Tip #10: Learn How to Land and Conduct Interviews

Photo: LouisvilleUSACE

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ...

After meeting a magazine editor at a writer’s conference some 12 years ago, he asked me to interview a college wrestling coach and write a feature about him. I fumbled through the phone interview, realizing afterward that I didn’t ask a focused line of questioning.

That same editor went into a Major League clubhouse with me for one of my next assignments to help me interview a player face-to-face. That went a little better. But I still had a lot to learn.

In both cases, these interviews were set up for me. Eventually, I learned how to set up my own interviews. I wrote a post about that last October. Read that first and then come back to this post for tips about how to prepare for and conduct an interview. 

Preparing for an Interview

“If you’ve prepared, you’ll ask the right questions. If you ask the right questions, the story will write itself.” –Timothy J. Caroll, staff writer at the “Hoboken Reporter” newspaper

• Look up everything you can find about the person you will interview. Don’t waste his or her time asking questions you should already know the answers to.

• In your research, begin looking for a theme. Your article will need one theme. You can’t cover every aspect of a person’s life. So, look for one area to shine the light on.

• After you have a theme in mind, develop a list of questions around the theme.

• Write down questions that require open-ended answers.

• Prepare for the interview with multiple markets in mind – even if you only have an assignment from one publication.

• If possible, hang on to all rights to the story you are selling. This isn’t always possible, but understand that if you are working for a publication as a freelance writer, you own the quotes you obtain and they generally own the story as you wrote it – at least for a while, depending on the rights you sold them.

Conducting the Interview 

• Ask questions in the order you plan to write the article. It makes it easier to find the quotes on your recorder.

• Double check time zones – be right on time.

• Turn off call waiting if it’s a phone interview.

• Be open to God redirecting your steps. If you sense a better story, throw out your questions and follow the real story.

• Try to make the subject feel comfortable. Use jokes. Make small talk.

• Don’t rely on your recorder. Take notes whenever possible.

• Consider getting a digital recorder – more editors are asking for the MP3 file.

• When you hear something you can use, write down the time on the recorder (for example, jot down 15:03 if the subject says something at that point in the interview that you know you will use).

• If you are face-to-face, you won’t be reading your questions – you need to know them. Learn to ask “gut check” questions such as, “What motivates you?” “Why did you ...?” “How does your faith ...?”

• Listen and watch for mannerisms that could enrich your article.

• Look for props that will give you a clue about this person’s passions. Does the athlete you are interviewing have a book in his locker? Ask him about it. Does your subject have a quote on her office wall? Ask her about it.

• Ask about personal struggles. Readers don’t identify with perfect people.

• If the subject strays, listen politely and redirect as soon as you can.

• Five minutes before the interview is over, mention that you need to wrap things up because your agreed upon time is drawing to a close. If the subject gives you permission, then keep going.

To read more posts in this series, click here.

How to Develop Your Pitch

Photo: Tate Johnson

If you were standing next to an editor, or seated across from one at a writers conference, and he asked you what your book is about, what would you say?

He’s not looking for a three minute answer covering all the major points. He just wants an overview. If he likes what he hears, then he’ll ask for the details, either formally or informally.

Some people call this an elevator pitch – something you could say in 25 words or less but still get your message across. It doesn’t have to be memorized word-for-word. In fact, sometimes I think that sounds too canned. But you do need to know it well enough that the general idea flows off your tongue.

This isn’t just helpful for pitching book ideas. When a prospective book buyer asks you, “So, what’s your book about?” an elevator pitch comes in handy.

I wrote a post that touched on the importance of having a good pitch a while back. But I want to go into more detail here.

Since Thanksgiving, I’ve watched 15 Christmas movies on the Hallmark, Lifetime and ABC Family channels. I don’t have the best memory, so I jotted down the movie titles and a brief blurb about each one taken directly from the DirecTV guide. These blurbs are really elevator pitches meant to draw potential viewers, so I’m going to list them here to get your creative juices flowing regarding your own project.

