business blog.

If you prefer to use a traditional long-form marketing plan to figure out your strategies and next steps in growing your freelance writing business, I suggest reviewing the marketing plan outlines and marketing plan templates available at Mplans.com.

Hopefully these resources will point you in the right direction as you begin to research newer (and better) freelance writing markets and develop your plan to grow and thrive as a freelance writer.

As always, you’re invited to share your thoughts, questions, or other recommended resources in the comments below.

What does it take to grow your business? What roadblocks are you putting in front of yourself? How will you remove them in order to gain profitability?

These are some of the questions Anne Wayman and Lori Widmer intend to address during their one-hour teleclass, Writers! Unlock Your Hidden Profit Potential. Join Anne and Lori Thursday, June 23rd at 1 pm PT/4 pm ET for a one-hour conversation that can help redirect your efforts and uncover opportunities.

Mark Your Calendar

When: June 23, 1 pm PT/4 pm ET
Where: by telephone (you will receive calling instructions upon payment of your registration fee)
What: A one-hour discussion and sharing session to help remove your career roadblocks and uncover opportunities

Free Gifts!

All paid attendees will receive five free gifts ($140 value!):

• A full six-month membership to the About Freelance Writing Squared membership forum (a $29.95 value)
• A copy of Lori Widmer’s ebook, The Worthy Writer’s Guide to Building a Better Business (an $11.95 value)
• A copy of Anne Wayman’s ebook, How To Get Started In Profitable Freelance Writing Now! (a $19.95 value)
• Access to the Webinar recording for at least 90 days in case you can’t make it or just want to hear it again (a $39 value)
• A PDF of the Webinar with all the information and links so you won’t even have to take notes (a $39 value)

Today and tomorrow only, register for the teleclass and receive an 11-percent discount! Plus all attendees receive five free gifts mentioned above.

For more information, visit About Freelance Writing Squared.

Register today!

It’s just $44.49 if you order today or tomorrow. Don’t miss out on this chance to invest in your future freelance writing success for less than the cost of private coaching!

Special Event (FREE!)

Join @AnneWayman and @LoriWidmer tomorrow, June 16th at 9 am PT/noon ET for a free Twitter tweetup. Use the #writingsquared hashtag and bring your freelance writing questions!

Four years ago this week I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I started my own hissy-fit inspired movement – Writers Worth Day – which has now morphed into Writers Worth Week, an annual awareness campaign designed to help writers everywhere uncover their own value.

In that spirit, I want to urge you to expect more. Expect more of your clients, your value, and your business. Shift your thinking, starting today, from take-what-comes work processes to building a stronger business that sustains you and helps you grow professionally.

Start here:

Redefine what legitimate work is.

Sometimes the problem lies in what you’ve been accepting as work. Take off the I-need-the-money blinders and look objectively at the job and the client. Is this something you’re proud to add to your portfolio? Is the work paying what professional writers should earn? Would the best writer you know accept either the rate or the job? If not, rethink that client.

Set your own rates.

Don’t allow anyone else but you to dictate your earnings potential to you. Clients should not tell you how much you’ll be earning per project or per hour. You determine that. If they insist, find a new client who respects you as a business person.

Create your own opportunities.

Don’t build a career on the passive approach. Instead of relying solely on job listings where you’re competing with thousands of writers, find your own clients. Locate companies and people you’d love to do business with, then tell them how much they can benefit from your services.

Treat yourself better.

You’re not merely a writer. You’re a business owner. Don’t allow yourself to think negatively about your abilities or your value. Your skills are marketable and you are a professional writer. Say no when you need to and enforce your work and income boundaries when necessary.

As a writer and business owner, you have marketable skills. Those skills are sought by clients who value good writing and professional behavior. If you expect more of yourself, you’ll be more appealing to clients. The reward – a stronger business and a happier you.

About the Author

Lori Widmer is a veteran writer and editor with over 15 years of  experience in standing up for her business (and in writing). The founder of Writers Worth Week, now in its fourth year, she helps writers understand their market value and take control of their businesses. Her e-book, The Worthy Writer’s Guide to Building a Better Business, is available on her weblog, Words on the Page.

Let’s say you’re a freelance writer working for a mill where you earn $15 per article on average. You need to earn at least $3000 per month for a modest full-time freelance income, so you churn out 200 of these articles each month (assuming you can find that many available topics to write about on a consistent basis). Before you assume $3000 per month is too grand of a goal, and you can get by full-time for much less, read this and use our freelance writing rate calculator to find out what you really need to earn.

Two hundred articles is a lot of writing each month just to earn a relatively modest full-time income. And the time involved in writing that much content doesn’t leave you with much left over to pursue higher paying freelance writing jobs within better markets. Let’s talk about how writing even just one or two e-books can bring in enough income to help you dig out of that low pay rut by replacing some of your low paying work while also freeing up some of your time to pursue better markets for future freelance writing work.

