Freelance vs. Corporate Employment for Writers

Which way should you go as a writer? Should you try to swing it out on your own or become an employee for a company?

Here are the pros and cons for each option:

Freelancing

PROS:

Freedom. You are your own person. You don’t need to listen to any boss figure. You “eat what you kill” and some people just love that kind of life.

Variety. Freelancers work on a variety of assignments, depending on client needs. Less chance for boredom.

Money. Successful freelancers earn more than their employee counterparts.

CONS:

Need to sell yourself. You need great social skills. You have to be an outgoing warm personality to win hearts and contracts.

Need to network constantly. You need to have a deep rolodex to keep in touch with decision makers and also with your colleagues for valuable references.

No benefits. You pay everything yourself and usually at a higher rate. Freelancers, for example, pay a lot more for medical benefits since they do cannot get group rates.

Corporate Employment

PROS:

High job security. If you do your job well, you don’t need to worry where your next paycheck is coming from.

Good benefits. Corporations lavish a number of benefits on their employees including medical coverage, paid holidays, and paid training opportunities.

No marketing. Once you find a full-time job, you do not need to market yourself day and night. Your job is there waiting for you every morning.

CONS:

Lower Income. Corporate writers, even if they are at a senior level, make less than experienced freelancers.

Lack of Variety. Some writing positions can become boring in the long run. Try writing assembly instructions for wooden garden furniture day in day out for 5 years.

Lack of independence. Your fate is tied to that of your company. When the company ship goes down, you’re out there without a job.

Google Announces KNOL

There is something new from the ever-inventive Google Team: a KNOL!

Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you.

Except for the different format, you'll get all the things you've come to expect from Blogger in Knol. Like Blogger, Knol has simple web authoring tools that make it easy to collaborate, co-author, and publish.

It has community features as well: Your readers will be able to add comments and rate your article, and, if you want, they'll be able to suggest edits that you can then either accept or reject. And, just like in Blogger, you can also choose to include ads from AdSense in your knols to perhaps make a little money.

One other important difference between Knol and Blogger is that Knol encourages you to reveal your true identity. Knols are meant to be authoritative articles, and, therefore, they have a strong focus on authors and their credentials. We feel that this focus will help ensure that authors get credit for their work, make the content more credible.

All in all, I agree with Google that Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.

You might consider it both as a stand-alone platform and as a supplement to your existing blog or web site. So many options, so little time :-))

P.S. BLOGGERS BEWARE -- A Knol is not a shallow marketing tool since the depth and quality of the AUTHORITATIVE articles published as a Knol is truly amazing. I posted up an experiemental knol myself but frankly did not like the quality since it was my very first "knol."

It'd be interesting to see how this new Google "article platform" will fare against such established article depositories as Ezine Articles of Chris Knight.

Writer, 98, Writes His First Novel

This is the sort of inspirational story that I love...

Writer at 98 writes his first novel and starts a memoir: "My First One Hundred years". You gotta love a guy with a sense of humor like that!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/28/DD2T10SJEI.DTL

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Osmond Molarsky has been writing all his life. He's written ad copy, radio documentaries, U.S. Navy training films and a series of children's books. But it wasn't until last year that the 98-year-old Mill Valley resident wrote his first novel, a contemporary political satire called "The Noah Hour."

So far, though, no takers. "I've sent query letters to publishers," Molarsky says. "I've tried agents, and they're all looking for 'chick lit.' A lot of them say that right on their resume."

Hollywood Writers Up in Arms Over "Residuals"

In this day and age of free YouTube downloads, webisodes, and mobisodes, "creatives" of Hollywood think they are shortchanged. They want a piece of the "backend." They want "residuals." That is, they want to get paid everytime, for example, you log on to ABC's web site and watch any episode of any show.

Or else? WGA, The all-powerful Writers Guild of America, will go on strike on October 31. So the studios are busy like crazy stocking up on extra scripts and shooting all those back-logged episodes so they'll be ready if and when the writer's strike hits Hollywood like a tsunami.

"Tsunami"? Well, perhaps I went overboard with that description because the last time WGA went on strike in the 1980s over the home video rights, 9,000 WGA members walked out. But then they came back for only 0.3 cents on the dollar! It turned out the writers' pocketbooks bled a lot faster that the "suits" in corporate offices. It's an embarrassing episode that most WGA members would rather forget.

One alternative is for the suits and the creatives share the ad revenues on these sites. But probably that's not going to happen anytime soon since the suits accuse the writers with splitting the profits but not the risks as, for example, when a show that has cost tens of millions of dollars bombs completely.

Importance of Keeping Your Work Close to Your Vest

It happens all the time...

A writer working on his or her first script, first novel, thinks it would a "great" idea to "share" it with a spouse, lover, child, friend, parent, co-worker or neighbor...

And the result is an unintended punch to the gut. The work stops right there. Enthusiasm and joy is replaced by doubts, second thoughts and eventually depression.

Why? Do our loved ones mean to harm us? Of course not.

Do they have an "ulterior motive" or a "sinister agenda"? Absolutely not.

But this is their problem -- they are NOT writers.

So they have no idea about the sensitive "mental and spiritual soup" in which our ideas and most precious creations ferment, multiply, and take shape as stories, scripts, articles and novels. It is a mysterious process, part "science" but mostly magic. That soup can be soured very easily by criticism while we are still adding crucial ingredients to it.

A lot of people think to give a "feedback" is to point out to the things that are missing. We all have that impulse to come across as "thoughtful" and usually the way we try to come across as thoughtful is to point out at what's "missing" or "wrong" with a project.

Even a casual and well-meaning comment like "I think that's been done before" is usually enough to dampen the spirits of a writer and mortgage her determination to press onward.

That's why I strongly recommend all my writer brothers and sisters not to show their hands too early, and not to ask their loved ones to read their stuff until it is 100% DONE. Only then they can read it if they please and enrich our work with their thoughful insights and learned suggestions.

But until then you have to protect your work just like a mother hen protects her chickens or a banker protects his vault.