[nabentre] Grant Writers

[Everett Gavel]

Hi Jim, and all,

Jim, there are tons of opportunities out there for you
to get paid for writing. Sounds like you have some
background so that should prove helpful, too. You might
be a perfect fit for the numerous job opps I see nearly
every day looking for technical writers to write
manuals, guides, etc., or to understand them and put
them in a more user-friendly, beginner-style frame of
English, y'know? 

You can get paid to write grants, yes. You can also get
paid nickels & dimes per word for blogging, and
quarters on up to a dollar and more per word, for
articles, columns, how-to helpers, even fillers. A
couple of sites you can find out more at, which have
tons of free articles to read and free newsletters
worth subbing to are:


www.writing-world.com (categorized articles in their
'Index' section)

www.FundsForWriters.com (newsletters)


Start there, and don't get overwhelmed. Just know that
today's world of writing is huge into the Freelance
market. Even magazines like Car & Driver, Entrepreneur,
Good Housekeeping, & Redbook pay Freelancers  for their
writing (and pay well). Most any glossy magazine you'll
find on a newsstand pays $1 per word or more. Redbook
is actually the best paying I know of right now. Last I
checked they paid $2500 for an 800-word article. That's
more than $3 per word. ;-)

Nonfiction pubs pay better than fiction pubs. It's just
a fact, like it or not. But fiction writers can get
paid by hundreds if not thousands of publications out
there as well. Often it's only pennies, sometimes dimes
per word, though. But hey, it's still pay, if that's
what someone wants or needs. Me, I'm way beyond that
stereotypical crap of writing for the muse, or writing
just to write, for the love of it, blah, blah, blah.
One can write, and if they truly write in any even
half-decent fashion, can share their beloved craft with
the masses to bless them - and still get paid for it.
;-)

There are thousands of newspaper sources that you can
get paid to write for as well, and it's often easier to
start out that way if you've got the frame of mind for
it. The large majority of newspapers are dailies, and
so need far more content than a 12-times-per-year
magazine. And quite honestly, it's easier to get into
the glossies and other pubs paying $1 or more per word,
if you  have a few published "clips" from almost
anywhere else, including the newspapers. Newspapers
don't pay much, but those clips are yuor resume and
definitely help you get into the better paying pubs,
quicker.

Lastly, I'll again suggest to any reading this to
simply go to my Writers Resources page for tons of
resources -- article databases, publication ('Market")
databases, job listing resources, and more -- at
www.everettgavel.com/writers_resources.html. It hasn't
been added to in about 6 months, but there's tons of
useful stuff there for you, still. 



Strive On, Writer!
Everett


-----original message----- 
This information is good for now. I think that I'm
looking for anecdotal material about what you do. I
ended up deciding to start with a course called Writing
For Fun And Profit from http://www.vu.org, with the
idea of beginning to build into my schedule the things
writers do everyday, and to get a feel for the business
side and non-writing side of things, such as getting
organized, how to write a query letter, where to find
work, what you have to do to just do the job. I'm
attempting to see if I am the kind of person for this
without investing a lot of money. I have grown in
confidence about putting words together because I was
once a typical programmer who wrote badly, and used too
much jargon. Now, when I hand over the occasional
article to someone in my area whom I feel is a real
writer, they rarely have substantive changes to make to
my work, and only have mostly visual cleaning up. Now,
I want to know what it's like to start to get real
assignments, such as ones with deadlines and word
counts, and what it's like to work with a real editor
and to interview people, and whatever goes with the job
of writing, including keeping records, business
activities of the craft, and everything else I don't
know to include here. 
Thanks.