I Write a Weekly Series for The Writing Cooperative
By: Melinda Crow
Tags: Publishing, Ideas, Advice, Ｍedium, Writing

There’s nothing quite like a solid weekly deadline to keep you on track when it comes to producing content. You may not even be aware of columns or series within your favorite publications. The pubs themselves rarely make a big deal about them. On The Writing Cooperative, they add a kicker above the title with the name of the series. My kicker is “Writer’s Toolkit.”

It’s an easy method for publications to ensure a predictable stream of scheduled content, even during slack times — like end-of-year holidays when writers sometimes let writing slip through the proverbial cracks.

It occurred to me you might be interested in how I got the series and how it’s worked out so far. For the record, I was among a group of writers invited to pitch series ideas during the late summer months. With some input from the editors and a touch of fine-tuning, my idea for a series dedicated to writing tools — both literal and figurative — kicked off in October.

Here’s how you can potentially land a series of your own:

Learn the publication

Stop typing your brilliant thoughts long enough to read the publication. More, importantly, read what the editors are writing about. Study their writing. Those are the people you need to impress. Read every single guideline several times. Commit them to memory and bookmark the page so that each time you finish a piece you can refer back before you hit the publish button.

Show up

Step two for becoming a regular writer for ANY publication is to show up on a regular basis. In my years as a freelance writer, I’ve worked with some large publications in my field of travel writing. I honestly can say only one was a swing and a miss when it came to my becoming a “regular” contributor. Editors are looking for reliability. If you are a writer who produces reliably competent work on a regular basis, they know they can trust you to continue to do so.

Be known

Without being stalker-ish, find and follow the editors on Twitter and LinkedIn, continuing to read their work to get a feel for what makes them tick. If the publication has its own Twitter handle, follow that. If the publication has a Facebook page or group, follow, join, and comment. Every interaction you have with the people behind the publication is one more time they see both your name and your enthusiasm.

Ask for more

This is the hardest thing in the world for some of us to do. It’s right up there with calling the doctor’s office for test results you are certain will be bad news. But just as those test results are often not as big a deal as you thought, asking an editor for a regular gig is less painful than you fear.

Think of it this way: There are only two answers, yes or no. If the answer is yes, you can celebrate and get to work. If it’s a no, what will you do? Get to work. You can’t really lose. Either way, you’re gonna have to do the work.

And if you’re lucky like I was, by following all the other steps, you might not have to ask. The publication may reach out to you.

Here’s what’s in it for you

Some of you are losing enthusiasm about now. The “ask” part was kind of a bubble buster. I get that. You’re happy coasting along with your handful of loyal followers and your place in the 94% of dabblers on this platform making less than $100 a month. Or maybe you already broke into the 6% realm but still hover well below the paying-your-bills level of income.

But for those of you malcontent dreamers still reading, here’s the list of what “being a regular” can do for you.

It puts you on a deadline

After thirty-plus years as a freelancer, you’d think I could enforce my own deadlines better, but there is something about a commitment to another human that amps up the pressure to produce.

It makes idea generation easier

If you have a guaranteed assignment to write and it’s neatly tucked within a niche, maybe even an atomic niche (yes, that’s a thing and I’ll be talking about it in an upcoming story in Writer’s Toolkit), you have a built-in idea generator. In my case, I know that even if I don’t have a brilliant idea for the next installment, I can fall back on the overarching plan of the series: helping writers navigate the various tools available to them.

It lets you be seen on a regular basis

My series has a specific time slot. It’s published at 11 am Eastern on Saturdays. That makes it promotable. The scheduled time makes it a reliable read and me a reliable writer.

It gathers followers

When you read top writers telling you over and over and over that followers find you through your writing, take them at their word. The more you write about the same topic, the more likely readers of that topic are to follow you. Other than a system purge that happened early this fall, my follower count has been on a steady rise since I began the series.

It earns you more money

The earning power of all my stories has been rising at an even faster pace than my follower count. Again, this is about the regularity of readers of the publication seeing my name every week writing about the same topic. On average, I’ve seen a 50% increase in my earnings since the series began in August, even as other Medium writers have been complaining about lower earnings.

Beyond Medium, every single outlet I’ve written for as a “regular” has paid more. Like the employee who shows up on time and works hard with enthusiasm, regulars in the freelance writing world are likely to edge out everyone else when the money is doled out.

You may get to move to the head of the submission cue

I can’t speak for publications other than The Writing Cooperative, but if you are assigned a specific series to write in almost any publication, it’s likely you will be provided an email address to send your submissions to, perhaps even your non-series submissions. That gives you an edge you can’t put a price on.

The deal may include “distribution” privileges

As you may know, some of the large publications here on Medium have negotiated expanded distribution for some or all of the stories they publish. My tiny publication doesn’t have that kind of clout, so I’m not privileged to the inner workings. What I do know, though, is that my Writer’s Toolkit stories automatically receive “distribution.”

Takeaways and other tidbits

The deeper story here is that if you follow the steps of working toward landing a series, you stand to be rewarded with all of the same things I get with my series, whether you get one or not.

In other words: You could change my headers above to Do this and Get this. It’s really that simple.

One last note: I’ve been asked about the Saturday time slot. Is it lucrative? My take is that it’s doing fine. My Saturday reads lag a little, but Sunday and Monday more than make up for it. Keep in mind that the full impact of “distribution” includes emails sent to topical followers. Those rarely happen early on the day of publication.