Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Schedules and How to Keep Them

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I often work with start-up publishers.  I like their enthusiasm and their vision.  After all, I once co-owned a start-up publishing company as well.

However, because I co-owned such a company, I keep a careful eye on the start-ups.  I make sure that I can get out of my contracts easily if need be.

When I see potential trouble in a start-up, I let the owner know.  If the trouble doesn’t get fixed, I do an assessment: can I live with that trouble? Will that trouble affect my work? If the answer to both of those questions is no, then I stay.  If it’s yes, I try once more to solve the problems, and if that fails, I leave.

Over the years, I have left primarily due to lack of payment.  Start-ups run through their money quicker than anyone else.  Several years ago, one start-up didn’t have enough cash to publish an anthology I had contributed to.  The owner sent a letter, saying payment would come six months after publication, which I found unacceptable.  The owner, in other words, got all the benefit, and if that owner failed to pay, I would lose first publication rights to my story and never get compensated for them.

Besides, the owner violated the contract.  I informed the owner of this, asked for my payment (which, supposedly on acceptance, was now overdue), and when the owner reiterated that no payment would come until six months after publication, I pulled the story.  The book was already in production.  That decision cost the publisher five times more than it would have if the publisher had simply honored our contract.

Such problems are common with start-ups.  I’ve had to deal with at least one of these issues per year.  The handwriting is always on the wall at that point.  If the start-up delays payment, the start-up has money troubles.  If a start-up has money troubles, and continues to deny them, the start-up will—and I mean will—go out of business.

In this particular case, the start-up I referred to was gone one year later.  Half the authors in that anthology got their post-publication payment. The other half did not.  The authors in the next anthology never did get paid.

Money issues are a place where problems become visible.  Anyone who pays attention can see that handwriting on the wall.

But some time back, I had a different issue with a start-up.  It had to do with scheduling.

This start-up—a small press—contracted to reissue several of my books.  The editor who contacted me was one of the most reputable in the business.  The press’s owner had had a few business failures in the past, but I see that as a plus.  The owner had managed to get start-up capital despite those failures.  The owner also was a bright person who learned from mistakes.  I think failure is a good thing, if a person can learn from it, so I did not hold the failures against the owner, but I made a wary note of them, just like I would have if there were hints of money troubles.

This company had no money troubles.  It was drowning in capital and had great plans for various projects.  But I had a lot of trouble finding out when my books would be published.  My editor couldn’t get answers on that issue as well. And no one provided deadlines.  I thought that strange.

Then came some personnel changes.  My editor left. The new editor never answered e-mail.  Neither did the owner.  And I had some pretty serious questions that needed answering.  Most importantly, I needed to know the publishing schedule because some of the books being reissued had co-publishing arrangements.

After months of no response from the publisher, I finally sent a registered letter canceling the contracts.  I took longer than usual in doing so, simply because the problems seemed so unusual.  But I was complaining to Dean one afternoon and I heard myself say this, “If I’m having trouble getting responses now before publication, when a publisher is excited about a project, imagine how hard it’ll be to get a response if there’s an actual problem, like a delayed payment or a botched cover.”

That sentence decided me.  I couldn’t continue to do business with this publisher.

Eventually, the owner responded to my registered letter.  The owner demanded to know why I hadn’t e-mailed.  I sent copies of all my correspondence.  We had several backs and forths, and things seemed to be getting resolved.  Then I reiterated that I had needed the publishing schedule.

The owner asked me why I needed a schedule.  I mentioned the co-publishing agreements, and then I stated what seemed obvious to me: All publishers had a schedule.  This publisher just needed to share theirs with their authors.

“But,” the publisher wrote back, “none of my companies have ever had any schedule, and we’ve done fine.”

Suddenly, all became clear.  The previous businesses hadn’t failed from undercapitalization or from overextending. They had all failed because the owner had never ever had a schedule, and was now repeating the same mistake.

Needless to say, I stood by my cancellation, which turned out to be a good decision.

The poor business owner never did understand what had gone wrong, with me and with others.  The company, while initially on solid financial footing, started having trouble.  The troubles had nothing to do with the finances and everything to do with the lack of a schedule.

You see, without a schedule, other businesses can’t work with yours.  If you’re a publisher, bookstores won’t know when to order your books – and won’t be able to depend on them to arrive on time.  If you’re a reader, you won’t know when a book becomes available.  I got five novels this week, all of which I had pre-ordered, all of them I have been looking forward to for months and in one case, years.  The books arrived on time, and I’m a happy, if overwhelmed, fan.

If you’re a busy author, like me, you need the schedule so that you can meet your deadlines. If you’re familiar with publishing, you can also see when things start going awry.  Many years ago, an inexperienced editor at a major publishing house forgot to put my book into production.  I noticed when the copy edit was late, then when the proof didn’t show.  I—and several other authors—had our agents find out what was going on. What was going on was that this editor was very incompetent, and once writers and their representatives started complaining, this editor got fired.  My book was delayed for a year because someone hadn’t met the schedule.  (You’ll see more about this in June, when the book gets re-released from a new publisher.  I’ll tell the whole story then.)

A solid publishing schedule gives the author all kinds of flexibility, and when an author is multipublished, keeps books spaced a proper length apart (or not, if we’re jamming something for attention).

Every publisher I’ve ever worked with, until this start-up, knew that a schedule was important.  Not all publishers—particularly the new ones—could keep to the schedule, but they at least tried.

Recently, I had the happy surprise of encountering an extremely organized and scheduled publisher.  I turned in a novel and got an e-mail from the managing editor, with all the important dates—when the revision (if there were any) was due, when the copy edits needed to be finished, when the proofs needed to be done, and when the book would be available for pre-order.  I about fell off my chair with delight and surprise.

Then I picked myself up, compared this publication schedule to my personal schedule, and informed the company of a possible problem—I would be traveling for weeks when one of the due dates hit.  We adjusted everything within the hour, and the managing editor told me this was why the company sent out the in-house schedule, so they could adjust it to accommodate everyone concerned.

Wow! Such professionalism.  In twenty-plus years of publishing and being published, I had never encountered such specificity before.  I loved it, and I confess, I feel spoiled now.

Now you know why schedules are so important to publishing.  But what about other businesses? Do they need schedules?

Of course they do.  Everyone needs a schedule.  If you don’t have a schedule, you end up like that poor start-up above.  After I left, I continued to pay attention, and I watched that poor business owner run from one fire to another, always trying to put them out.  Detail after detail got lost as problems blew up in the owner’s face.

Schedules provide structure.  Sometimes that structure is as simple as business hours posted on the door of a retail store.  Customers know when the store is open, and the owner knows when she needs to be there. But the store needs to keep to the posted hours. After a few tries, customers won’t return to a store that’s closed during its posted hours.

The structure provides a framework for the entire business.  It’s up to the owner of the business to enforce that structure. For example, I recently heard of two different firings that occurred in our small town.

In the first, the employee showed up hours late for work, without calling.  The employee did this repeatedly.  After a year of this (!), the employee got fired.  Was this the employee’s fault? Of course.  But it was also the business owner’s fault for not respecting the schedule and the structure it provided.

Had I been the owner, and had my employee been that late without cause (a trip to the hospital; a car breakdown outside of cell phone range), I might have fired the employee on the spot.  If the employee was particularly good, I might have issued a warning, and fired the employee the second time the employee was hours late.  But I certainly wouldn’t have waited a year.  A year meant that the schedule had no meaning.  Ignoring the problem gave the employee tacit permission to misbehave.

Another local business fired one of its three managers for failing to follow a different schedule. The manager would occasionally skip the night deposit, taking care of it the next time the manager drove past the bank.  Which meant that the books for the business were off considerably.  It also meant that the manager had an entire day’s receipts just riding around in the car.  The manager was a nice person, without guile.  It was just a case of being clueless.  In this instance, the manager was clueless exactly twice: the first time, the manager got a warning; the second time, the manager got fired.

Schedules are schedules are schedules.

So…

You work for yourself. Why do you need a schedule?

Go back to the posts on discipline, deadlines, and time. You need a schedule to help you manage your time, to acquire discipline, and to meet deadlines.  Once you become adept at your business, you will know how many hours something will take.  You’ll be able to schedule your time very well.  You’ll know in advance when you’re overextended or underextended.  You’ll know when you have to work extra hard and when you have some leisure time.  You’ll know when you need to hire help, even in the short term.

You’ll also be able to compare your schedule with that of the people you do business with and come up with a joint schedule that suits you both. That’s what I did with the publishing house that gave me its internal schedule, and what I tried to do with the start-up I had to leave.  Because I’m very scheduled and I’ve been doing this a long time, I knew that my March, April, and May would be crammed.  (They were.)  I know that I need to work extra hard in June, July, and August because I’m going to lose two, maybe three weeks of work in September due to two trips (and all the planning that goes into such trips).  I also know I’ll be tired when I return, so I have to schedule lightly.

