Kathryn Foxhall has been an editor and reporter on health and health policy publications in the Washington, D.C. area for over 30 years, including 14 years as editor of the newspaper of the American Public Health Association. She made the break into freelancing about four years ago and currently writes for publications targeted at nurses, physicians, health informatics professionals, pharmacists and others.
For most of us breaking into and staying afloat freelancing will take a very business-like attitude toward marketing. And more effort on that side of the business than most us want to contemplate. What does a serious marketing campaign look like for a writer? How do you target your campaigns to maximize success? Perhaps most important, how do you change your attitude from that of an easily wounded writer to a knowledgeable marketer?
I hope you all are inspired journalists who really want to do some quality writing. But my talk is not about that. It's about being serious about business and marketing: So that you can go freelance, so that you can stay freelance, so that you can increase your income. And maybe, so that you can get that really quality material you WANT TO DO assigned and published.
If there is one thing I would like to leave you with, it's the image of what marketing is like. And how much marketing is needed to sell almost anything in this large and complex society.
People who work in direct marketing go by ratios. For example, they say, "We will send out so many hundred or thousand pieces of mail." Often times, if they get a one percent response on those mailing, they are in clover. They have found potential customers. If they have a good business plan, they know they can make money from there.
In contrast, most of us writers will send out fewer than 20 queries and get discouraged.
We actually take a lack of response personally. We take it as rejection: "Obviously I'm not good enough. Nobody wants my work. I can't do this."
We have no image of how much hard-nosed marketing is needed to find a market for almost any product, including our work.
I think for most of us, starting out or trying to build our business, we need to think much more like a direct marketer than like a writer. We need to turn ourselves into marketers.
Now, you can't REALLY do mass marketing for your writing. You do have to do more targeting of queries.
But here is what a decent marketing plan for a freelance writer might look like, particularly for someone just getting into freelancing.
Over the next 10 working days:
- I will make 100 (or 50 or 35) contact emails with editors.
- I will have those emails contain a total of at least solid, targeted 200 (or 100, or 70) quenes.
- I will find out if will get at least one assignment out of that campaign.
[I usually put two or more story ideas in one contact email and call each one of those a query.]
You have to turn yourself into hard-working marketer. This is more like locating a needle in a haystack or locating the one employer in a city who needs you. Particularly starting out, you may have to do much more marketing than you do writing.
And we HATE doing this. We don't want to work as marketers and we don't understand marketing. But it needs to be done if you want to get to the spot you want to be.
Generally, the more push you put in upfront, the faster you will have the contacts you need.
No Response
You need to know going in that BY FAR the most likely response for anyone contact will be no response at all.
You shouldn't waste energy anticipating responses from specific publications. You want to set out to what response ratio you can achieve, on average. Can you expect one response for 35 queries? One for 15 queries?
And I want to say why you don't need to worry about individual responses.
To increase your success ratio you do need, a good story that's well targeted to the publication (at least there needs to be some possibility the publication will be interested). The query needs to be well written, and you need to sell you background and ability to write the article. Every book on freelancing is going to tell you that.
But I want to emphasize, even if you do everything right, there are many possible reasons for the deafening silence that have nothing AT ALL to do with you.
Among these reasons:
- Editors are extremely busy. When you are trying to add quality to a publication there is no such thing has working enough or being finished.
- Sometimes they just don't use freelancers.
- Sometimes they don't have money for freelance.
- Even if you have done good stuff before, they are living in their own world, they don't understand that.
- They have their calendar mapped out for months and your piece doesn't fit.
The Re-usables:
Other business ideas to keep in mind, from the moment you start sending queries:
- The re-usables are absolutely essential to staying alive freelancing.
- Focus hard on re-using files of research, re-using queries, and re-using editors.
Re-usable editors: the pot of gold you are looking for:
After you once work for an editor, he or she is much more time likely to be interested in your next query. You are a known entity. That's the big thing that cuts that marketing time down.
Keep this very closely in mind: Re-usable editors are really what you are marketing for when you are trying to build a business. That's what these campaigns are about.
So target your campaigns to publications you are likely to have future stories for, so you can take advantage of that editor who knows you.
When I first started out I did articles, pulled from my health subject matter files, for Road King magazine, which hundreds of thousands of truckers pick up at truck stops, and for a magazine on traffic engineering. It was a lot of fun. But I had spent all this time marketing and doing the articles, and I had snagged an editor. But my specialty is health. So I was not likely to have another story to offer those editors a long time, if ever.
Also try to hone your campaigns to editors who are likely to be able to pay and are somewhat more likely to use freelancers.
