The Work from Home Landscape

What would be better than pursuing your dream of writing and supplementing it with a part time job that allows you to set your own hours or utilize your own personal skill set? Let's welcome B. K. (Brenda) Jackson as she opens the discussion on juggling your dream of writing with the very real obligation of paying the bills.

Take it away, B. K. (Brenda) Jackson...

I once spoke with a writer at a Western Writers of America conference who told me he wrote his first draft manuscripts in three weeks! He did not indicate how long the revision process took afterward, but I would suspect that like me, most authors need considerably longer to write a manuscript draft. One of the reasons it takes longer is because of our “day job”.

I work at a hospital in the Phoenix metro area as an Administrative Assistant/Scheduler. My 8 hour a day job typically costs me 13-14 hours a day, plus I’m in school at night, so during the week days, being up 19-20 hours a day is typical (and those hours don’t include time for writing).

This scenario is not ideal for many reasons. Desperate for alternatives, I wondered about work from home jobs—not only to save several hours’ time out of my day and to improve my health, but because I have office space in my apartment that is to die for, and I’d like to be able to use it.

Don’t you just love all the natural light that fills this office?  I do!

I have found the whole work-from-home scenario to be absolutely mystifying. In day to day life, I come across people who work from home. When I watch HGTV reno shows, almost every couple who is going through a house reno has one or both adults working from home.

Where do all these mystical, magical work from home opportunities come from? I posed this question to a writer’s loop back in October to get feedback. I gained several good insights into the work from home market as well as emails from many others who were as frustrated as I about nailing down legitimate opportunities for work from home jobs.

Responses to my inquiry boiled down to two main categories of work from home:

First, people who moved into work from home positions at companies for whom they’d worked for a number of years and the opportunity became available. The typical types of jobs in this category included people who worked in:

·       Direct sales

·       IT

·       HR

·       Medical Billing

·       Government field rep

·       Test grading

·       Banking related jobs/analysis

The second category of work from home jobs comes from those who are freelance/entrepreneurs:

·       Photography

·       Freelance writing/copywriting/editing/reviewing

·       IT (ad sales, web design, etc.)

·       Consultants of various types

·       Teaching music

·       Corporate trainer

·       Virtual assistant

The first category would seem to be the most dependable financially, especially for people like myself who are our own sole source of income. Unfortunately, not all industries lend themselves to the forward thinking concept of work from home.  In healthcare, the closest you will get are experienced coders, but transcription opportunities are dwindling as technological changes occur. And while the work I do as an Administrative Assistant and Scheduler could easily be done from home, healthcare will never be able to make that leap.

The wonderful, tranquil view from my apartment—you should see those desert sunsets!

Freelance work seems to be on the rise and has great rewards—if you can manage the financial ebb and flow endemic to that career path.

Also as I have learned in my own searches, you have to be very careful when searching online for work from home jobs because the majority of them are scams. Someone recommended checking Monster or Indeed. I also checked into another website someone had forwarded to me but reading about them on the Better Business Bureau website left me with mixed feelings. Even those who use websites to search for any type of work get scammed—instead of legitimate opportunities, they get emails pressuring them to enroll in various colleges and rack up consumer debt.

A couple of the respondents to my query thoughtfully summarized that they felt the best opportunities to work from home probably fell among these instances:

* Web related work - coding and design

* Accounting

* Artistic work - painting, Photoshop, Etsy, Fiverr, 99designs, etc.

* High paid short burst work that takes lots of unpaid prep time - e.g. training

* EBay trading - buy low, sell high

* Daycare

The two most interesting responses I got were from one person who worked as a doula (I had to look that one up) and one who did some agricultural related work (goat cheese, handmade soap etc.)  How cool is that?

While it is not work from home, I also know someone who garners a nice side income as a house-sitter and she has really developed her business. 

