Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

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As you all know, this is a new blog. I do have some other blogs that I’ve been working on for some time — the oldest since 2003.

Inklit is so brand new that we’re still counting the articles here in single digits, and we have “archives” for March — the month we’re in now.

That’s hardly a reputation yet, it’s more like an indictment. Yet things are moving along about the same as they always do on a brand new blog. The Feedburner feed is done, and we’re listed on MyBlogLog. I was able to chat up Jennifer and get her to stop by. That was nice. Google has figured out that we exist and has started indexing us.

For the most part, though, nobody knows I’m here.

That’s either good news or bad news, depending on your point of view. As my wife pointed out a few days ago when I complained that I didn’t quite have my subject matter in hand yet, the lack of readership means I can make all the mistakes I want. A less charitable way to say it would be this: It doesn’t matter how much I suck, because no one’s reading me anyway.

When In Doubt, Change Your Mind

Being new in a career is a sure fire way to experience a false start or two. One of the things I remember about my first year in real estate was how many different directions I tried before things started to click for me. There’s a lot of that going on this blog and in my new writing career as well. For example, the post that appeared here yesterday about setting writing goals was one that I actually wrote a bit earlier. Now it’s Friday already, so it’s time for me to think about how it went this week, catch up on the unfinished tasks, and maybe report back.

OK, then, well here’s my report, oh ye who are not yet reading me!

As far as production goes, my blogging production on my various blogs is at about 80% of the goal I set for myself, and I should have it up to 90% or better by the end of the day.

The fiction goals I set for myself, which in my earlier post I said was “the good stuff” I was making room for, is the one area where I have a big fat goose egg to report. The opportunity that drove me emotionally and that also consumed most of the time this week was the PLR writing goal. I spent well over the allotted ten hours on this goal working on setting up a shopping cart system, in the course of which I scraped my knees a few times and found out about three or four different ways that the shopping cart won’t work. Originally I’d been promising my writing partner that I’d have the cart up and running by Monday, but it’s looking like it’ll slip.

In miscellaneous news, I did a creditable job of keeping track of my time for the most part, though I still find I have to force myself to set my timer before I set out writing. My output varies between about six and fifteen words per minute — I’m using 10 as a rough idea of what I can produce.

I do think the idea of setting the goals in writing for the week was worth doing — and setting them somewhat aggressively was also the right approach.

Almost as soon as I resolved to write professionally, I realized that I should start setting goals for my writing and tracking my production and progress.

My need to track my goals and production was not born of self-improvement 101.  Instead, this drive to organize my time grew from some minor terrors that had made themselves visitors in my heart, unannounced and certainly unwelcome.  Do I have too many projects on my plate?  Can I master enough basic skills quickly enough to start making a living?  Am I crazy for even trying, or should I just take out some house hunters and scare up an escrow or go back to writing software for someone?

More than anything else, I was afraid that if I didn’t make explicit room for the fiction work, I would tend to ignore it in favor of work that wasn’t so emotionally loaded with uncertainty and risk.  So if you need a reason to set goals and track your progress, feel free to steal my reason.  Goal setting and progress tracking are a boring, self-imposed task that you do to make room for the good stuff in your writing (whatever "the good stuff" means to you). 

For those of you who might also want to steal my process as well as my motivation, here’s how I did it.

How I Got Started Tracking My Goals

Sunday at Borders I sat down and started writing all my current projects in my journal.  For each project, I tried to estimate how much time each one would take.  There are several blogs I’m working on, for example, and each of these needed so many posts at so many hours each.  Since I’m trying to improve my blog writing while I’m trying to understand the time I spend, and since I have a goal of writing longer posts, I gave myself two hours per blog post.   (I know I often bang out shorter works in a half hour, but again, the goal is to go long).  Knowing how many posts I want to publish for each blog monthly or weekly, I was able to come up with hours per week per blog.

At the same time, I’m running another business, so I entered the number of (non-writing) hours I need to devote to that.  There’s some overlap here in my case, because I also blog for my business.

In addition to my current blogging efforts and business, I also wrote down two types of writing that I’m working on writing and selling:  short fiction and Private Label Rights articles (including blogging subscription) work.  I allocated ten hours per week for each of those categories.