What level of schedule do you need? That’s determined by your business.  Most businesses need some kind of external schedule, marked by deadlines and contracts.  But most employees—including you—need an internal schedule.

Just because a retail store is open from 10 to 5 doesn’t mean the owner should spend the entire time behind the counter twiddling her thumbs as she waits for customers.  She needs to have a schedule to change the inventory, to make bank deposits, to clean the store itself.  She might put inventory up on e-Bay, which has its own scheduling demands, and she might have external deadlines imposed by the state and municipality in the form of tax documents.  Even something with a seeming simple schedule might be a lot more complex when viewed from the inside.

Other businesses work off appointment schedules or on construction schedules.  Some have deadlines.  Others have seasonal demands.  All of them valid.  All of them create external schedules.

But external schedules mean nothing if you don’t have your internal schedule under control.  How do you do that?

You work backwards.

You’ve done this your whole life.  Think of it this way.  When you went to your day job, you had a schedule.  Let’s say you had to be there at nine a.m., and unlike the employee mentioned above, you couldn’t be five minutes late without a phone call and a damn good reason.

So you figured the time in your head.  You had a thirty minute commute that could stretch to forty-five on bad days.  You had to drop the kids off at school, which was fifteen minutes out of your way.

That meant you had to leave the house no later than eight o’clock.  It took you an hour to get ready, counting shower and breakfast.  If you lived on your own, you could get up at seven and make it. But you didn’t.  It always took an extra fifteen minutes to get the kids out of bed. Plus, you always hit the snooze button twice.  No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t break yourself of that habit.

So, to be safe, you set your alarm for six in the morning, knowing you had built leeway into your schedule.  You could oversleep an hour and still get to work on time.  Maybe with practice, or as the kids got older, you could shave a half an hour off of that, and get up at six-thirty.  Or maybe you convinced your spouse to take the kids. Then you could get up at seven.

We all make those kinds of decisions, every day.  Now you have to make them for your business.  Let’s say yours is a deadline-oriented business, like mine.  The external deadline is in stone (remember the deadline section).  So you don’t want to miss it, not even if you get the flu or you lose an employee or your computer dies.

So you move the hard deadline a month earlier or two months earlier, and shot for the new date.  Then you count backwards.

In your backwards count, you must be realistic. Let’s go back to the getting to work metaphor.  A friend of mine once told me he lived ten minutes away from work when there was no traffic. The problem was the commute took thirty minutes when the traffic was going speed limit.  If there was a jam, his commute took an hour.  (This was why, he told me later, he decided to walk—he actually got there quicker.  But that’s a digression about a health decision, as well as a scheduling decision.)

If you worked at top speed, you could probably get the project done in a month.  But top speed isn’t always possible.  In fact, top speed usually leads to mistakes and burnout.

At your slowest speed, barely working at all, you could get the project done in four months.  But that would be dull and probably counterproductive, since most of us who work on deadline get paid as the deadlines get met.

So how to find a happy medium?

First, buy a calendar.  Write in holidays, days off, and vacation days.  If you have chronic health problems, like I do, plan for those as well.  (I usually plan for an unscheduled week off somewhere in a quarterly schedule.)  Put in personal time, like parent-teacher conferences, the kids’ soccer matches, dinner and a date with your spouse.  Those days are days away from work.

Then figure you can finish the project in 75 days of steady work (add the one month at top speed to the four months of slow speed and divide by two.  That gives you 2.5 months or 75 days).  Count backwards from your early deadline, skipping the days off and half days.  Circle that date on your calendar.  That’s your drop-dead start date.  Do not miss it.  You might finish the project earlier than your early deadline.  Good for you.  You’ve just become reliable.

But you might have to struggle to meet your early deadline because—guess what? Life happens.  If you’re struggling, you have some time built into your schedule. But your drop-dead deadline is just that.  Something you cannot miss.

Play whatever mind games it takes to make your schedule work.  And write it all down.  The early deadline, the start date, the time you think it will take to finish.

Because you might have to juggle everything if another deadline gets into the mix.

This happened to me in April.  I agreed to write a story that would take quite a bit of research.  The editor implied that the story would be due in June. When I asked for his actual deadline, he gave me May 15.  I looked at that, looked at my already-crammed schedule, and realized that I would have to work late into the night to get it done. But I could do it, research and all.  It meant that I had to shave some things out of my schedule—mostly, following the news (which I do obsessively).  No morning newspaper.  No evening newscasts.  No peeking at news websites.  I took to listening to NPR on my iPhone because the app let me download and listen in the middle of the night if need be, or when I was taking out the garbage or feeding the cats.

I adjusted a few other deadlines closer to their drop-deads than I liked.  And I didn’t write ahead on the Freelancer’s Guide, for instance, although I planned to.  But I managed to make it work.  I got it all done, and done well.

I would have had to turn the editor down, though, if I hadn’t already had extra time built into my schedule.  And I would have lost some significant revenue.

Do what it takes to set up your internal schedule.  I use calendars and computerized reminders.  I also maintain a daily, weekly, and monthly to-do list.  I frequently look ahead at my list, so that I make sure I’m on track.

I work on a project basis—sometimes working 12-hour days, sometimes working 6-hour days.  (Occasionally slacking with 4-hour days).  Others work on an hourly schedule. They sit at their desks from 9 to 5 just like they would if they had a day job.  Or they give themselves a certain number of tasks to complete each hour.

That minute level of scheduling is an individual thing.  But there are two things that  must be absolute:

1. Your schedule must help you complete work.  That sounds so elementary.  But if I had an hourly schedule, I’d subvert it and get nothing done.  I learned that a long time ago.  However, I love to finish things, so I try to finish as many projects as possible in the space of a year.  I also like to challenge myself, so I make sure most of the projects are outside my comfort zone.

Long ago, I defined the things I could not cut from my schedule.  An hour for meals.  (Half an hour for lunch, if need be.) Reading. Exercise. A good night’s sleep.  An hour of TV per night.  I could jettison those things, but not for long.  Those were absolutes.  And if I skipped some, like exercise and sleep, I wouldn’t be effective at my job.  So there are times I eat at my desk, but I skip an hour of TV before I skip my daily run.  (Dammit.)  You have things like that too. Be honest about them. That’ll help you keep your schedule and meet your deadlines.

The other absolute is this:

2. You must enforce your schedule.  Just like that business owner who let his employee arrive late every day for a year (!), you risk losing control of your business if you think of a schedule as a suggestion rather than something written in stone.  You’ll run from crisis to crisis like that publisher I mentioned, instead of completing good and productive work on time.

Not to mention the fact that if you use a schedule as a suggestion instead of a structure, you’ll be in a constant state of panic. Everyone from your suppliers to your creditors to your clients will be angry with you for neglecting one or another detail.  Your business will suffer, even if you thrive on conflict.  And, ultimately, you’ll end up hating the job you created for yourself.

A schedule is as essential to a business as the skeleton is to the human body.  Often outsiders can’t see the schedule—or just get hints of it—but they’d know if it were missing.  A human being would be a packet of flesh and fluids without the skeleton.  A business is just a bunch of good intentions without the structure provided by a schedule.

Figure out your schedule—both internal and external.  Refine it as time goes on.  Figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.  Then implement it.  Make sure that the people around you know about the schedule and respect it.  You have to respect it as well. It’s the thing that will make or break your business.

Why do you think I haven’t missed in sixty-one weeks of the Freelancer’s Guide? Schedule, my friends.  Some weeks, it was the only thing that got me to the computer—despite being tired or cranky or just plain reluctant.  It got me to the computer tonight, even though I would much rather be working on a new project that has me all excited or reading those five new pre-ordered books.

I have time for both of those things in my schedule.  And I can get to them now, since this week’s Guide is done.

I know some of you have built a weekly trip to  my blog into your schedule so that you can read the Freelancer’s Guide. For that, I thank you.  I also appreciate all comments, thoughts, and donations.   You guys are great.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Schedules And How To Keep Them” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Expanding Your Business

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

For the last six months, I have lived in a constant state of panic—and weirdly, that panic exists mostly in my own mind.  From the outside, everything is going well, extremely well, in fact.  But inside—well, a few mini volcanoes are going off—all of them triggered by the digital revolution.

I had already come to terms with the fact that I have more story ideas than I can write.  Somewhere in the past, I figured that the  marketplace would take care of some of them—meaning that the marketplace would deny me the opportunity to publish some of those ideas.  In fact, the marketplace has closed the door on a number of projects, deemed unworthy by major New York publishers to be taken to readers.

