In this issue:
Keeping Fresh as a Freelance Writer
Three Ways To Improve Your Time Management
Five Ways To Kill Your Blog
Who Owns My Writing?
Ghostwriting Ethics: Do You Have Any?
Diary Of A Working Writer December 2007

Keeping Fresh as a Freelance Writer

One of the challenges of freelance writing and ghostwriting is to keep your writing fresh, both so you can enjoy it and so that your clients can get a good job.

But how do you do it? In this article I outline several strategies for keeping your writing fresh. Here's an excerpt of the post.

Apart from the health issues, such as the threat of RSI (tendinitis), there’s a valid professional reason to leave your desk and experience the world from time to time. That’s because if you stay in your bubble, your writing will get stale. Even if you’re an expert, sometimes you need to refresh your outlook so that you can find new ways to express an old concept. Remember, it takes a bit of dirt to make a pearl.

Read the rest of Keeping Fresh as a Freelance Writer

Three Ways To Improve Your Time Management

By Sharon Hurley Hall

One area that many writers struggle with is time. You sit down at your computer in the morning, and before you know it, you’re working through the night to finish what you should have accomplished during the day.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep your work on track, but there are three strategies that you can use to manage your time effectively.

Cut Down On Email Time

Email is a real time sink. Yes, you need to check to see if writing jobs are coming in, to send out queries and to connect with other writers. However, you don’t have to do this 24 hours a day. This is one area where I still struggle, but I have tried to check email first thing in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening. It’s actually much easier to set aside half an hour to deal with email a couple of times a day than to handle it as it comes in. That’s because it’s easy to get distracted from your writing when you focus on something else. I also turn off my IM client when I’m supposed to be writing.

Read the rest of Three Ways To Improve Your Time Management

Five Ways To Kill Your Blog

By Sharon Hurley Hall

You wouldn’t really want people to read your blog, would you? If you are sick of the hassle and the hype, here’s how you can make sure that no one new visits your blog and your old readers go elsewhere.

Go Off Topic

One reason why people stop reading a blog is because they don’t know what they will get. That works for some blogs, but if you have a niche and readers expect a certain kind of content, not providing it will drive them away.

Forget About Optimization

There are plenty of plugins that will help you optimise your blog post titles, create metatags and avoid duplicate content. Don’t use them and Google will soon put most of your content into the supplemental results index. With luck, your blog will never come out.

Read the rest of Five Ways To Kill Your Blog

Who Owns My Writing?

By Sharon Hurley Hall

Copyright can seem like a minefield, especially if you're starting out in freelance writing. However, the truth is that copyright law is pretty simple. Here are the basics of copyright law for freelance writers.

Protection Of Ideas

It happens to all writers at some point. We have a great idea for an article, mention it to a few people, and the next thing we know someone else has written an article based on the idea. And it's OK for them to do it. You can't copyright an idea. However, once a story has been written, that's when copyright law applies. The information writers choose and the way they arrange it is what makes each story or article unique.

Protection Of Written Work

What this means is that literary work such as newspaper and magazine articles, song lyrics. short stories and novels get automatic copyright protection. This protection also applies to dramatic, musical and artistic works, published editions of works, films, sound recordings and broadcasts. In order to enjoy legal copyright protection the work must arise from independent intellectual effort. That's a fancy way of saying that the person who owns the copyright must have put some work into creating the material.

Read the rest of Who Owns My Writing?

Ghostwriting Ethics: Do You Have Any?

By Sharon Hurley Hall

A few months ago one of my blogging friends challenged me to answer some questions about my ethics as a ghostwriter. The questions were:

1. Would you completely write a book, play, or other creative work and allow someone else to have the credit?

2. Would you write a blog and allow someone else to claim it as their own?

3. Would you use a pen name or pseudonym?

4. Would you write a nonfiction piece and allow someone (or something as in the case of a company) to have the credit?

5. Would you write someone’s term paper for them?

Read the rest of Ghostwriting Ethics: Do You Have Any? to find out how I answered the questions.

Diary Of A Working Writer - December 2007

November was a strange month. Many of us face the challenge of balancing our writing careers with family time, and with non stop visitors for most of the month, that's just what I had to do. However, I still found time to blog about getting more work from existing clients on the Writing White Papers blog and to do a quick roundup of paid to blog programs on PiggyBankPie. I'm also quite proud of my post on writing great web content on Daily Writing Tips.

As you can imagine, with so many visitors, I haven't done much more work on my ebook, but I have been experimenting with advertising on my Get Paid To Write Online blog and streamlining my other blogs to improve my online presence.

December has started out as a busy month, which is just as well, with all those Christmas presents to buy. Thanks for reading Writing Lab News this year, and I hope you enjoy the holiday season.