Crofts - The freelance writers handbook : how to turn your writing skills into a successful business

Andrew Crofts has been a freelance writer for over 35 years and is one of Britains most successful ghostwriters. He has published over 50 books and also works as a freelance journalist, business writer, novelist and non-fiction author. His books include several Sunday Times number one bestsellers.

The Little Hero

Maisies Amazing Maids

Ghostwriting

Ghosted Titles Include

Betrayed (Lyndsey Harris)

Pete My Story (Pete Bennett)

For a House Made of Stone (Gina French)

The Little Prisoner (Jane Elliott)

Shattered (Mavis Marsh)

The Kid (Kevin Lewis)

Just a Boy (Richard McCann)

Please, Daddy, No (Stuart Howarth)

Crocodile Shoes I and II (Jimmy Nail)

Sold (Zana Muhsen)

Kathy and Me (Gillian Taylforth)

My Gorilla Journey (Helen Attwater)

Through Gypsy Eyes (Kathy Etchingham)

Visit www.andrewcrofts.com for more information on the authors titles.

Published by Piatkus

ISBN: 978-0-3494-0630-5

Copyright 2002, 2007 by Andrew Crofts

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Piatkus

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

To my wife, Susan, with much love and many thanks
for putting up the vicissitudes of a freelance life.

Freelance writing is the most wonderful way of earning a living. Nothing, except perhaps inherited wealth, provides greater personal freedom. You can follow your interests and develop yourself in any direction you choose, free to live where and how you want, and to travel wherever and whenever the urge takes you. As a freelancer you never know when Lady Luck is going to drop some fabulous opportunity into your lap, but as the highly successful television writer Russell T. Davies was recently quoted as saying, Luck is just hard work a lot of the time.

My aim is to inspire you with the necessary hope, ambition and nerve to give it a go, and to lead you through the various preparation stages so that you have a sensible, realistic plan and an understanding of the marketplace youre about to enter.

I will then show you how to turn your writing skills into a business that will support you in whatever lifestyle youve set your heart on.

There are many ways to make a decent and pleasant living from writing, but its all too easy to be carried away by unrealistic dreams. We all need dreams to get us out of bed in the mornings, but to make them come true we must have the basic tools of our profession. Becoming a successful freelance writer is difficult, but its perfectly doable if you go about it the right way. Ill show you how to put yourself in a position to be offered the lucky breaks, then all youll need do to succeed is produce the best work youre capable of.

Much of it is about marketing. Selling writing skills is not a lot different from selling airline seats, vodka or cigarettes. Approach your career as you might approach the launch of a new shop or a new pop singer. Im going to show you how to find customers, persuade them to buy from you for the first time and how to keep them coming back for more.

We live in the Information Age and the Entertainment Age, so it is a great time to be one of the people who creates and sells both products.

Scaremongers keep telling us that fewer and fewer people are leaving education with even basic writing skills; if this is true and you are one of the select band of skilled workers, you are in a stronger position to sell your wares than at any time since literacy first became widespread in the West.

The market for material is expanding at an increasing rate with more magazines, more websites, more books and more television programming being created and sold than ever before. At the same time, as computers become more user friendly and affordable and printing techniques more accessible, we have ever more sophisticated ways of producing our material. Publishing giant Random House worked out that they sold four times as many books in 2005 as the entire worldwide book industry did in 1955. And that isnt the end of it, because for every book that is published there are probably a hundred new blogs going on-line.

Every morning you wake up as a freelance you know something exciting might happen today. A publisher may ring with a big commission, your novel might be accepted, a huge star might agree to an interview, a magazine might buy an article or send you to Tahiti with all expenses paid, the film rights to a book could sell for thousands or a chat show host will want to interview you. Most days none of these things will happen, but some days they will.

My book How to Make Money from Freelance Writing came out at the beginning of the nineties. Five years later it was updated to include developments such as word processors and fax machines. Five years later under the new title The Freelance Writers Handbook, it needed a complete rewrite because of the changes brought on by technology: most notably the spread of the Internet and the power of the on-line bookseller Amazon, plus the increasing use of e-mail, mobile phones and print-on-demand techniques. Now, another five years on, we have witnessed yet another quantum leap into a world once only imagined by science fiction writers. Almost all these transformations have been to the benefit of freelance writers and these changes are hurtling into our lives at an ever-increasing speed.

Not only have we seen the arrival of stars like Dan Brown, Jordan and Sharon Osbourne, genres like misery memoirs, initiatives like Richard and Judys Bookclub and shelves of books being introduced into nearly all the big supermarkets, but there has also been the spread of blogs on the Internet, the growing use of print on demand, on-line publishing, e-zines, laptops and the rest.

In the past thirty-five years, ever since I left school, Ive tried to sell work in virtually every area of the writing market. Some attempts were more successful than others. Ive collected as many rejections and disappointments as anyone. But Ive still managed to stay in business and I still wouldnt trade writing for any other profession. I hope this book will lead you not only to making a good living, but to having a great deal of fun doing so. If you persevere you can achieve whatever you want.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

A.A. Milne

Being a writer means you can dip into interesting and exciting lives and situations, find out whatever you want, and then return to the peace and security of your own garret to write the resulting story, whether it be a book, a film script or an article for the local newspaper. You can live as many different lives as you want, while always maintaining an escape route. You can follow any path your curiosity takes you down, and go to places youd never otherwise see; one day rubbing shoulders with princes at polo matches, the next unearthing a prostitution racket in a Third World shanty town or taking tea with your local vicar. You can head into the dust of war zones or the red carpet world of celebrity gossip, whatever turns you on.