And if you’ve been holding off due to the price, you’ll love this: For this session only, I’m letting students pay what they want for the Basic version of the e-course with no e-mail support (*well, kinda: minimum $30). The Basic version normally costs $120, so you can get as much as a 75% discount. I’m really excited about this experiment and hope you are too!

When you click the Buy Now button, you’ll be able to fill in any price you want, but I ask that you pay a minimum of $30.

And of course, as always I’m offering the Premium version of the e-course with eight weeks of e-mail support where I’ll answer your questions and critique your assignments.

Not sure my course is right for you? Here’s what a couple of recent students had to say:

“I had been freelancing for two years, and was desperate to grow my business beyond regional markets. I signed up for Linda’s Write for Magazines e-course, and within months landed an assignment in one of my dream magazines: a national health/fitness publication!

Well, I am happy to say that my first PAID article hit the newsstands yesterday. It’s a 9/11 10th Anniversary story in Flight Journal‘s October issue. My mom found it at the local Barnes and Noble.”
—Shannon Salinsky

If you’re interested, please check out the Write for Magazines page to see more testimonials, download the FAQ, and sign up.

If you want e-mail support, don’t wait — I have only 10 spaces in the Premium version, and they go fast. And if you want the Basic version — pay what you want and I’ll see you on the 27th!

I look forward to helping you make 2012 your best freelancing year ever! [lf]

Now’s the time to take action: The registration for our popular class ends on Monday, and the webinars start on January 24.

Don’t wait — check out the Blast Off page to see how we’ve helped other writers break in to their dream markets and earn more as freelance writers. And then — sign up!

Carol and I look forward to helping you reach your writing goals this year. [lf]

You can start by watching Carol Tice’s and my 30-minute webinar, 10 Biggest Obstacles to Freelance Writing Success…and How to Solve Them.

Then — if you’re looking to launch your freelance writing career in 2012, join Carol Tice’s and my 4-week group mentoring course, Freelance Writers Blast Off 2012 for Newbies, on January 17. You’ll learn from two longtime writing professionals about how to choose your writing niche, build a kick-butt writer website, explore potential markets that want your writing, market yourself, write a killer query or letter of introduction, and run your freelance business.

Our students have been e-mailing us to let us know that the Blast Off helped them break into their dream markets, rack up $5,000 in assignments, move from $100 blog posts to $1,000 features, and more.

We now offer three levels of the Blast Off to match your budget: You can audit the course, participate in the webinars, or participate in the webinars and get phone mentoring sessions with Carol and me.

In the past, all our spaces for the Blast Off have sold out in as little as four hours. With this newly formatted class, we can now accept an unlimited number of students so no one is left out in the cold. (Though we do have only 20 spaces for the highest level with phone mentoring…we can only do so many calls!)

If you choose the Participate or Get Mentored versions of the Blast Off, you’ll also get e-mail feedback from Carol and me on what writing niches will be most lucrative for you and how to make your writer website a client magnet. And — you’ll get a free monthlong membership in Carol’s Freelance Writers Den where you can get your questions answered and hang out with like-minded writers.

And no matter which level of the Blast off you choose, you’ll get more than 40 pages of resources and tips and a bonus recording of our Story Idea Lab seminar.

I’m psyched about this newly reformatted class and hope I get the chance to help you skyrocket your writing income in 2012.

Interested? Read more and sign up today.

Have you ever wondered how some freelance writers seem to shoot to success?

Here’s how it happens.

I know because it happened to me.

Once upon a time (in a decade far far away), I was a starving songwriter living in Los Angeles. Then I entered a couple of essay contests and won them.

The next thing I knew, I was writing features for the L.A. Reader (R.I.P.) and the Los Angeles Times real-estate section.

I was terrified and excited all at the same time. This article-writing thing seemed really fun. And it paid money, a nice change from my songwriting life.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I had been writing prose for about five minutes.

How did I go from there to a six-figure freelance writer?

One word: Mentors.

Two incredibly generous editors at these two publications took me under their wing and taught me how to be a reporter. From scratch.

They liked my writing. They thought I had potential.

I was willing to work my rear end off for cheap, and was thirsty to know
more.

I’d come in the day after a Reader piece of mine came out and say, “I see you changed my lede from this here to that. Why?”

He loved that.

When I started, it took me six weeks to write a 600-word feature for the Times. I kept asking if I shouldn’t know more about real estate, maybe be a former Realtor or mortgage broker. I felt really in over my head.

“Perish the thought!” said my editor. “Those people can’t write. You’re funny!”

The Reader editor helped me write a 3,000 word feature for the first time. My first draft was 10,000 words long.

For reasons I’ll never understand, this generous man was willing to show me how to sculpt it into a compelling feature that fit in the paper.

I did mention I had no idea what I was doing, right?

After he helped me and the story came out, I sold a one-year movie-rights option on that story for $10,000. True story. (No, it never did become a movie, darnit.)

Without these two mentors, I might have floundered around for years and years, slowly figuring out how to write an article on my own.

I might have just given up.

Mentors help you keep the faith that you can do this.

Mentors are your career’s rocket fuel.

Ask any successful writer you know how they got started and somewhere in the story, there will be mentors.

If you’re struggling to launch your freelance writing career right now, ask yourself: Where are your mentors?

You need to find knowledgeable people who believe in you and will help you develop as a writer.

They will cut years off your ramp time.

