I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass through me and over me. 

When you’re writing as a hobby, fear of failure means fear of writing poorly and being embarrassed when you share your work.

When you write as a professional, fear of failure means fear that nobody will every buy your work again, that you’ll stop making money, lose  your house, have your spouse and kids leave you and wind up destitute in an alley sipping sterno you drained through a used gym sock because it dulls the pain just enough to make it bearable.

That’s a reasonable thing to be afraid of, but for professionals it’s not itself a reasonable fear. It’s almost impossible to not get paid for your work if you know where to look. Non-native English speakers get paid for writing in English. They don’t get paid much, but they get paid.

And so will you.

Fear can get in the way of that. It can make you anxious or depressed so you don’t make your deadlines. It can keep you in your day job, working so hard that you never step out to freelance as a writer. Defeating that fear requires a simple change of your mindset. The question is not

Will I make enough money?

The question is

How hard will I have to work to make the money I need?

If you enter your goal-setting and workday with that in your mind, you’ll get by. Keep submitting articles. Keep searching for jobs. Accept the work that comes your way. Some days, you’ll work a cushy assignment for two hours and make the money you need. Other days, you’ll pull teeth for a ten-hour marathon and barely make your nut.

In both cases, you’ve made it for that day. In every case, you’ll make it for that day. It’s just a matter of disciplining yourself to push through the hard days — and never again fearing that you won’t make enough money.

Because you’ll see to it that you do.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

Halloween is upon us, for some reason a holiday people associate with fear — rather than getting messed up on foreign substances. Kids get sugar high on candy. Teens and young adults get drunk on beer and shots. Adults end up sleep-deprived and running on pure adrenaline. I figure this makes this week as good as any to talk about one of the most common barriers to success for freelancers:

Fear

Today I want to focus specifically on fear of rejection. To freelance, especially as a writer, you have to send out countless proposals to potential clients. Some of them will ignore you completely. A few will contact you and give you work. Others will contact you, ask you to spend several hours on a more detailed sample of what you can do….then ignore you completely or send you a form “no thank you” letter. Bottom line: freelance writers get more rejection than acceptance. This is true no matter what kind of freelancing you do. Fear of rejection keeps some writers from ever submitting their work. It keeps others from making the money they could by limiting how many jobs they’re willing to apply for. Fear of rejection is the enemy, and you need to develop the tools to defeat that enemy. According to my sources, there are roughly three hundred and seventy five bajojozillion pages of self-help and sales books that claim to help you overcome this basic fear. I’ve tried much of that advice, and seen how it works in the fields of sales, freelancing and dating. After eliminating the snake-oil and bunk, I can boil the best advice down to one word:

submit your writing

Just do it. It’s easier than asking someone to dance. Less fraught with peril than trying to close a sale. You write that email or letter and send it off. Then you do it again.

• No excuses.
• No procrastinating.
• Just.
• Submit.
• Your.
• Writing.

Soon afterward, you’ll begin collecting rejection notes from publications throughout the world. A bit after that, you’ll start getting acceptance notes and money for your writing. The first rejections will sting — heck, I’d be lying if I said they don’t still sting. But they won’t have the power to send you into a deep blue funk after you’ve read your first few dozen.

It’s really that simple. Bite the bullet. Dive into the pool. Rip off the band-aid. The sooner you do it — and the more you keep doing it — the sooner it loses its power to sting.

Thanks for listening.

Writers out there — what’s your most ridiculous/embarrassing/amusing rejection story?

I listened to an NPR interview a few years ago where an author talked about the increasing importance of aesthetics in the modern business world. Twenty years ago, you could send in a photocopy of a typed resume with no fancy text. Today, everybody has access to word processing — meaning that laser-printed paperwork with appropriate bold and italic type is the minimum requirement.

As a freelance writer, you’re not just a job applicant — you’re a business. It’s worth taking a day or two to develop a handful of forms and graphics to form a best foot for you to put forward. It’s possible to go overboard with tri-fold brochures and similar business collateral, but as a simple contractor you will definitely need the following:

• A business card with a simple graphic,  your name and contact information. If it’s legible, this can double as your email signature and your logo.
• A banner logo for the top of your website and paperwork.
• A letterhead with your banner logo on top, preferably formatted for easy entry.
• A solid resume, preferably checked over by a professional, ready for customization to each job you’ll bid on.
• A form cover letter. You should never turn it in unaltered, but it will form the bones of the application letter. You can send this as a data file, or copy and paste it into your email applications.
• An invoice. MS Publisher and MS Excel come with a selection of form invoices, which you can customize using your banner logo and/or letterhead.

So one of my major clients — one worth about 2/3 of my income — is experiencing serious problems of late. This isn’t catastrophic, but only because I have other opportunities I can pursue. It did mean spending much of last week getting more aggressive about pursuing those opportunities. Research on job boards, reaching out to contacts and similar leg work have put me in the middle of a few negotiations — and put my resume in many more dark holes where I’ll never hear from them again.

I applied to probably 50 writing assignments last week. I’ve heard back from about 5. One point of this is that even somebody with a reasonable resume does well to get a 10% callback rate in this market.

But that’s not the only point.

The main point is that I applied only for the jobs I thought I’d enjoy — which was less than half the gigs I found out about. There is an abundance of opportunity out there, even in the middle of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression. Some examples:

• A greeting card company willing to pay $300 a pop for material
• Several websites wanting blog content, at $15 to $75 for a page of material
• A children’s book publisher needing words for a picture book
• Magazines, both print and online, seeking fiction and nonfiction articles
• Companies needing business plans, grant applications, internal documents and advertising copy
• Content mills paying a little money for a little effort. Sure, it’s like working fast food — but it’s real money for writing.
• An insurance agent wanting copy to educate his clients.
• Writing reviews of local strip clubs
• Straight-up journalism for big-name and small-time papers
• Ghostwriting opportunities ranging from online content to full-length manuscripts.
• Resume and cover letter writing.

The work is out there, folks. It’s just a matter of taking the time to find it. For some, the constant job hunt can be a deal-breaker — it’s one of the reasons my wife prefers a “real” job to freelance work. But if you’re willing to do the legwork, freelance writing is a literally bottomless well.

Thanks for listening.

Apologies to my Facebook friends for the repetition, but this was too beautiful to pass up. Stephen King on two of the most popular publishing phenomena of the past twenty years.

Words of wisdom from somebody who knows a little about writing popular fiction. You can find similar observations here:

http://www.mugglespace.com/photo/hermione-vs-bella-1?xg_source=activity