Scott Oldford Site

Tag: writing tools

  • Freelance Writers Den Review. Is it Worth It? Our Honest Take

    Freelance Writers Den Review. Is it Worth It? Our Honest Take

    Editor’s note: The Freelance Writers Den only opens for enrollment a few times each year. If you want to be notified when it opens, your best bet is to join the waiting list. Enjoy this Freelance Writers Den Review!

    Freelance Writers Den Review

    I’ll be honest: a huge part of the reason I became a writer was to avoid networking.

    I’m an introvert and also one of those kids who, when tasked with group projects, made everyone else in the group give me their stuff so I could do it all myself. “Teamwork” and “collaboration” don’t have prominent places in my vocabulary.

    But as I quickly learned (and as you know if you’ve spent more than two seconds trying to freelance), this is not a business where you can go it alone. Finding a writing community, or at least some reliable industry resources you can turn to, is a critical step to creating the kind of freelance career you’re dreaming of. And fortunately, there’s an option that doesn’t require leaving the house—or even putting on pants.

    Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll cover in this review:

    What is the Freelance Writers Den?

    Taking place entirely online, the Freelance Writers Den is the perfect place to find a resource-packed writing community, especially for socio-phobes like me.

    But since its 1,100+ members come from all over the world, it’s also helpful for bona fide extroverts, even if they do already have access to a real-life writing circle. Even the richest local writing community can’t compete with global!

    The Den was founded in 2011 by Carol Tice, the “Den Mother” and mind behind the Make a Living Writing blog. She’s been a successful freelancer for more than 15 years and today earns six figures doing it. She wanted to help other freelancers find real financial success as efficiently as possible—and also to stop the influx of one-off how on earth do I do this? emails she had in her inbox.

    Membership to the Freelance Writers Den comes with a host of useful tools, content, and learning opportunities, which we’ll dive into below. It costs $40 per month with no obligation—which isn’t crazy expensive, but isn’t nothing, either.

    So what do you get for your price of entry?

    Freelance Writers Den Review: "The forums are an amazing way for a work-from-home writer to interface with other real, live people" Writer Jamie Cattanach

    What features & benefits do you get as a Writers Den member?

    For most of us, freelancing isn’t exactly a get-rich-quick scheme—so when we pony up for a writing resource, we want to know we’re getting our money’s worth.

    Here’s what the $40-per-month Freelance Writers Den Membership gets you.

    Online community forums

    Ever sit down to write a story (or pen a pitch, or start a blog, or—you get it) and wish you had a friendly fellow freelancer whose shoulder you could tap to ask for advice, or even just commiserate?

    The Freelance Writers Den forums are the next-best thing: an active, affable group of writers convening to swap tips, ask and answer questions, and share both challenges and success stories.

    Unlike even the most active real-life writers’ group, the Den’s forums are open for your musings 24/7, and they’re organized into helpful and relevant categories. Moderators and fellow members chime in with answers and help within hours. The collective wisdom of the group is tremendous.

    Whether you’re looking to amp up your marketing skills or ask a specific writing question—or maybe you’re just looking to meet more writers in your position. Either way, there’s a board for it, and a writer (or ten) on the other end waiting to connect.

    Live and recorded resources

    The Freelance Writers Den is first and foremost a community, and the ability to connect with other freelancers working to meet their goals is invaluable on a fundamental level.

    But there’s also a whole lot of expertise to be mined from that community, and it’s available in the form of more than 300 hours of evergreen resources—as well as an actively-updated calendar of live events.

    • Bootcamps are essentially four-week-long ecourses, and your Writers Den membership gives you instant access to over two dozen of them. They’re designed to help you get to the next step in your writing career no matter where you are on your journey, from finding your first-ever paid gig to breaking into business writing or building a better writer website and LinkedIn page. Each bootcamp comes complete with videos and engaging homework assignments, and the ones offered live on a monthly basis feature real-time Q-and-A calls to help you make the most of the effort you’re putting into the course. They’re also augmented by discussions in the forums so you can connect with other writers diving into the same topics, and get feedback from the experts dishing the details. (In other words, it’s nothing like being yelled at by a Drill Instructor.)
    • Webinars and Podcasts are also offered by industry influencers on a regular basis, including a helpful “Ask the Editor” series which gives you an insider view of what, exactly, editors are looking for. You’ll also learn to overcome fear, increase productivity, and figure out the business end…not to mention, of course, honing the craft itself.
    • The Resource Library is where all this content lives once their livestream has passed, and it’s packed with over 300 hours of content. So even if you can’t make the scheduled events, you’ve still got plenty of helpful goodies to wade through.

    Direct Referrals for Jobs / Gigs

    Finding gigs is one of the hardest parts of freelancing, hands down. Finding good gigs is even harder.

