However, the big question is what people are looking for. Over on the Half Hog Forums, I’ve posed the question… what’s your ideal writing site, as a writer or as a client looking for content?

Who knows, one day you might actually get your ideal site!

If you have opinions, I’d LOVE to hear them, either in the comments here or over on the forum.

However, today I returned to one of my old haunts – HubPages – and began posting a series that should be of use to all the newbie onliners out there: Getting Started As A Freelance Writer.

The content’s pretty huge and long, which is why I’ve held off posting it here. Part one went up today and covers some of the preparations new freelancers should do even before they start looking for advice on setting up!

Hope you enjoy it. (And don’t forget to do the ‘follow’ thing so you get updated when each step’s published!)

The ideal start to 2012

It’s finally here. After months of work, weeks of waiting and days of reformatting for the Kindle (yikes, that was painful), my book is available to the public!

It’s incredibly cheap, too – $7.50 for the paperback or around $5 for the Kindle edition (depending on taxes and other fun stuff Amazon does with the so-called “list price”). Over 100 pages of essential info for less than the price of a couple of pounds of pork sausages. Awesome!

You can find out more from the Half Hog Home Page, which is soon to become the new hub for everything to do with half-hogging - tips, advice, resources and anything else I can come up with to help you get your part-time freelance career off the ground.

Right now, there’s just a static page but the Half Hog Forum is open and just waiting for you to drop in and ask questions, offer your own tips and special tricks or even just chat for a while.

Keep your eyes on the new site URL: I’m working on some fun freebies to go with the launch!

I'm giving. Are you?

The holidays are coming up fast and, as usual at this time of the year, many of us are thinking of the less fortunate. For my part, I’d like to make a quick plug for my charity of the year:

Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research

They are still the only national research charity solely devoted to blood disorders in both adults and children. 24,500 people in the UK every year are diagnosed with a cancer of the blood and leukaemia is the most common form of cancer in children in the UK. They rely entirely on voluntary donations.

My mother died suddenly of leukaemia about 18 months ago, which is why I’m plugging them (instead of Cats’ Protection who I’d normally opt for).

They have a webpage here and tons of auctions on eBay.

Thanks for listening.

It’s stupid.

Allow me to impart a wonderful little nugget of wisdom that I picked up from a certain Mr. Coker.

Picture, if you will, a 15-year-old Spike and the said Mr. Coker, a schoolmate who was later to achieve legendary status among his peers by placing a satsuma in the path of a bus and singing the “Small ones are more juicy” song from an Outspan advertisement as it was obliterated.

We were on the same work experience posting for school and had to sign a document limiting liability for the employer. Coker said:

I’ll bring it with me tomorrow. I never sign anything without reading it first.

An amazingly responsible thing to say at only 15 years old but I felt stupid for not having thought of it myself. I was ready to sign immediately, to trust the adults who’d handed me the document. It was all above board, of course, but the advice stuck with me. Years (a lot of them) later, I still follow Coker’s advice.

This all came back to me today when I read a comment on a myLot discussion about earning from writing on revenue share sites. It read as follows:

I’m a member there but I have only submitted one article with them. It was approved but it was based on hits, I think. To be honest I really don’t know how it works there.

My first thought was “too much trust”. They had signed up for the site and submitted content, expecting to be paid, but had never read the terms and conditions. They didn’t even know how the site’s revenue share model works.

Every employer – whether they’re a site, a magazine, an individual or anything else – makes a contract with you when they employ you. When you click the “I agree” button at the end of the registration process on a rev share site, you’re agreeing to a collection of legal statements that define the payment terms: how, when and if you’ll earn money.

Not reading those terms is stupid. You could be giving away your work for nothing. You could be giving up your rights as copyright owner. You could be submitting content for free. Unless you read the terms, you don’t know.

99 times out of 100, a contract will be clear and contain nothing to worry about. However, that one time it doesn’t might cost you a lot. So remember what I learned from a schoolboy friend and follow his excellent advice.

Never sign anything unless you’ve read it first.

¹ The presence of a photo of Ms. Kardashian (who has taken the step of showing her boobies in W magazine, no doubt to further the cult of zero talent) in no way implies any connection to this phrase. Nope. Absolutely not. No way.

Oink!

As you all know by now, Going The Half Hog: Freelance Writing Without Marketing will soon be published. Since I’ve been somewhat obsessed with getting it done and consequently talking about it a lot, I’ve run into several people who’ve asked me the same two questions:

Is it true that almost everything in the book is available on ScrawlBug for free? And if that’s true… why am I publishing a book? Aren’t I cutting my nose off despite my face (as they say)?

There are a lot of answers to those questions, so I thought I’d clear the matter up publicly instead of replying to each individual who asks.

