Freelance tips
Here’s something. A journalist I ran into, an editor, in fact, told me about flying out of an airport in a developing country after a fact-finding trip he had been on.
Patricia Carswell started life as a barrister in a commercial practice in London.
After ten years, she flirted briefly with life-coaching and eventually fell into journalism.
Simon Tait is a freelance journalist, former arts correspondent of The Times and co-editor of Arts Industry magazine. You can contact him at www.staitarts.com
A new national magazine covering Cruising is set to launch next month with national distribution.
Many journalists look down on women's weeklies and their real-life stories. Most don't aspire to being the writer behind gems such as 'My husband was a boob slasher".
Assumptions: Never assume. Always help out other journalists as they may help you out later (Duncan Campbell).
Freelance journalists have been warned they are breaking the law and could be fined thousands of pounds unless they register with the Information Commissioner's Office as a 'data controller".
Freelance education journalist Janet Murray plans to take the summer off this year. Trouble is, she's worried about how much work this will lose her.
Sandra Geere says freelances across the country are being exploited by wealthy organisations which are routinely selling on their work and pocketing the profit.
So, you've filed your copy and sent off your invoice. Now you're just waiting for the fee to hit your bank account. Except you've already been waiting two months and it still hasn't materialised.
When identical triplets were born in January this year, the odds were quoted as 160,000 to one. Just three months later, the chances of having three identical babies had reportedly risen to 200 million to one.
There's nothing like a light bulb moment, followed by a lucrative commission, to make you remember why you went freelance. This business is based upon bright ideas and the ability to sell them to the highest bidder.
At some point in their careers, most journalists have to cover violent or psychologically distressing events. For years, we presumed this left no scars.
For a perfect pitch, you need a perfect target.
Rejection. It's a key part of any writer's job, we all know that. Nevertheless, dealing with the reality can be a difficult lesson to master.
It only takes stepping into your spare bedroom-turned-office on your first day as a freelance to realise that there's more to it than working in your pyjamas.
Fancy trying your hand at a spot of non-fiction book writing? You have a corker of a subject in mind and can bash out a knock 'em dead synopsis. So what's stopping you?