So when I was done my list of hours and projects looked something like this, with real blog names in place of "blog 1", etc.

07 hours blog 1
05 hours blog 2
02 hours blog 3
10 hours fiction work
10 hours PLR work
05 hours existing business
06 hours blog 4
___________________________

45 hours total per week

To me, it’s very important to understand that every time you list your goals, you’re working on an experiment for your life that should be short term.  Fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done will recall that one of the most important disciplines he recommends is the weekly review, where you fine tune your list of projects and next actions.  I believe a week is an excellent unit of planning, and my goal eventually is to add another ten hour block to the week such as "magazine writing".  It can either replace one of the ten hour blocks that’s there now if an activity doesn’t pan out either emotionally or financially, or I may decide that four blogs is about two or three blogs too many.

Whether forty-five hours is a realistic work week is another open issue.  Sure, it’s less than the fifty I had thought would be my maximum, but in practice even forty-five may be overly aggressive.  Let’s face it, the first and most destructive thing that happens to any beautiful written schedule is real life.  Sure enough, almost to prove the point, the first thing that happened to me on Monday morning with the beautiful schedule I created on Sunday was an email with a potential for about three days worth of paid interruption. 

That’s fine.  Next week I will experiment with my life again.

Tracking My Production and Progress

When Monday rolled around, I shifted the focus from planning the week to tracking a few core details I wanted to track for each of the projects listed above.  I quickly tried out a couple of a task-timer style programs downloaded from the Internet.  I’m using AllNetic’s Working Time Tracker for now.  If it doesn’t work out, I’ll resort to writing down start times and stop times on a pad, since often the simplest solution is best.  (The goal is to start working, not to spend the day fiddling with software).

One other "tracking tool" that I put together in a  few seconds was a brain dead simple Excel Spread sheet with the following column headers:

The first column is meant to record whatever title I worked on, or it can be a task, in which case it’s just a note reminding me of what I was doing.  The second column is the project or blog (from the list above).  Date is of course the date the work was done, and time spent is simply the elapsed time for that task that day.  Next come the number of words written.  Finally, quality is simply a subjective letter grade for the story or work.

Keep It Simple

Whatever system you set up and use, make sure it’s simple and easy to use.  It can be as easy as a diary.  Getting organized is not an end in itself, and it should never be so complex that it detracts from the good stuff.  The goal of setting goals is to distract from the good stuff, but to give it the time it needs to flower and grow.

I began blogging about writing as a career partly to have a journal of my writing work, but even more importantly as a personal exploration into writing markets.

One of the first new ideas I bumped into was the concept of PLR writing.  PLR stands for "Private Label Rights".  PLR articles are written once and then sold to multiple web site owners, each of whom purchases the rights to use the article as is or modify it as needed and then "privately label" the article as their own.  As Courtney Ramirez points out, PLR articles are commonly sold as filler for Adsense web sites.

Freelance writer and trainer Angela Booth has also written extensively about PLR writing, including her article on Writing and Selling PLR Content.  Angela’s article does a great job of making the case for PLR content as an first rate business model for an online writing career.  She also gets into more detail than Ramirez on the PLR licensing model.

Of course, not everyone likes PLR.  To answer the PLR critics, CatalystBlogger’s Jennifer Williamson wrote a fine article recently entitled PLR:  Legitimate Business Model or Morally Bankrupt.  Jennifer examines some of the controversy among Freelance writers surrounding PLR articles.  As a real estate broker in my other life, much of this debate reminds me of the debate around discount brokers.   As Jennifer points out, one of the problems with PLR writing is that it’s cheap.  So at least part of the backlash against PLR articles stems from a purely financial consideration:  people can pay less for them than for custom work.

At this point in my exploration, my own position is that I’m fairly ambivalent about PLR.  On the one hand, the combination of writing SEO-optimized copy together with the opportunity to distribute my work online is a natural fit for my current background as a real estate web site author/webmaster/blogger.  On the other hand, at least a part of my motivation for exploring new writing outlets was that I wanted to escape the daily grind of "pimping to the search engines".  That being the case, you’d be hard pressed to find a worse example of "moving in the wrong direction" than becoming a PLR Guru.  Just call me Stephen King to the Sploggers.  (Or is that Gore Vidal of Viagra?).