Bacon's gives you the ad rate that a publication charges and its circulation. A 600 circulation publication, in general, is not as likely to use freelancers as a 15,000 circulation publication.
Compare the circulation and ad rates of publications in the same subject matter.
My feeling is you want to go for a publication that has a decent level of circulation and decent ad rate, without getting into those publications that are household names. That middle level, I feel, is where you are likely to find editors who may be able to pay, but who don't have enough good material or have many freelancers contacting them.
I have used $1,000 ad rate level as a sort of an indication that a publication might have some money. I have no idea whether that has any validity. But I think ad rates can give you an idea of whether there is any freelance payment is possible.
Re-usable files of research:
This is the great advantage of freelancing. Do not fail to take advantage of it. You get a handle on a topic by going to a session at a conference, or a news conference, or even by good old enterprise reporting: talking to people.
You could probably write articles on that subject matter for many different audiences:
I covered a press conference recently on a free e-prescribing software program.
So far I have done different stories for: nurses, urologists, and IT professionals. After while I know the material well and it gets faster to every time I do a story.
I might be able to sell it to any number of physician publications, health reimbursement, hospitals, publications directed at consumers, the elderly, business, pharmacy, computer, etc. Perhaps until I was just sick of the subject matter. I don't think I've ever done 10 stories on the same research, but that's probably because I just have not marketed enough. I imagine you could do 20.
Put your file of research on one hand and a list publications, like Bacon's, on the other and think, "What other audiences would have an interest in this? Or an interest in an aspect of it?"
You should be able to find connections to many publications.
I write mostly for trade publications. As long as the target audiences of the publications are not too similar, editors don't care usually if you have done a story on the same subject for a different publication.
You can even add another element to marketing goals and say I'm going to contact 100 editors with queries on one or two of these three specific files of research I have.
This is where you begin to see where re-usable editors are so important. You think: I will target this business editor, because he may be interested in some of the business aspects of the pharmaceutical or health information technology stories I will do in the future.
Re-usable queries
You need to target a query to the subject matter of the publication, but often times you can use much the same language of a query to target different editors.
Also, for example, if one nursing publication has not expressed an interest within a few days, you can flip that same query around and send it to another nursing publication. It can begin to make querying go much faster.
They are nerds and they don't know their own audience at all: it happens.
What is more, you are NEVER going to know why they were not interested in your material. It's self-defeating to think that way. Just get your other 99 queries done and see what kind of ratio you get.
Admittedly, doing this can be the most depressing thing on earth. And I'll bet you this is where most people who try to go freelance falter. The silence can be so overwhelming you will think the Internet is broken.
Keep that image of a marketer in mind: Marketers spend no time worrying about the fact that the overwhelming majority of people they target don't respond. They are working with ratios. If one out of a hundred respond, how much time will it take to get to that one person? Can we be successful with this product with that rate of return? If the answer is yes, go for it. We have a profitable product.
But Probably, Somebody Needs Your Stuff
The good news is, there are thousands of editors out there and some of them probably need your stuff. Just as an illustration, I was editor of an association newspaper for 14 years. The publication was targeted at fascinating subject matter. I might have been interested in freelancers if they had well targeted ideas.
I was contacted by freelancers only about five or six times over that entire 14 years.
Bacon's magazine directory has 3000 pages of listing of magazines. That does not include newspaper or websites or anything else.
Sometimes you can buy a Bacon's directory used on the web. There are other directories and there are some publication listings on the web.
Don't dare use Writers' Market alone. It does not scratch the surface.
Think Long-Term
But what this kind of marketing goal anticipates two weeks to get to one editor.
How does anybody on earth do this? How can you live on one assignment from all this work?
The answer is, as you build your business and you collect some editors who know you, your marketing ratio can get really sweet: As in, five queries sent out, one assignment. Two queries sent out, two assignments.
And you may begin to get editors contacting you to ask if you will do a story.
Records:
Keep records! The whole point of a marketing campaign is to understand the market out there. Find out those marketing ratios.
I have a spread sheet that takes a story all the way from query, through assignment, to money appearing in the bank. And I put in a line for each query, not just each contact.
That helps with my business after I get an assignment. But it helps me get a picture of who I have queried with what and what the response was.
My sortable spread sheet column headings.
- Date of Query
- Publication
- Query subject
- Response (Assigned or other)
- Deadline
- Expected pay
- Date filed
- Date invoiced
- Pay received
- Sent to Bank
(Adjunct columns to help with sorting)
- Story in play [meaning its somewhere between assigned and payment received]
- Upcoming Deadline
- Payment outstanding.
Also, keep a careful table of editors you have had some kind of positive contact with. This is the first place you want to look when you have a new story to sell. See an example.
