Writer Online is pleased to have Peter Bowerman, veteran commercial freelancer and author of The Well-Fed Writer (the award-winning how-to on lucrative commercial freelancing) join WOL as a regular columnist on the subject of commercial freelancing. The following piece will be presented in two parts over the next two issues and then look for Peter to share his experience on a monthly basis after that (every other issue).    

Starving Writer No More! Part One

"Commercial Writing" Offers Good Money, Flexibility and Time to Pursue Your Writing Passions   

by Peter Bowerman                                                                        

The PR firm had hired me to work on a 12-page brochure for their client, a local telecomm giant. Source material was nine one-hour interviews, which I then transformed into the same number of one-page profiles plus an intro piece. The fee? $6000. Hours? Probably about 50-55 spread out over 2-3 weeks.

The brochure was an "audition" piece for the PR firm. If it went well, they'd get the contract to produce a six-page monthly newsletter for the next year. Well... it went well. The client really liked my work but wasn't quite sure what the PR firm was doing to earn their hefty add-on fee. So, once the project was done, she called up the PR folks and said, "We've decided to produce this in-house. But, we want your writer."

What could they do? So, for the next year, I was the writer for this six-pager, the main internal (for their employees) communications piece for this division. After paying the PR firm 10% as a "finder's fee" (only fair), my monthly income from this single account was $4000. Time invested in writing the piece? 30-35 hours.

Common scenarios? Not everyday occurrences, but hardly rare once you're established. This is the field of commercial writing - a.k.a. "copywriting" or marketing writing. If you've got writing in your blood, you've likely dreamed of writing full-time but realize how difficult it is to thrive as a novelist or poet. But, in the commercial field, it's all about becoming a well-respected and well-compensated writer. And with hourly rates ranging from $50-125+, you can write for a good living and still have time and energy left over to pursue your writing passions.   

Prior to entering the field, I had no paid writing experience or professional writing background and I was entering a high-stakes writing field. Yet, by leveraging my sales and marketing background to prop up a pretty sorry starter portfolio, I was paying all the bills in less than four months. You may have the writing background but no marketing experience. We all come at this from different places.

How Good An Opportunity?

In the last decade, two huge trends have sculpted the American landscape: downsizing and outsourcing. The creative and communications departments of today's companies are running leaner and meaner, but the work still needs to get done. Add to that the countless opportunities with smaller companies that don't have budgets for either those departments or high-priced agencies, but nonetheless, still need to create a wide variety of marketing materials. Put it all together and it spells rich opportunities for freelancers.  

A manager with a huge high-tech firm in Atlanta says, "Most people would assume that a company of our size would do the bulk of our writing in-house, and they'd be wrong. My writing needs these days are pretty steady, and I pay anywhere from $65-85/hour, depending on experience."

Huge Volume of Work

The sheer volume and variety of work outsourced by not only industry giants like UPS, the Coca-Cola Company, BellSouth and IBM but companies of all sizes is formidable. Marketing brochures, ad copy, newsletters, video scripts, direct mail campaigns, speeches, web copy, and much much more (and FYI, you just do the writing; graphic designers handle laying it all out).

Corporations outsource for good solid business reasons: They pay for what they need, only when they need it. They get fresh "outsider" perspectives. No salaries, vacations or benefits to pay. And given the wide variety of writing projects, a stable of talented freelancers, each with different strengths, ensures the best writer for the job.

And there's far more work out there than meets the eye. As consumers, we mostly see what's known as "B2C" (business-to-consumer): newspaper and magazine ads, direct mail solicitations, newsletters from our frequent flyer program or utilities and the like. What we generally don't see is "B2B" (business-to-business): all the materials created by a business to market to other businesses. And finally, there's the huge arena of internal communications : all materials created by a business only for their own people: marketing manuals, brochures, CD-ROMS, sales sheets, newsletters, web sites, speeches, etc. Someone has to write them. Sometimes it's done in-house, oftentimes not.

Study Your Mail

Start taking the time to study your (junk) mail - the B2C stuff you get every day - the ads, direct mail and newsletters. Take a peek at the rack brochures in your bank. Pick up a brochure or two from a car dealership. Take a closer look at the web sites you visit. Notice which ones are well written and user-friendly and which aren't. Ask yourself if you have the skills to write any of this. I'm guessing you do. Every single one of these projects is written by someone, and many by a freelancer.     

Could You Get Used to This?  

Recently, I had nicely productive three weeks of business. A non-technical eight-page brochure for a medical software firm: $2500. A four-page financial services newsletter (recurring quarterly): $1800. A rework of a rack brochure for the same client: $600. The first phase of a brochure project for our state's EOE department: $900. An 800-word article for a huge global staffing giant: $800. Two sales sheets explaining a company's new Web site: $850. And finally, the same company had me bid on two big brochures ($3000-3500 each), both to be done within the next six weeks.                

Stay Tuned for Part Two in the next issue of Writer Online - where we'll discuss how good a writer you have to be for the commercial field, who will hire you, how to find them, how to put together a portfolio and much more.

Peter Bowerman is the author of The Well-Fed Writer (2000) , an award-winning Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and its companion volume, The Well-Fed Writer: Back For Seconds (October 2004). A commercial freelancer and columnist in Atlanta, Georgia since 1993, his client list includes Coca-Cola, BellSouth, IBM, UPS, Cingular Wireless, American Express, Mercedes-Benz, Junior Achievement and others. He has published over 250 columns and articles and leads seminars on writing. www.wellfedwriter.com.