The Business of Writing & Editing - Practical Tips & Templates for New Freelancers

INTRODUCTION: HOW I GOT STARTED AS A FREELANCE WRITER & EDITOR

Starting at the Very Beginning

My story is, I think, a pretty typical one. Ever since I could hold a pen—before I even knew how to print letters—I would scribble on paper and pretend to write. Once I learned my letters, I started writing stories. I lost track of the amount of stories I wrote. Most of them were fantasy novels with thousands upon thousands of words, accompanied by maps illustrating the imaginary lands that I created and a dictionary of the words that I designed for my new languages.

Between the ages of eight and 18, I probably wrote somewhere in the range of 20+ novels.

It was around my late teens that I began to shift my focus from fiction to nonfiction. I started to become more interested in the world around me than the worlds that I created. I also became very interested in healthy living (specifically, nutrition and fitness). At this point I was doing a fair amount of reading online, and one blog that I loved was written by a health writer, Leslie Goldman. It had never occurred to me before that someone could be a health writer, but since I was so fascinated by health and I still loved to write, it seemed to be the perfect career option for me. I emailed Leslie inquiring how she got started, and she graciously agreed to a phone call Q & A.

Leslie was the person who advised me to start my own health blog. She explained that if I started out by blogging, it would give me practice as a reader, enable me to figure out if writing about health was really what I wanted to do, and also provide me with some writing samples to build up my portfolio. And so my first blog, Living Healthy in the Real World, was born.

I started out on Blogger, moved to Wordpress.com, and finally purchased my own domain name (www.livingintherealworld.net, which I switched to SaganMorrow.com in February 2015), using Wordpress.org as my platform.

Over the years, I watched as my blog grew and grew. After my first year of blogging, I began to get requests from companies to do product reviews in exchange for free books, food, and even running shoes!

And in October 2009—less than two years since I had started my blog—POM Wonderful flew me down to California with 14 other bloggers on their first-ever Blogger Harvest Tour to tour the orchards on foot and by mini plane and to be wined and dined. I was the only Canadian blogger who had received the invitation, and it was the first time that it really hit home that I could make something of myself with this writing business.

Exploring My Passions and Interests

During this whole time, I was attending university. I had grown up with the understanding that university was just “what you did.” My parents weren’t concerned with what degree I got or with whether I would go on to graduate school; they just wanted me to get a degree in something to help me get farther in life. Since I liked learning, that made sense to me, and I happily went to university right after high school.

I started university assuming I’d get my degree in Psychology (I had always enjoyed my introductory psychology class in high school), but my professor was a bore in first-year university and besides, I found out that I would have to take a statistics course if I got a degree in Psychology. Frankly, I was tired of math (and clearly I didn’t want to get into Psychology that badly), so I decided to get my degree in English instead, since I loved writing.

And then, after only barely starting to take some English courses, I discovered that our university had a Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department.

I had never heard of such a department before but it sounded pretty fantastic to me. The subject material included everything from analyzing advertisements to interpreting fairy tales to talking about our understanding of gender as a society to learning about communication theories and more. It was basically an entire degree in critical thinking, and it was absolutely perfect for me.

While I was in university, around the time that I decided to switch to the Rhetoric department, I grew interested in the student newspaper—and thanks to my health blog, I soon became the newspaper’s health columnist. I wrote a weekly column on health and wellness, recipes and nutrition, fun and easy fitness routines; the works. I even applied for a position as the Copy and Style Editor at the newspaper, but I didn’t get it (probably because of my complete lack of qualifications at the time!).

Even though I didn’t get the Copy and Style Editor position, the managing editor at the newspaper (who happened to be best friends with my sister) offered me another position that to this day I’m sure she invented on the spot: to proofread the entire newspaper before it went to print. It wasn’t a paid position, and it had never been available as a volunteer position before, but I jumped in happily. Tuesday evenings became one of my favourite parts of the week, and I felt such a thrill every time I caught a typo, formatting error, or punctuation mistake which had been missed by the writer, section editor, and managing editor. I knew then that editing was for me.

In my last year of university, I also started another blog: Living Rhetorically in the Real World. I began writing about the things I was learning about in university and about communications in general. I was starting to get interested in writing about other things besides just health.

I completed my degree in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications in 2010, writing my final exam the same week that I moved into my newly-purchased condo. I was a new homeowner, I had a degree under my belt, and I was ready to get out into the real world and start my career.

…Except that I didn’t know what my career would be. I was stuck! What could a person do with a degree in Rhetoric, anyway?

My First Foray into Freelancing

I got lucky. If I’m honest, it was luck that played a major role in helping me along my way to becoming a freelance writer and editor. I knew that I wanted to edit, but I also knew that to get hired with a big publishing company, 99.9% of editors required a degree in Publishing. I didn’t want to go that route—much as I loved learning, I was tired of the education system and wanted to finally have a “real job.” So I sent my resume off to dozens of local publishing companies and advertising agencies and even a public relations company in the hope that someone would bite.

Meanwhile, a family friend, who was the past editor of our city’s newspaper and who heard that I wanted to break into the writing and editing industry, passed my name onto a creative agency when they offered her a freelance gig that she was unable to do herself. That simple act of passing my name on led to a wonderful long-term relationship between me and the creative agency. Ever since that initial project, the company offered me more work a couple times each year for the next four or five years. They weren’t always very big projects, but they were something!

Almost at the exact same time as I first met with the creative agency, the owner of a local public relations company (which I had sent my resume off to) reached out to me as well. As it happened, he had just signed a contract with a local health centre. Based on my background in health writing and my passion for health and wellness, he decided to take a chance on me—even though I had no knowledge of writing press releases or connecting with the media.

The rest of my opportunities grew from these two initial people taking a chance on me. I received a contract job as the communications person with a new non-profit (a fruit picking and sharing organization) and became a full-time freelance writer for about six months. But when my contract with that fruit sharing non-profit ended, I panicked!

I didn’t think I could continue to find work, and I had this mortgage to pay too. At this time, it is also worth noting, I didn’t do much research into how to succeed as a freelancer, and I was making some critical mistakes such as working in my pajamas at home (which we’ll talk about later). So I applied for a job that paid $14 / hour (a big difference from my freelance gigs, most of which paid $40 or $50 / hour) at a local provincial registered charity. I got the job, and I stayed there for a full three and a half years while continuing to do part-time freelance work on the side.

My position at this registered charity shifted dramatically over the years. At one point I wore four different hats: I was the coordinator for a healthy food project, I was in charge of development and fundraising for the organization, I was the youth outreach coordinator, and I was also in charge of the wellness and fitness of the office staff.

In short, I was burned out, exhausted, and drastically underpaid, even with my $2 / hour raise. My boss was a lovely woman, but she and I didn’t agree on a lot of the copy for our promotional and fundraising materials, and we had different ideas about how to go about doing things. It was time to leave, and I decided that now was also the time to make the big leap and become a full-time freelance writer and editor—again.

My Second, Successful Foray into Freelancing

After making the decision to become a full-time freelance writer and editor, I stayed for five...