• The Christmas Blessing: A medical resident falls in love with a young teacher. 

• Holiday Switch: A woman wonders if she married the wrong man when a former boyfriend returns to town. 

• A Boyfriend for Christmas: A strangely familiar man may be the answer to a 33-year-old woman’s long-ago holiday wish for true love. 

• Debbie Macomber’s Mrs. Miracle: A single man hires a nanny to help him care for his 6-year-old twins. 

• A Christmas Wish: The owner of a diner helps a homeless woman and her children during the holidays. 

• Debbie Macomber’s Trading Christmas: Holiday travel leads to cross-country romances when a man and a woman temporarily swap houses. 

• The Christmas Card: A soldier falls for a woman who wrote a well-wishing card. 

• The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: A snowbound stranger brightens the holiday for a retired police officer and his niece. 

• A Holiday Engagement: A woman hires a man to pose as her fiancé when she returns home for the holidays. 

• Home by Christmas: A housewife must learn to make it on her own after her husband divorces her and she loses everything.

• The Town Christmas Forgot: A stranded family helps residents of a small town organize a Christmas pageant. 

• Under the Mistletoe: A woman becomes the center of attention after she unwittingly enters a dating contest on a radio station. 

• 12 Dates of Christmas: A woman magically experiences Christmas Eve over and over again. 

• Christmas Comes Home to Canaan: A man bonds with a woman who helps his son recover from surgery. 

• November Christmas: A community works together to help a couple bring an early Christmas to their sick 8-year-old daughter.

Okay, so now you know I’m a sappy guy who loves chick flicks. Guilty as charged. But you can benefit from my sappiness.

A few of these blurbs aren’t specific enough – like “The Christmas Blessing” and “Mrs. Miracle,” but they are just lacking a few words.

I just went to the IMDB website and found this for “The Christmas Blessing,”: “A young doctor encounters romance and deals with his past when he returns to his hometown during the holidays.” The website has a better blurb for “Mrs. Miracle” as well.

But here is the important thing – most of the pitches (14 of the 15) start with a person, followed by that person doing something (falling in love, wondering, hiring, helping, learning), followed by a unique twist (married the wrong man, wonders about an old holiday wish, brings an early Christmas to a sick child).

That three-fold formula is not a bad way to develop a pitch for your book – especially if it is a novel.

Tip #9: Learn How to Maximize Google

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ... 

“Has the industry really changed that much in one year?” a friend asked me on the phone yesterday.

“One author turned down a half a million dollar advance to sign with Amazon because he believes he can make more money self publishing.”

After we hung up, I sent him links to the following stories:

• Authors leave publishing houses out of the plot
• Self-published authors find e-success
• Barry Eisler turns down $500,000 advance to self-publish ...

This morning, my friend, who is also a newspaper editor, sent me an email calling me a guru. I’m not really a guru. I just use Google alerts and it makes me look like a guru sometimes. Rather than scouring the internet all day looking for publishing news, I let Google alerts do the work for me. I set up 15 alerts and throughout the day, Google emails me with stories that match my criteria. I have alerts set up for the following words and phrases:

• American Booksellers Association
• Christian Booksellers Association
• Book news
• Christian publishing
• Freelance writing
• Freelance editing
• Publishing industry
• Publishing
• Writing
• Books
• E-books
• E-readers
• Kindle
• Nook
• iPad

Periodically, I’ll add to or tweak the list.

While I’m eating my Cheerios in the morning I scan the emails (which I have set up to go into one folder) looking for information about the publishing industry that will help me stay informed. And then I’ll go through the list of emails again at lunch. It doesn’t take long.

When I’m working on a book or when I’m working for a newspaper on a series of articles, I’ll set up Google alerts about those topics as well. It gives me a place to turn when the creative well runs dry.

But Google is more than just a simple search engine that sends alerts.