For what it’s worth, here’s a link to a news video with work-from-home opportunities and websites (I cannot vouch for their validity): Legitimate Work from Home Jobs that Really Pay

For me, it boils down to changing the industry within which I work, or going freelance and taking the associated financial risks. I still have no definitive answers.

What about you? Have you dipped your toes into the work from home life to make more time for writing and other things? I’d love to hear your insights.

If being self-employed or working from home is just a glimmer in your eye, check out these 50 Self-Employed Business Ideas, then come back to Seekerville and let us know which one is the perfect shoe-in for you and your unique skills.

And, to get your creative juices flowing, Seekerville is giving away FIVE copies of the ebook 130 Work From Home Career Ideas. Mention in the comments that you'd like a copy of the ebook.

B.K. Jackson is an author of Arizona-based historical fiction as well as devotionals and screenplays. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers. Her co-authored screenplay, Esperanza, was a 2004 quarter-finalist in the national Fade In Awards. In 2008, her devotional work appeared in the compilation book Devotions For Writers.  In 2010, Principle Engagement won the Historical Fiction category in ACFW’s Genesis Contest.

The Best of Seekerville from the Archives and First Fives Page Critique

Updated: How to Support Your Contest Habit by Tina Radcliffe

Entering approximately 20 contests a year averages out to about
$1,000 a year. Yes, it’s tax deductible and all part of doing business as a writer. But for every dollar going out it’s nice to have one or two coming in. It seems only poetic that I pay for my habit by well, writing.

• Freelance Blogging: Blogging can and does bring home the bacon and many gigs are by the week or month. Turn what you know into a paying job. My favorite place for all things freelance? Freelance Writing Jobs. In addition to blogging jobs I have gotten editing and short article jobs from this site.
  

• Confession Mags: Don’t scoff. And you didn’t think those stories were true did you? True Romance, True Confessions, True Love. Now owned by Dorchester Media. They have been around since 1922. They buy all rights and pay a month after publication. Stories have the first person appeal of a neighbor chatting over coffee and –confessing. Payments vary and they buy all rights. Essays and columns pay 50-65 dollars. More information can be found in Michael Bracken's guest post and by joining the Yahoo True Writers Group. Send a request to subscribe to this email address: TrueWriters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

• Woman’s World Magazine: The weekly magazine features a romantic short story each week. This magazine pays $800 upon acceptance for 800 words. OOPS sorry it is 800 for 800! The Fiction Editor is Johnene Granger. The style is intimate and sweet, as the audience is a homemaker or working mother. Read several issues to familiarize yourself with what they are buying and check out Seekerville's latest update on the topic here.
  

• Seeker Myra Johnson offers some great ideas for writing for the magazine market in her post : Hone Your Craft and Build Your Credits with Magazine Writing.

• New Love Stories can be found at your local book retailer. It is a monthly collection of short romantic stories that run from "sweet to heat" -their words! They buy global publishing rights and electronic and internet rights in all languages as well as future anthology rights. Payment is $300.00 on publication along with complementary copies of the magazine. For more information check out their website www.newlovestories.com.
  
  

• Keep your eye on Cindi Myers Market News Blog. She provides weekly golden nuggets of magazine, small and large press news.

• WOW! Women on Writing offer a subscription based freelance market newsletter here.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for supporting the contest habit.

This post first appeared 10/12/2007 and has been updated to reflect current markets.

Tina Radcliffe has been dreaming and scribbling for years. Originally from Western, N.Y., she left home for a tour of duty with the Army Security Agency stationed in Augsburg, Germany and ended up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While living in Tulsa she spent ten years as a Certified Oncology R.N. A former library cataloger, she now works for a large mail order pharmacy. Tina currently resides in the foothills of Colorado where she writes heart warming romance. Her debut release from Love Inspired, The Rancher's Reunion is a January release.




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Sin, Suffer, Cash The Checks

Writing Confessions with
Seekerville Guest Blogger,Michael Bracken.

