My experience as a freelance writer
In a university Creative Writing class, I once received a "C" on a writing assignment. The professor commented "Magazine style writing.". She clearly meant this as a criticism (the C grade being my first clue) but I actually took it as a compliment since my favourite form of literature, at the time, was that great American classic, "Sports Illustrated".
Thirty years later, I attempted to realize my professor's prophesy. Knowing a bit about technology and business, I thought I might try my hand at writing a technology article for business people. I picked Profit Magazine only because the November 2009 issue has been sitting on our reception coffee table since well, November. I must have walked by it 1000 times.
I sent one of my blog pieces to the general email address listed on their website. I was a bit surprised by the immediate response from Kim Shiffman, Senior Editor.
"This is an interesting story idea. Let me talk to the other editors of PROFIT to see if there is a place for it in the magazine."
Hey, this writing stuff is easy.
Turned out to be not so easy. I had to write something new since the piece I submitted had already been "published.".
I was able to bang out a first draft fairly quickly but the revisions and re-writes turned into a full-time job. The hardest part was getting the article down to 700 words. Hell, that's shorter than my average email. I have a tendency to be rather verbose.
A week later, I submitted a final draft that I was happy with, albeit 400 words too long. Kim was able to work her magic and shaved the article down to the required length without losing any content or altering the tone. She is very good at her job and a pleasure to work with.
In the end, the satisfaction of seeing my writing in an honest-to-goodness, actual business magazine was worth the effort. The fact that Profit actually paid me was a bonus. Based on the amount of work I put into it, I earned about $2.50 an hour. That's a 15 cent raise on my wage as a busboy and dishwasher in 1978.
The article, titled "Open source software: Not too good to be true" is in the May 2010 issue. On your newstands now. Or, if you're too cheap:
Contributions back to open source community
Great article, Henry. Educational and well-written. Did have one comment when you wrote " And, because it's open source, your company's own techies can modify it to suit your needs." - didn't you want to add that your techies could add features and propose their own contributions to the open source community? That is, give back and feed. Also, no reference to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php) when you cited Ubuntu?
-Benny
700 words
You are right on my technically-aware friend. But, in the interests of brevity, something had to be cut. I had a long blurb on how collaboration in the open source community works and the editor shortened it to what you read in the article.
As for LAMP, the audience is SMB and entrepreneurs. I focused on desktop apps only.
brevity is the soul of wit
Makes sense, Henry. And cool that you enjoyed a friendly "battle" with your editor. And keep on writing!
:)
Henry, I love your sense of humour. Thanks for a smile in a crap week. You rock.
You're welcome
Glad you enjoyed it. I forgot to enable a name field in my comments form. Now it's on so you don't have to remain anonymous.