How to Get a Cash Fix and Push Your Career at the Same Time

Freelancing in China often means living hand-to-mouth, so writers should be on the look out for ways to make a little extra money in ways that are more career-helpful than the ever-tempting English-teaching route. Peter Hessler got his start by working as a clipper, clipping relevant stories out of newspapers and filing them for reference. Clipping is now obsolete, but freelancers should also keep their eyes open for other opportunities at publications.

Although clipping's now in the grave, one opportunity is still available: copy-editing duty. I recently got a phone call from an editor I often work with looking for help with copy-editing duty. Pay wasn't great: 100 RMB an hour--half what I could get for teaching English. Yet the job has a huge benefit over teaching English: it's useful experience to get to know the style usage of the magazine, improve copy-editing skills, and to get to know the people at the magazine better.

It should be easiest to get copy-editing duty with editors that you've written for previously, but don't just wait for editors to call you. Send an email asking if they use outside copy-editors and say that you're interested in signing up if they do. It won't automatically make you the next Peter Hessler, but it will be helpful to your career--and it just might mean one less week of living hand-to-mouth.

Blogging Tip: Know Your HTML

Blogging and posting stories online can be a great way to for freelancers to establish themselves, and knowing a good resource for basic internet language can be a great help. Writers aren't programmers, after all, but posting smartly is not hard. A great resource for writers can be found at:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_elements.asp

The magazine that I've blogged for on a consistent basis has often required a basic knowledge of HTML or other online editing languages, but no training was provided. Yet an twenty minutes on the website above--or even just the ten seconds it takes to bookmark it--should be enough to put you on track.

A couple of skills to look out for:

-Creating links
-Inserting and resizing pictures
-Creating block quotes
-Putting in extra line breaks

Two Easy Steps to Creating a Title for Chinese News

It's often not the responsibility of freelancers to come up with titles for the stories they write, but a catchy, clever title can be a good way to garner attention. And with China as a focus, there are two easy steps that just about any successful title follows.

Step 1: Take any well-known Chinese cultural object or recent historical event.

Examples:

The Great Wall
The Cultural Revolution
The Little Red Book
The East is Red
The Red Guard
The Great Leap Forward
(Arguably) The Hundred Flowers Movement
The One-Child Policy

Step 2: Twist the object or event from Step 1 into a pun related to your article.

Follow these two steps, and voila! You have the magic of "The Great Firewall of China" or "The Green Leap Forward." China has such a well-known culture full of brazen names, many of which come pre-loaded with kitsch value, making writing from China that much easier than writing from Cambodia. Just how many puns can you get out of Angkor Wat and Pol Pot?

How a Freelancer Should Spend Time in the Airport

As I sit here in the Dubai Airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to China, I'm reminded of one of the best ways a freelancer can spend an hour in the airport: leafing through magazines in the bookstore.

Half of freelancing is pitching, whether you like it or not. A decent part of pitching is figuring out whom to pitch to. This can be even more difficult if you're living abroad and have little access to English-language publications.

Thus, every chance I have to revisit the English-language world, in the form of airport bookstores, I take a notepad and go through the magazine section. I scope the magazines to find out what their scope is--is it travel? Academic? Business? I look for what sorts of columns they run--do they run short news-type briefs? In-depth investigations? And most importantly, I look for the editors' email addresses, making sure to jot down their names carefully.

It's a useful way for a freelancer to spend an hour, and it believe it or not, in our digital age, it can actually be faster to look this information up the old paper way.

Secret Tips: Write-offs

Completing this year's tax return, I ran into a great tip for freelancers: the magic of the write-off.

Freelancers need to file tax returns just like business do. Yet freelancers are allowed to make write-offs just like businesses do.

Write-offs are used to calculate total profits. The more costs that go into working, the lower total profits are and the lower taxes are.

Write-offs are any sorts of costs related to working: a laptop, phone costs for interviews, transportation, lodging (important for travel writers), and any parts of the home used exclusively for work. Therefore, any writer should keep a folder with receipts and records of costs related to writing. It's a small investment in time that you'll be thankful for come April.

Freelancer Must: Record-keeping

I've written that getting paid on time can be one of the biggest problems of freelancing. The longer I'm freelancing, the more I'm learning that there's a problem more basic than getting paid on time: getting paid at all.

As a freelancer, you get the freedom to be your own boss; as a freelancer, you get the annoying responsibilities that go along with being your own boss. One of the biggest responsibilities is tracking whether you've been paid--and whether you've been paid enough.

Lots of complications of the writing process can make tracking payment harder than you'd expect. Many publications don't provide invoices for payments; those that do often provide vague invoices that don't clearly lay out which articles the payments are for. This can be tricky if you've written lots of articles for a single magazine. Add to this the fact that payment is often delayed until the next pay day after publication--and the fact that articles are sometimes shelved and published later than originally planned--and tracking becomes a big hassle.

As if things couldn't get more complicated, bank records often don't include names of the money sender, so you may have to rely on dates on numbers to figure out where the payments are from. Finally, exact per-word figures can be different from the word counts on articles that you send in, since editors sometimes calculate from the words printed rather than words sent in.

Therefore, I've discovered a simple solution:

Start keeping a Word document where you make a note every time you send in a final draft to an editor, recording:


-The date sent and approximate date to be published
-Number of words
-Subject matter and publication name


As I've discovered, the more I write, the more I'm responsible to track, meaning Jay-Z was right: mo' money, mo' problems.

A New Record Response Time

Back in January, I blogged about a new personal record for the amount of time between sending a pitch and receiving a response just to give a picture of how hopeless pitching can seem. The record at that time was nearly four months.

This March 22nd, I received a letter from the LA Times travel section:

Thank you for your submission to the LA Times Travel section. After consideration, we’re going to have to pass on your story.

We receive many more submissions than we have space to print so competition for every column inch is fierce. We also generally try to leave about five years between major destination pieces, except on the oft-visited places, which we do more often.

If you’d like a look at our guidelines, please go to latimes.com/travelguidelines.

Again, thanks for thinking of us and all good wishes,

C--------
travel editor

The date on my original message?

July, 25, 2008

That's right, nearly 8 months had passed between my original pitch and the response. I never said pitching was all roses.