How To Start Freelancing Part 3: Where To Send Your Query or Content

by Joe Wallace

Once you’ve picked out a publication or two to submit articles or other content, you need to know how the process works when it comes to actually firing off those query letters and articles.

There’s no one right way to submit content to a mag, website, or publisher. There are some best practices, though.

First, do your homework. Research the magazine to find out who the editorial staff is and how you can contact them. Don’t waste time sending queries and articles to the editor-in-chief of a big publication, look for a departmental editor instead. On small publications the editor-in-chief may well be the right person. It all depends…

Sometimes all you have to do is call the magazine and ask who you should send a freelance article query to, but sometimes you might have to do some detective work if you can’t get the help you need by phone or by looking at the masthead of the publication or the About Us section of the website.

Here’s a clue to finding the right editor. If you can’t get a specific name, pick an email address that IS available and write a quick e-mail asking for some help in the right direction. Usually e-mail addresses for people far lower on the the magazine’s staff are listed–use one of them but remember that you’re not sending your actual query or work to them–just requesting information.

Here’s my secret for getting the right names and e-mail addresses. You will often find more useful information in the ABOUT US section of a publication’s website. CONTACT US sections aren’t as useful in my experience. Go to ABOUT US first. Many list the editors, e-mail addresses and other crucial information. … Continue Reading

Request a Free Electronic Copy of Be Your Own Editor

Be Your Own Editor is a crash course in grammar and writing basics. It covers a wide variety of topics from common errors in punctuation and word usage, to structuring nonfiction material and essays, to developing strong characters and plausible dialogue in fiction.

Until midnight on Mother’s Day, I’m giving away free electronic copies of BYOE. Send me a note at sigridmac at rogers.com and I’ll be happy to send you a copy. Please let me know if you have Kindle so I can send a Kindle version instead of a PDF.

Introducing Sigrid Macdonald

Hello there! I’ll be doing a biweekly column on writing tips, and I’m very excited about that. Before I begin, I want to tell you a bit about myself.

Sigrid Macdonald

Some of my earliest memories in grammar school are of being in the library and asking the librarian for suggestions about books to read for fun. She gave me a book called The Trouble with Jenny’s Ear, which was about a girl who could hear other people’s thoughts. I was so entranced with this book that I wrote to the author, Oliver Butterworth, and he wrote back! That was the first time I ever seriously considered becoming a writer.

Since then, I’ve published three books and countless articles. I blog on a regular basis, act as a book coach, a manuscript evaluator and an editor. I’ve made mistakes — who hasn’t? — and my editing clients have made mistakes, and from that I’ve learned a great deal. I’d like to share this knowledge with you, in the hope that it will improve your writing.

Starting with all the components that make for a smashing e-mail, I’ll move on to other areas, including how to establish strong characters and background in fiction; how to organize nonfiction; important tips for proofreading; how to ensure consistency and eliminate redundancies; if you can trust your spell-check; and anything else that you’d like to hear about.

Writing is one of life’s greatest pleasures that is neither illegal, immoral nor fattening! So hop on board and join me on the road to polishing and perfecting your writing skills.

Sigrid Macdonald is the author of three books, including Be Your Own Editor, available at Lulu.com.

Confessions of a Lazy Editor, part 1

by Amanda Smyth

No promises on part 2.

I’ll be the first to admit it. I am a lazy editor.

I DO enjoy reading the work my freelancers submit. Some days, my job is the best job in the world. I can kick back and read great articles from great writers on a variety of topics. I learn new and wonderful things from their articles and I bask in the warm glow of their musings. So what makes me a lazy editor? Well, the part that’s the most grueling is the actual editing.

And frankly, I’d rather just skim.

Audience: “WHAT? THE HORROR! But you’re an EDITOR! Don’t you love dissecting, cutting, pasting and mutilating our work?”

Me: “Not really. I’d much rather put my feet up and surf the interweb for funny pictures of cats.”

*Audience lights torches … Continue Reading

Top Editing Tips From A Pro

Word Choices

Good word choices are tricky, even for experienced writers. In my day-to-day editing duties I find a wide range of mistakes that should make good writers cringe–once they are hip to the error. Do you know the difference between a credit report and a credit rating? What about the meaning of “affect” versus “effect”?

These are common errors that give editors grief–but they cause problems for writers, too. Imagine the look on a prospective editor’s face when they read a query that talks about “the affects of the electrical storm” or when you ask the editor to “bare with you.”

I’ve ranted on these issues before, but there’s a good reason. If your query letter is full of holes, it doesn’t inspire confidence. Why should an editor take a chance on an untested writer who starts off with issues like these?

The trick is to put yourself in the editor’s shoes and try to think like them. Look at your query letter with a critical eye and try to remove linquistic land mines before they blow up in your face.

That last line had some cheesy alliteration in it, didn’t it? As an editor, I once took a pass on a writer who got too cute with alliteration in one of their published clips. It made the piece read like a high school book report, and it clued me in that the clip itself was published in a college newspaper. Not the end of the world all in itself, but definitely a warning flag.

You might think that too cynical, but that’s the kind of thinking you work against when you query.

I’ve been on this site for a while now and I’m not done reading yet! Paradigm Online Writing Assistant is a total must-see resource. If you want to know about editing, revising, essays, documenting, organizing or just about anything else under the sun–it’s here. The best part is that it is digestible and presented very well. Don’t miss this one!

