follow up – Almost An Author

Here are seven post-conference strategies to get the most out of your investment

Send thank yous. Send a brief email to every professional you met with, thanking them for their time and their advice. You may also send thank yous to conference hosts and anyone else that seems appropriate.

Follow up on contacts. Dig out the business cards you collected and follow your new writing friends on social media. Even better, send them a brief personal message that will help them remember who you are. You never know which contacts will turn out to be important a few months or years from now.

Follow through on submissions. Right away. Do not procrastinate. (In fact, having your query/proposal/sample chapters polished and formatted should be part of your pre-conference checklist so you are ready to take advantage of these opportunities.) Sending your promised materials promptly shows busy agents and editors that you are professional, disciplined, and prompt. It also puts you in the front of the line, when they can still remember who you are and why they wanted to see your work.

Give yourself time to recover. Conferences can be exhausting, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Yes, you may be pumped to go home and try all the wonderful things you learned, but be patient. Practice good self-care by allowing your writer self to recover for a day or two before starting a blog or completely revamping your website.

Organize your notes. Go through all the materials you acquired during the conference. File course materials where you can find them for later reference. If you do not have a workable system for storing information so you can find it again, this is a good time to create one.

Choose One Thing to implement right away. Conferences can fill us with motivation and inspire us to try new and wonderful techniques, but attempting too much too soon usually leads to frustration and a lack of focus. You will be more successful if you select one or two practical strategies or ideas to implement. Choose ones that particularly resonated with you or that apply to exactly where you happen to be in your current project. Once you get that going, you can return to your notes and apply something else.

Journal your thoughts. It may be helpful to spend some time pondering your experiences and journaling about them. Pay attention to what excited you the most, what struck fear into you, and what caused a pang of some other emotion. Think through the reasons for those emotions and ponder what to do if those emotions are holding you back. You may also find it helpful to list all the key takeaways you learned, or list the wonderful people you met and jot down a note or two about what you discussed with them. Whatever will help you put useful information into long-term memory.

May your next writers’ conference be the best one yet.

Award-winning writer Lisa E. Betz believes that everyone has a unique story to tell the world. She loves inspiring fellow writers to be more intentional about developing their craft and courageous in sharing their words. Lisa shares her words through speaking, leading Bible studies, writing historical mysteries, and blogging about living intentionally.

Deadlines and Follow-up for Freelance Writers

If you want to impress an editor as freelance writer, I’ll let you in on a little writer secret. Meet your deadline with excellent writing. While it sounds too simple, writers are notoriously late to meet their deadlines. If you meet or even deliver the article ahead of the deadline with excellent writing, you will stand out from the other writers.

In the “old” days, writers used to be able to fudge a little on the deadline. Without an internet, we had to mail our articles on disks to the editor. When the editor asked about the article, you could say, “My article is in the mail” and sometimes gain an extra couple of days to deliver the piece. Now with high-speed broadband, those excuses do not work. The editor expects the freelancer to send their material on time.

Excellent Writing Is Appreciated

Editors have been trained to recognize excellent writing for their publication. Does your article have a great beginning paragraph that draws me into the article? Does it have a solid middle with detailed information targeted to the reader? Does it end with a single point or takeaway for the reader? If you can answer each of these questions with “yes” then you have probably written a solid article for the publication.

Also make sure you write your article several days before it is due, then you can leave the article and return to it with fresh eyes. Pick up a pencil as you read the article fresh and make any adjustments that is needed.

Follow-up Is Important

In our tech driven world, we have grown dependent on email for our communication. Yet email doesn’t always get through or get answered. Today I remembered an article I had turned in for a publication yet the editor never responded. It had been 10 days with no response—which is long enough for that editor to have been on vacation and be back at their desk. I sent a short follow-up email with the article to make sure they got it. You can follow this same pattern if you don’t hear from the editor. A simple reminder asking if they got the submission is professional and acknowledging that things get missed in the process. It also shows the editor you want to deliver excellent work in a timely fashion. The key with your follow-up is to ask straightforward and polite questions with short emails. Editors spend a lot of time answering emails so in general the short emails get answered.

As you meet the editor’s deadlines with excellent writing, you will become a part of their stable of writers. These writers have proven their dependability and are the go-to people that the editor uses when they need to assign a feature or special writing assignment. It’s a select group and you want to be part of this elite group.

To write for Christian magazines, you need to be pitching ideas through query letters and writing full length articles then reaching out and connecting with new editors and new markets. As you take consistent action to meet deadlines with quality writing, you will be published in multiple publications.

Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. Terry is the author of How to Succeed As An Article Writer which you can get at: http://writeamagazinearticle.com/. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: http://BillyGrahamBio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham at: http://bit.ly/BillyGrahamBT His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/terrywhalin