Book Review: Write for a Living in 7 Easy Steps

Write for a Living in 7 Easy Steps by Grant McDuling. Amazon Kindle book. $4. 99.

Even the most seasoned writer needs a kick in the pants once in a while. And Grant McDuling provides it in his new e-book, Write for a Living in 7 Easy Steps. Ostensibly, this book is designed to help the person deciding to become a freelance writer or, as McDuling prefers to call it, a “practicing writer.” Yet this hundred page inspirational volume also helps people who have been in the field a long time. It is also full of useful information. In between lines of exhortation, such as Descartes’ famous quote “I think therefore I am,” McDuling own “it’s a question of attitude” and “take control of your life,” the author truly does provide us with seven helpful steps to get a writing career started. He's talking primarily about career in freelance journalism, but he doesn't rule out ghostwriting books and writing promotional copy for PR agencies.

Here are a number of tips that I found particularly useful:

• Put testimonials on all types of self-promotional material like business cards and stationery.
• Testimonials can come from colleagues as well as past clients.
• Put all your receipts in an envelope, one envelope per month. Don't wait till the end of the year to start sorting them.
• Think of yourself more as a profit generator than a word generator. This will get you in the mindset that you are in business to make a living, not to express yourself artistically or to nourish an expensive hobby.
• Marketing consists of “The Five P’s. They are as follows: Product, Position, Place, Promotion, and Price.” (He describes all of these in detail in the book.)

McDuling spends the first chapter describing how he came into the business. While I may have trimmed this section a bit, it is certainly good information for a beginning writer who wants to learn from the journey of an exemplary writer, and find out how he came to do what he does. He also talks about some of the hurdles he faced along the way, such as when he tried to become a writer for the Irish Times and found out that their union was so full he couldn't become a member.

He also speaks of the importance of setting goals, such as short-term, medium-term, and long-term ones. And of course, he believes in establishing a business plan. He mentions writing a media release to sell yourself to an editor (but doesn't provide a sample). He also gives examples of the types of advertising tools that you could use to promote yourself, such as direct marketing, postcards, editorials, and display ads in trade magazines. But again, it would've been nice for him to have reproduced one that he did that was particularly successful.

We could all learn from McDuling's ambitious approaches to his craft and his tireless tips about self marketing, which include public speaking, association memberships, radio spots, and above all, an overweening and infectious confidence in one’s ability to get the job done. This last one is perhaps the most important in producing success.

Review of PhotoZoom Pro 4: Enhance the Photographs They Give You

      Quite often these days, clients will ask a ghostwriter to include photographs or drawings to accompany the text being written. More likely than not, these graphics are supplied by the client. Can you guess what shape they will be in? In a recent job my client handed me some JPEG graphics that he wanted in the book that we were writing. Alas, they were of very low resolution – 72 dpi (dots per inch), which is standard for screen displays. This means that he probably got them off the Internet and thought they look fine on his screen. And of course they did. But they would look wretched in print, cluttered with and bordered by rough edges commonly referred to as “the jaggies.” For print reproduction, it's common knowledge that everyone needs a minimum of 300 dpi. It then became my task to enhance these photographs for which no high resolution copy exists. How was I to do that?

      It's situations like that in which PhotoZoom Pro 4 shines. When you load a picture into the program, the picture’s current size and dpi are displayed. You can then change both if you like. For example, if your picture is 4 x 2”, you can change it to 8 x 4”. (The program preserves the aspect proportion.) You can also change the dpi from 72 to 300. As this happens, an animated sequence moves a line down the picture showing the removal of the offending jaggies and the general smoothing out of the image. (It's actually fun to watch.) But it's not over then. You can fine tune it. For example, you can select one of four JPEG jaggies-removal presets. “Light” provides a modest removal and “Extreme” provides, well, an extreme removal. Of course, there is a trade-off: the more extreme the removal the blurrier the picture becomes. If you really want to get into the process deeply, you can specify certain levels of sharpness; however, this is getting more into the realm of photo retouching than the casual user requires. Usually the program’s default preset (called “S-Spline Max”) is adequate.

      Of course, no program can work miracles. If somebody gives you a tiny thumbnail photograph with 72 dpi and expects you to turn it into a wall poster, there's only so much you can do. It may come out looking blurry or missing important detail. Trust me, it will never look like the original picture. It is then that you sit the client down and tell them the grim facts of the situation and what expectations she can have. But if you want to solve most of your picture resolution problems, you can't do much better than PhotoZoom Pro 4.
      For more information, go here: http://www.benvista.com/products.