    That fact is why I really appreciate the Den’s built-in referral system. Writers are helping other writers find gigs with an attitude of abundance. And you won’t find anything that pays less than $75 per post.

    There’s no shortage of opportunities to scope out. You’ll find both remote and on-site listings for copywriters, editors, content marketers and more, and along with regular old freelance gigs, there are also part-time, contract, and retainer positions.

    That’s really just the start of what’s available; as the helpful Orientation Guide puts it, the Den has “a lot of nooks and crannies.” Fortunately, you can easily keep tabs on it all with once-weekly newsletters that come out every Monday, getting you ready to tackle your week with strength and success.

    What do I like about the Freelance Writers Den?

    I’ve been making a living as a freelancer for a while now, and only just learned about this resource. Which parts made me say, “Man, I wish I’d known about this earlier?”

    Well, I’ll admit it: I’m not really the ecourse type. I’m midway through my third full year of freelancing, and I’ve yet to find one I’m willing to drop money on. (Of course, I was lucky enough to learn a lot of my freelancing skills through friendships with other writers, giving me a jump-start that not everyone gets. There’s that networking thing again!)

    But I know plenty of writers adore ecourses—and I have to say, a Den membership seems like a great way to access them. It offers both an active, rotating calendar of live events as well as scores of pre-recorded bootcamps, podcasts, and webinars, and you get into all of it for just $40 per month. That’s way less than the fees I usually see advertised on private ecourses.

    What I do love about the Freelance Writers Den: the job board and the forums.

    • The gigs posted on the job board are authentic, high-quality, and easy to filter, and I saw a few that hadn’t already crossed my radar via the grapevine or my newsletters. It’s nice to know they’ve been pre-screened for non-crappiness, so I don’t have to be quite as critical as I usually am while I’m clicking through. No freelancer has time to work for peanuts, and we have even less time to scrounge around on the internet trying to figure out where the well-paid jobs are. So for me, the Den’s job board is easily worth the price of entry all on its own.
    • The forums are an amazing way for a work-from-home writer to interface with other real, live people—who actually understand the unique challenges we face as freelancers and can help us find the resources, opportunities, and advice we need. I especially love the board dedicated to feedback and critiques, which allows you to get some gentle constructive criticism from other writers before you ship off your piece to an editor or potential client. Hey, better to hear it from a peer than a paying customer—or to have it derail your pitch!

    What do I not-so-like about the Freelance Writers Den?

    Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to love about this community. The recorded content could keep you busy for months, and with a vibrant group of writers ready to chat in real time, you’ve got other minds to bounce those new tips and tricks off of.

    But no platform is perfect—and if I had to pick a part of the Writers Den that could use improvement, I’d say the user interface could be a little bit more intuitive. Those “nooks and crannies” Tice mentions are well-described; it’s easy to get lost back here! And while the main parts of the site are helpfully listed as links in the site header, I constantly feel like I might be missing something as I click around.

    Rumor has it their team plans to address this in coming months.

    Ready to sign up for the Freelance Writers Den?

    So what’s the catch? Well, the Freelance Writers Den only opens its digital doors to the public twice a year.

    If you want to be notified the next time it’s open for enrollment,  your best bet is to join the waiting list.

    This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

    This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase through our links, you’re supporting The Write Life — and we thank you for that!

    Photo via apichon_tee/ Shutterstock 

  • 3 Ways Scrivener Makes Self-Publishing a Breeze

    3 Ways Scrivener Makes Self-Publishing a Breeze

    Professional creators should use professional tools.

    After all, how would you feel if you went to a restaurant and noticed the food was being cooked in cheap microwaves by chefs using low-quality equipment? You would probably rightly assume the output from substandard tools would be a substandard meal.

    Writers are no different.

    To produce the best work possible, it’s vital to find the right tools for the job.

    How many writers do you know who still use a standard word processor app like Microsoft Word? Perhaps you even do yourself. Why? It’s often due to a lack of knowledge about what else is out there.

    I still remember the day I found something better and tried it out for the first time.

    That something better was a writing tool named Scrivener.

    Here’s how this tool has made a major difference to my writing process.

    1. Better research and planning

    The self-publishing marketplace is more crowded and competitive than ever before.

    In the past, it was possible to release a hastily written book containing the minimum of research, and still experience success. Those days are gone. Success in the current climate requires careful and conscious research.

    Research isn’t easy. We live in an era of unprecedented information and ideas.

    Curating the best and most suitable concepts for your book is no easy task. Yet so many writers make it even tougher than it needs to be by taking a scattergun approach to the collection and storage of information.

    Before I discovered Scrivener, my research process typically involved a mess of folders, files and illogically named documents. Even worse, leaving my writing software and accessing my research disrupted my creative flow and led to procrastination and distraction.