I don’t give up, but with so many projects, some have taken the back burner while others—more viable by publishing standards—rose to the forefront.

And then the digital revolution happened.  This Guide happened.  Kindle, Nook, and smart phones happened. Suddenly, I can publish what I want.  Five thousand readers might seem small to New York, but to my little cottage industry, five thousand readers is huge.

All of those story ideas on the back burner?  They’re crowding the forefront of my brain, boiling over, and causing a mess in my writing kitchen.  (Or to stretch the metaphor in another direction: they’re children who used to sit quietly in the back of the room and are now crowding the front screaming, “Me first! Me! Me!”)

Add to that my entire backlist of already published material, most of which I control all the rights to.  (For an idea how big that is, click on my bibliography)  Over three hundred short stories and more than two dozen novels.

Not to mention all the work that’s already in play, stuff I’m currently writing and stuff I have committed to write.  Plus the teaching that I do because I believe in paying forward (I can’t pay my wonderful teachers back, so I’m paying forward by teaching the next generation), and the reading I do to keep up, and the stories I watch on TV and movies—again to keep up—and the music I listen to because I love music (and without it, I would not exercise) and the newspapers, the magazines, the blogs, and…ack!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Internal panic ensues.

Now, those of you who have regularly read the Guide have already figured out that I’m very, very disciplined and very, very good at time management.  I make lists, I know my priorities, I meet my deadlines.

But I want to step into this brave new world of publishing, and to do so I need to make choices.  First, I need to prioritize my projects.  Then, I need to make a budget of both time and money (projected incoming and projected outgoing).  Then I need to figure out my timeline.  And finally, I need to factor in where (if anywhere) I need help.

Let’s start with the last thing first.  Do I need help? (Okay, you wags.  I mean employees, not, y’know, professional help of the kind you’re thinking of.)

There are some things in my business that only I can do.  I’m not like Alexander Dumas or James Patterson: I can’t farm my ideas with a great outline to other writers and be happy with the result.  I recently told an editor who proposed just such a project to me the same thing: I have learned through several long hard lessons that I don’t play well with others when it comes to the actual writing.

So all those new backburner projects currently bubbling over from volcano #1? My problem.  Something I’ll have to solve through time management and discipline and sheer joy (can you tell I’m looking forward to this?)

But that pesky backlist.  I don’t have time to put it online—not and write new material.  If I wanted to retire right now, I could and live off my backlist, thanks to the brave new world of publishing and some other changes in the industry.  (See my husband Dean Wesley Smith’s post on The Magic Bakery to understand how backlist translates into money for writers.)

Of course, once I figure out what I want to do with that backlist, I could hire someone to do the actual conversion to online formats for me.  The question is: do I want to do that?

If only it were so easy.  In a magical world—the ideal world—the world of expectations (see last week’s post), I could just hire someone and all of my problems would be solved.

But I’ve run enough businesses to know it doesn’t work that way.

First, look at the Guide sections on employees. You’ll see that often employees are more trouble than they’re worth.  You have to train them, supervise them, and pay them.  All of this costs money—and worse for me—time.

So I have to do a cost-benefit analysis.  Is it worth my incredibly precious time to train an employee who may or may not work out? Is it worth the money to hire someone? And if I do hire them, where would they work? Do I bring them into my home office? (okay: that sound you just heard? Me, screaming.  Apparently no.  They can’t work here, in my home.) Do I let them work in their home office? (Nope: can’t supervise very well there.)  Or do I rent an office for them to work in?

Given my personality, my choice is the office outside of the home.  I can supervise and I can keep them out of my home.  But…an office costs money.  Rent, utilities, insurance, as well as the employee’s salary, and furniture for the office, a topflight computer so they can do the work, and here it is again…time.  I’d have to stop in every day to make sure they’re getting the job done.

The very idea of all of this makes me tired.  I really don’t want an employee at this stage of my career.

But what that means is that all of my volcanic plans must take a backseat to time—my time—and my focus.  If I’m going to do this myself, then I need to carve out some time to do so, and I need to realize that going it alone will make the changeover much slower.

Again, I’d have to do a cost-benefit analysis.  Can I make more money going it alone? Will slow get the job done—without the office expenses, without the employee hassle?  Will I be able to make the change?

Is the change worthwhile?

And if I decide that the change is worthwhile, is it something that needs to get done now, this instant, or something that can stretch out over several years?

All personal questions about my business, all with both empirical answers (timeline, money) and personal answers (figuring out what I really want).  Let me state here and now, however, that my decision to do work on future projects means that I will not approve fan fiction and I don’t want anyone to do the work for me “as a favor.”  I license my copyrights and my worlds, and I am not in any way giving anyone blanket permission to work in them.  (Remember? I do not play well with others.)

My analysis here is a textbook example of what all businesses go through when they want to expand.  So let’s discuss expansion.

First, let me deal with the elephant in the room.  Unsuccessful businesses often expand to increase revenue.  It sounds counterintuitive, but some businesses can only get capital (investment money) if they have a new project to spend the money on.  This leads to businesses that get stretched too thin.  When you hear that a business was a house of cards, and once one card fell the entire thing toppled, you can pretty much guarantee that the business expanded too quickly—whether internally (hiring too many employees, rushing out too much product) or externally (opening too many storefronts).  If you’re thinking of expanding to get more capital because you’re already underfunded, stop now. That way will guarantee the collapse of your business.  All you’re doing is holding off the inevitable.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s discuss successful businesses.

At some point, every successful businesses will reach a point where expansion looks like a good idea. But is it?

The first question you must answer is this: Can your business continue to thrive without expanding?

Most businesses can thrive without growing. Even though growing seems like a natural state, it is sometimes the death of a healthy business.  The owners get spread too thin or the expansion doesn’t work out or the economy has a downturn. The expansion might actually weaken the business itself.

Does your expansion have its roots in changing neighborhoods or changing technologies?  If you own a storefront, would you be better off in a different neighborhood with more traffic? Or another neighborhood with a different kind of traffic? Is your neighborhood aging or going downhill, facing economic changes or a retooling?  You need to consider all of that when considering moving your business to a large space or adding another storefront in a different location.

Changing technology is another matter, and it happens to be the one I’m facing.  My business would thrive just fine on the old technological model.  But will my business thrive in five years? Ten? If I believe that the new technologies are essential to the publishing industry, then I need to jump on the wave now.  I won’t be an early adapter—that’s Michael A. Stackpole and others—but I’d be in the early wave.  Already I’m getting e-mails and tweets from around the world, asking for digital copies of my work.  Imagine how many I’d have to fend off if I refuse to cross into e-publishing.

I’ve analyzed my industry and feel for me that working in conventional publishing and e-publishing will be beneficial.  (Remember, I have a mountain of real-world publishing experience, as the former owner of a publishing house, a former editor, and a non-writing-related small business owner.  In other words, I have a lot more experience than most writers going into this, not counting the goodwill from my writing career.)  Now that I’ve figured out that it’s beneficial, I need to figure out what works for me in my expansion.

But moving into new technologies might not work for your business.  The technology might be a fad—something that seems like a good idea, but doesn’t catch on. Remember, we have had video phone technology since the 1980s, but it’s taken 20+ years for the technology to garner even marginal usage—and that’s via computer, not through a landline.  If you had been an early adapter of video phone technology for your business or running a communications business with video phones as a main selling point, you would have lost money, particularly if you adapted that tech in the late 1980s.

Sometimes letting others adapt early is the best response.  They’ll work out the bugs, and take the risks.  The key for any business that feels it must grow and change due to changes in technology is research.

Before I made the decision to add digital onto my writing business, I did two years of research—and I’m still doing research.  This blog is part of that research.  But I’m reading about digital, trying some of the products on a consumer basis (I have a Kindle and an iPhone, and have already had some hands-on contact with an iPad), and continue to look at pricing, as well as successful—and unsuccessful—adapters of the new technology.

Research—as I say almost every week—is an important part of your business.

If you are going to expand due to new technologies, you also have to look into the future.  If it takes 20 years for these changes in your field to establish itself—like a video phone—will you be around to capitalize on it?  Do you want to be self-employed in 20 years? Will you be retired? Can you imagine yourself selling the business and moving onto something else?

If any of those things are true, and you don’t need the new technology to maintain your thriving business, then technological expansion might not be for you.

Other things to consider as you expand:

1. The financial cost of expansion.  I delineated my costs above.  I’d need an outside office and an employee.  Here in my tiny town, I’m looking at a minimum of $24,000 per year in additional expenses for just those two things.  Will the expansion bring in $30,000 in its first year so that I can afford that change and make a profit? Or would I be hurting my business with the expansion by breaking even on the new office space and the new employee? Or would I lose money?

Be harsh here, because these decisions are the ones that will make or break your business.

