Coffee....
Yay, morning coffee.
I slept in late, of course. Thus the problem with getting the writing bug regularly at 4 am.
This month I have also done lot's of research on potentially lucrative gigs that involve writing.
Here's some links and ideas for anyone else interested:
About.com Guides
About hires and pays people to write short articles and keep a blog oriented to various topics. They pay about $675 a month to start, after accepting an applicant and putting them through 2 weeks of assignments. To apply go to the site, choose a category and fill out your information, and submit a relevant article of more than 500 words. Apparently they get LOT's of applications, so it takes some time to get through them- and you better make it interesting enough to stand out. However, they are still regularly hiring writers for this, and seem to like the somewhat astute but every-day guy approach. I found the information from a reputable source who does this for them, and apparently they actually do pay once they have weeded through the application process and completed training.
http://beaguide.about.com/
Lulu.com Self Publishing
This one I got from a couple of friends of mine who used their service a while back. It is a self-publishing company. You can use their service to upload your material and make it available as a book or an ebook. You have control over the content, editing, and layout of your work which you still own the rights to and can pull at any time. You can make your materials available to download for free, and use it as a way to share information in a nicelt done context. You can also choose to make them available for sale through their market place. You set the prices beyond the cost of production. The company gets a small part of each sale. With e-books for instance, there is no production cost, lulu keeps 25%, and the creator gets the rest of the revenue. With paypal you get paid faster, but they will also pay with a traditional check quarterly. The friends I had that used this service made physical books, and were pleased with the look and feel. They didn't really do it to make money, but later they were geeked that they had some sales and actually got a check.
Incidently, I also found several other writing gigs where a service offers to publish your writing and pay you for it, who are actually using lulu to do it and then paying you 50% royalties instead of the 75% lulu will give you, and buying the rights to your work on contract. Hmmmm.... now, that's shady. Watch for it. Technically if your work was good and you were willing to put the time into promoting it, this could be a better deal than a traditional publishing house.
DIY Publishing with LULU:
http://www.lulu.com/en/about/demo.php?cid=en_tab_demo
And the next set that I'm really trying to figure out has to do with blogs that pay. This had -never- occured to me, but I was ran across a very cool chick last week who has apparently made some real money doing this. You hook your blog up to advertisment that pays you when people check out the links. There are a lot of services that do it, I'm sure many of them are scams. Some of them are apparently legit tough- I mean, this chick wasn't trying to sell me anything, so why would she giggle and say- nope, you-really- should do this and point me in the direction of tons of info? She's apparently been doing it for several years with enough sucess to turn it into a full time gig, and her blog doesn't look more or less sophisticated than most of what I see here on live journal.
That one will take me some time to explore the merits of- I'm going to have to get a new bank account and hook it up to paypal specifically to experiment with lulu and professional blogging. I'll update about it once I see weather it looks like more hassle for nothing, or a worthwhile thing to try.
If anyone catchesd this post and tries any of these things, please let me know how it works out. One of my friends and I are trying to compile some information on gigs and projects to see which are legit and not. These are a few I decided to try, I'd love feedback from anyone else who does.
And now I have some other things to attend to...
~nicolette
I slept in late, of course. Thus the problem with getting the writing bug regularly at 4 am.
This month I have also done lot's of research on potentially lucrative gigs that involve writing.
Here's some links and ideas for anyone else interested:
About.com Guides
About hires and pays people to write short articles and keep a blog oriented to various topics. They pay about $675 a month to start, after accepting an applicant and putting them through 2 weeks of assignments. To apply go to the site, choose a category and fill out your information, and submit a relevant article of more than 500 words. Apparently they get LOT's of applications, so it takes some time to get through them- and you better make it interesting enough to stand out. However, they are still regularly hiring writers for this, and seem to like the somewhat astute but every-day guy approach. I found the information from a reputable source who does this for them, and apparently they actually do pay once they have weeded through the application process and completed training.
http://beaguide.about.com/
Lulu.com Self Publishing
This one I got from a couple of friends of mine who used their service a while back. It is a self-publishing company. You can use their service to upload your material and make it available as a book or an ebook. You have control over the content, editing, and layout of your work which you still own the rights to and can pull at any time. You can make your materials available to download for free, and use it as a way to share information in a nicelt done context. You can also choose to make them available for sale through their market place. You set the prices beyond the cost of production. The company gets a small part of each sale. With e-books for instance, there is no production cost, lulu keeps 25%, and the creator gets the rest of the revenue. With paypal you get paid faster, but they will also pay with a traditional check quarterly. The friends I had that used this service made physical books, and were pleased with the look and feel. They didn't really do it to make money, but later they were geeked that they had some sales and actually got a check.
Incidently, I also found several other writing gigs where a service offers to publish your writing and pay you for it, who are actually using lulu to do it and then paying you 50% royalties instead of the 75% lulu will give you, and buying the rights to your work on contract. Hmmmm.... now, that's shady. Watch for it. Technically if your work was good and you were willing to put the time into promoting it, this could be a better deal than a traditional publishing house.
DIY Publishing with LULU:
http://www.lulu.com/en/about/demo.php?cid=en_tab_demo
And the next set that I'm really trying to figure out has to do with blogs that pay. This had -never- occured to me, but I was ran across a very cool chick last week who has apparently made some real money doing this. You hook your blog up to advertisment that pays you when people check out the links. There are a lot of services that do it, I'm sure many of them are scams. Some of them are apparently legit tough- I mean, this chick wasn't trying to sell me anything, so why would she giggle and say- nope, you-really- should do this and point me in the direction of tons of info? She's apparently been doing it for several years with enough sucess to turn it into a full time gig, and her blog doesn't look more or less sophisticated than most of what I see here on live journal.
That one will take me some time to explore the merits of- I'm going to have to get a new bank account and hook it up to paypal specifically to experiment with lulu and professional blogging. I'll update about it once I see weather it looks like more hassle for nothing, or a worthwhile thing to try.
If anyone catchesd this post and tries any of these things, please let me know how it works out. One of my friends and I are trying to compile some information on gigs and projects to see which are legit and not. These are a few I decided to try, I'd love feedback from anyone else who does.
And now I have some other things to attend to...
~nicolette