E-book Pricing Strategies for Success

There are many different ways to price your e-book. And in the end, it all comes down to your e-book’s specific market. For example, if it’s a massive market (like weight loss) you could probably get away with a very low pricing strategy, knowing that you could sell a boatload of copies. But if your market is much smaller (let’s say freelance writers), that strategy doesn’t work as well. You’ll never sell to everyone in the niche so to make a decent profit you need to price higher, knowing that you’ll sell fewer copies. At the same time that means you’ll have to create an e-book that justifies the higher price (why I treat my own as mini-courses or extremely in-depth tutorials, and load them with tools and worksheets).

Let’s look at a couple of different examples using different e-book lengths and prices to find out how much you would have to write and sell in order to replace all or part of your content mill work.

Strategy 1: Short E-book and Low Price

In this example let’s say you write a short, 25-page e-book. You price it at a low $10 price point — a relatively easy price point to find buyers for. Now in many cases a “page” in an e-book is actually much less content than an individual article because of spacing, images, and font choices. But let’s assume a worst-case scenario where each page equals a flat 400 words, comparable to an article you might right. How many of these $10 e-books would you have to sell to earn $3000? Three hundred of them.

If you’re new to writing and selling e-books, 300 sales in your first month might be a bit ambitious (although doable, again depending on your niche). But I’d say 100 sales is a pretty reasonable goal to set if you take the time to plan out your launch marketing strategy effectively. And keep in mind, any marketing you do for your e-book is also marketing you do for your personal brand, meaning it also has the potential to attract clients in the better markets you want to target. Just keep your e-books relevant to the markets you’re interested in.

So if you can sell 100 copies, you’ll earn $1000 from 25 pages of content. That’s in comparison to the more than 65 pages of content you would have to write for the mill in that same month for that same $1000, plus any marketing you do also has the potential to help you grow your career rather than pulling time away from marketing your services.

As you can see, an e-book doesn’t have to replace your full monthly earnings in a low pay rut to have a benefit.

Strategy 2: Middle-of-the-road Length and Pricing

Now let’s look at another example where you create a more in-depth e-book and you charge a bit more for it. Let’s shoot for that same 100 sales goal in your launch month. In this case we’ll say you wrote a 50 page e-book (including a few value-added resources to make the content more interactive) and you decided to charge $27.

In this example, 100 sales would earn you $2700. That almost completely replaces your earnings from the low pay gig. Better yet, you almost completely replace that income with only a quarter of the content being written and published. That clears up even more time for you to pursue better markets that month (and really a month is plenty of time to get your foot in the door with better paying clients if you’re even remotely aggressive about it).

Strategy 3: High Value, Higher Price

Now let’s look at a third strategy — creating a much longer and more detailed e-book and charging a premium price for it (this is what I did with my first Web Writer’s Guide e-book). Let’s use my own e-book’s price as an example here — $37. And let’s choose the similar length of 100 pages. If you sell those 100 copies during your launch month you earn $3700 and more than account for your content mill pay. You earned more money while writing only half the amount of content. if you have a small niche, and a big enough topic for the e-book where you can write 100 pages and keep it valuable to your readers, this can be a good way to go.

Other Considerations in E-book Writing

There are a few other things you’ll want to consider if you want to use e-books to help you work your way out of a low pay rut as a freelance writer. Here are some things to think about:

• You won’t get paid for the e-book until it’s complete. So you might want to use off-hours time to work on your first one until income is directly coming in rather than cutting the existing paying work while you write it. This doesn’t have to take long though. I wrote my first e-book during a single weekend (wrote it all Saturday morning and edited it that Sunday and had it up for sale for $17 on Monday — it sold very well and was in a niche where it attracted new paying clients at the time as well). If you start off with a long e-book, that kind of writing time probably isn’t possible.
• You can always write more than one e-book. If one short e-book won’t bring in enough income to satisfy you, go ahead and write two (or three, or however many you think you can write and sell within your market). I suggest spacing them out a little bit if they’re all targeting the same buyers though. You don’t want to give them e-book fatigue with an onslaught of new titles all in the same month.
• E-books earn residually. You don’t get just a one-time payment for writing your e-book like you might if you wrote one for a client. You’ll earn money as long as the e-book continues to sell. For example, the one I released in 2008 and do pretty much no marketing for anymore still can bring in a few hundred dollars each month without me even trying. And that’s all income beyond my initial goal.

Whether you aren’t being paid enough to make ends meet and live a comfortable life or you simply know you can earn more than you are while stuck in a low pay rut, e-books are just one of many options you have to help you dig your way out. Have you used e-books to help you grow your freelance writing career? Have you implemented one of these pricing strategies? Did you remember to plan out your launch marketing to take advantage of an initial push in sales? Tell us how they worked out for you and what you’d do differently if you could do it again in the comments below.

