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writing

Work is a place…

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…not an activity.

Over at the Empowering Mom blog, author Tisha Tolar posts a thoughtful and interesting rumination on the way people react when they learn someone is stepping off the job treadmill to start a business—especially a work-at-home business. She takes the negativity that you can encounter (especially when you first get started) as a manifestation of jealousy.

There’s no question that people say the strangest things to freelancers. A friend’s mother, for example, asked her when she was going to get “a real job.” Said friend’s pretend job entailed stringing for Time Magazine (a nicely paid gig), regularly writing for The New York Times, generating 30 to 40 column inches a week for a Scripps-Howard business journal, running a successful public-relations practice, and (oh, by the way) raising two children and functioning as an active corporate wife for a successful lawyer.

I don’t think, though, that jealousy is quite the word for it. It’s more that people are trapped in a specific mindset and can’t break free from it. For most people, work is a place, not an activity. You’re “at work” when you’re at the office, on a jobsite, down at the shop…never mind that half the time you’re standing around the water cooler, a quarter of the time you’re out front smoking, and the rest of the time you’re building a championship score at Spider Solitaire on your office computer. When you’re “at home” you can’t be working. Can you?

This is a cultural box, like all the other cultural boxes we use to compartmentalize our lives. Most of us find it difficult to climb out of any given box and see the world from a new perspective. The result is that most people genuinely, truly cannot imagine that you’re gainfully employed if your workplace and your home coincide. To their minds, if you claim to be working while you’re physically at home, you’re in the wrong box.

During the several periods when I worked as a freelance writer out of my home, I published four books and more articles than I can count, spoke at endless writers’ conferences, and taught feature writing on the college level. Despite a busy schedule and some high-profile success, the wrong-box phenomenon manifested itself over and over.

There was the time, for example, that my son was in preschool and the school’s volunteer room mother was trying to round up moms to drive vanloads of kids to a farm south of the city for a Hallowe’en pumpkinfest. She called every mother who had been foolish enough not to provide a business telephone number. I used to repeat my home number as my business number, because that’s where editors and clients called me during the daytime; when you do that, people assume you’re not working. She called me while I was on deadline for a national magazine and demanded that I “volunteer” to drive kids to this farm.

I explained that I could not, because I was working on a job and I had to meet a deadline.

This simply did not register with her. She persisted. I tried again to explain that I couldn’t drop what I was doing to drive kiddies around the landscape. She grew angry. She insisted that I certainly could take a full day off my job (because, understand: in her mind I didn’t have a job) to drive children to the pumpkin farm. By the time I finally scraped her off the telephone, she was furious!

At the time this incident occurred, I was writing one feature-length article a month for a city magazine, one to three short pieces a month for each of two monthlies, 30 to 60 column inches a week for a business newspaper, and one to three feature-length articles a month for regional and national magazines. None of that activity came under the heading of an unpaid hobby.

This effect—the “you must be eating bon-bons in front of the soap operas” reaction—is particularly pronounced where women are concerned. Men face a slightly different response (the “what kind of lazy worthless fruitcake of a bum ARE you, anyway” question). Women, when they’re working out of a home office, are assumed to have nothing better to do than socialize, volunteer, and babysit.

The most extreme episode that I can remember came the morning my son committed the heinous crime of uttering the word “fart” on the kindergarten playground. I was on deadline for an article that had to be finished that day when the school principal called on the phone to announce that I had to come and pick up my child forthwith.

I explained that I had a job I had to finish, and that I would come and get him as soon as I could.

No, he said, he was being sent home and I had to come and get him RIGHT NOW. I said, look: I’m a journalist. I write on deadline. I’m writing a project that has to be done today. If I miss my deadline, I will lose my client—the editor will not hire me to do any further work for him.

“Well, that’s fine, but you have to come and get him right now,” he said.

Understand: Editors and publishers have no commitment to freelance writers. You’re not an employee. Some of these people never see your face. All you have to do is miss one deadline, and you’ll never get another assignment from that editor.

I called one of our adult sitters and arranged to drop the kid with her while I finished the job. Traipsed over to the school, drove him down to her house, and raced back to my computer.

An hour later as I was sweltering through the feature, phone rang again: babysitter.

“He hasn’t stopped crying since you left him. You have to come and pick him up.”