    Scrivener helped me to collect, organize and access my research in a way I never even knew was possible. Within Scrivener, you have all of your research directly available, next to the actual writing environment itself, as seen below.

    Being able to see all of your research without having to leave your writing software is an incredible time-saver and productivity-booster. You never have to run the risk of forgetting about a useful piece of research while in the throes of creation.

    Scrivener painlessly integrates text, visual and online research. It also syncs up with Evernote, making Scrivener a superb choice for Evernote fans.

    Some of the best research and planning features of Scrivener for fiction writers include the ability to create, store and access detailed character notes, create a detailed and useful outline of your story, and to store images and ideas related to setting and location.

    Professional writers need professional tools. Improve your writing process from start to finish with Scrivener.

    2. Writing well

    Any specialist writing software worth your time and money needs to offer functionality and benefit when it comes to the actual activity of writing itself.

    While research and planning are important, the core activity for writers will always be, unsurprisingly, writing itself. Thankfully, Scrivener does not disappoint in this area.

    Some of my favorite aspects of writing while using Scrivener include –

    • The ability to write in a distraction-free fullscreen mode
    • The option to use a template created by another writer to structure my work in a tried and tested way
    • Setting quantified writing targets and visually monitoring my progress towards them in real time
    • Being able to quickly and easily rearrange chapters and scenes as I write

    Write without distraction

    If you’ve ever struggled with the problem of being able to zone in on your writing and get things done, you will appreciate the full-screen composition mode offered by Scrivener. It’s a way of digitally tuning out the distractions of the world and zoning in on the vital process of stringing sentences together.

    As you can see from the above image, Scrivener blocks out everything but the words you are writing. If you combine this with a time period where you turn off your internet and cellphone, you will truly be able to focus on your writing. The full screen mode shown above displays a plain background, but you can also customize the image seen. Views of nature are a popular choice.

    Use templates for successful structures

    One of the toughest challenges for me was knowing the proper structure to use when setting out to write a book. This is another area where Scrivener excels.

    You can easily download, import and modify Scrivener templates. This gives you a predefined structure for your manuscript and research which allows you to focus on the act of actually creating.

    Using templates in Scrivener can also give you the confidence to try out a style or method of writing you may not have experience with. For example, if you’ve wanted to write a screenplay, but haven’t known exactly how, a template can be your best friend.

    The above image shows the template selection available when loading up Scrivener. You can always add and modify templates depending on your personal requirements.

    Set targets and monitor progress

    Almost every writer has a unique approach to measuring progress and monitoring projects. If you like to set targets for your writing, and ensure you stay on track, Scrivener makes it easy. You can easily set writing targets for an individual writing session, or an entire project, and quickly monitor your progress towards them, as seen below.

    You can see that the progress box floats over your writing and shows both your overall and session targets.

    Scrivener also allows you to quickly combine, separate and rearrange the individual pieces of a writing project. If you are rewriting nonfiction, and aren’t exactly sure of the order you want your chapters to be in, it’s easy to switch up the sequence, as seen below.

    3. Formatting and sharing

    Have you ever experienced the joy of seemingly finishing a writing project, only to experience unexpected frustration when finding the right format for your work, and exporting it, becomes a nightmare?

    This is especially true when writing in software like Microsoft Word. It can be tricky to impossible to find a way of easily converting your work into the right file format. Even if you do manage to export to the file type you need, there’s often no guarantee that your work will look the way you wanted in its final form.

    In Scrivener, you can ensure that your writing project will look exactly as you intended after you export it. Some of the options for doing this can be seen below.

    Scrivener also supports a wealth of export file formats, which are suited to different types of writing.

    Some of the file format supported by Scrivener include –

    * .epub (used for Google, iBookstore, Nook and Kobo)

    * .mobi (used for the Kindle store)

    * .html (used for webpages)

    * .PDF (used for Adobe Reader)

    * .doc (compatible with MS Word and Google Docs)

    This powerful export capability can save both time and money. Exporting with Scrivener can save on the need to hire a freelance worker to carry out the format process for your book. It also can help you to avoid having to invest in a separate piece of software to get the file format you want.

    As well as being great for full ebooks, this file format versatility is well-suited to blogging. Bestselling author Michael Hyatt decided to switch to Scrivener for all his writing projects, not just his books. While you may not decide to go this far yourself, it’s good to know that Scrivener is suitable for whatever type of writing project you decide to engage in.

    Better Books With Scrivener

    Writing a book is a demanding endeavour requiring software that is up to scratch. Scrivener not only produces a better final product, but also makes each and every stage of the writing process easier along the way.

    If you have any questions about Scrivener, feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to respond. I’d also love to know about any awesome Scrivener benefits you’ve discovered that I haven’t mentioned here.

    This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase through our links, you’re supporting The Write Life — and we thank you for that!
    links