Often when I or other business writers talk about earning more money as a freelance writer, people comment with things like:

“But you’re a business writer, so of course you earn more. I want to be a Web content writer, or blogger, or ‘article writer,’ or whatever.”

Yeah? What’s your point?

Here’s the thing. If you think you can’t earn as much as “business writers” you’re fooling yourself. Guess what a lot of those business writers are doing? They’re writing for company blogs. They’re writing niche SEO content to promote a company in search engines. They’re pitching feature ideas to magazines just like you would if you wanted to write for magazines yourself. They’re ghostwriting feature articles picked up in magazines and major industry websites (I even covered this kind of work before here). They writing… you guessed it… content!

Misconceptions About Business Writing

Business writing is often confused with copywriting — more specifically with writing sales copy. Is copywriting a part of business writing? Absolutely. But it’s one type of business writing — not the whole specialty area. When you work as a business writer, you have to be able to adapt to different types of writing that benefit your clients’ business.

The bulk of my business writing work used to be press releases, because I ran an online PR firm and my full-time writing work kicked off by bringing along most of my former PR clients. But now the vast majority of my freelance writing work as a business writer is actually blogging.

Sometimes I’m asked to help launch a new blog — coming up with the branding / domain name, choosing the categories, and creating the content. Other times I’m there to serve as a spokesperson for the company (usually ghostwriting short news posts to keep their customers updated about what’s going on with the company). Sometimes they have me respond to reader comments, and sometimes they prefer to have regular staff do that once the posts are written. Sometimes if I blog for them I also tweet for them.

Sometimes I write beginner-level content that takes 20-30 minutes to write (introductory articles to business or finance-related topics). And sometimes I’m even hired just to write up my opinion on industry issues in my specialty areas. Why? Because those opinions ignite conversations, build organic incoming links, and get resulting organic traffic — all things being done with a business purpose, and all falling under the umbrella of “business writing.” (And let me tell you, that’s an awesome job to have.)

It’s All About Your Hourly

Do I charge less for this kind of writing than I do for writing press releases, pitch letters, newsletters, email marketing copy, or Web copy? No. Not really. I know how long an average project will take me in each category of services I offer, and I set my rates based on a set hourly goal ($150 per hour). Sometimes, especially getting to know a client’s business well over the years, I exceed that significantly. And sometimes, like when I’m first putting research into a company to get to know them and their market, I just pull it off or come in slightly lower. That’s regardless of the type of writing I’m doing. It’s just how per-project pricing generally works.

I make as much writing Web content and blog posts as I make with more traditional forms of business writing. And you can too. Remember, you only make less than someone else (thinking on an hourly level) if you choose to. If you want to earn more you have to charge more, and you have to show clients that you’re worth it. Web content is worth a lot more than some folks seem to think. And as long as you stay within that group’s mindset, it will continue to be true. For you.

Below are ten questions (some from me, and others submitted by Jessie Haynes – #s 6, 7, and 8) about the latest version of The Well-Fed Writer. Feel free to discuss any or all of them in the comments below the post. And don’t forget to use the “subscribe to comments” feature so you don’t miss out on any other comments in the discussion.

I hope you loved this book as much as I did, and found some valuable take-aways to help you improve your freelance writing business!

1. Overall do you have a favorite piece of advice given in The Well-Fed Writer, and if so, what is it?
2. Was there anything in the book that you disagreed strongly with?
3. What did you think of the general style and tone of this book? Is it something you’re likely to keep going back to as a reference?
4. Peter Bowerman places a heavy emphasis on cold calling and other direct marketing efforts. What are your thoughts on this? Are you comfortable with it? Can you get comfortable with it? Would it apply as equally to other areas of freelance writing beyond commercial writing?
5. Are you actually a commercial writer, like those the book targets? Do you want to become one? Or did you read the book to pick up more general advice you could adapt to another freelance writing area?
6. Of the portfolio display options mentioned on page 67 of the book, which do you prefer and why?
7. Of the types of clients discussed in chapter 5 (end users or middle men) which do you work with most often, or which do you prefer to work with? Why? And how do you personally overcome the disadvantages of each?
8. Do you have any clients for which you are “waiting in the wings” a la page 124 and, if so, what is that situation like for you?
9. The subtitle of The Well-Fed Writer is Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less. If you’re a new freelancer, after reading the book do you think that six month goal is realistic for you? Why or why not? How will this book help you make it happen?
10. What are your thoughts on “aggravation fees” as mentioned in the book by Devon Ellington on page 179? Do you charge them? In what kinds of circumstances?

You don’t have to answer all of these questions. You can pick and choose if you prefer. Or, if you’d like to discuss something else specific from The Well-Fed Writer, please feel free to do that or pose your own questions for others to answer.

Tomorrow I’ll post three book choices for the next discussion so everyone has time to get a copy and read it. Remember, next month we’ll do a book on writing books, alternating each month between that and freelancing.