It might be a college writing professor, or a magazine editor, or a marketing manager, or a professional writing coach.

But if you want to speed up this process, get to where you make a living at writing, and cut the agony factor down, you need a mentor.

Looking to launch your freelance writing career in 2012?

Join the Freelance Writers Blast Off 2012 for Newbies on January 17 to learn from two longtime writing professionals how to choose your writing niche, explore potential markets that want your writing, market yourself, and run your freelance business. We now offer three levels of the Blast Off to match your budget: You can audit the course, participate in the webinars, or participate in the webinars and get phone mentoring sessions with Carol and me.

http://www.therenegadewriter.com/?p=3653

This week one of my former students let me know that a story idea she’d generated and worked on in my story idea workshop this fall ran in last Sunday’s New York Times and was generating a ton of reader response. (Woo-hoo! She’s the third student of mine to land an assignment with the Times. My students ROCK. But I digress.) Anyway, we were e-mailing back and forth about dealing with polarizing reader response, and then she asked me, “Is there anything I should do with this story at this point?”… Click here to keep reading...

This week one of my former students let me know that a story idea she’d generated and worked on in my story idea workshop this fall ran in last Sunday’s New York Times and was generating a ton of reader response. (Woo-hoo! She’s the third student of mine to land an assignment with the Times. My students ROCK. But I digress.) Anyway, we were e-mailing back and forth about dealing with polarizing reader response, and then she asked me, “Is there anything I should do with this story at this point?” Good question!

Whether you’re a new writer who’s staring at her first feature in a newsstand publication or a jaded professional who’s finally hit a career high with a 2,500-word feature in Esquire, beyond sending the clip with new story pitches there’s the question of “What else can I do with this shiny piece of paper I hold in my hands?”

I’ve given the question a lot of thought while wearing my jet-powered marketing/self-promotion hat; here are some of my ideas about how writers can work their clips more effectively.

1. Send a link to the published story to editors who rejected your idea.

Before you jab your burning torches and sharpened pitchforks at me, hear me out. You have to be thoughtful about this. If you’re sending the link to editors just to rub it in their faces — “Nah, nah, look what the NYT bought, you dumb-ass idiots — next time, be on the ball, okay?” — that’s not so cool and these editors will be thrilled they avoided working with such a reject rejected your idea … thrilled!

Tone is everything. If your motive is to get more work with the editors who rejected your idea, send them a new idea, then say something like, “Remember the story I pitched to you last summer about the snake hunters in Florida’s Everglades? X Magazine finally bought it and it ran last month. Here’s a link; I thought you’d like to see how it turned out.” This can be especially effective if the editor liked the idea, but it was nixed at a story meeting.

Even if he didn’t seem to love your idea, send him the link anyway. Your clip shows persistence — you believed in your idea and you continued to market it — and it gives him a little glimpse of how you turned your initial idea into a full-fledged story. It also shows you can toot your horn professionally with no hard feelings. Everyone wins.

2. Send the link to editors you work with regularly.

I aim to develop collegial relationships with my editors, so I occasionally do this with clips I’m exceptionally proud of. When I wrote a piece about British cookbooks for The Atlantic‘s food blog, I sent the link to a couple food editors I worked with; one had no idea I was such an Anglophile and she assigned me a piece about British food, and another editor added the clip to my resume package, which eventually landed me a lucrative short-term writing project.

I know two other writers who send out quarterly e-mails to editors that include links to recent clips. This is a brilliant idea, one that an established freelancer can steal for her marketing arsenal.

3. Tweet ‘em/Facebook ‘em. And ask your friends to retweet/repost.

I know a lot of writers are iffy about Twitter and wonder who the heck would be interested in their 140-character blurps about their morning coffee. Forget tweeting the cuppa Joe — tweet links to your clips and add relevant #hashtags to get other people to notice your story and retweet. Same thing with Facebook; post a link, write a little about why you’re happy with the story, and see what happens. The key is to get as many eyeballs reading your article — and with luck, some of those eyeballs will belong to people who hire awesome writers.

4. Alert the media!

A friend of mine wrote a thinky-piece for Reason that producers at NPR happened to read, and the next thing she knew, she was on a public television news program (or the radio, I forget) to talk about her research. She wasn’t paid for the NPR appearance, but it was certainly something worth crowing about in her credentials.And less impressive, but last year when I blogged about Sarah Ferguson and her latest scandal involving the British royal family, I got calls from the British media, including the BBC, to talk via satellite about Americans’ perception of Ferguson.

OK, great, you’re thinking — these media outlets came to you guys. But there’s no law that says you can’t reach out to the media. If you’ve written a story that’s controversial, timely, and/or challenges commonly held beliefs, start by calling the story desks of local news stations.

Here’s an example: you just wrote a feature for Parents about a grade-schooler who was bullied and successfully sued her school system. The week your story comes out, you notice a story about one school system’s flawed anti-bullying stance. Call your local news station and tell them who you are and what you’ve written and offer to speak to them on air if they’re doing a story on this. Even if they weren’t planning on covering the story, knowing that there’s an expert (that’s YOU) they can call upon may make them think, “Hmm, maybe we SHOULD do a story on this.”

5. And of course, add links to the clip on your website, blog about it (if you have a blog), and make copies to send to editors who want to see hard copies.

Because if I don’t mention all this, some Sherlock will point it out.

Any other ideas about how to work a clip? Add your comments below. [db]

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