Welcome to the latest edition of Writing Lab News. This issue has a mixed bag, starting with an article on keeping your writing business healthy during an economic downturn. I've answered a reader's question on when to follow up queries with editors, and discussed a new way of aggregating all your work. Check out our humour section and don't forget to read the announcement about my new writer mentoring service. See you next month! Next edition: December 5.

In this issue:

• How To Avoid The Recession Blues
• Chasing The Editor
• Writer Mentoring Service Launched
• Why Writers Should Use Lifestreaming
• Writing Talk: Scam Spotting 2
• Diary Of A Working Writer November 2008

How To Avoid The Recession Blues

by Sharon Hurley Hall

I recently wrote a post about recession and the freelance writer. As a follow up, I thought I would give more detail on avoiding the pitfalls of a troubled economy. The first thing to realise is that you can't affect the overall economy, but you can manage your own economy. So how do you do that?

1. Diversify
If I'm always preaching the benefits of diversification, it's for a reason. Diversifying your client base leaves you less vulnerable to the effects of a client going bust or failing to pay you on time. In this climate, you can't be sure that today's rock solid client will still be here tomorrow, so step up your efforts to find new work. Now's a good time to give your website or online portfolio an overhaul. It's a great time to follow up old clients and see if they have new work, and it's an excellent time to use your contacts and job sites to see what else is out there that might suit you. I recently started writing for Canmaking News. It's an area I've not written in for a while, but I practice what I preach, and getting a new client is great.

2. Promote
Promoting yourself is not just a question of a few emails or a website makeover. You need to get active. Join writing forums and interact with the people there (they will bring you leads and will lend you support). Add your site to relevant directories to improve its search engine rankings. Submit your best posts to relevant blog carnivals. In other words, let the world know that you are there and make it easy for them to find you.

3. Chase
When times are good, maybe you can afford to wait a while before chasing payment, but sometimes delays can drag on. When you have submitted work, invoice immediately. If you usually get an email acknowledging receipt of the invoice, chase if this doesn't arrive. If your invoice is usually paid promptly, chase when the deadline passes. Income is only income if it actually arrives in your bank account, so do your part to make sure it does.

Now, more than ever, it's time to manage your writing business efficiently. You need to be on top of what you have to do, when payment is due and when it's received. Then you can make sure that your personal economy is healthy, even if the overall economy isn't.

Chasing The Editor

by Sharon Hurley Hall

It's been a while since I wrote my freelance writing questions series, but the questions are still coming in. One reader wants to know when it was ok to chase an editor about submitted work. Here's my experience, born of being both a writer and an editor.

The thing to know about editors is that at any time they can be juggling the content of two or three magazine issues. On a typical monthly magazine you might be laying out one issue, checking submissions for another and commissioning for a third. Editors are busy people and when deadlines loom, they may not have the time to respond to every query as quickly as writers would like them to.

So how do you work out when it's time for a follow-up? The guidelines for writers may state how long it will take for editors to give you a response. If you have submitted a piece on spec and less than that time has passed, there's no point even asking. If the editor has commissioned a piece for a particular issue and has given you a deadline for submission, then it's OK to check in a few days after that to make sure the piece has been received and is appropriate.

Some guidelines state that they won't acknowledge submissions unless they have been accepted. That's probably because they get a lot of queries and don't have time to respond to every single one. In that case, if you don't hear within the stated acceptance period, you can presume that it's ok to submit the work to someone else.

Writer Mentoring Service Launched

In case you missed it, here's the announcement about my new mentoring service for freelance writers.

How is your freelance writing career going? Have you been frustrated by the difficulty of getting reliable insider information to jump start your career. If you’re anything like I was then you could probably use some help. I know that when I started writing, I got advice from editors and other writers about writing skills and it really helped me to develop my skills and abilities and to launch a successful and varied writing career. As I moved through the ranks from sub-editor to edit magazines and books, I learned more about the writing business (20 years will do that) and I’ve learned even more since I’ve been freelancing.

One of the most important things I have learned is that developing a successful writing career is a series of next steps, but you have to know what they are. That’s why I am launching a personal mentoring service. It’s your chance to get one-on-one advice about the writing business and how you can take the next step in your freelance writing career. We will discuss where you are now, the aspects of the business you want to know more about and where you want to go. I will help you see how you can improve the way you present yourself to potential editors and clients.

See client testimonials and fee details on my blog.

Why Writers Should Use Lifestreaming

by Sharon Hurley Hall

If you're anything like me, you probably do a heck of a lot of writing. Not just writing for clients, but blogging and writing for yourself. And it's hard work keeping track of it all. That's why you should consider a lifestreaming application. Lifestreaming means aggregating your online social life, and there's one way you can make it really useful for your writing career.

Most lifestreaming sites work automatically with delicious and twitter, so by bookmarking all your content or using a private twitter feed you can automatically send these to your lifestream. If you bookmark your content in other ways, then lifestreaming apps will work with these too. It usually only takes a couple of seconds to sign up, a few more to add your accounts, and then you have put your online social life on autopilot.

I find lifestreaming a good way of jogging my memory about the sites where I publish content and it's been useful for attracting clients, too. I've written a few reviews of lifestreaming apps, and will be adding to that list on Techgerm this week. Here are some to check out and get you started.

• Lifestreaming: First Look
• Lifestreaming With Swurl
• I'm Into Iminta
• Profilactic: The Ultimate Lifestreaming Tool?
• Making Sense Of Your Online Social Life

Writing Talk - Scam Spotting 2

I've been playing around on Bitstrips.com and have created some comics on the writing life. The series is called Writing Talk and this latest one is about a common scam. See the others here.

Diary Of A Working Writer - November 2008

In October I continued my travel blogging gig for ParkRideFlyUSA.com and it was fun. Just to get it done, I wrote a post about offsite airport parking, but my favourite posts of the month were the ones about Halloween vacation ideas and Halloween vacation planning. I also spent some time creating social media profiles for that blog. It's a work in progress, but I'm already starting to see results.

Another new gig was working as a news journalist for Canmaking News, a British online publication. It's been fun so far, and it's already created other opportunities. I've also been working on proofreading for an EU publication. Meanwhile, I've helped clients to promote themselves with some new Squidoo lenses, and I hope that work will be ongoing. For me, though, the big news of the month was the launch of my writer mentoring service. I'm looking forward to extending the help I give to new writers through this new channel.

In the coming month, I've got more new things to look forward to, including a new course for my premium content channel. I'll also be doing more comic strips and adding new content to Get Paid To Write Online. Have a great month!