Prompt 11: What can you learn from my experience?

This is our last true reflection week. After this we will focus on your projects and helping you polish your reports. So this week’s reflection activities are going to take more of a Q-and-A type approach. I’m going to tell you about my career as a professional writer and then encourage you to ask questions about the areas that interest you the most. I hope this will help you think about the variety of options available to you in terms of professional writing.

I graduated from SUNY College at Plattsburgh with a BA in English with a concentration in journalism. While still in college I worked for the campus newspaper as a reporter, layout editor, and editor-in-chief. In addition, I interned in the college public relations office and published my first magazine article in a regional publication.

My first job was with Wolfe Publications – a community newspaper chain in the Greater Rochester (NY) area. I was editor of The Webster Post and a staff writer for the chain. I had a small staff (a couple ladies who ran the Webster office and handled society items) and had access to the photographers and production staff of the main office. I was given great freedom as I worked in a satellite office far away from the powers-that-be. I worked for Wolfe for six years – right up until my husband and I moved to Kentucky.

While I was working for Wolfe I decided to pursue a dream of mine – writing a novel. I wrote a historical romance set in the 1600s in Holland and America. Then I found that was the easy part – trying to sell my novel would be much more difficult. In the end, I did publish it with a small publisher who also contracted to publish the sequel and then went belly-up after paying only one royalty check on the first book and before the second went to press. My search for a publisher did lead me to the Romance Writers of America and I attended a conference in Buffalo, NY, before moving to Kentucky and then in Kentucky I became very involved in the organization – eventually taking on a leadership role in the Kentucky chapter. This gave me contacts and mentors which eventually led to another two-book contract but this time with a major mass market publisher. Those books did get published (both set in Revolutionary War Kentucky territory).

My husband had a job when we moved to Kentucky but I did not and my first two years were marked by a slew of jobs. My first job was serving as editor for a start-up magazine called Lexington This Month which managed to put out three issues before closing up. However, that experience brought me contacts which led to additional freelance gigs including ACE Weekly, The Lane Report (I was on staff there for several years), Kentucky Living, and Kentucky Monthly as well as a short-term full-time contract at Lexington Philharmonic. In addition, I did some writing for a vocational publication. I think that covers most of my jobs.

However, working piece-meal like this is not a good way to get ahead so when the opportunity came to join the staff of the Jessamine Journal doing much the same work I had for The Webster Post I took the job. I worked there for less than a year (I didn’t really like the working situation there) before moving to the Mt. Sterling Advocate as a reporter. After a few years I was promoted to managing editor (which meant I was in charge of the newsroom staff and assigning stories as well as designing each issue).

After a few years of that I realized that there was no real career advancement left for me in newspapers and I was ready for a change.  I decided to go back to school and get a Master’s in English so I could teach at the college level. However, going to school full-time (even with a graduate assistantship) would be a challenge for us financially as it would mean giving up my income. I also suspected that I would miss writing, even though I still had some freelance gigs (The Lane Report plus occasional articles for Kentucky Living and Kentucky Monthly), so I decided to go into web publishing.

I started out publishing two weekly ezines (electronic magazines) – The QuizQueen (themed trivia quizzes) and JustFolks (featuring profiles of inspiring people) and eventually ended up with four weekly ezines and two daily ezines plus a monthly trivia contest. These were actually fairly profitable if time-consuming. Mainly I made money by selling advertising slots (I had a subscriber base in the thousands). I published my ezines right up to the point where I entered my Ph.D. program because they were a nice additional income even after I was teaching full-time. However, I knew the addition of graduate classes to my already full schedule (as a full-time MSU instructor and a mom) would make it impossible to keep up my ezine publishing schedule. However, I had a lot of trivia quizzes and articles written so I decided to switch up my web publishing business to a more flexible model that I could attend to when I had time and let earn passive income when I did not. This meant for a while I had more than 100 web sites with blogs and/or articles posted on theme in various themes – usually with affiliate programs posted on them but even that is time consuming as you need to work to drive traffic and keep up-to-date with affiliate programs so I have let those web sites go and now the only online income I have is through Squidoo because that is totally passive. However, I am still earning a couple of hundred bucks a month and sometimes more which is fine by me. I’m sure I could earn more (I know Squidoo folks earning more than a $1,000 a month) if I put the time into it but I just can’t. However, just to give you an example this lens: Inspirational Messages About Life has earned me $1100 in lifetime royalties ($30 to $50 a month).

So journal about what you would love to see happen in your own future career (write for a living, publish a novel, work for a nonprofit), ask questions in the discussion board about my experiences, and Tweet something key.