Yes.

The kid was so anguished by being thrown out of school for half a day, he was beside himself. He was just frantic, so much so that our sitter, an accomplished mother and grandmother, could do nothing to console him. So…

Of course, I missed the deadline.

By midafternoon, I was so furious—especially after I got off the phone from my audibly irked editor—that I called my husband to vent.

He called the school principal to inquire what was going on, and in the course of the conversation, he explained in exactly the same words I had used that I worked as a freelance journalist, that I had to make my deadlines, that I had to finish an article that was due that day, and that picking up my son before school was out meant that I would miss my deadline and risk losing an important client.

The principal said—get this!—that if he had known that, he wouldn’t have insisted I come and get my son.

Two phenemona were engaged there:

1. The ineffable inaudibility of the female voice; and
2. The impossibility of conceiving that a person who works at home is working.

It’s not jealousy. It’s not meanness. It’s not even stupidity. It’s plain old social convention. You can’t beat it. You just have to learn to ignore it or work around it.

Mysteries of blogging

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Tina, my associate editor at the Great Desert University and partner in crime at our business enterprise, e-mails to report that our Copyeditor’s Desk site appeared among WordPress’s fastest-growing sites. It arrived at number 64, after a reader stumbled one of Tina’s recent entries.

Isn’t that amazing? Our readership is anything but huge, and so, I suppose, when a spike to 340 hits appears, it’s relatively so large it creates the impression of rapid growth.

I never cease to marvel at what attracts readers. The olive-oil hair conditioner story still is cranking readership: over 300 yesterday. Every day, someone out there googles “olive oil” and “hair conditioner” and shows up at Funny. Interestingly, the piece I posted on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out blonde or red highlights hasn’t generated anywhere near that much traffic. Must be a lot of folks out there with dry hair.

Wish I knew what people love. Then I would give it to them. But then, if we all knew what people love, we would all be rich, eh?

Or better yet, happy.
😉

Thinking about publishing a book?

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My business partner and I just finished editing a book manuscript for a client of a client. Our client is a book packager (an outfit that puts books together for publishers); the subclient is an on-demand vanity publisher preparing to print a book written by the author of a fairly laughable conspiracy theory.

On-demand publishers have their uses and are worth considering if you have a book that will supplement a business enterprise. For example, a friend of mine ran a lucrative business providing in-house communications seminars to large corporations. She wrote a book that summarized the basic principles described in her presentations, which she sold in large numbers to her corporate clients—and also to the general public through the Barnes & Nobles and the Borders of this world. While the book would have been profitable on its own (she had something to say that people wanted to know), it vastly enhanced her company’s revenues.

You may have a subject too limited to your business or your specific interest to sell to a traditional publishing house, but it nevertheless would be useful if presented in a book. Before the advent of on-demand publishing, you could have the book printed and bound through a vanity press, but then you’d be faced with the many headaches of warehousing, marketing, and distribution. Most people who go this route end up with their cars parked in the street, because the garage is stuffed to the rafters with unsalable books. But lo! an on-demand publisher can produce only the number of books you think you can sell at your next dog-and-pony show, or that you want to give away to your 100 best customers.

If your book is adequately edited (so you don’t look like a screaming fool) and decently designed (not a matter to be neglected), a self-published product can be a valuable adjunct to any number of enterprises.

What you should NOT do is pay a vanity publisher to bring out a book that no one else in their right mind would publish. There’s a reason these outfits are called “vanity presses”: they profit nicely from the wannabe writer’s ego. Remember: when you’re a real writer, you don’t pay someone else to publish your golden words; they pay you!

And also remember:
Every writer needs and editor.
[LOL!]

Sploggers get rich quick off your work

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Several sploggers have been harvesting posts from Funny about Money. Most recently, a site called “The Retired Millionaire” has been reproducing passages from Funny and monetizing them. I have contacted Adsense to let them know that if they don’t bring a stop to the use of their service to steal money from me by using my work as an advertising base, they soon will be hearing from my lawyer and from the U.S. Attorney General, and to instruct them to remit all revenues generated from my content to me.