2. The time cost of expansion.  I mentioned this above as well. Expansion takes time out of your business day. When you’re already pressed for time, such a change can be disastrous. Figure out your hourly wage.  Even self-employed people can break down their earnings into an hourly rate.  Once you have that, then factor in the time it will take you to establish the new office (say) or train the new employee(s) or learn the new technology.

Will the profit you make off the expansion be worth the money lost because your time is spent on the expansion and not earning like you have been doing?  In other words, can you afford to lose 10-30 hours per week of your time to establish this new side of your business? Can you make a profit on the expansion by doing so? Or can it wait?

3. If your math proves that expansion is worthwhile, are you better off making a slow expansion or a rapid one? Sometimes it’s better to lose a month of work time all at once and get the new part of the business up and running.  If you extend that month over a year (an hour here and an hour there), you might lose the advantage the expansion would bring or you might actually increase your costs in both time and money.  Again, it depends on the type of expansion you’re planning and the type of business you’re running.

Whether or not to expand your business is the second most important business decision you’ll ever make—right after deciding to own your own business in the first place.  Look at expansion as closely as you would look at leaping from your day job to working for yourself.  Use all the of the tools I mention in other parts of the guide as your blueprint for expansion. Because expansion is like starting a new business.  You’ll fundamentally change the business you’ve started and you might jeopardize it.

Plan carefully before you make the decision.

And here’s one other thought on the expansion.  If you’re at all in doubt, if thinking of expanding makes your stomach hurt, then don’t do it.  Your gut sense on this is as important as all of the number crunching, the facts, and the figures.

If you have made your business successful through hard work and perseverance, then your subconscious knows as much or more about that business than your conscious brain does.  Your gut is an informed gut, and if it’s worried that an expansion will fail, then maybe you’re missing something important in your very logical plans.

Never take a leap as important as expanding your business without being fully confident in your decision.  You must believe that your business will be more successful if it expands.  Not a little more.  A lot more.

Because an expansion will cost you more in time and energy than you will plan on. Any change does.  There will be unexpected results—good and bad—from that expansion.  You won’t be able to plan for everything.

You will have to know you’re making the right decision.

I know that moving into e-publishing is the right thing for me. But I’m not yet ready to commit to a path on how to achieve it.  I have more research to do, more numbers to crunch.  I have to decide if I need an employee or if I’m simply pushing myself too far too fast.

I have a lot of exploration to do before I commit to a path for my business expansion.  I’ve been around long enough to know that research and planning are the only things that will make this decision work.

In the meantime, I have a novel and several short stories to finish. I have some backlist that I will e-pub, slowly.  I have to finish the seemingly never-ending Freelancer’s Guide.

My business is thriving and I’m enjoying it. Even with the panic attacks. For once, I’m panicking about having too many opportunities rather than not enough.  And that’s a change from 20 years ago.  A good change.

One I can appreciate as I look toward the future of my industry, which seems brighter than ever before.

I also appreciate everyone who comes to my website each week to read the Freelancer’s Guide.  I love the e-mails and the comments. The interactions mean a lot and have helped shape the Guide.  I still have several weeks of work on this, so if you feel inclined—and if the Guide has helped you—please contribute a dollar or two to this wonderful experiment.  And thanks for all the help so far—both in ideas and in dollars.  I appreciate it all.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Expanding Your Business” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Expectations

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

A short time ago, a young writer who did not know my history in the science fiction field mentioned in e-mail how much he hated certain editors.  He felt those editors had mislead him, and were, therefore, unethical people.

Since those editors happened to be friends of mine of longstanding—I’d known both for more than twenty years—I knew they weren’t unethical people.  Nor did they deliberately mislead writers.

After a few back-and-forths, I found out what happened: those editors had met this young writer in a networking situation (one a convention, the other a guest lecture at a writer’s workshop) and invited him to submit stories to their various projects.

The writer had submitted stories which were then kindly, but soundly, rejected.  He was furious. He thought the editors had broken an implied promise.  By inviting him to submit—he thought—the editors were committing to buy the stories.

Never mind that neither editor had ever seen his work before.  Never mind that they had no idea whether he even wrote in the genre.

He hadn’t thought the situation through.  A little more probing uncovered something else: he had an improper understanding of the writing field.

Somehow, this young writer had gotten it into his head that most writers sold stories not because the stories were good, but because the writer had met the editor and the editor liked the writer.  I have no idea where that idea had come from—it certainly isn’t written down anywhere, even as a myth—but it had embedded itself firmly in this writer’s brain.

(To clarify, in case any others out there have this notion in their minds: stories sell because the stories are good.  There are other factors such as what the publisher wants for the magazine/book line.  For example, no matter how excellent a hardboiled mystery is, you won’t sell it to a sweet romance book line.  It just won’t happen.)

Before you sit back smugly and think that you would never make a mistake like the one this young writer made, realize that everyone who is in business for himself—every single freelancer/business owner—has made this mistake at least once.  Many make it every single day.

The mistake comes from unrealistic expectations.

I almost wrote that it comes from expectations (leaving out the word “unrealistic”) and while that may be true (we shouldn’t have expectations; we should have plans), without some measure of expectation, we probably can’t do what we do.  I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, let’s deal with unrealistic expectations.

When my ex-husband and I opened our frame shop and art gallery twenty-mumble years ago, my ex was the realist (for once).  He knew that he couldn’t open the store without a customer base already in place.  I was the unrealistic one: I thought that because we had a storefront and a sign above the door and lovely inventory and a talented framer, we would have customers on the very first day we opened.   We did, but only because my ex ran his legs off.  He planned a grand opening, sent out invitations (with maps), called people, and made sure everyone who needed to know about the store did know.  And then he grew the business.

I had Field of Dreams in mind: Somehow I believed if we built it, they would come.

Many retail store owners make that mistake.  I just watched the same thing happen this last year.  A woman opened a what-not shop in the same local mall as the collectibles store Dean started.  The what-not shop, which this poor woman had spent years saving items and money for, was no different than three similar stores that had not survived in that location, and sadly, her store wasn’t as nice as the two other what-not stores that already existed in the same mall.

Anyone with any business experience could have told her the store would fail.  She had the wrong location, and she was undercapitalized.  She couldn’t wait long enough to build a customer base; she didn’t even have enough money to join a group ad for the mall in the local paper.  When the business went under, after less than a year, none of her neighbors were surprised—and none were sympathetic.  Everyone mentioned how unrealistic her expectations were, and one other store owner even mentioned the Field of Dreams analogy, albeit in reverse.

“Just because you build it,” he said in his curmudgeonly way, “doesn’t mean anyone will come.”

He was right.  It made the loss no less painful for this poor woman.  Her dream died in short order.  But of all the things she did wrong—and she did quite a few (all first time business owners and freelancers make horrible mistakes)—the worst thing was the devastation left by her unrealistic expectation.

How can you start a business without expectations? You can’t.  You have to have expectations of success or there really is no point in going out on your own.  How many people do you know who start a business saying that they believe it will fail?  I’ve never met anyone like that.

But your expectations have to be realistic.  The woman shop owner hadn’t done any research. She had planned and dreamed for her store, but she hadn’t researched how to run a business or how much capital she would need.  She had assumed these things would come to her.

I dealt with some of this in the post on Goals versus Dreams, but expectations are subtler than either of those two things, and they blow up on you when you least expect it.

I had one of those expectation bombs blow up on me this year—and I didn’t even see it coming.  My twenty-fourth birthday was terrible.  I spent the day alone.  My friends had moved out of town, my family forgot my birthday, and my ex-husband didn’t even remember to get me a cake (yes, I know, the handwriting was on the wall at that point).

I spent the day alone, stuck on the farm that we lived above without a car, so I couldn’t even go into town to entertain myself.  I read, watched a little television, and generally felt sorry for myself.  I also—Scarlett O’Hara-like—vowed I would never have another crappy birthday again, even if I had to make sure the celebrations happened.  I promised myself that when I got old and was rich and famous, I would give myself the party of a lifetime.  I would pay for all of it—spending tens of thousands of dollars on caterers and airline tickets for all my friends and family—and it would last all weekend, and it would be very, very Dynasty, with designer clothes, rich food, and upscale swanky digs.

Fast forward to January 1, 2010.  2010—the year I will turn fifty.

I had a complete and utter meltdown.  Not because I’m going to be fifty this year.  But because — apparently—to the 24-year-old me, 50 is really, really old.

The expectation bomb went off.  My twenty-four year old self had planted a huge landmine and as the calendar turned to 2010, I stepped on that damn mine.  I realized I don’t have Dynasty level money.   I can’t afford to fly my friends and family into some swanky resort somewhere and spend what would have been in 1984 dollars tens of thousands of dollars but what is in 2010 dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars on a party.  I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around—and if I did, I’d pay off my house and add to my savings, not spend every last dime on designer duds for my shindig.

