Notes from a Hired Pen: Five marketing activities to kick off fall

Readers!

Fall! Fall! It’s fall!

I know fall doesn’t technically start until later this month, but it’s nice and cool here in New Jersey for the start of our school year. Fall always feels like a season of renewal for me, more so that January 1. And while I don’t have children, I did go to preschool then kindergarten then elementary school, middle school, high school, college and graduate school, so a September reset is burned into my central nervous system.

If you’re looking to give your freelancing a boost in this new season, my five suggestions are below. BUT ALSO! Don’t forget that the ASBPE Solopreneur webinar series kicks off this Thursday and yes I’m a speaker!

1. Follow up on five previous letters of introduction. When I’m busy and/or feeling lazy and need to accomplish a marketing task, this is what I do: I look at my pitch sheet and see when I set out my last batch of LOIs and following up with a short email along these lines: “I just wanted to follow up in case you’re looking for a writer. Even if not, I hope you’ll still enjoy a few pieces I’ve had published recently” and include a few links. Do they always respond? No. But I often hear back on the follow up, more than I do with the original outreach.
2. Contact an editor you like but haven’t worked with this year. This is another easy way to drum up work. You don’t have to prove to this editor that you’re worthy of an assignment, and it’s a way to check in to see what their needs are right now. I did this over the summer and ended up with a few thousands dollars of assignments, just for reminding editors who don’t always need a freelancer that I exist and could help them out.
3. Look up someone from your last full time job and see what they’re up to. One of the best places to find potential clients is in your already existing network, so take a spin on LinkedIn or the internet to see where your former coworkers are these days, and reach out. This is assuming that you didn’t work with a bunch of jerks, of course! If your previous co-workers were a bunch of a-holes then try this instead: check your high school, college or graduate school’s alumni pages and see if you can find connections there.
4. Take a pitch that didn’t sell and brainstorm where it could go right now. Just because an idea hasn’t sold doesn’t mean it’s not a good one. So take one (or a few!) that haven’t found their home yet and think about where they could go. Maybe there’s a business angle on a consumer idea; another publication you recently heard of that might be a better fit; or maybe there’s just a good news peg right now. It took YEARS for this idea to find the right news item to hang from. But it worked!
5. Take a story you wrote last year and think how you could re-slant that information. I write a lot about business tech topics for CIO Dive and Cybersecurity Dive, and have more than once spun something I learned there into ideas for other publications. For example, I took things I learned writing this piece about cybersecurity issues with genAI and turned it into two more stories, one for a college alumni magazine and one for a banking magazine. I didn’t repeat sources, and the editors were aware I’d written about the topic before — in fact, showing I had that ability strengthened my pitches.

 

Recent Bylines

“What does the CHRO need to know about cyber security?” for HR Dive (a note on this one: I was assigned a piece for Cybersecurity Dive about this, and my HR Dive editor asked me to slant it for their publication — editors do this on their own too!)

“CIO lessons on business continuity after the CrowdStrike outage” for CIO Dive

 

What I’m Reading

• Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty. If you’ve been following my reading habits, you know that I generally like Moriarty’s books but thinks she gives too much slack to mediocre men. Three Wishes is the first book she ever published, and she does not do that. She also depicts coercive control in a way I haven’t seen in a novel before. I wrote about one specific thought a character has about this in my memoir — if you’ve read that and then read this, you’ll get it (and yes it knocked me for a loop).
• Viscount in Love (Accidental Brides #1) by Eloisa James. My favorite regency author’s newest book, this time with a dyslexic heroine (though of course they didn’t call it that at the time). How people treat her/talk about her/make assumptions about her intelligence is infuriating, but of course part of the hero’s arc is he doesn’t treat her that way and defends her intellect to others.

 

What I’m Watching

• Worst Ex Ever. Each episode of this docu-series is about a different abuser, and the trail of destruction in their wakes (three abusers are men; one is a woman). The series creators centered the victims in each episode, and also highlighted law enforcement mistakes that made everything worse. It didn’t feel sensational or exploitative for a true crime miniseries.
• The Miracle Club. This movie is about a cluster to Irish women going on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, hoping for a miracle at the shrine and baths there. The one thing that bothered me was the ages of the women didn’t match up — Kathy Bates’ and Laura Linney’s characters are supposed to be the same age, for example. It turns out that the movie, which came out in 2023, was originally green lit in 2005, and instead of recasting, they kept the same core crew. No offense to these great women of acting, but trying to figure out why women in their 70s had school aged children was distracting.
• Mother. This Albert Brooks/Debbie Reynolds comedy from 1996 hasn’t aged all too well, but it was another perfectly fine movie to just put on in an afternoon, especially because Reynolds is fun to watch in anything. I got this one free through my library’s Hoopla app.

 

Nail Polish of the Week

Check Your Baggie by Essie. A darker yellow for the end of summer. And while I know we’ll still have hot days ahead, and I’ll be returning to the Jersey Shore this month, it seemed the right color to polish off the end of the season.

 

Until next time,

Jen A. Miller

Notes from a Hired Pen ebook series

Like this post? Buy Jen a Coffee!

Bookshop.org links are affiliate links.