reynoldswriting.com Blog

Happy Halloween, fellow freelance copywriters! If you’ve been pursuing this line of work for any length of time, you may have noticed its “Trick or Treat” aspects. Most of the time you can fill your bag with candy, but once in a while, like Charlie Brown, you get a rock. Here are a few of the ghouls and goblins that might cross your path as you go from door to door….

The Sample Eater. This fearsome beast has an insatiable hunger for writing content. It lurks in the dark corners of the Internet, looking for half-starved writers who are willing to do anything for work. It promises an avalanche of article-writing and other opportunities: “Just fill out our application and submit an original writing sample on one of the following topics.” You can see where this is headed. Every writer who applies gets a “Thanks but no thanks” letter — and the Sample Eater gets an unlimited supply of free writing to pass off as its own. And guess what happens if the rejected writer decides to sell his work to another publisher? It gets stopped by the plagiarism checker, because there’s already a VERY similar article posted on the Web…. Of course, some requests for sample articles are perfectly legitimate. Just proceed with caution.

The Hurry Up and Wait Monster. This guy is almost a variation of the Sample Eater, except he consumes entire projects. His secret weapon is a magical ability to alter the flow of time. He may throw you onto a job with an urgent yet apparently arbitrary deadline. If you demand a payment before starting work, however, the fourth dimension suddenly begins to warp and flex. He’ll get the money to you soon. Oh wait, he’s having trouble with the electronic payment, so he’ll write a check instead. “What, you never got the check? how about we meet somewhere and I’ll hand you cash? By the way, we really need to get moving to make our project deadline….” The Hurry Up and Wait Monster is trying to pressure you into writing at least some of the job before you’ve received any money. If you resist, the “urgent” deadline may miraculously change. Or perhaps another writer is innocently writing the second chunk of the job, wondering where his check is….

The Ghost of Projects Yet to Come. This spectre haunts writers who are willing to accept inadequate payments (including the dreaded “writing on spec”), endless rewrites, redundant meetings and other abuse in exchange for the promise of a brighter future scenario. You may recognize this creature by its distinctive howl, which tends to include phrases such as “building a team,” “long-term relationship” and “future projects,” liberally seasoned with a dash of “eventually.” This association will do great things for your career — someday. But once you’ve gotten that distasteful “trial run” out of the way, don’t be surprised to see the ghost flicker and fade into thin air, as spirits are wont to do.

Keep your flashlight charged and your eyes open, and you’ll be able to sidestep these and other clients that go bump in the night, leaving you free to enjoy your work with the other 99 percent. Go for the treats, not the tricks!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Sometimes prospective clients will ask me if I specialize in their particular industry: “Do you have experience writing for the automated-widget business?” Many times I can truthfully answer, “Yes.” Other times I can just as truthfully say, “No, and here’s why it doesn’t matter.”

So here’s why it doesn’t matter.

Most of us copywriters consider ourselves generalists — professionals adept at absorbing whatever information we need to write on the widest possible range of subject matter. Specializing in a particular industry or subject has its points, of course, both for clients and for writers. Specialists usually require less intake on the subject from the client, eliminating much of the learning curve on the front end of the project. From the writer’s perspective, a more specialized niche is easier to market to because that target market makes up a more cohesive group — people who tend to belong to the same organizations and speak the same lingo.

But as a generalist myself, I think general-subject writers have the edge in some notable ways. For one thing, the sheer cross-pollination of concepts, information and resources that we sift through on a daily basis, year after year, enables us to see the broad view of how your particular industry relates to others. If you work in the “green” industry, for instance, your product or service may impact the manufacturing, real estate, health and wellness, energy, electronics and other industries. Well, guess what? I’ve written for all of those industries and many others, so I can see the connections between them all — which means that I can help your audience see them as well.

At the same time, the outsider’s perspective counts for much. People who live and think in one field 24/7 start to assume that the rest of us know as much about it as they do, so they start speaking in buzzwords and technobabble without even realizing that we’re staring at them with a blank expression. A writer who can step in as Joe Q. Public and say, “What’s the bottom line on this stuff?” can see your products or services from a mainstream audience’s point of view.

Of course, everyone specializes in some way or other. For instance, even though I write on every topic under the sun, I focus on marketing pieces, or as I like to call it, “writing for short attention spans.” The work I do has a specific mission: to grab a reader’s interest and then nail a point home quickly and engagingly enough to inspire a purchase or a phone call. But as a general-subject writer, I can do that for any industry, product or service. So befriend a generalist today — and start getting your point across to the rest of us.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Copywriting mastermind Robert Bly recently discussed an extraordinary new technological advance — writer-less writing. This program, the product of a company called Narrative Science, apparently synthesizes facts and figures to generate news stories and other articles. I was intrigued by this idea and stumbled on a New York Times piece that explores the technology and its applications in more detail.

The software does more than simply throw sports scores or stock prices into a blender and hit the mix button. It can accept and work with colloquial expressions and even choose a specific story angle, such as a come-from-behind win by a sports team. The resulting work is coherent, well organized and professionally presented. The folks at Narrative Science see an increasing role for this kind of computer-generated writing in journalism as the technology continues to advance.

So is it time for us writers to put away our laptops, pens and caffeine habits for good? I don’t believe so.

Take a look at the sample news brief referenced in the Times article. Underneath the smooth grammar and coolly professional tone, you basically get a sequence of events and statistics. Yes, the program communicates the significance of this data, but it can’t speculate on what might happen next or evoke the participants’ feelings on the matter. And it can’t imbue its work with its own feelings either, because it doesn’t have any. That’s okay for an objective report, but what about persuasive writing?

Real writers do much more than just write. When you hire a skilled, experienced freelance copywriter, you gain a creative partner as well as a scribe. I’m constantly asked for editorial guidance, creative brainstorming sessions, and opinions on what that next round of blog posts should explore or what tone a sales letter should employ. And yes, I rely on previous experience, collected facts and basic logic in my work — but I’m not stuck with those options. I can also leap beyond logic by drawing on such uniquely organic resources as intuition, humor, opinion and emotion. I can do more than just extrapolate story points from facts and figures. I can use those facts and figures as a launchpad for sailing into uncharted “What If” territory. Irrationality has its downside, but it also allows us to create, imagine, wonder and dream. That’s the extra edge a flesh-and-blood writer brings to the table.

Now if they ever start making computers as nutsy as humans, then we’re ALL in trouble.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.