[nabentre] Writing/Re: Grant Writers

Sun Sep 18 16:15:02 UTC 2011

Everet,

I am also very serious  in moving my career direction  into free 
lance writing. I will definitely check out your resource page. If you 
or any other writer on list would be willing to give input on the 
below, that would be appreciated.

1. Do you utilize any special software to produce newsletters or 
other specially formatted writing jobs? If so what, and is it screen 
reader friendly/usable?

2. Do you find a particular kind of  job to be less graphical 
intense, or in today's world  is the free lance writer having to do 
more graphical layouts for some of the more simpler, less graphic 
artist type jobs?

3. Are there any particular resources other than scanning the net, 
that will give sample style and layouts for such things as press 
releases, technical manuals, bios, commercial radio or video 
scripting, speeches, etc.?

4. Assuming you do free lance commercial writing. and not currently 
focusing on magazine article or other similar jobs, do you have any 
samples of the above items you'd be willing to share that you might 
send out to potential clients when looking for a job?

Thanks. I am very eager to learn what I need to learn to make this a 
career move. I've dabbled in writing various types of things over the 
years. Things such as a songwriting tip for our local NFP 
organization and now an international e-zine for songwriters. Of 
course my own song catalog, some policy and procedures for our 
state's vending program, persuasive letters regarding an issue or 
two, created various complex reports using MS Excell, created a 
newsletter for local musicians, a forward for my cartoonist friend's 
first book, and so on. As I look back I've been  dabbling in various 
writings for  quite some time, not all finished works as they were 
projects of mine which are not yet done and have been shelved or 
become obsolete due to reason's out of my control. At any rate this 
is a field I've considered  more than once but until now have  both 
reason and motivation to work towards making a career change.

Thanks again for the post and any insight on the above you or anyone 
else might have for enlightenment.

Brad

Brad

On 9/18/2011  07:54 AM Everett Gavel said...
>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.
>
>
>
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Brad Dunse

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  unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.. -Ralph Charell

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