I knew that.  Realistically, I should have shrugged and laughed at my twenty-four-year-old self. But built into that party expectation were two other expectations.  The first expectation was that fifty was really, really, really old.  I am about to become ancient—at least to that poor lonely girl I had once been.  And second—I should be a multimillionaire, maybe even a billionaire, by now.  I should have a household name like Stephen King or Nora Roberts or J.K. Rowling.

I don’t.

So—by the lights of the expectation bomb I planted at the ripe old age of 24—I am both old and a failure.

Oh, and happy 50^th birthday!

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I’ve run into a million of those personal expectation bombs throughout my career.  Some are pretty easy to see—if I sell my first short story, I’ll have it made.  If I sell my first novel, I’ll be rich.  But others aren’t visible until you step on them (which is why I’m using the term landmine).  When I got nominated for my first Edgar award (and typing that phrase is a trip, even now.  My first Edgar), I almost declined it but I managed to stop myself just in time.

When Dean asked why I would do such a thing, I heard myself answer, “Because I’m not good enough to be nominated for an Edgar.”  It took some digging to find when I planted that particular landmine.  I had planted it (we plant all these expectation landmines) during the summers of my childhood, then continued to grow the mine during my adulthood, by buying novels with Edgar-winner emblazoned on them.  I had used “Edgar-winner” as a stamp of quality—and it is a tribute to that award that I was rarely if ever disappointed.

Instead of being flattered and honored at first, I was terrified that I had been nominated by accident.

Pieces of that landmine still exist, as you can tell from my parenthetical phrase about my first Edgar award, but now I have that particular bomb under control.

Not all of these landmines are about success. Some are about failure.  A pragmatic friend of mine knew the statistics when he started his business.  He knew that it took five years to establish most businesses, and since his was particularly tricky, he figured he might not be successful even five years in.

That was his expectation, and his mantra, and he recited it often.

Surprise, surprise: His business got established within two years.  He started making a profit. About the time he should have grown the business or made a few changes dictated by his success, he didn’t even notice.  Instead, he continued to talk about the three more years he had before his business got established.

No amount of arguing could change his mind; he expected to have a rough first five years.  He didn’t notice the success and actively sabotaged it.  By not seeing his situation realistically, he lost his business within six years, and declared himself unsurprised.

What surprised him was that as he put the bankbooks into storage, he realized that he had achieved his success four years previously.  He was stunned.  He saw his business through the prism of his unrealistic (negative) expectations, and as a result he made mistakes that caused his business to meet those expectations and fail.

How do you root out these unrealistic expectations?

I wish I knew.  I’d do a deep personal inventory of my psyche right now and make all of my unrealistic expectations disappear.  In fact, I would have done it years ago, so this past January 1 had been a pleasant day instead of the nightmare it became, all because I tripped over a mental landmine.

In the twenty-six years since I planted that particular landmine, however, I have learned how to recognize some of those unrealistic expectations and how to prevent them from becoming time bombs.

1.  Don’t plant the unrealistic expectation in the first place. Listen to yourself as you make casual and joking statements.  An old friend of mine had a habit that he had to force himself to quit. When a waitress asked, “What would you like?” My friend would say, “I’d like to be rich and never have to work again.”

That’s a very funny statement—particularly in that context (and with the right waitress who also sees the humor)—but it has an unrealistic expectation built into the middle of the joke.  “I’d like to be rich and never have to work again.”  Most rich people work.  The ones who lose their riches let someone else manage their money.  Money management is work.  So if my friend had become rich before he stopped saying this little bon mot, he would have stopped working too—and probably would have lost all or most of his money to an unscrupulous money manager.

2. Research your expectations.  Has anyone become rich and never had to work again? If so, how?  And if not, why not?  And really—this one was always the key for me when my friend made his little joke—do you want to stop working?  I know a lot of fantastically wealthy people who still work.  They work harder than everyone else because they enjoy their jobs.

I’m sure Steven Spielberg could have stopped working somewhere around 1980, but luckily for modern American film he did not.  Stephen King could have stopped writing about the same time.  As a fan, I’m happy he didn’t.

If I had Dynasty level money and could have thrown myself that party this year, I would still be working.  I love what I do. The money isn’t the reward; it’s a byproduct of being able to do what I love.

3. In fact, research everything.  Before you go into business for yourself, research the industry. Then research money management. Then research business.  Listen to the negatives and the positives.  If you don’t like what you hear, figure out how you can avoid those problems.

If someone tells you that no one succeeds in your industry (writers hear this all the time), investigate.  See if that’s true.  See if you can find five people who succeeded in your industry. Then ten. Then twenty.

If someone tells you there’s only one way to succeed, see if that’s true.  Usually it isn’t.  Ask questions.  Find the answers.  And don’t take the first answer.  Get a second, third, and fourth opinion.

4. Research continually.  If you’ve been reading this Guide for a long time, you know that I’m a firm believer in continuing education.  Make sure you keep up with your industry.  If your freelancing business is in trouble, figure out why.  Make the necessary changes to save it.  Then make sure you do enough research so that you won’t make that same mistake again.

5. Listen to people who are already successful in your field.  Those people will often offer you advice, but that advice might be oblique.  I can’t tell you how many times early in my writing career, a very successful writer would say in the middle of a conversation, “That attitude will get you in trouble.”

I would be defensive or I would ignore the sentence.  I’d rarely follow up.  But years later, I would remember the comment when that attitude—in the form of an unrealistic expectation—did get me in trouble. And sometimes I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go back to that writer and ask how to repair the damage caused by that expectation landmine.

Nowadays, however, I’m often the writer who says, “That attitude will get you in trouble,” and I watch as writer after writer ignore me.  Early on, a writer friend (and former student of mine) was making such an egregious error, based on an unrealistic expectation, that I actually told him point by point why he should not take that terrible action.  He got angry and defensive and then told me I had no idea what I was talking about.

At that moment, I realized why the sentence “That attitude will get you into trouble,” gets spoken, but no successful person ever follows up on it unless asked to. The newer professional has to want the information and  has to be willing to hear the answer.

6. Pay attention to the questions you can’t answer.  These are tough.  They’re the kind of questions that, if your parents had asked them when you were a kid, you probably would have answered like this: My friends are doing it. And if your parents were like mine, they’d haul out the old If your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you follow?

You’ll probably have elaborate justifications built up in your mind and you’ll offer them as answers to the question. But listen to that whisper which happens just before you offer up the first justification.

For example (and I’m clearly making this up):

Question: Why do you need ten $250,000 cars?

Justification: I collect them.

The Whispered Thought: Rich people own dozens of outrageously expensive cars, and now that I’m rich, I need to act rich.

Each business has those same unrealistic expectations built in.  A writer friend of mine rented an office outside the house because (justification) he “needed quiet to work.” Real reason? He believed that people who worked at home were not working, even though he had made 50K a year while working at home.  (The office ate up his profits, and he eventually moved back home to save money—and in the process had to ferret out the unreasonable expectation that had caused the problem in the first place.)

An acquaintance of mine graduated from law school in the middle of her class.  The law school was the best in her state, and in the state’s major city.  However, that city was overrun with graduates from the law school, most of whom graduated with a better record than she had.  When she couldn’t get a job in any of the city’s law firms (not a one) because her grades were not as good as other applicants, she didn’t move to a different city.  Nor did she do some volunteer lawyering or take a job at Legal Aid, like some of my other friends who had not graduated at the top of their class.

Instead, she hung out her own shingle in a town filled with lawyers.  She got a few clients—not enough to pay the bills—and because she thought she only needed the law degree, not actually do any hard work, she did a poor job.

Why would this bright woman believe that she could survive in the cutthroat legal atmosphere of the state’s major city with just a law degree?

Her justification was that no law firm hired women like her—which was true in the year she was born.  But in the 1990s, when she was trying to do this, law firms hired women all the time.

The whispered unrealistic expectation? Real lawyers worked for a law firm.  If no firm would hire her, she had to set up her own firm.  She didn’t believe real lawyers worked for Legal Aid or as legislative counsel to a state senator or as in-house attorney at some corporation.

Her law firm—and eventually her dream of being a lawyer—disappeared under the weight of her unrealistic expectation.

7. If people tell you you’re acting irrationally given the evidence around you or events around you, check to see if you’re acting out of an unrealistic expectation. Think back to my successful friend who refused to believe his business had become successful after two years (when he expected it to take five). From the moment he refused to believe his business was doing better than most, many of his actions were irrational—and people told him so.  If he had analyzed the comments and done a little research, he might have saved that business.