You’ll notice a new addition to the blogroll atFunnyand atThe Copyeditor’s Desk:Exposing Sploggersis a group of WordPress bloggers who are banding together to fight back. They propose to track down the owners of offending groups and to develop various ways to force them to remove members’ copyrighted material from their sites and to stop the wholesale theft. Exposing Sploggers also lists several other sites with information and resources, which you should know about.

It is against the law to use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, and profiting off that material is actionable. I am not above filing lawsuits against anyone I can catch in the act. No © symbol or copyright notice is required to establish your rights in your work, nor is it necessary to register your work with the Library of Congress to establish rights. Copyright applies to all reproducible hard-copy, film, and electronic material, and the law protects such material from the instant it is created. If you would like to know more about this, my chapters on copyright and on libel in The Essential Feature were vetted by an internationally prominent publishing lawyer, who pronounced them the best summaries in layman’s language that she had seen.

If you’re a blogger, I urge you to join Exposing Sploggers and work actively to bring a stop to theft of your work. In some cases, copy pirates have ripped off entire blogs, so that Google searches go to the thief’s site instead of to the real blog. Obviously, if you are trying to monetize your site, these crooks are stealing from your pocketbook. Even if all the slimeball steals is your ideas and your creativity, you should care. You should care very much.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has a new URL

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It took us a while to obtain and then ensconce our new domain name at The Copyeditor’s Desk. We’d expected to apply the domain name to the site shortly after we started it, but somehow we didn’t get the process done until after we had picked up a number of readers, who now probably think we’re lost and gone forever.

If you’re an unmoored reader of The Copyeditor’s Desk, here’s its URL: http://thecopyeditorsdesk.com

Please come on back! Or, if you haven’t seen it, c’mon over. Tina just posted a squib on getting scholarly work published; in the next day or two, I’m planning to write on the progress of starting a small business. To our amazement, our little enterprise has already generated as much work as we can handle — if we get any more assignments this month, we’ll have to farm them out. We’ll let you know at that site how we did it, what worked, and what apparently didn’t work.

A$king and re¢eiving

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“A$k and ye shall re¢eive” is the motto of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, to which I used to belong until I figured out that freelance writing is a losing proposition. ASJA put me on to the fact that publishers don’t pay a fair rate for work done; they pay what they know they can get away with. They bank on the tendency of writers to work in their own little garrets, to cultivate social lives best described as null and void, and to be way too shy to ask other writers how much they earn. Magazine publishers in particular will pay one writer, say, $1.00 a word and another 50¢ or 75¢ for the same kind of work of the same quality. They recognize that some wannabe writers are so anxious to see their bylines in print they not only would work for free, they’d pay the magazine to publish them, and so the magazine plays that for all it’s worth. Which is plenty.

Entertainingly, today I learned that book publishers will do something similar when they outsource editorial work. My young business partner (late one of my research assistants) and I have been proofreading detective novels for a company that publishes nothing but mystery fiction. Because the work is easy and the copy so entertaining it’s hard to believe anyone would pay you to read it, we’ve been accepting the publisher’s offered rate of $12 an hour.

In response to our talking up our new enterprise, The Copyeditor’s Desk,a book packaging company e-mailed me and asked our rates for proofreading. Without thinking about the mystery publisher, I gave her a rate on the very lowest end of what I actually expect to earn: $25 an hour. Proofreading does not rise to the level of rocket science, and so I couldn’t reasonably ask for the amount I try to get by manipulating my copyediting page rate to fit the difficulty of the copy: $60 an hour. But on the other hand, there comes a point where you can’t just give it away. I figured $25 would be a bit rich for her blood.

To my astonishment, she wrote back and said our proposed rate was in the range of what they’ve been paying others.

Whoa! You are paying proofreaders twenty-five bucks an hour? You’re paying more than twice what we’ve been earning reading mystery novels? Are we talkin’ the same people who have the skills you could have expected from a bright high-school graduate a quarter-century ago?

Huh. Wonder what they would have paid if I’d suggested their arcane interior decorating books need a proofreader with a Ph.D. to make them right. . .

So the message is this: Don’t be shy about asking what you think your time is worth. If you don’t get it, maybe it’s for the best: the next client or employer will come up to your standards. And find out, even if it means bald-facedly asking colleagues what they earn, how much others in your trade or profession are earning for similar work.
Ignoran¢e is not bli$$.