Ghostwriter For Hire

I've been a big fan of Squidoo for some time, and have three lenses there, including on on site promotion. So it's no surprise when I find quality content that is just waiting to be discovered.

Today's discovery is a lens on ghostwriting. How To Hire A Ghostwriter is aimed at those who are intending to hire ghostwriters and answers some common questions in a clear and simple way. If you're starting out as a ghostwriter, it's a good way to find out what clients might be looking for and what you can charge, though there are other resources that do that too.

I've written a bit on ghostwriting myself, but I found this a really useful lens. Way to go, stevemcc.

My Laptop Disaster Recovery Plan

As a working writer you should always have a plan B for when technology lets you down. It’s my own fault. I should have known better. In fact, I usually do. When I first owned a computer in the early 1990s, I fell prey to a Word macro virus. I got my act together, installed an antivirus program and have not had a single one since.

I've been equally ferocious about backing up. First I used floppies, then CDs, then DVDs. If nothing was handy I used a virtual backup drive by emailing my work from one email address to another. I never lost anything. That was the old days. If you read my previous post you'll know that my laptop died and I lost a couple days' work. So how could this happen to someone who's usually so well organised?

Well, there are a couple of reasons. I'm much less well organised since I had a child. Simply put, there's much less leftover brain power to apply to keeping my life ticking over. I wouldn't have it any other way, but this wouldn't have happened to the old paranoid me three years ago. I'm stretched thin and suddenly very busy. The result of that is that when I managed to do 25 tips for LifeTips (I finished them on Wednesday when my daughter was napping), I forgot to back them up. Most of the time you can let things slip for a little while, and there's no danger. Not this time - and there was no warning. At 5.15 my laptop was working. At 6.15 it was dead.

What this has taught me is that it's important to have a plan B when you make your living with a computer. Until recently my plan B was my husband's computer, but he's on the road more, so I can't relay on having access to it. The library doesn't open at hours that suit the rest of my life. I quite often work late at night after my daughter’s gone to bed and my local library closes at 5.

While I was facing the loss of two days' work and the prospect of 10 days without a computer (and I admit, shedding a few tears of annoyance), I thought of a plan. My hubby had a tablet pc he had never used so maybe I could use that as a backup. We bought a USB keyboard and then tried to get it connected to our wireless network. Nothing. I fiddled around with settings, still nothing. Eventually I discovered that Microsoft’s tablet software does not support WSP-PSK or whatever it is, so it's not going to happen. So I dug out an Ethernet cable and finally got online.

All of my work at the moment has to be researched on line so doing without a net connection is not an option if I'm to meet my deadlines. Now I've got to figure out how to prop the tablet up so I can type and see the screen at the same time.

Meanwhile I am missing my favourite programs:
- Firefox - I will install this soon
- Thunderbird
- Performancing - my blog editor of choice (by the way, that’s why there are no links or fancy formatting in this post. I’ll go back and fix it once I’ve got my laptop back).

I have lost
- 21 lifetips
- a new poem
- my WritingUp backup
- my invoice template
- this week's writing jobs - most of which I had submitted

The lesson I'm getting to is that you need to have a plan B. So, I've now got a few.

First, I'm moving everything that I can online. I already use blinklist and Google calendar. Now I'll use my gmail account for backing up my work in progress. That way I can access it wherever I am.

Second, as soon as I can afford it, I'll get a cheap desktop pc as a backup.

Third, I'll replace my 80GB external hard drive with something that I can keep permanently attached to my laptop, so I can backup as I go.

Fourth, I’ll put a reminder in my diary so that I always do it.

Fifth, my new laptop will come with an international next day onsite warranty.

Apart from the social deprivation of being without a reliable internet connection (regular writnguppers will know what I'm talking about), this incident has very real consequences for my writing. I'm going to have to make up a couple of days' work over what is already a busy week. I won’t get caught this way again.

How have you done with disaster preparedness? Do you have a plan B?

PS. If I'm a bit slower than usual responding to comments you'll know the reason why. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Writing Lab News - Three Month Review

I started a newsletter in April. Why? Because I thought I ought to. All the site building, traffic building material says you should have a way to communicate with visitors to your site. This makes you a real person, builds a relationship and keeps people coming back to the site. So I did. I found a site called ConstantContact.com, which allows you to create and send a newsletter free of charge up to 50 subscribers. I thought this would be a good place to get started. Of course, now that I've got a few subscribers, I'm wondering if I should have gone with another option, but that's another story. Here are the contents of my first three issues:

April 2006

• So You Want To Be A Freelance Writer?
• How To Write Copy That Pays The Bills
• Article Secrets For Writers
• Resources For Writers

May 2006

• Freelance Writers - Four Reasons To Get On The Net
• Turn One Moment Into One Hundred Years
• Diary Of A Working Writer
• Free Resources For Writers
• How I Get Paid To Blog

June 2006

• Copyright Law: A Quick Guide For Freelance Writers
• Article Secrets For Writers (this is different from the April one)
• Diary Of A Working Writer - June 2006
• Free Resources For Writers
• Guru and Elance: Are They Worth It For Writers?

Now that I'm preparing my fourth issue, I've got a format. I try to have one article I've written, two articles by someone else, a diary entry, a roundup of my best blog posts of the month and some free resources, if I've found any. I also have links to products I recommend (so far only to things I've used).

I've also started archiving my posts on sharonhurleyhall.com. That way, when subscribers sign up mid-month, I can send an email out pointing them to the previous issue. I follow up mid-month anyway (thanks, Mitch) with a a short letter highlighting the archived copy and something new, like a blog post, article or resource. I've had good feedback on it so far.

