Now that the "age of self-publishing" is being heralded for both long-form journalists and book authors, the question of self-funding, so to speak, is on more and more writers' minds. The ability to publish and market one's work, using platforms like Amazon's Kindle Singles or Apple's iBookstore, can be freeing, once the piece is complete. But…
Being able to slap whatever price tag you want on your own work is one of the most freeing things about self-publishing, but it can also be the most challenging. Not all writers are marketing experts, and, as far as we know, a guide on How to Compete in the E-books Marketplace — with its various publishers and platforms and e-stores — has yet…
The past couple days, a post about unpaid internships has been making the rounds on Twitter, and its writer, Bethany Horne, has been getting a lot of support for declaring that she will never (again) work for free, after completing an internship as part of her school program. She argues that unpaid work is detrimental not just to the people toiling…
Freelancers maintain personal blogs for all sorts of reasons: to have an all-in-one-place online portfolio, to increase their profile in a particular community or gain a reputation as an authority on a particular topic, to experiment with different types of writing than they get to do in their freelance work, or, often, to post photos of their…
In a shocking revelation, a study of Huffington Post bloggers by researchers at UC Santa Barbara's Carsey-Wolf Center---which included analyzing 500 press clippings about AOL's $315-million acquisition of HuffPo and a survey of HuffPo's most frequent contributors---found that they think they deserve to be paid for their labour, which requires their…
In the video above, Susan Swan, novelist, journalist, and former chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, discusses the Writers’ Coalition Benefits Program, which offers affordable drug, health, and dental care insurance to writers.The Writers' Coalition's latest initiative, coinciding with the federal election, is a campaign to get Ottawa to…
On his Mixed Media blog at Forbes.com, Jeff Bercovici offers a new angle to consider in the recent lawsuit that unpaid writers have brought against the Huffington Post and AOL.Bercovici starts off by acknowledging that, in terms of ad revenue, US$105 million is too high a value for the bloggers' work, but he builds a good case for why their writing…
[caption id="attachment_662" align="alignnone" width="501" caption="Screengrab from Theglobeandmail.com."][/caption] Last night Massey College hosted the third Press Club Night, a series devoted to "celebrating Toronto's community of journalists."Well known Globe columnist and author Christie Blatchford sat down with the college's master,…
[caption id="attachment_622" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="Graphic from the Guild Freelancers of the California Media Workers Guild, posted on the Newspaper Guild's "][/caption]Open letters to publications' management are a last-ditch tactic to right wrongs and spur change—but as we've seen recently, they can be effective.Now, adding…
