Welcome to Writing Lab News. This month I'm focusing on career management. I start with the suggestion that you have to work hard to build a writing career. One of the ways that you can smooth your path is by using social media such as Twitter and by blogging. There's an article on managing your relationship with your clients and I've put a new blog under the spotlight. Enjoy! Next edition: June 3

In this issue:

• Writing Success: There Are No Shortcuts
• Tuning Into Twitter
• How To Take Charge As A Freelance Writer
• Five Steps In The Evolution Of A Blogger
• Writing Blog Spotlight: CopyWrite
• Diary Of A Working Writer May 2008

Writing Success: There Are No Shortcuts

by Sharon Hurley Hall

There are no shortcuts to building a successful writing business. Although we would all love to start writing today and be making money hand over fist tomorrow, that's not the reality for most people. In fact, you have to be prepared to work harder than you have ever worked in order to get your writing career off the ground.

A key question for people is deciding when you should give up the day job and become a full time freelance. Only you will know when the income potential becomes greater than the risk, and you have to expect some bumps along the way. Another issue is avoiding the people who want something for nothing, and there are a lot of them about.

Don't think I'm being a pessimist. I'm not. But I am realistic. It takes a couple of years to build up a successful freelancing career, if you really dedicate yourself to writing and promotion in equal measure. When you're in the career building stage, it can seem like a daunting task, but stick with it and you'll soon be doing the best job in the world.

Tuning Into Twitter

By Sharon Hurley Hall

This is a guest post I wrote for PiggyBankPie. I think writers should consider using Twitter for the connections they can make with fellow writers, bloggers and internet marketers.

In Twitterland, you can follow and be followed. If you follow someone, you get their updates in your Twitter stream. Following someone is entirely your choice, so you can choose people with particular interests to follow. One of the interesting things about Twitter is that there are a lot of successful bloggers there who share resources of interest. Sometimes these are their own posts; at other times they are resources created by others. Most of the time, in my experience at least, what is shared is of excellent quality. Following bloggers like Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett and Maki is a great way the be tuned in to the blogosphere.

I also find it useful to keep in touch with my writing friends. It’s a bit like a water cooler. We talk about what we’re working on and exchange stories about good and bad client relationships. We point out useful resources and we highlight good posts on writing.

Read the rest of Tuning Into Twitter

How To Take Charge As A Freelance Writer

By Sharon Hurley Hall

Another guest post for Writing White Papers, inspired by a real life situation.

If you have ever had a job that took three times as long as expected, with more revisions and much less satisfaction than usual, then you’ll know what I mean. Taking charge of the client relationship can help you to avoid time consuming mistakes and a bad relationship. Here’s how you do it.

Writing Services

When clients approach you, be clear about what services you offer, how much they cost and when you require payment. Setting prices can be a nightmare if you’re new, so invest $10 in your career and buy an online subscription to Writer’s Market. That will help you with getting your prices to the appropriate level. Browse around other writers’ sites and see how they approach promoting themselves to clients. Many successful writers are very specific about their services. If your client wants to buy a writing and layout package and you only do writing, find someone who does layout, get a quote and then give your client a package price. Don’t feel that you have to go beyond your skill level. You will end up stressed and your client won’t be happy.

Read the rest of How To Take Charge As A Freelance Writer

Five Steps In The Evolution Of A Blogger

By Sharon Hurley Hall

This is another Pureblogging post. Here's an excerpt:

Step 4: You Mean, I Can Make Money With This?

The bloggers I have spoken to (and I admit there might be a bias because most of us are writers) all started blogs for traffic building or profile raising. It wasn’t till they’d been blogging for a while that they realised that there were other advantages to blogging. The ability to make money from Adsense, affiliate products and ad sales was a revelation, and many of us started monetizing wildly, often with little idea what we were doing. (As an aside, it’s much easier to make money if you are blogging about blogging, technology, entertainment or health. Other than that you have to have a LOT of traffic on a writing site to make anything decent. I do ok with my site, but my friend who has a writing site that gets 100,000 visitors a month is really doing well.)

Read the rest of Five Steps In The Evolution Of A Blogger

Writing Blog Spotlight: CopyWrite

As you know I occasionally feature reviews of writing blogs on Get Paid to Write Online. Here's the second blog to be featured in the spotlight.

This month's featured writing blog is CopyWrite, a copywriting blog by Jonathan Crossfield, a professional copywriter who lives in Australia. In the past month or so, I've marked several of his posts for future reference, but what I want to share are two series that you may find useful:

• The Professional Writer
• Writing The Value Proposition

This blog is a recent discovery, but I've already subscribed to the feed. Hope you like it too.

Diary Of A Working Writer - May 2008

This has been a strange old month. An unexpected trip forced me to re-evaluate what the essentials were for writing on the move. I discovered that while I love freelancing from a tropical island, there are many advantages to having a reliable internet connection.

During the month I took a potshot at those who think that web content writers are not real writers , highlighted some bidding strategies and warned against counting your chickens with clients. Over on Daily Writing Tips, I highlighted the essentials for a writer's bookshelf, looked at reduplicatives, and wrote about a prefix that's all man.

May looks like a busy month with more work on press releases, an ebook and several travel articles - and that's just for starters. I'm aiming to make this my best month so far. Hope your writing month is successful too.