My only niggles are with the ConstantContact templates. The links are ugly and the interface a bit clunky. However, I still think it's a great place for the novice newsletter producer. Once my subscriber base grows a bit, I'll be exploring other options. I'll let you know what I've found out.

Subscribe to Writing Lab News, my FREE writing newsletter

Free Is Good: More Free Resources For Writers

When it comes to tools that help me do my job better, free is always good in my book. When writing web articles, writers often need to know how many times they have used particular keywords and keyword phrases. Some employers specify a particular keyword density, while others ask for some keywords to be used a certain number of times in a written article. There are hundreds of keyword density analyzers online, some of them free, some not. These are great if you want to analyze an existing web page but no use at all if you want to check keyword density before you've uploaded a piece of writing. But a bit of searching uncovered a couple of tools that allow writers to do just that.

Enter The Textalyser

Textalyser is an online text analysis tool. Near the top of the page is a box where writers can paste their text. They can then set a minimum number of characters per word, ask it to analyze a particular number of words, and apply a stoplist (words to be ignored such as 'and' and 'but'). Then just press 'analyze the text' and wait for the results, which arrive quickly. The results include a word count, lexical density percentage and readability assessment as well as a frequency count and listing for words and two, three, four and five word phrases.

I have found this incredibly useful and there are features I haven't even used. I could, for example, ask for a particular word or phrase to be analyzed.

Textalyser also analyzes French text, for those who need it, though I haven't tested that function myself.

Marking Time

Although I prefer Textalyser, there's also an alternative that I've used from time to time. Mark Horrell's Keyword Density Analyser does exactly what it says and it works almost the same way as Textalyser. Paste the text into a window and you get a simple table which shows the word, frequency and density. However, it does not show phrases, so this limits its usefulness in my view. That said, there are a number of other free tools on Mark's site, including another spell checker. I haven't used any of the other tools, but some of them seem worth a look.

So those are my recommendations for keyword analysis. And if you really want to analyze an existing web page, both these tools will do that too.

My other posts on free tools and resources

Free Ezine For Your Site
Resources for Freelance Writers - What's The Job Worth?
Writing Tools Online: Resources For Freelance Writers
Keeping Track Of Your Writing
Freelance writing - how much to charge?
Doing The Maths
Without Word: Free Online Tools For Writers

Free resources outside my blog

Freelance writing articles
Writing skills articles
Free writers' forum

PS. Thanks to Haven for the title, which came from this comment.

Without Word: Free Online Tools For Writers

I'm just starting a new gig for a writing website. (Sneak preview is available here.) While I was checking over my articles, I noticed that some strange characters had appeared in the text. I knew immediately that the error came from Microsoft Word. Word is one of the best of Microsoft's programs, but all its functionality relies on special codes which usually mess up your formatting. (Don't, whatever you do, write and upload HTML pages from Word. Your code will be messy and will break in some browsers.) I've known this for a long time, which is why I usually use Notepad or Wordpad to write my articles. However, both these programs have two major failings: no spell-check and no word count.

Now, wordcount is the most useful tool in Word, IMHO, because writers, editors and publishers always need to know how long a piece of writing is. What I normally do to avoid the problems caused by Word is compose in Notepad or Wordpad, paste into Word to spellcheck and count the words, and paste back into Wordpad or Notepad. As I found out today, that doesn't work quite as well as I thought it did.

Instead of tearing my hair out, I got on the net and found two tools that appear to solve the problem. A free online spellcheck is available from spellcheck.net and a free online word counter can be found at allworldphone.com.

I can't make any grand claims about these two services, as I've used them only once each, but they did what I needed at the time. And I'm sure there won't be any strange characters in my next batch of articles.

And by the way, if you want a program that saves in rich text format automatically (no funny characters), and has a built in spellcheck and word count, you could do worse than Jarte. And it's free, too!

My Squidoo Lens On Website Promotion

Doing The Maths

Now, you're probably wondering why the word maths is cropping up in my blog? After all, I usually write about writing, don't I? Well, you're right. Numbers are not my strongest point. I'm OK with the basics - I can add and subtract (and occasionally multiply and divide) but that's as far as it goes. As a freelance writer, you often find yourself having to deal with numbers. And if you want to be known for accurate copy, you'll need to have a grasp of more than just the basics. That's why I was so pleased to find this guide to Statistics Every Writer Should Know by Robert Niles. Robert is a writer of long standing, who describes himself as having been caught up in the collision between computers and journalism in the 1980s (check out his home page for the full description). In Statistics Every Writer Should Know he gives a guide to the basics (mean, median and percent) as well as some more complex figures, tests and analyses. Read his guide and you should avoid being taken for a ride. It's easy to read and very useful. Why not take a look?

Keeping Track Of Your Writing

As a freelance writer, you should be writing regularly and submitting your work to as many places as will take it. If you're doing that, you'll need to keep track of what you've submitted, when and to whom.

Now, I didn't have a huge software budget when I started submitting my work, so I did some research and found a submissions tracker you can get for free. It's called WriteAgain from Asmoday Enterprises.

WriteAgain manages projects, markets and contacts, submissions and deadlines. I've been using it for about seven months and haven't used all the features yet, but here's what I've done with it:

• I have started a project file for an article series. Each time I complete an article I add it to the series
• I have input the titles and genres of all my articles, stories and other writing (adding genres as needed)
  
• I have put contact details for all the publishers to whom I have submitted work
  
• I have made a note of the date of submission, whether it was email or snail mail and how long it should take for publishers to get back to me.
  
• I have viewed submission status reports, which allow me to keep track of all my work (and to decide whether it's time to chase for a response)

The software also includes a time planner, finance manager and market viability reports. A full list of features can be found here.

The software comes in three editions: Professional, Standard and Light. The Light edition will be enough for most people and is free. Why not give WriteAgain a try?