I don’t say PLR’s wrong for everyone.  I certainly don’t find fault with those for whom it’s a lucrative living.  I’m not even saying it’s wrong for me at this point.

I find it an interesting addition to the march of business models.

I’d no sooner written my first post here than I began to look for other blogs who had more than one post plus hello world put together.

There are a lot of them, and it looks like I’m late to the party.  That’s all right.  I just hope there’s still food. 

There are more "writing blogs" than there are "real estate blogs", at least according to Google.  The difference is approximately twenty-one million to fourteen million.  Or make that 3:2 times seven million.

That’s a lot of activity.

When I looked around to see who was early to the writing-about-writing party, I realized that I’d stopped writing and started blogging.

What’s The Difference Between Blogging and Other Writing?

1. It’s a Social Activity
   I look at blogging as a sort of party-drunk edge of writing.  Writing by its nature is somewhat solitary, whereas much of blogging always seems to run the risk of devolving into a cocktail party on a good day, or a brawl on a bad one.  This is not to say that blogging is not a legitimate writing career path.  My own writing career is being sponsored by my blogging revenue. 
2. It Combines the Role of Author and Publisher
   One way to look at blogging is that it is a form of sweat-equity self-publishing.  As the publisher as well as the writer, you spend a lot of time on sales, promotion, and distribution — work that a lot of time feels dangerously like "mere socializing".  Much of our activity as bloggers serves the same sales-related function as a book signing or author interview would in traditional publishing.
3. Its Often — Though Not Always — of Poor Quality
   Because blogs are not vetted in any way and needn’t be "sold" to a publisher or editor before they appear, there’s a huge variation in quality among them.  I don’t mean to idealize print writing as some sort of uniform quality utopia, but editors, agents and publishers do serve an important function of quality control that simply disappears in an online environment.
4. It May Not Even Have a Human Reader In Mind
   One of the functions of blogging that has fed me quite well in some of my work is establishing my expertise and credibility on a topic not for human consumption, but for computer algorithms — notably search engines.  I suppose that writing pieces meant to promote the author somehow are nothing new, but I can’t think of any historical parallel where a writer sought the approval of a mechanism.  This is just plain weird.

What’s Beyond Blogging?

One of the domain names I considered using for this site promoted the idea that this blog would be about forms of writing that are outside of or beyond mere blogging.  In the end I’m quite happy that I didn’t take the blog in that direction, but I am trying to see how well, and to what extent, blogging fits into my overall writing career.  I don’t see any need to bite a hand that’s fed me just because other hands beckon.

To paraphrase an old sixties joke about drugs and reality, above all I hope that blogs are not just a crutch for those who can’t handle fiction.  I’m not sure that spending some time working on fiction and continuing to blog are mutually exclusive.  I made a fair amount of progress on two stories and discarded a third in about ten hours or so.  I see no reason to lock myself in at this stage.  On a strictly business level, picking one or two areas to try to master may be far more productive than trying to take on the whole field in a hot week. 

OK, look, let’s start crossing stuff off:  no poetry or novels in 2008 unless absolutely necessary.

There.  I feel more focused already.

Inklit is a blog about writing as a career.  It has just come into the world like any newborn, slick and helpless and stupid about what it will become.  As though struggling for oxygen, it’s the wrong shade of blue. 

Inklit was born at 11:00 AM on Saturday, March 1st, 2008.

I had an idea about my writing career, and my idea gave Inklit life.  I already have a career as a professional writer of sorts.  I am a blogger, pimping used houses to the search engines.  This pays the bills, but all by itself it’s not very satisfying.  So I thought I would enjoy doing more with my writing career and my life.  With this idea, I began to write some stories.

The idea that I would share what I learn about writing as a career gave Inklit life. 

Maybe you haven’t made any money writing yet.  Or maybe like me you’ve done some writing as a career, and now you want to get better at your writing work, and explore new formats and new markets.

That’s what this blog is about.  Welcome.