Get Set (Part Two)

Suzanne Lieurance is a former classroom teacher, now a fulltime children’s author, freelance writer, and The Working Writer’s Coach. She teaches children’s writing for the Institute of Children’s Literature based in West Redding, Connecticut, and is the founder and director of the National Writing for Children Center.

She continues her series, READY, SET, GO! HOW TO CREATE A CAREER WRITING FOR CHILDREN

by
Suzanne Lieurance
The Working Writer's Coach
Working Writers Coach
Suzanne Lieurance website

GET SET - How to Build Your Writing Resume Even BEFORE You Start Your Career (part 2)

Freelance writers are hired to write stories, articles, books, and other materials for children all the time. But to land these types of assignments, generally you need to submit a resume and/or writing samples to the publishers who are offering this kind of work.

So what can you do if you have no experience like this to include on your resume?

Well, you need to get some.

Here are some easy ways to do that.

Online article directories such as www.ezinearticles.com accept short articles from writers all over the planet. Start out by writing short non-fiction articles for children and submit them to these directories. You won’t get paid to write these articles. The payoff is that other people use your articles on their websites and blogs and in their ezines and newsletters and you get a byline (called a resource box) with each of your articles. Many times, popular websites for children and parents will pick up articles from these article directories. If they do pick YOUR articles and post them to their site, you can visit these sites and find your articles, then copy the URL for the page where one of your articles appeared and use this as a publication credit on your resume. You can also print out your articles from these websites and use them as clips to submit to publishers who require published writing samples along with your resume.

So how will you know when one of your articles is being used at a popular site for children or parents?

That’s easy.

You create a google alert using the title of your article. Then, whenever an article with that title appears anywhere on the Internet, you will receive an email alerting you of that. To set up a google alert go to http://www.google.com/alerts and follow the directions you will see there.

If you wish to acquire some children’s fiction publication credits, in addition to your nonfiction article credits, search for online magazines for children. Most of these publications will not pay for submissions but it is usually a bit easier to break in with these publications than it is the hardcopy editions.

Try these ideas if you’re short on publication credits for your resume, and it won’t be long before your freelance career is zooming along!

Suzanne Lieurance