But he attributed them all to jealousy or to other motives on the part of the other people.  Granted, people will tell you things out of fear or jealousy.  That’s why I tell you to research their comments. See if their statements are true.  If not, dismiss them.  If so, pay attention—and maybe make some changes.

We all have unrealistic expectations about ourselves, our careers, and our birthdays. (Well, maybe I’m the only one with an unrealistic expectation about a birthday.)  These unrealistic expectations can ruin our careers—either by giving us the wrong benchmarks (why does anyone need a Dynasty-style party at any age?) or by making us refuse to see what we really have.

You’ll never find all of your unrealistic expectations. But you’ll track down some of the important ones.  And if you do, you’ll stop tripping over landmines and start walking forward which, after all, is how every business progresses.  One not-always-smooth step at a  time.

This Freelancer’s Guide is part of my not-so-smooth writing road. My unrealistic expectation about blogs? That no one read them (even though I did, each and every day).  You guys have blown that expectation out of the water, along with another—that doing something like this would be painfully hard.  Instead, it’s been fun.  So thank you.

If you’re getting something out of the Guide, please donate a dollar or two.  I’ll be giving an e-copy of the Guide to anyone who donates as soon as I finish the Guide.  And, as always, please share this with your friends.

Much appreciated—

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Expectations” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Online Networking 4

(Networking Part Ten)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Unless I missed a major part of the topic, this is the final networking post.  I’m sure those of you who are excellent networkers are relieved.  I, for one, learned a lot, and I thought I was pretty darn good at networking.

Even though all ten (!) of the posts are linked, the most important ones for the purpose of this post are the previous three.  If you haven’t read them, start with online networking part one. That should get you ready to read this post.

At the end of last week’s post, I promised that I’d answer the all-important question: Is online networking worthwhile for the freelancer?  And, I also stated, that the answer wasn’t as easy as it seemed.

You’d think, since I devoted so much space to it, that online networking is important.  And it is.  You should understand what it is and how it functions before making the decision for your business.  But the decision as to whether or not to use online networking should be yours, and not anyone else’s.

One of the questions I asked my panel of online networking experts (hand-picked by me, of course) was this:

1. How has online networking helped/hurt your business?

Because I asked it as a binary question, most everyone answered it that way.  The most succinct answer to this question came from writer and Pyr editor, Lou Anders.

He wrote, “I’d say the internet is more than essential.  Since I’m located in Alabama and my employers are in upstate New York, there is no business without the net.  Beyond that, my writers are all over the country and the world.  But really, if you’re asking about networking, it’s the same.  The internet allows for close relationships with contacts in other countries that never would have been possible ten years ago.  I’m pretty (in)famous at work for doing most of  my job via an iPhone.  Not sure I’m answering this except to say—internet, positive.”

I’ve had similar experiences.  As someone who started her freelance writing career thirty years ago, I find the internet and the quick access invaluable.  Let me give you a few examples.  The first is this post.  In the 1980s when I wrote nonfiction full time, I spent much of my time on the telephone.  My long distance bills were ugly.  The only communication I had with my out-of-town editors was by snail mail, unless they picked up the phone to call me.  The interviews I did for this post would simply not have been possible thirty years ago—especially not on a project that might or might not pay me this week.

Secondly, I made my first international sales twenty years ago.  All of my communication with my foreign editors was via fax and snail mail.  There was no talk of having me promote my British books because I would have had to go to England to do so.

In June, the British edition of my novel, Hitler’s Angel, will appear from John Blake Publishers in their Max Crime line.  It’ll also be the first paperback appearance of the novel in English.  I’ll be talking to British bloggers and doing quite a bit of promotion on my site—something inconceivable at the start of my fiction career.

Will it get me more sales? Absolutely.  In Great Britain? I don’t know. But here in the States, I know of many readers who have asked about the book and are happy to hear that a new edition is coming out.

Newbery Award winning writer, Neil Gaiman uses the internet like I do (only more effectively).  He writes, “I think having an online presence is great for an author, mostly because you can tell people when you have something new coming out.  You aren’t at the mercy of advertising or luck.  You can tell millions of people yourself.”

But he adds a warning.

“Like anything that happens online,” he writes, “it can be a time sink.”

It can be and is.  And that’s part of the analysis that you, the freelancer, have to make.  You’ll need to do a cost-benefit analysis about your time.  (See the Time post earlier)

Freelancer writer Dave Creek, who supplements his fiction writing by working as a web producer for a TV station in Louisville, Kentucky, e-mailed me with some great advice for promoting my blog.  Since I was familiar with his writing from Analog, I asked him what he did to promote his own writing.

He answered, “I’m afraid my experience in online networking isn’t much help.  I have a website, a professional Facebook site, I’m on Twitter, and I have a blog.  But nothing much comes of them.”

The reason? Time.

He writes, “A problem as a part-timer is that I spend 40+ hours, plus commute, at a ‘real’ job every week.  I have maybe an hour or so a day to write.  A day spent writing a blog posting or tweeting or anything else is often a day I don’t spend on a new story.  I’d rather write the story.”

This is precisely the kind of cost-benefit analysis that I mentioned above.  Given Dave’s limited time, he’s better off doing the work, instead of networking.  It seems like good old common sense, but not everyone understands this.  (See the networking post on personality types; it also applies [in a limited way] to people on the net.)

Still, Dave isn’t about to give up his blog.

“All the same,” he writes, “I’m glad I have those presences in place, and I have to take it on faith that continuing to reach out may let me ‘make my own luck’ sometime.”

Exactly. As mentioned so many times in the networking posts—not just by me, but by others as well—you never know which casual contact will turn into a profitable business relationship.

Everyone who networks does some form of the time cost-benefit analysis—or should.  What works for one individual might not work for another.

Different businesses have different needs as well.  I think writers can survive without much of a web presence. What matters is the story itself.  Retail stores who cater locally might benefit from a web presence, but it’s not necessary.  And too much information from an attorney online would be counterproductive to a business that has confidentiality at its core.

Glenn Hauman of Comicmix.com admitted in one of the earlier posts that his time is limited.  However, he writes, “The Internet is my business.  We publish electronically at www.comicmix.com, so we have to be here.”

So being online is part of his job.  But that’s not all that factors into his online networking calculations.

“More to the point,” he adds, “[the Internet] is where the readers are heading.  Wishing for newsstand sales to come back—well, first you have to wish for newsstands to come back. The good news is the barrier to entry is lower, so you can get out there. The bad news is the barrier to entry is lower, so you’re competing with everyone else on the Internet for attention.”

While his second point might—and has—discouraged some people, it doesn’t discourage Glenn.

“You don’t need the world’s attention,” he writes.  “Heck, having the attention of 5,000 dedicated people can be far, far more than enough.”

I’ve noticed that with the Freelancer’s Guide.  My readership has grown steadily and it’s more constant than a readership I would get from a nonfiction title, thrown into the mix of thousands of other nonfiction titles, with a month of shelf life.  Many of you have shown up every week to read the next installment, and for that I thank you.  Another positive? A large number of you have picked up my fiction for the first time, which is an unexpected perk.  And finally, I’ve made a lot of contacts and revived the part of my nonfiction career that I enjoyed.  I’m doing more articles than I was, about topics that I love.  All unexpected, and all quite fun.

Online networking has benefited Carolyn at BookChickCity as well.  She writes, “I think both Twitter and Facebook has helped my blog in so much as it lets others know I have a new post up, etc.  It’s also a great way to let my readers and followers know if I have any author guests.  I don’t think as a fairly new blogger (only nine months) that my blog would have been as successful as quickly if it wasn’t for the use of these other online mediums.”

John DeNardo, also a professional blogger at SF Signal, says that online networking helps bloggers.

“Professional bloggers will tell you that Networking is essential to building a successful blog—and they’re right,” he writes.  “That’s a big part of the story, immediately on the heels of the even-more-important Providing Valuable Content.  Blog networking consists of visiting similarly themed sites, leaving comments, making yourself known, etc.  It also means joining social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

“Is there a negative to networking? Only if you are disrespectful or otherwise troublesome to those you interface with.  Because then instead of making contacts, you’re making enemies.  And who wants to do that?”

Politeness has been a theme throughout the networking posts.  In fact, I think it might be the Golden Rule of networking, based on all the comments I’ve gotten from others.  It’s very easy to get the reputation as an unreasonable hothead online, primarily because things you can say with a smile in person often sound nasty online.  (That was my biggest worry when I increased my online presence; I’m blunt and sarcastic by nature, and I was afraid of alienating my readers simply by being myself.  I don’t know if it’s happened, but I’ve strived to avoid it as much as I can.)