Confessions of An Editor: I’m Watching You

Ready for a shocker? Sometimes editors are so damn busy they can’t be bothered to fire useless  people right away. Instead, they use them for anything they can acutally be trusted to do until such time as it’s more convenient to let them go. We know it’s hard to find good people, so we’ll put a medicore slob into as much grunt work as possible to make our lives easier til we can get around to giving them a pink slip.

At one job, I had to keep dead weight around for MONTHS because my bosses were too slow to hire replacements. I had to look for a new body on the sly, line up my choices and tell them to hang in there for a little while.  When this company did hire replacements, they wanted practically the entire office to interview them.

Ridiculous.

“Guys, don’t run each and every person that … Continue Reading

Holt Uncensored on Empty Adverbs

I stumbled across this great article on Holt Uncensored about common writer mistakes. The entire piece is definitely worth a look, but the payoff for me was the section on what Holt calls “empty adverbs”.  There is nothing worse than reading something stuffed with these needless words. How many times have we all gone there with descriptions of things that are “completely” or “totally” something or other, an “absolutely” such and such?

The point of the empty words screed according to the Holt Uncensored post is not that you should cut these words out of everything you write, but that more often than not the words do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do–they make the sentence bland and trite rather than calling attention to something important.

The article gives some hilarious examples of wretched writing from famous authors including Dan “The Da Vinci Code” Brown. He also skewers People Magazine (rightly so!) for their flagrant abuses of the adverb.

I’d never read Holt Uncensored til I found this post, but I’m a fan now…

Not Getting Any Freelance Writing Gigs? Why Your Query Letter Sucks

If you aren’t getting any responses in spite of sending query letter after query letter, it’s time to examine the root causes of the problem. There are three basic issues that could be roadblocking you:

1. The publication isn’t interested in your ideas.

2. The publication isn’t using freelancers at this time

3. Your query letter sucks and the editor is laughing at you.

The first two you can’t do much about. To fix #1, you need to read more of a particular magazine or website and try again once you’ve got a better idea of what they print. To fix #3, we need a closer look at your work.

“To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Editor” is your first mistake–and probably your last with that particular query letter. It shows a basic lack of research. What’s worse, it shows a lack of INTEREST in that research. An editor can spot your lazy ass coming a mile away. Yeah, it’s harsh of me to say, but it’s true. Now you know. … Continue Reading

Confessions of an Editor: Schadenfruede

The German phrase schadenfruede means “pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune.” I regularly indulge in this shameful practice by reading blogs like the sadly discontinued (but perpetually archived and available) Miss Snark.

What can I say? I enjoy reading about other people dealing with the same sort of nonsense I encounter…it makes me feel good to know that other writers, editors and publishers struggle with me. Lit Agent X provides one of the best I’ve read this week. In the post “Query Oops”, she discusses the bonehead blunders she gets in her query letters. People asking her to “bare with me”, discussing “cereal killers” without a trace of irony, and my all-time fave, the guy who enclosed a “synapses” of his novel.

To be fair, I am willing to bet that the “synapses” guy was a victim of his spell checker. But I don’t care. Its grounds for round-filing, if you ask me. Then again, I am guilty of my own moronic blunders, which are usually the result of hitting “Send” far too eagerly. The three things I have learned in my stint as a writer and editor:

1. Never submit while hungover.

2. Never submit before coffee.

3. Never submit before breakfast.

If you can heed these three very related warnings, chances are you will go much farther than I. One day, you’ll be sitting in a high-rise office building in Manhattan and you’ll be round-filing MY correspondence. And laughing.

Oh–and before you ask: there isn’t a writer worth a damn who doesn’t go overboard on the food, alcohol, smokes or other bad-for-you things. It’s just the way we’re wired. I insist on the no hungover submissions rule with this in mind. You can pickle your innards as much as you like when the day’s work is done, but don’t you dare let morning -after sludge brain screw you out of a paying gig.

Confessions of an Editor, Part One

It’s true–I’ve been pulled back into the dark side. I’m currently doing editor duties for as as-of-yet unannounced online publication/e-commerce site, basically setting up the editorial department from SCRATCH. What does that mean? For starters, I had to create all the company’s documents and policies for the editorial side—everything from freelance writing terms and conditions and training manuals all the way to “about this website”.

Then there’s the part I truly love about creating new websites—hiring new writers. I enjoy this process so much I forget to pee. Ahh, sarcasm. It just doesn’t work in print when you write it straight. I SHOULD have put down that I tuh-ruhhhhly loooo-huh-huh-hoooove hiring new writers. That would have conveyed my utter disgust with the whole process.

The thing I hate most about hiring new writers is the deluge of wildly inappropriate responses from the online “help wanted” ad. I figure this must be my karma, since I have fired off too many blind queries in my day–utterly wasting some poor editor’s time with poorly researched pitches to magazines that couldn’t care less. Yes, it is clear that I’m being punished for NOT reading at least two issues of a magazine before querying in the early days of my career.

What kind of punishment, you ask? … Continue Reading

Top Five Editor Complaints

OK, so these are MY top five editor complaints. As in, when I have to edit the work of my fellow freelancers–these are my top gripes. I’ve gotten some decent money revising the work of other writers when my poor harried editors simply don’t have the time to do it themselves. Trust me, when the time comes for YOU to sit in my place and do a bit of freelance editing (or when you take a job as an editor yourself) you will find your own list of major pet peeves. At least ONE of my list will end up on yours, I have no doubt:

… Continue Reading