It might seem like a tired old bit of advice, particularly in this age of computers with spell checkers built into everything including the Internet browser programs, but nothing beats good old fashioned spell checking by hand to make sure that you have everything looking right. And, if you are not a [...]]]> Proofread, proofread, proofread.

It might seem like a tired old bit of advice, particularly in this age of computers with spell checkers built into everything including the Internet browser programs, but nothing beats good old fashioned spell checking by hand to make sure that you have everything looking right. And, if you are not a native speaker and reader of the language that you are printing something in, get a native to triple check everything for you.

Why, you might ask, do I suggest this? Because poor spelling cost a company a sale last night. I was in the store and I needed to pick up some cat litter. As usual, I scoped out the other brands to see if anything might be on sale and less expensive than my regular brand (hey, it’s dirt for cats to do their business in, I don’t see any reason to pay more than I have to for it).

Anyway, as I scan the shelves a purple bag catches my eye. Amazing Cat Litter. Hmm… a bit more expensive, but I’ll bite. What’s amazing about it?

I get the bag down and sit it in my cart. A cat litter that can last for up to eighty days, with multiple cats?  Now, as a cat owner / border, I can tell you that is amazing. I do good to make it a week with a container of litter for the four cats I harbor at my place. I want to know more about this silica crystal based cat litter (particularly since I had thought a few months ago as I cleaned the cat box that silica would be a great way to absorb the urine.

I flipped the bag around to see the back and find out more.

Okay, so the bar graph is an eye catcher, and it caught my eye. 80 days is for one cat, three and you can make it for 30 days – which still beats normal litter in my experience. I look for more information about it and the next thing I see is the top right where a couple of small stopwatch images highlight some key points about the litter…. and I find a typo.

It will leab my cat tray odor-free in 30 seconds? Is “leab” the new science in Amazing Cat Litter? I am fairly positive they meant that it would be “leaving odor-free cat try” not “leabing odor-free cat tray”. Interesting to find a typo like that on packaging, but, hey, it’s just cat litter. A typo can be overlooked, right?  I smile at the typo and read on…

The benefits list is a reasonably long list.Third one down, their single bag will replace the same amount of 5 bags of clay or chumping litter… wait… chumping? My regular cat litter “chumps”? I think they mean “clumping”.  Skip that typo and continue on, a few more lines down and we have “no more urine-soaked chay”. So with my normal brand of cat litter my chay is getting urine soaked and chumping?

Still undeterred I move on to the instructions -

First line…. “adry” – I think they meant “a dry”. Step 4, I’m not sure how you remobe something, but it sounds a little painful. I think they want you to “remove” the solid waste, and that would be for “best results”, not “best rosults”.

This was just far too many typos on such a small bag of cat litter, I snapped the above pictures and put it back onto the self. I’m sure that silica absorbs cat urine quite well, but I was turned off on trying it by how many typos there were on the packaging. I saved a little money by sticking with my regular brand.

And, I think it is an important lesson for anyone that is relying on writing to sway someone. You really need to make sure that you have caught every typo and corrected them before you send something out – in particular before you print a package or booklet for a product that is intended for mass distribution. People will overlook a few typos, and some people might overlook a lot of typos, but you can also loose potential customers if they are turned off by poor writing. It makes them wonder how much they can actually trust the product if the packaging has repeated and blatant typos – which was what happened to me with the cat litter.

Sure, it’s just something for my cats to defecate in, but after a certain number of typos on the package, I decided to stick with my regular brand that I know gets the task done, rather than risk buying the more expensive (twice as expensive) brand that was poorly packaged in a package littered with typos.

Read your work, then read it without relying on your spell checker. Then have someone else read it. Writing is very powerful and can sway people’s decisions. And when it is a brand you are trying to sell, you want them to be swayed in your favor, not away from the product.

I can see the perspective of the questioner, identified as “Freelance Friend Finder”, in their ability to locate work being somewhat limited. There is [...]]]> I was reviewing article titles on my Google Reader a few minutes ago when my attention was caught by a Forbes post from Susannah Breslin: Dear Pink Slipped: Can Freelancers Be Friends?

I can see the perspective of the questioner, identified as “Freelance Friend Finder”, in their ability to locate work being somewhat limited. There is no question for me that there is a drastic difference in how many freelance writers are in the marketplace, to how many jobs that marketplace has for them to compete for. And this was an observation by a freelancer out of New York city. I would have thought New York would have enough work to go around and then some, but apparently even the city that never sleeps has its problems with the economy.

Anyway, in her article, I had been prepared for Breslin to be starting out on a humorous note when she immediately said no, freelancers can not be friends. I expected that to be followed by a bit of fluffy fun before she turned serious and answered the question. The trouble is, she was serious, from the first unequivocal “No”.

I must admit that I felt a little ‘ow!’ at her comment about twenty-something writer’s having nowhere to go but their parent’s basement. I was once a twenty-something writer… and I have lived (or rather had my bedroom and office) in my parent’s basement. Was that because I could not make it as a freelance writer? No, I was actually starting to find my footing and by the time I was living in my parent’s basement I was making a full-time income off of my writing. I lived with my parents because I was their caregiver. That is all beside the point, though, the point is – can freelancers be friends?

Yes. I have friends that are freelancers. My best friends are other writers. We’re all women, and we all share mostly the same interests. Granted, my best friends all live over a thousand miles away, but that is because I am a hermit that lives in Alaska and they all live in the lower 48.

I think the evidence that freelancers can be friends lies in the popularity of things such as Writer’s Market and the many websites that offer information for how to find writing markets and resources.

Perhaps the perspective that freelancers can not be friends stems from a competitive market, but friends can compete. I would be delighted if my friend was able to make some money to pay her bills, even if it meant I had lost out on a job. At least I would know the person who had got the work and that they needed it as much as I did.

