Ghostwright

Book Review: Write for a Living in 7 Easy Steps

noreply@blogger.com (New England Bodegas) — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (New England Bodegas) — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:25:00 +0000

      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.

New Client? Make Sure They Know What They're Getting Into

noreply@blogger.com (New England Bodegas) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:08:00 +0000

A local businessperson contacted me recently. He'd heard about me from work I'd done on a local board of trade a few years before. He was asked to deliver a 20-minute speech by a trade organization he was a member of. They wanted him to provide his take on new developments in his industry.

He was clearly terrified. He'd never spoken before a large crowd before. And not only had he never written a speech before, he'd never even written the one-paragraph description of his company for his Web site. His secretary did that. Unfortunately, she was not a speech writer.

He called me into his office and for a short while, everything seemed to be going well. He had no problem with my fee; he even agreed to pay half of it up front. Then things started getting strange. He handed me a folder containing articles from trade magazines. He pointed out two or three of them "that had some meat in them." I started to ask him what points he wanted to address. He mentioned one or two innovations he thought were "cool" and said that the folder would explain them all. And then suddenly, seven minutes later, the meeting was over. He had to be somewhere. As he escorted me out the door, he added, almost as an afterthought, could I "stick a little humor" in the speech, preferably at the beginning?

That was it. I was to get back to him by Friday. Two days. I watched him rush out the door, telling his secretary he'd be back sometime after five.

I felt like a plumber who was shown the way to a leaky toilet and had the door shut behind him. I called him up the next morning and said that although I'd read the folder contents, I really needed to talk to him a little while longer. We needed to go over the points he wanted to emphasize. Maybe the slant I took wasn't quite right. Maybe it was completely out of the ballpark. I also needed to hear him talk, maybe even record him briefly, to get a sense of how he phrased things. This would help me make the speech seem natural. Most importantly, I needed to get a sense of his sense of humor. "Humor is subjective," I said. "What I might think is funny, you might not."

He sighed long and hard. "How long would this take?" "An hour at least," I said.

This time he groaned. "Not gonna happen," he said.

"Excuse me?" This wasn't sounding good.

"Can we do it now? I can give you five minutes."

As much as I would have liked this job, I politely turned it down, right then. I said that without his collaboration--that was the word I used, not what a plumber would say--we couldn't proceed. I would keep giving him unsatisfactory results because I'd just be guessing. We'd end up spending more time correcting my not-quite-right speech assumptions and my way-off sense of humor impressions.

I'm glad I did it. I wasted less than an hour of my time filtering out a job that would have taken far more time because it would have had to have been redone, possibly several times. Results would have been substandard. I would have ended up doing the client and myself a disservice. There's no excuse for that.

Photograph Publication Snafu

noreply@blogger.com (New England Bodegas) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Photographs and Ghostwriting: Good or Awful Mix?

Sometimes the writing of a piece for a client can involve a need for photography, particularly a portrait of the client. It gives the article a human face. If you are also a photographer, it's a good idea to arrange a shooting session. You needn't have a studio; in most cases, the client's office more than suffices. If you don't know how to take pictures, adult education classes are cheap, fast, and effective ways to learn. We can get into the details of photography techniques in a later posting, for it is a vast topic. This posting describes one approach I took when something went wrong. Horribly wrong.

My client works in the financial services field and wanted me to get an article published about the mutual fund scandal of 2003.

From Good to Awful

After signing a contract, we sat down and I interviewed him with my trusty data recorder. I also brought my equally trusty camera and flash (with a spare in the car in case of malfunction). I took the following shot:

Not too bad. These days I would have balanced the lighting better so that I wouldn't have had to Photoshop out the shadow. The client liked the picture, so we submitted it to the Milton Times. The next week, were we ever surprised to discover what the small-time newspaper had done to our photo:

Actually, it was more of a matter of my client finding out first. He called me the instant it came out and -- well, he was not happy. "One of my important clients called me," he said, barely containing his rage, "and asked me if I'd put on weight! What on earth did you do to this picture?"

I knew exactly what had happened. The photo editor of the Milton Times had decided the picture wasn't wide enough and had stretched it to fit into the requisite column width. It didn't even occur to him or her to proportionally widen the picture so that the bottom part increased as well. It was good enough for them. They needed to get a paper out. No time for Photoshop lessons. Or to call me and request a larger picture.

The Solution

After a long conversation with the client, I calmed him down-- somewhat. I told him that in a matter of days, the article, with its distorted unflattering picture, will be forgotten by the average reader. They may or may not absorb its content. What we needed to do was concentrate on what to do next. I needed to create a tearsheet from the Milton Times Web version of the article for my client. He would then print it out and distribute it to current and prospective clients. It would be no trouble on my part to insert a properly formatted version picture. This I did. The damage control apparently worked, for when I proposed a more ambitious undertaking to my client a month later, he took me up on it.

This time I spelled it out in the contract. "Unlike a brochure or pamphlet, your publication in a trade magazine may not have the layout or design you prefer. The magazine editor may even make mistakes with your piece. These and other similar situations are unfortunately out of our control."