Confessions, a unique genre of women’s fiction published in True Confessions, True Experience, True Love, True Romance, and True Story, are written “by,” for, and about “real” women. A confession is a story about a woman confronting and resolving a problem. This might be dealing with a parent’s death, overcoming financial difficulty, or finding love when life seems to conspire against that possibility.

The protagonist of a confession confronts her problem and resolves it either directly or indirectly through her own actions. The more emotionally-charged the problem, the greater the reader’s involvement and the more “confessional” the story seems. While the structure of a confession is essentially fixed, variation in subject and theme are permissible.

A typical confession is written in the first-person from a lower- or middle-class woman’s viewpoint--though confessions written from a male viewpoint or from the viewpoint of an upper-middle class woman are published occasionally--and are written in a colloquial manner, as if the narrator is speaking directly to the reader.

Confessions have evolved over the years. The fundamental plots of the first confessions were often described as “sin-suffer-repent.” These evolved into “problem stories” in which a woman confronts a problem and then overcomes it directly or indirectly through her actions. During the past few years more and more “confessions” appear to be “romances-told-in-first-person” and the unique qualities of traditional confessions are disappearing. This may be the result of a major romance publisher purchasing the magazines from the previous publisher, or it may be the result of an influx of romance writers with little or no knowledge of the confession genre.

Confessions follow standard story structure: each has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A traditional confession begins with the narrator confronting her problem. This is followed by background information explaining how the narrator came to be in her current situation, the narrator’s attempts to solve her problem, and the results of her attempts. The conclusion comes from one or more of the narrator’s attempts to solve her problem. Many confessions have happy endings; the rest are “lesson learned” stories where the narrator sums up the moral of the story and the reader flips the page, thinking, “There but for the grace of God...”

Confessions that resemble “romances-told-in-first-person” begin with a “meet cute”--which is how many chick flicks and romance novels begin--and follow a girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl-gets-boy back plot structure. These types of confessions inevitably have happy endings.

Problem stories and romances can be blended into a single story to create a hybrid confession, one that, if done well, contains the best of both story types.

Confessions are presented as if the stories are true, as if the events described in them actually happened. Don’t be fooled: They aren’t true and they didn’t happen. Even so, a good confession always has a fundamental truth as its core and the events described could have happened. For example, a confession about two seemingly mismatched people meeting and falling in love might have as its core the idea that love conquers all. This couple might meet at an oncologist’s office where the man is a nurse and the woman’s father is a patient. The plot revolves around their developing relationship and the continuing decline of her father’s health. Does the father die? Perhaps; it could happen. Or, does his cancer go into remission? Perhaps; it could happen. Or, does somebody give the father a miracle cure? No. There is no miracle cure for cancer and the moment you inject it into your confession, your story has lost its veneer of reality.

Confessions come in various lengths--I’ve sold confessions of less than 1,500 words and more than 25,000 words--but a new confession writer might want to aim for a story between 2,500 words and 5,000 words. A confession that falls within this range is long enough to have a good plot (and maybe a sub-plot), a reasonable setting, and sufficient character development, but is short enough that the writer doesn’t lose control of the story and go wandering off on too many tangents.

Writing confessions isn’t for the impatient. Editors may be slow to respond to submissions, with response times occasionally measured in years and months rather than weeks and days. The magazines purchase all rights, and payment--five-cents/word at True Story; three-cents/word at the other magazines--is made more than a month following publication and can be late.
On the other hand, a highly productive writer who masters the problem story, the “romance-written-in-the-first-person” story, and the hybrid, can become a frequent contributor to the confession magazines.

I know.
I’ve been selling to the confession magazines since 1981.

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Sometimes referred to as “The King of Confessions,” Michael Bracken is the author of 11 books and more 1,100 short stories, articles, essays and poems, including more than 170 confessions. Additional information about Michael can be found at his Web site: www.CrimeFictionWriter.com.

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