If I’m working on a newspaper article and I need to find credible statistics or facts for my story, I turn to Google’s news page. It allows users to search newspapers and magazines rather than unfamiliar random websites and blogs.

Let’s say you are working on an article about the difficulty of finding a job in this economy and you need to find credible stats to include in the story. Go to the Google news page, type in a phrase such as “jobless claims” and you’ll see that the Wall Street Journal published a story called “Jobless Claims Drop Again” just five minutes ago. Business Week published a story about the topic 15 minutes ago and CNN published a story about it two hours ago.

If you are seeing too much information, you can narrow your search (see the bottom left side of the photo) by clicking “Past 24 hours,” “Past week” or any number of other options.

Last year, I covered the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting for a news organization from the comfort of my home office. I watched the convention via video feed from the SBC website and when I wanted to supplement the material, I went looking for what the leaders of the convention were blogging about in regards to the meeting. The first place I turned was Google Blog search. I found a number of great insights and quotes there.

Google also allows a person to search patents, scholarly papers, trends, books, images, videos and more. All of these customizable searches are just a click away from the main Google page. Just use the navigational tabs at the top of the page. Or you can use this link as a starting point.

By learning how to maximize Google as a freelance writer, you save time, you look like an expert and you hit your deadlines. All three are important in this industry.

To read more posts in this series, click here.

Tip #8: Learn to Evaluate a Newspaper’s Needs

Photo: Adam Rugel

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ...

So you grabbed eight or ten newspapers from your local supermarket or bookstore as suggested in the previous post and now you need to figure out how to evaluate them to see if you might be a good fit.

What exactly should you be looking for?

1. Sections where the paper is missing a local angle.

Six years ago, I flipped through the only Christian newspaper in my community. I stopped on the sports page since I follow sports and already had a few profile articles published about various athletes. This particular sports page had two or three national stories pulled from a wire, but nothing local.

I turned to the masthead, found the editor’s email address, queried her about the possibility of covering local sports and she asked me to come in for an interview. After meeting with her and her husband (they ran the paper as a couple), I began writing a regular sports column for them. That eventually led to me also writing hard news and features for them.

Even if you’ve never written for publication, you are an expert in multiple topics – gardening, parenting, church leadership, administration, computers, coaching, movies – be thinking about how you might be able to turn those areas of expertise into articles or columns for the newspapers you browse.

2. Sections where the paper is using wire stories.

A number of times editors have asked me to track down high profile athletes, singers or politicians, knowing that it might not be possible, but they told me not to worry about it if I couldn’t get in touch with them because they had a wire story (AP, Reuters, UPI, Baptist Press, Agape Press, etc.) as a back up.

Sometimes an editor will see a great story on one of the wires her paper subscribes to and she’ll run it, but many times she’ll run those wire stories to fill holes. If you begin to see a particular newspaper using wire stories every issue in certain sections, it’s probably an indication that the editor doesn’t have anybody to cover that area. That’s an opportunity for you.

3. Sections where the editor is writing the material.

Editors love words and they love to write, but when you begin to see an editor’s name in multiple bylines in each issue, it might be an indication that she doesn’t have anybody to cover those beats for her. Or maybe she does have writers to cover those beats, but they dropped the ball and she had to pick it up.

Your willingness to cover those areas for her might lighten her burden and anytime you can do that for an editor, you are in business.

4. Advertisements.

Maybe the newspaper isn’t missing a local angle, you aren’t seeing many wire stories and the editor isn’t writing many of the articles, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for you. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper. One way to do that is to evaluate the newspaper’s advertisers because the advertisers know the paper’s target audience.

As you flip through an issue, let’s say you see advertisements from a toy store, a Christian school, a coffee shop and a Christian bookstore highlighting the latest bestselling YA novel. The common theme is parents – probably mothers, more specifically Christian mothers.