For example, on a private listserve that I share with other professionals in the business, I mentioned a positive comment another professional had received from an editor of an online publication.  I wanted to point out the compliment to my friend.  She responded with shock, and said that the online editor had never said a kind word about her before and had, in fact, been actively nasty to her (something I hadn’t known).  Others responded as well with the same experience.  I’d had a similar experience with the online editor—he’d made a comment on one of my articles elsewhere online that dripped with venom, and I had wondered what I had done to offend him.  Turned out that was his main online persona—one that alienated instead of helped him grow his online business.

If I were advising him, I’d tell him to ease back on the networking, since it was having the opposite effect than desired.  But I’m not advising him (and am actually not sure I want to meet him in person).

So you should also be aware in online networking, as in personal interactions, how you come across to others, and whether or not you’re going to be an effective networker.

Because I asked people I thought were effective at networking to help me with this topic, I received a lot of positive comments about online networking.  Some of the benefits people listed were a bit of a surprise, but made sense after I thought about them.

Writer and futurist Brenda Cooper writes that online networking gives her three general and ongoing benefits:

“1. I meet new people.
“2. I stay in touch with my friends—for example, I like to hear what you and Dean are up to—it makes me feel like we’re still friends even though we don’t have much face-to-face interaction at all.
“3. I learn stuff.  Other people are out there adding value, too, and I benefit from that.  I find new markets, I get pointed to interesting new articles, and I’ve even sold a few stories because of interactions started on Twitter.  My monthly column at Futurismic started because I was introduced to Jeremiah Tolbert who introduced me to Paul Graham Raven—all online.  I’ve not ever met either of them.  I love Starship Sofa, and I’ve been a guest on the associated podcast Sofanauts for the same reason—through an introduction from Jeremy and ongoing Twitter interactions with Tony C. Smith.
“4. I also follow people who I think are good at this and try to learn from them.  I follow Neil Gaiman, and Jay Lake, and Tobias Bucknell and others.  Most of these people are also my friends (I don’t know Neil), but they’re good at this in their own ways and have more followers than I do.”

She concludes with, “I don’t think it has ever hurt me.”

So far as I can tell, she’s right.

Like Brenda, technology journalist and internet marketing consultant Mitch Wagner has had some tangible benefits from online networking.

“When I was laid off in December,” he writes, “I announced it on Twitter and my blog (making sure it was OK with my soon-to-be former employers, whom I expected would soon be clients).  Within a day or so of announcing my availability, I had several offers of work, and within a month I had lined up two really sweet jobs, blogging at Computerworld where I write the Tool Talk blog as well as occasional features, and as Internet marketing director at Palisade Systems which makes an Internet security solution for business.  I believe both of those clients find out about my availability over social networks.  One of them contacted me; I think the other one is someone I called first, but he’d already been planning to reach me because he heard I was available.”

That’s how we all dream online networking should work.  We make our presence known and we get a positive response, one that will help our business in good ways.  Often, however, we have no idea whether or not the networking helped at all.

As writer Patrick Alan writes, “That’s the thing about networking.  Sometimes you use it, but have no idea if it does anything.  It’s  like pressing the sidewalk button. You press it, but then wait.  And you don’t know if it’s still on the same cycle and would have turned to ‘walk’ anyway or if pushing the button sped anything up.”

Next week, onto a new topic.  Thanks to everyone in public and behind the scenes who helped with this massive topic.  Much appreciated.  Thanks too to everyone who donated throughout the drawn-out networking series.

If you have found this Guide valuable, please donate a few dollars to keep me in chocolate and tea so that I can write the next post. When I’m finished with this long first draft, I’ll be sending out an e-version of the Guide to everyone who donated.  And, as always, please forward this to whomever you think might be interested.

Thanks!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Online Networking 4 (Networking Part Ten)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Here’s how you link to these great folks on social networking sites:

Patrick Alan
Patrick-Alan.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/patrick_alan

Lou Anders
Pyrsf.com
Louanders.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Pyr_Books

Bookchickcity
Twitter: bookchickcity
Facebook: bookchickcity

Brenda Cooper
Brenda-cooper.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/brendacooper

Dave Creek
www.davecreek.net

John DeNardo
SFSignal.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sfsignal
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sfsignal

Neil Gaiman
Neilgaiman.com (adult books)
Mousecircus.com (books for younger readers)
Twitter: http://twitter.com/neilhimself

Glenn Hauman
Glennhauman.com
Comicmix.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/comicmix

Michael A. Stackpole
Stormwolf.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MikeStackpole

Mitch Wagner
Mitchwagner.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MitchWagner

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Online Networking 3

(Networking Part Nine)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Well, the fine group of people I interviewed about online networking last week taught me something—all by example.

I often post the Freelancer’s Guide late on Wednesday night—about midnight or so Pacific Time.  It’s too late to tweet that the Guide is up (no offense to the Australian readers) and the wrong time to post on Facebook or on my various list serves.  So I wait to announce the new Guide until I get online the following morning.

Last Wednesday night, I posted the Guide at about 11:30 p.m., then I shut down the internet computer and trundled off to my evening relaxation routine.  (Yes, I’m a late night person.  Setting your own schedule is one of the many perks of freelancing.)

I figured I would notify everyone that the post was up in the morning, and that also meant sending e-mail to last week’s participants.

By the time I logged on the following morning, I found that half of the people I had quoted in the Guide had not only figured out the Guide was up, they had also tweeted about their participation and in most cases, they had also written a small post on their own blogs about the Guide.

Whoa.  That’s impressive.  And impressively fast.  The internet—not bound by time or tides—allowed them to respond when they saw the post, long before I had contacted them.  In the case of the regular bloggers (who were the ones who responded quickly), I have a hunch they have their blogs set up to accept pingbacks, which are notifications that someone has linked to their blogs (for lack of a better definition), followed the pingback, and saw the post.

But still, impressive.  I often follow pingbacks to my blog, but I usually don’t have the time to write a short post about them.  (Or maybe I don’t make the time.  Hmmm.  More learning here.)

When it comes to internet networking, everything does move at light speed—rather like a real time conversation. But unlike a real time conversation, the back-and-forth remains on the internet for a long, long time.  (I hesitate to say “forever” because I am a science fiction writer, and therefore am quite aware that nothing lasts forever.)

I started the networking topic because writer Carolyn Nicita reminded me that networking is an important part of freelancing.  I saved online networking to the very last because I felt that I didn’t have enough knowledge of the topic to write convincingly of it by myself.

This is the third installment of the online portion of our discussion, and the ninth (!) installment of the networking discussion.  Whoops.  I would have really missed a major topic had I written this book without reader interaction.  (Thanks, Carolyn. And thanks everyone else who has suggested various topics.)

If you haven’t read the previous two posts on online networking, I suggest you do so now because I am going to continue where I left off last week. (Here are the links to the first part and the second)

Writing about online networking has helped me in some respects.  I realized that I automatically do a few things right.  I also realized that I’m more experienced at online networking than I thought.  Like everyone else, I tumbled into the online community (several of them, in fact) and accidentally used it to build a platform. While I’ve come late to some parts of the game (blogging, Twitter, Facebook), I’ve had a website for nearly fifteen years and I’ve been on listserves and e-mail networking lists since the early 1990s.

Many of the people I interviewed for this part of the Guide have similar experiences.

Bestseller Neil Gaiman (who, when asked for a description of what he does, wrote, “I write books and stories and things”) says he got his online start on CompuServe in the late 1980s when he still lived in the United Kingdom.

“I was on the comics, SF, and writing boards,” he writes.  “Then when I moved to the U.S. in 92 I started using GEnie, which I used until it died a few years later.  In the late 90s I used the Well as a forum/platform, then started my own blog in 2001.  I started twittering about 14 months ago, after resisting it for a while, and a couple of months ago I got tired of explaining that I had nothing to do with the Neil Gaiman Facebook page, and took over the Neil Gaiman Facebook page too.”

As he mentioned last week, he didn’t do this to network, but to have fun.

Mitch Wagner, who interviewed me yesterday on his podcast Copper Robot about the Guide (thanks, Mitch!), started his online presence in much the same way as Neil.

“I very much enjoy conversation over Internet text,” Mitch writes.  “I find it gratifying.  I became active on Usenet and the Genie online service in 1989 and just stuck with it, until sometime in this century someone slapped a label “social media” on the activity and it became mainstream, with participation from politicians and TV and movies stars as well as just us nerds.”

After I tweeted about last week’s installment of the Guide, writer and editor Cat Rambo sent me a link to her excellent article called “The Networks Around Us.” In that article, she gives a history of the rise of social media.  Even though she has given  me permission to quote from the article (excellent networking, folks), you are better off using your mouse and clicking on this link. She does a much better job of explaining the rise of social media that both Neil and Mitch refer to above than I ever could.

