rejections

What makes a professional writer? 1

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged business rejections writing on by

Is a professional writer just someone who makes money writing? Then we might as well call anyone who gets paid for doing anything a pro. The word implies more than that. It means a commitment to producing the best results possible. It means not just being paid for work, but being paid for good work.

Professionals know that a career is an ongoing effort, not a leap to stardom. It’s a matter of constantly developing better skills, both at doing the work and at marketing it. Jeff Goins’ “7 Things Professional Writers Know That Amateurs Don’t” makes some excellent points on this topic. He explains that “success in any field is more about commitment to a process than it is about finding one magic trick that will make it all come together.”
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The soul-crushing client

This entry was posted in Writing as business and tagged editors rejections on by

Writers have to deal with rejection and not let it hurt too much or too long. Sometimes you write a really great piece and it’s just not what the client wants. Sometimes clients don’t make it clear what they need, or their needs change suddenly. And sometimes you have to admit you were in over your head, or you had a bad writing day and wrote a piece of garbage. It’s all part of the job.

What’s harder to deal with is the deliberately malicious client. The one who tells obvious lies just to spite you. These people claim you made errors which you didn’t make, or that you didn’t do work which you did. Many of them like to string writers along. They’ll encourage you to submit a revision and then claim you didn’t follow instructions when you did meticulously, or they’ll reverse their previous requests.
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