Once you’ve established that, go back through the articles thinking about how your areas of expertise could meet the needs of Christian mothers. You could pitch the idea of writing a devotion each month for Christian mothers, or a column called “Mother to Mother” or you could offer to interview mothers in the community about the issues they face.

To read more posts in this series, click here.  

Tip #7: Accumulate Clips

Photo: Jessica Spengler

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ...

“Do you have any clips?”

I met the editor at a writers conference a couple of months prior to our phone call. She was honest when she called me, saying she liked an idea I had for an article, but she needed to know if I could write.

“I have links on my website to a couple dozen articles I’ve written for various publications – will that work?”

“What’s the url?”

We browsed my website together. I gave her a few minutes to click on and read articles she wanted to read. It was enough for her to offer me an assignment.

If you’ve been around the publishing industry for a while, then you know that the term “clips” comes from the notion of clipping your work out of magazines and keeping them on file in case another editor wants to see them. Sometimes these were also called “tear sheets” because the articles were torn out of publications.

What are you supposed to do if you don’t have any clips? How do you start building them? One of the best ways is to start local. Most grocery stores have a rack of free newspapers and magazines near their entrance. If your local grocery store doesn’t make free publications available, your local bookstore probably does.

Grab as many of these publications as you can find and begin to examine their content. We’ll go through this process in more depth in the next post, but examine the publications to see if the type of material you write would be a good fit for what they publish. I would probably aim at publications that have an online presence because linking to your work from your website makes it easier to show other editors your work. But building clips from publications that aren’t online is acceptable as well.

Make a list of the most suitable publications and then flip to the masthead for each one (usually found on the first two or three pages). Capture the editor’s email address and send him an email, pitching your availability and letting him know how you can meet the needs of the readers of that particular publication.

I’ve written for many of these publications. Some of them pay and some of them don’t. If your primary goal is to build clips, then don’t worry about whether they pay or not. You just need to get published to build your credibility. When other editors ask for your clips, it doesn’t matter whether you were paid or not for those clips. It only matters that a publication liked your work enough to put it in front of their readers.

You can set a time limit on how long you are willing to write for free. Just make sure you have multiple clips from each publication. Doing so signifies the trust of an editor over a period of time. After you’ve written five or six articles, it’s okay to approach the editor and ask to be paid (most of these newspapers pay between $15.00 and $50.00 per article if they do indeed pay established writers).

If you wrote for three monthly local publications for six months, you would acquire 18 clips in that amount of time and that would be plenty to consider expanding to national markets. And if one of those editors asks for clips, you’ll be set.

To read more posts in this series, click here.

Tip #6: Read Your Genre Extensively

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ...

A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen topflight authors every year. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. —Stephen King

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it’s also full of fourth-rate readers. —Stan Barstow

Photo: visual_dichotomy

Ask any professional musician who his musical influences are and he is likely to mention four or five artists. He’ll tell you his favorite albums and songs by those artists and he’ll tell you what he loves about their sound. He’ll go into detail about how the lyrics of one particular song spoke to a situation in his life.

And if he is really honest, he will tell you he is hoping to tap into that same magic, adding his own twist, so he can share it with kindred fans.

My favorite band, Over the Rhine, lists Cole Porter, Frank Loessner, Rodgers and Heart and The Gershwins as their influences. I know very little about any of those artists and what I do know, I learned from Over the Rhine, but their influences are strong enough for Christianity Today to write this about one of the band’s albums a few years ago:

“They’ve spiked this punch with New Orleans spirits – horn ensembles jazz up the joy and sweeten the sour. Bergquist’s voice fills up the room like red wine in a glass, while Detweiler’s piano playing has the ethereal tone of a fingertip lightly tracing the rim of a glass. It’s more Cole Porter than Coldplay.”

Writing works the same way – or, at least it should. Diehard readers in your genre should be able to identify your influences. Whenever I hear a fledgling writer say, “I don’t have time to read” or “I’ve never read anything in this genre, but I really feel like this manuscript will speak to people,” I wonder where the disconnect comes from.

