The Freelancer's Rulebook: A Guide to Understanding, Working With and Winning Over Editors (Story Line Press Writer's Guides)

This is a warm and wonderful book filled with nuts and bolts wisdom and practical advice that can be used over and over again, whether you are writing alone or with others. A treasured tool for beginning or seasoned writers, it can be used at home or as a teaching tool in the classroom. Enjoy! A gifted writer and instructor, Bonnie Hearn Hill has given me some of the best writing advice I've ever received. Enjoy!

This is a freelancer's book written by a former freelancer now editor. As such you get an insider's view on what is needed to be a successful freelancer. There aren't a lot of hints for improving your writing or picking subjects or any thing like that. The author assumes either you have the necessary ability and talent needed or you'll learn soon enough that you don't. Instead the focus is more on what to do to get in the door and stay inside. That is getting the attention of the editor and once you do get it how to keep it. I'll give you the main tip in two sentences. Do good work. Write what the editor asks for, write it well and write it on time. The author goes into more detail and explains more of how to do it. Not a bad investment if you're looking to get into freelancing. I give it a B+ on the StuPage Reviews.

Highly successful author Bonnie Hearn Hill begins this book with an important distinction: "The process of creation, exhilarating as it can be, is distinctly separate from the process of publication." In this easily readable guidebook, Hill offers specific tips about the creative side of writing. However, she focuses most of her attention on "the business of writing."Readers will respond favorably to Hill's mission: To save other talented writers from the mistakes she made early in her career when she pitched her materials to publishers. You will welcome her candor. She admits her early blunders, and tells us how to avoid them. Enriching her readability, her keen sense of humor surfaces and resurfaces throughout the book.At the end of each chapter, she lists rules writers should follow to become consistently paid writers. Concluding the book, she repeats the rules-all 112 of them.Her advice covers: proper letterheads, query letters, how to follow up with the editor who has held your article too long, using the Internet judiciously, and much more that relates to getting the free out of freelance.Good news: Knowing that she has excelled as a nonconformist at times, she encourages readers to exercise poetic license with her proposed rules. After all, "None of this means you have to write a paint-by-number piece." One of her views as an iconoclast: Query letters may just delay a decision, rather than speeding up the decision by sending the manuscript itself.Had I bought this book two decades ago, my submissions to editors would have generated a much greater percentage of paid acceptances. I recommend The (Expanded) Freelancer's Rulebook enthusiastically.

If you are a writer that wishes to get your work published but need a tool to help show you how---this book is for you! Every writer should have this in their library. The author, Bonnie Hearn Hill, makes points in the book that are VERY important to a freelance writer. Well written, easy to read--I couldn't put the book down!

Thanks to the tips and suggestions in this book, I regularly freelance for magazines and newspapers. The pracitical advice and sound rules have actually had editors asking me for articles. My byline on the stories has even helped to promote my own book. This is a great book for anyone looking to break into the freelance field.