For those of you too lazy to click, however, let me give you a few salient points: She found a Consumer Research Center study that says 43% of online users visited social networking sites in 2009, up 16% from 2008.  I’m sure in the five months since her article was published, that number has increased even more.

Cat believes—and I think she’s right—that cell phones are what has made the difference.  Now that you can access the internet on your phone, you can check e-mail, search social media sites, Tweet, or easily post a newly taken photo on Facebook.  I’m sure that by the time I put this entire Guide together into one volume, there will be new apps and other technologies that make posting on online forums even easier than they are in late April of 2010.

Still, the internet is full of something I call “the noise.”  So much is happening online that no one can keep track of it all.  Rising above “the noise” takes a special project or a confluence of events or maybe just a cute cat playing the piano (you know who you are, YouTube).  Justin Bieber and Susan Boyle both became international celebrities because of the internet—YouTube in particular—but I’ll wager there are a few of you reading this who have not heard of one or the other of them.

The internet makes it possible to specialize, and to spend your entire online life in one particular area, ignoring all others.  Programs and apps facilitate this.  For example, I use TweetDeck on both my iPhone and on my laptop to access Twitter. Without TweetDeck, Twitter would be impossible for me. But TweetDeck lets me separate the people I follow into various categories—friends, publishing, writers, news, etc.  I still don’t see everything in my own categories, but I see more than I would if I just followed the stream.

I’m sure that over time, more and more programs and apps will become available that will streamline things even more. Just today, I noticed that there’s an iPhone app which will organize everything that I experience on a trip so that I can easily blog about it or send it to my friends via e-mail.  And I mean everything, from my GPS locations (you really want to know where I walked on my journey?) to my hotels and meals to my photographs.  And honestly, if I decide to blog about an upcoming trip, I might download the app to keep everything organized in one place.

But while that organizes information for me, it doesn’t help you thread your way through the various social media.  Again, let me point you to Cat’s article, because she separates out the various online sources, from LinkedIn to MySpace, and discusses what they are used for.  Remember Mitch’s advice from last week: pick the sites that you’re most comfortable with, and use them.

Everyone I asked seems to use the various sites differently.   Some do it haphazardly, doing whatever works for them without a lot of analysis, while others figure out what’s best given their limited time resources.

Writer and futurist Brenda Cooper is quite organized about her social networking.  “I have a blog (associated with my website), three Twitter accounts (I am a technology professional in government, so I have one account for that personality, I have my own personal Twitter account with my real name, and I am one of many futurists who twitter occasionally on the joint account ‘futurefeed.’), a LinkedIn account, and a regular FaceBook page (no fan page so far).  I have some things I’m not really using well yet like a YouTube channel.”

But she admits that she uses some technologies more than others.

“I spend more time on Twitter than anywhere else, followed by FaceBook,” she writes.  “I pretty freely mix the science fiction writer and the technology geek and the futurist and the dog lover.  I figure what I’m marketing is me, and that’s me—a pretty wide-ranging person with eclectic interests.”

Writer Patrick Alan isn’t quite as technical about his approach, although he’s very aware of the networking potential.

“I have a blog solely for internet networking,” he writes.  “I’m not promoting anything because I have nothing to promote.  The thing is, it’s me online.  I comment on forums and blogs.  I twitter.  It’s an opportunity for people who my comments have amused or annoyed to go find out who I claim to be.  The most important page on my website is the ‘About’ page.”

John DeNardo of SF Signal is quite creative about how he uses the internet to network.

“The problem for me (as blogging is not my day job) is finding the time to network after the all-consuming task of feeding the blog is done,” he writes.  “What has evolved over time is a mixture of networking while providing content.  For example, our Mind Meld roundtable interviews provide our most consistently popular content, and they are also a great excuse for me to contact folks (authors, fans, actors, producers, scientists) out of the blue.  Also, folks will contact me out of the blue with a tidbit suggestion or to say thanks for an unsolicited plug.  The connections made in these cases are nice side-effects to the main task of providing content.”

Carolyn who runs the blog Bookchickcity says, “I network by using Twitter and Facebook mostly.  I use Twitter for publicising posts on my blog as well as communicating with other book bloggers.”

And in the lovely charm that is the internet, the only way you can tell that Carolyn’s blog is based in England is that she spells things differently than I do (but still correctly, I might add).

Glenn Hauman of Comicmix.com runs an e-mail list that includes a ton of professionals in various entertainment industries from all over the world.  (It has been running since the early 1990s, and in the beginning, most everyone was just starting in their industries.)  But he does a lot more, even though he writes,

“I don’t do as much as I’d like to; too many things get in the way.  But I always try to get in a few tweets in a day, at least one blog post a day if not five.”

Which sounds like a lot to me.  Five posts in one day? I can barely manage a few a week.

He adds, “For me, it’s a blog with an RSS feed, Twitter, and some Facebook.  And a widget from Widgetbox.com.  And posting on other web sites, being part of the community.”

Community is also important to bestseller Michael A. Stackpole, although he doesn’t use the word.  He writes,

“I network on the internet in several ways. First, I maintain a website and blog regularly about fiction, entertainment, writing, life and I use the blog to provide samples of stories.  The idea is to establish myself as being entertaining, since entertainment is what I do.  Second, I use Twitter, Facebook and Myspace (which are all linked) to get my blog further out there, and to interact with my various constituencies.”

But that isn’t all Mike does.

“I participate in a few listserves,” he adds, “and have organized some projects among peers.  Being the motive force on a project that helps others earns a lot of good will. Folks return favors, which is always useful.”

So far so familiar to me.  But Mike has ventured into an area that I’m not technologically able to follow in at the moment.  (I have to upgrade a computer before I can do so—and honestly, I can hardly wait.)

“Finally,” Mike writes, “I use podcasting and Second Life as audio vectors to reach folks.  Podcasts can go into MP3 players, so folks can hear me even when they’re not at their computers.  Second Life allows me to do live readings and classes for an international audience.  All of these opportunities allow folks to become invested in my success, which is rather critical if one is to succeed.”

Mike isn’t alone in using Second Life.  As I mentioned above, Mitch Wagner uses it as well.  It was on Second Life that we had our interview yesterday.

He writes, “Second Life is where I do interviews for my podcast Copper Robot.  I like the community there, and the crazy 3D visual effects.  We have a good bunch of people who come to the show regularly and make smart comments and ask intelligent questions.  Copper Robot is also available as a podcast.”

He’s also active on Twitter, which he says he prefers (see last week’s post).  But, he adds, “Facebook is a close second for me.  I try to keep my friends list on Facebook to people I know and like, either in real life or by reputation.  I use Yakket, a Facebook app that echoes my Twitter updates to Facebook.  I have Yakket set to exclude any update that contains a URL.  I found Facebook users aren’t as tolerant of the constant stream of links as people on Twitter are.”

As Cat Rambo points out in her article, each social media site is different, and Mitch seems to understand what he wants from each.

“I use my personal blog,” he writes, “mostly as a feed of articles I’ve published elsewhere, as well as the occasional professional announcement or—very rarely—a personal post.  I’m finding it more rewarding to post on other people’s sites rather than try to build an audience for my own blog.”

And finally, he uses a network I’m just beginning to understand: LinkedIn.  He writes, “I use LinkedIn as an extended business card or resume.  I’ve never found the kind of community on LinkedIn that I get from other social media.”

If you take anything from this series of advice from good networkers, take this: Do what feels right for you. Doing it because you feel you have to or because you heard that everyone else is doing it will seem phony.  Do what you enjoy.

Because—going back to last week’s post—the key to effective networking is to have fun.  Last week’s word was “party”—social media is like a big cocktail party and it’s the amusing person who gets remembered. But this week’s word is “community.”  If you’re there and interesting and enjoying yourself, even if you’re relatively quiet or not the most noticeable raconteur, you’ll find a group of like-minded people to spend time with.

Next week, I’ll wrap up with the question that really matters—does all of this help or hurt a freelancer’s business? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.

I’m learning a lot from the Freelancer’s Guide too—you’re all sending me out to discover answers to questions I didn’t even know I should ask. So thank you.

It does take time, however, so if you’ve gotten some value from the Guide, please donate a few dollars to pay me for my writing time. When I’m finished with this long first draft, I’ll be sending out an e-version of the Guide to everyone who donated.  And, as always, please forward this to whomever you think might be interested.

Thanks!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Online Networking 3 (Networking Part Nine)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Here’s how you link to these great folks on social networking sites:

Patrick Alan
Patrick-Alan.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/patrick_alan

Bookchickcity
Twitter: bookchickcity
Facebook: bookchickcity

Brenda Cooper
Brenda-cooper.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/brendacooper

John DeNardo
SFSignal.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sfsignal
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sfsignal