How can a writer who doesn’t read extensively in his own genre, and partially in other genres, have anything to say to a specific audience, given that he’s never been willing to read what great minds in that genre have to say to that same audience? How can a writer learn his own voice if he’s never fallen in love with another writer’s voice? And how can he learn how successful commercial writers craft a great story if he has never taken the time to read them?

Imagine your favorite musician sitting down for an interview and responding to a question about his musical influences by saying, “Oh, I’ve never had time to listen to other musicians, so I don’t have any influences.”

Seems absurd, doesn’t it?

If you want to write end times Christian fiction, then you need to be immersed in what Jerry Jenkins and Joel Rosenberg have written about the topic. Why do their end times novels work? Why do so many people read them? What can you do with your own end times novel to tap into that market?

Beyond getting a better grasp for the market, what point of view do they use? Does it work? Would another point of view work better in your novel? How do they create tension in their work? Are their novels character driven or plot driven? How likable are their protagonists? Do you identify with them? How can you incorporate that in your own novel? Are their novels more about advancing a particular eschatological view or about how characters will deal with the dilemmas they face if the author’s eschatological view is correct? 

Without any of that knowledge, you are flying blind – hoping to make a connection with readers you haven’t taken the time to sit next to.

To read more posts in this series, click here.

Tip #5: Build Your Brand

Photo: Jolante van Hemert

Continuing with the 25-part series about how to build your freelance writing business ...

“Tom mentioned you in one of his classes.”

Tom was an editor I met at a writers conference, but I didn’t think he would remember me. Actually, he didn’t remember me. He remembered what I write – a truth that became evident when another writer at the conference approached me to let me know Tom mentioned me in one of his classes.

“What did he say?”

“He met a sportswriter while he was here. He couldn’t remember his name, but at some point he said he was going to need a sportswriter and he would look him up.”

“Why did that come up in class?”

“He was talking about the importance of writers being known for something.”

That was a light bulb moment for me. Being known for something leads to work. Some editors already knew me as a singles or devotional writer. Now this editor knew me as a sportswriter. I established a few other brands and built them over time. As I did, work began to find me.

You don’t necessarily need to develop multiple brands. In fact, some experts would tell you to find one brand and stick with it. In my experience, some writers have one message and that becomes their brand, while other writers have, or need, multiple messages and brands.

I wrote a post recently about why you need a brand. I won’t go into that again here. Instead, I want to expand on ways you can build your brand. Before you can do that, you need to identify your brand(s).

Your brand needs to be specific and it needs to be in demand by editors. What types of columns or articles do they run in their publications? Healthy living? Parenting? Marriage? Simple living? Relationship advice? Music or movie reviews? Those are all brands and editors need writers who can cover those topics.

If you need help in identifying your brand, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and I’ll be happy to help you.

Once you’ve established your brand (or multiple brands), here are several ways to build it:

• Write a newspaper or website column that fits your brand. I wrote a sports column in a local Christian newspaper for years, which gave me access to coaches and athletes, in addition to helping me establish relationships with people at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. After establishing my brand, many of those same people began coming to me with stories and I sold them to national publications. 

• Refer to yourself by your brand. As you speak to editors, writers or anybody else about your writing, let them know you are a spiritual disciplines writer, a caregiver writer, a sportswriter, etc. As you become known for those brands, your opportunities for work in those areas grows.

• Blog about your brand. Tama Westman is writing a series of novels about the ways in which love extends beyond the realms of time and the way connections exist between generations. She has a blog called The Touchstones that deals with the same concepts. She is establishing herself as a legacy writer.

• Tweet and Facebook about your brand. If you write about caregiving, then tweet about caregiving. Become a go-to person for information about the topic. Link to interesting news stories about caregiving, include stats about caregiving, offer comforting Bible verses for caregivers, etc. And, of course, link to your own writing about the topic.

To read more posts in this series, click here.