And yes, I know there are three questions there: the third sort of runs on from the second.

Let’s start with the first question, since it has a nice, easy answer: yes, almost everything in the book is available on ScrawlBug for free. There are a few extra bits in the book but pretty much all the vitalstuff is already online.

What about the whole “nose and face” thing? By publishing everything for free here, aren’t I defeating the point of a book you have to pay to read?

For starters, let me lay out three important facts:

1. Nothing I’ve learned over the last three years of being a freelance writer has cost me any money.¹
2. At heart, I’m an information-sharing hippy who believes that education should be free for everyone.
3. I intensely dislike marketing, which is why there are no ads on this blog and why the book’s about freelance writing without marketing (duh).

That should answer why virtually all the information is available here for free. If it doesn’t, er… try reading the three points again!

Now, the big question is why I’m publishing a book with a price tag.

From a personal point of view, the Half Hog is one of two books that have been trundling around inside my head for the last two years. The other’s my NaNo attempt (which is way behind schedule).

When you’ve had an idea slowly constructing itself in your brain like some kind of time-lapsed Lego film, with pieces flying in from all over the place and slotting themselves neatly into place, it’s hard to resist the urge to catch it on paper, bind it and sit it on the shelf, to regard in times of adversity, against the flapping of the flames.

On a less personal level, when I started squeezing the Half Hog out of my synapses, one of the most annoying parts of the process was searching for and collating the content I wanted to include from ScrawlBug. Anyone who’s ever tried to do this knows two things:

1. The WordPress search sucks.
2. Categories never work the way you wish they did.

It was a massive job to go through the whole of the site, piece everything together and assign entries to the different parts of the book where they would appear. Even once I’d figured out how to export a WordPress blog as text (or PDF in my case)² it was a major undertaking.

All the information is in one place and in order, so it’s easy to read and refer to.

So there you have it. If you don’t mind hunting around the ScrawlBug site, using the WP search engine (I pity the fool who tries that) or going through everything to collate the information you want, it’s all free. If not, the book will only set you back $10-$15 (price TBD) and will save you the hassle.

Plus you can carry it around with you or use it to prop open a door. Awesome.

Have you signed up for your chance to win a free copy of Going The Half Hog?

¹ If you exclude getting scammed once and paying for a month’s membership on a bidding site to try it out, that is.

² Lordy me, have I really been working on the book since June? How time flies when you’re beating yourself senseless against the brick wall of writer’s block.

I don’t know who said that (or something like it) but they were right. Editing should ensure clarity as well as factual accuracy, style and everything else.

This is particularly difficult when you’re editing your own work. After all, you wrote every word so they’re all there for a reason, right? Not necessarily. We’re all excessively wordy sometimes, especially if we’re writing in a conversational style.

You want examples? Alrighty, here’s a couple.

A few weeks ago I was editing a short article about property. This sentence leapt off the page as a great example of unnecessary wordiness (or a freelancer trying to fluff out their word count):

“The demand and supply forces in the current market have ruled a mandate that has dictated that…”

How many unnecessary words are there in that single phrase? Almost half the sentence is useless. The author could have written “Demand and supply in the current market dictate that…” and used nine words instead of seventeen. The meaning is the same and it’s a lot clearer.

More recently, I ran into the problem in my own writing. As you’re probably aware, Jill has finished her first edit of Going The Half-Hog, my book on freelance writing without marketing. Apart from the 143 corrections, changes and comments she made (aaargh!), she wrote almost an entire page of commentary about my distaste for advertising and marketing. According to her, the tone of one particular section was excessively venomous.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t often get nasty about subjects but when I do, I really let loose. The frequency of the expression “marketing whore” on this blog is testament to that! However, in her opinion – and mine once I’d read her well-considered argument – was that I sounded like a crazy man or someone with an axe to grind. That could alienate a large number of readers or make them wonder whether they can trust the opinion of someone so obviously deranged.¹

I sat and rewrote the section for over three hours. It was only a page long but every time I tried to express myself better, I fell into the same trap of sounding like Mr. Straightjacket, complete with foaming mouth and gnashing teeth. Not good.

In the end it was my lady who came to the rescue. She’s such an inspiration! I explained the problem and she solved it with a single phrase: “You need another solution.” Somewhere in my brain, synapses fired, a light-bulb lit and I knew what to do.

I deleted the entire section.

In four words, she gave me the insight to step back and realise that the page-long diatribe I had vomited onto virtual paper was completely useless. It didn’t add anything to the book and, in fact, detracted from the subject. It made me look like a ranting idiot rather than conveying useful information.

Lesson to learn: if something you’ve written doesn’t add value to your work, press the delete key. You’ll feel better, believe me.

¹ This is a superb example of why you need an editor for your work!