Tag Archives: AvantGuild

Writing tips for n00bs: Get a job!

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Back when I was finishing up my writing degree and looking to land a nice “writing job,” I found myself a bit confused about where a writer might seek out these kinds of dream jobs. After all, everyone knows classified ads are dead and Craigslist is full of scammers and spammers. So where do the pros go when they’re looking for legitimate writing jobs?

Here’s what I learned from my J-school pals, who were infinitely more practically trained than I was in terms of searching out legit writing jobs:

  1. JournalismJobs.com — The go-to website for journalists looking for work, whether it’s in print, online or broadcast media. Find a job, post your résumé, or catch up on the latest media news. Just be wary of the Demand Studios ads and other content mill crap that seems to come up at every writing job board and you’ll be fine.
  2. JeffGaulin.com — At first glance, this site’s URL doesn’t seem particularly like it would help the media job-seeker, but if you’re Canadian, you’ll definitely want to give it a whirl. Gaulin is a Canadian journalist with an assortment of degrees, as well as experience in the field, and first started the job board in 1995 to help his fellow J-school classmates find work. Now the board’s a phenomenon; hit it for good quality full– and part-time jobs or to post your CV.
  3. MediaBistro.com — Aimed primarily at U.S. journalists, but also featuring perks for the freelancers of the world, MediaBistro has a pretty decent job board that can be sifted by industry, location, duration (FT/PT/freelance) or featured employers, which are typically the big boys like the NYT, Dow Jones and (unfortunately) Suite101. Steer clear of the content mills, as always, and hone in on the skills you’ve got to pay those bills. As an added bonus, you can purchase an AvantGuild membership, which offers special insights about breaking into those top-tier mags through their How To Pitch guides, as well as discounts on their online course offerings and other freelancer goodies (like health insurance).

Aside from those top 3 sites, you should also check the Berkeley School of Journalism’s excellent list of journalism job banks to see if any particularly fit your needs. They’ve got everything from general sites (including my top three) to freelance-specific to radio, TV and the ever-dwindling print media, plus a section for “new media” (i.e. web writing and multimedia).

You can still cruise the Craigslist writing section for your city (and any others with bigger listings, like NYC, LA and even Chicago), as there are occasionally some good jobs listed there, particularly for freelancers looking for new gigs. Of course, some of the best places to find new (and perhaps previously overlooked) markets to try, plus a regular source of job listings are Angela Hoy’s WritersWeekly.com and Hope Clark’s FundsForWriters.com. Sign up on their respective sites to get both of them delivered straight to your inbox on a weekly basis, with WW on Wednesdays and FFW on Fridays. Throw in a dose of FFW’s Small Markets for listings from the smaller markets that will get you some of your first published clips and you’re rolling.

What about you? Have you found any great job boards or e-newsletters with helpful tips, tricks or writing gigs? Feel free to share in the comments section; it’s good karma, you know.

How to get published

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How do you get published? Or, perhaps more to the point: How do you get people to pay you money for your writing? These are questions I hear a lot from writers who are new to the freelancing game and looking to write for magazines and websites. While I would love to help everyone find the answers to these questions, one of the first things you should know about freelancing and writing in general is that you have to be able to find your own work. But how?

First of all, what do you write about? What’s your niche or focus? Do you write about home-woven handicrafts, or are you a hard news hound? Figure out what you like to write about, and what you’re good at writing about, and make a short list of topics you’d be able to cover on a moment’s notice.

Research, Research and More Research

Once you’ve got some topics in mind, get online and start Googling. Find publications that fit with your specialties and note their contact information, as well as any specific submission guidelines. Grab a copy of the Writer’s Market for your genre and start flipping through it until you find something that piques your interest or pertains to your area of expertise. Then, start pitching.

What’s a pitch? It’s a short email that communicates the basic kernel of your story idea to the editor who will potentially buy it. Always follow the rule of Keep It Simple, and make sure your pitch is short and to the point.

Send out a set number of pitches every day. Start with one or two and work your way up. Keep track of where you’ve sent your pitches so that you can follow up with editors after a reasonable amount of time. (Note that a “reasonable” amount of time may vary, but if your pitch is very timely, you’ll want to hear back sooner rather than later. If you haven’t heard anything in 30 days, politely inquire to see if the editor received your email.)

Even if your pitch is rejected, be sure to send it out to other publications; sometimes it may just be bad timing, so don’t give up on your ideas. Be sure to keep things in motion at all times.