I freely share information, including how I come up with ideas, but I probably would not tell anyone but my best friends the exact particulars of “I found a great source of information on this topic here, so I am going to write an article about it focusing on this aspect of it, and hitting these target talking points, because that magazine is prime for such pieces, so I should have a really good chance to be published when I submit it.”

In short, I might tell everyone “That magazine publishes things on these subjects”, but I would think twice before I told everyone my full outline for how and where I will do research for a article covering a specific focus. And what magazine I think is primed for accepting such things. My friends I would talk to about it, mostly because they are my best source for brainstorming on what angles I am missing and how I could better narrow the focus of my proposed idea to best fit the magazine and what they look for.

And if one of my friends decides they want to submit a story as well, that is great. I know they would do their own legwork and we would most likely share everything we collected on the subject. Then we would likely read one another’s work to see how it could be improved and make critique suggestions.  And when the articles are shipped off, it would be no more of a competition than with anyone else that would have sent a competing article in. The only difference is, my friend and I collaborated our skills on making our articles a bit more polished and maybe, just maybe, one of them will stand out above the rest as being what the editor is looking for.

Who will get published? I don’t know, but I’d like to think it would be worthy of a free cup of coffee or tea being bought for the person who lost out while we got together to scheme on our next article attack.  We just need to make sure that we keep improving on our skills, and write to the best of our own individual capabilities, so that we stand out above everyone else when we submit.

I’m taking the recommended NSAID ibuprofen pain relievers for reducing any swelling and easing off the pain, now if I [...]]]> The pinched nerve in my shoulder is slowly but surely getting better, mostly if I stay off of the computer and don’t type anything. Hard to do when one makes ends meet via their writing.

I’m taking the recommended NSAID ibuprofen pain relievers for reducing any swelling and easing off the pain, now if I could just afford to spend the next few weeks not working I might actually heal up okay, but that is not about to happen. Someday I want to get far enough ahead in life that I can go sit at the local club for a few hours and not worry about having to keep up with my work load. For now, however, I have taken a ibuprofen and have my V-Fusion drink and I am getting back to work after a couple days of taking it easy and staying off the computer to catch up on some work around the house and play a bit of Sims – which is good vegging out, since for me, Sims means creating a Sim that should act a certain way (which I already had several of them made up) and then letting them loose in their house to watch what they do. It is a far better predictor of if they are going to act how they are meant to if they are not told what to do, and it makes it kind of like kicking back watching soap operas all day while I watch them wander about to see if they are reacting how they should or not.

I can’t say my shoulder is at 100%… not even sure it is at 50%, but my work needs to get caught up before I am buried under it, so tonight I catch up on work I should have got done over the past week.

I am at least grateful the phone loads the sites, even if it is slower typing on the phone.

I [...]]]> Here it is on day two of having to update my websites using my cell phone and I am wondering if they sell keyboards for Motorola Milestones. These things need bigger keys on the keyboards.

I am at least grateful the phone loads the sites, even if it is slower typing on the phone.

I really need to figure out issue with desktops and loading my sites though. This is frustrating. I can not update sites on the cell phone.

Or as anything relating to writing and online researching. I was looking at a request [...]]]> I was looking for more work online and realized that Alaska’s $7.75 per hour minimum wage is by no means a low hourly wage. Anyone that thinks it is, just needs to try to earn some money as a writer.

Or as anything relating to writing and online researching. I was looking at a request for a virtual assistant, and in one of the ads I found the person wants to pay $30 for 25 hours of work. That means they want someone that will do all kinds of tasks for them such as writing and research and a variety of other listed daily activities, for at least 5 hours per day, and they want to pay them $1.20 an hour. That’s $6 for a full day’s worth of work. That might seem like a lot in some countries, but for me it does not even pay one month’s fees on my websites. I think my mom made more than that in the 1960′s working as a waitress in diners.

The online world, in particular the world wide aspect of the online world, has completely devalued the skills of anyone working online for a living. Average pay per word seems to have dropped down to $0.002 per word for writing. That means that to earn $1 online a writer needs to write 500 words. Average typing speed is, I think, around 62 wpm… going by that, if all they do is write, no research no pauses, solid typing at the computer, a writer can kick out around 3,720 words in an hour. And that does not account for any research or proofreading after the piece has been written. So, let’s be very crack-the-whip toward the writers and say that they can write 2,000 words in an hour, which includes a little research about what they are supposed to be writing and writing it, and proofreading, and since they are writing it for someone else that also needs to include the time it takes for them to send the writing back to the person who now owns it.

Yes, owns it. For that $0.002 per word the writer is giving away all rights to the piece and the person purchasing it owns all rights to it forever.

So, 2,000 words plus research plus sending them off to the person who bought them means the writer is working very hard to earn $4 an hour. An average of about half minimum wage in Alaska. Earning roughly $20 per day, five days a week makes it $100. So, writing their fingers off five days a week a writer can earn around $400 in a month, bringing the income for online writing up to somewhere between $500 and $1,000 if they work really really hard and can get enough work that they are not taking breaks or weekends off.

There is no room for the writer to take on a second job, because all of their time is spent writing to manage to earn what is basically rent for their home for the month. There is little if any time left for them to relax and enjoy time with friends and family, not if they want to hit the mark of possibly earning enough to pay the mortgage.

I’m not sure what a writer is to do when a world-wide market for skills means that even the best writers are competing for work that can be done by someone willing for work for $1 a month. And it is really bad that even $5 a week of guaranteed income is looking really good to me, no matter how hard I have to work for it.

So, what is the least you would take per word writing online? Has the online market caused a major undervaluation of a writer’s time?