When you receive the go-ahead on a pitch, get to work! You may need to interview subjects or do more research on the topic, so get started early and deliver the piece ahead of schedule to really wow your editors and build a solid partnership for future assignments.

Getting published isn’t rocket science; it just requires ordinary actions, performed consistently, to achieve the desired results.

A Writing Success Cheat-Sheet

While these certainly aren’t the only places I regularly check for writing tips and potential jobs, these are some of the best places to start. Here are the top three places I find helpful on a regular basis, as a kind of cheat-sheet for writing success:

  • The Writer Magazine — A great magazine (in actual paper format, delivered by the post office!) for writers of all genres. Published monthly, you’ll find lots of great tips for everything from how to write in a certain style to how to get your work published to markets you might want to explore. If you subscribe to the magazine, you’ll also get access to web-exclusive articles, which are often geared towards writing for Internet publications, rather than print pubs.
  • MediaBistro — While I’m opposed to the fact that they advertise Suite101 on their job boards (along with a bunch of non-writing jobs for various media companies), they do have a lot of listings here that are reputable, and a lot of high-profile media outlets post jobs here. You can sign up for free and get tons of newsletters from them, if you so desire, or join their AvantGuild membership and get extras like health care coverage (a big plus for Americans), discounts on writing-related services, the ability to post your CV and a media profile on their site, and access to their excellent “How to Pitch” articles that will help you figure out how to pitch to specific media outlets that are particularly challenging. This site is extremely helpful and totally worth the $55 US it costs for a one-year subscription.
  • Writers Weekly — Sign up for this free e-newsletter and get job postings, writing tips, publishing advice and even free e-book recommendations in your inbox on a weekly basis. The woman who runs this newsletter, Angela Hoy, also runs an e-book publishing company called Book Locker, which publishes books on the subject of writing from every angle imaginable, so you’ll also receive ads for her e-books and quarterly writing contests, which you may find helpful as well.

Finally, although my post about how to become a successful writer in 3 easy steps is a bit tongue-in-cheek, writing is really all about sitting your butt in a chair and writing. If you’re writing on a daily basis, you’re bound to improve, so sit down and get to it!

Help name the MediaBistro blog, or forever hold your TK

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namefailOkay, I will admit that I am not tops at coming up with brilliant names, headlines, sub-heads and so forth, but I definitely know a clunker when I see one. MediaBistro is starting up a blog that will allow their AvantGuild members to showcase some of their work, comment on the media fields in which they work, etc., and currently their chosen blog title is… TK.

That’s right, TK. For those not in the media, “TK” is what you write in a piece when you think “Hmm, there should be a fact or figure here, but I don’t happen to have it right now, so I will have to go look it up later.” It’s a placeholder meaning “to come” that makes it easier to return to the spot in your manuscript once you have the info, or else it acts as a reminder that you have to look something up. It’s perfectly helpful and reasonable for a writer to use TK in their drafts, but as the title for a blog, it stinks. Total name fail.

Here’s why:

  • It implies that the people writing the blog don’t actually know anything, because they will have to go look it up later (as this is what TK literally means)
  • It looks like the name of the blog is, itself, a placeholder, which implies that the people who started it have no idea what to call it and have given up
  • It’s trying to play on some “insider” knowledge, but TK is pretty low on the list of things an insider would need to know to get ahead in the field
  • Seth Godin (writer, speaker and agent of change) says you should never use a placeholder name for your blog, as people will fall in love with it, and then changing it will be impossible. Please, for the love of dog, listen to Seth Godin!

That being said, it’s better than all their other idiotic suggestions, which include 4UXU (“for you by you”), The Mediabistro Bump (supposedly “an homage to Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Bump”), UFTW (“you for the win”), and the possibly-maybe facetious “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Blogorium.” Seriously.

I know media types love puns (hell, I sure do), and riffing on already-famous titles, song lyrics, etc., but 4UXU? UFTW? These are pathetic. We can do better… can’t we?

In the comments section, there were a few good suggestions. Greg Vogel suggested “BistroVision,” and Ed Cohen went for “In Communicado.” These are both far better than “TK.” As I said in my comment, the blog needs something that suggests its connection to MediaBistro, something that’s clever but not precious, and avoids being a lame variant on “for us, by us.” I certainly don’t think “BistroBlog” is the most original name in the world, but at least it’d be honest.

So what would you name a MediaBistro blog?