‘Feast or famine’ is a phrase that’s often used to sum up the freelance workflow — one minute, you’re scrabbling around for commissions, and the next you’re staying up late every night to keep all your clients happy. What’s to be done?

Ask: temporary or permanent?

When you have a lot of work on, the first thing is to consider how long-term the situation is. If it’s a case of making some extra cash with a couple of chunky one-off rush jobs, my tendency is to take them on, be prepared for a busy few days, and reap the benefit. I can always take things a bit easier after that. …

Gwen Goodkin’s A Place Remote (West Virginia University Press) is a collection of stories that examines the lives of characters from a small fictional town in rural Ohio. ‘When I began writing this collection in 2005, I had no plans for it to be a book,’ she says. ‘I just wrote the stories as they came to me. Eventually I realised they belonged together.’ She had a publisher and she had her material; there just remained the small detail of working out how best to put the stories together.

‘I could show you screenshot after screenshot of me working out the order of the stories in notebooks, the back of envelopes, scraps of paper,’ says Gwen Goodkin. ‘I thought about the order over a long period of time because there are so many directions a writer can take.’ …

While content is a multimillion industry for big brands worldwide, there are still many businesses sectors — especially smaller businesses — who don’t see that content is worth it for them. They’re not necessarily against content — they may in fact quite like the idea of having a blog or publishing regular articles or ebooks. It’s just that their marketing budgets are finite and they aren’t sure how paying a freelance writer like you to write content for them will yield a decent return on their investment.

Here, then, are some key ways to help you build the business case when selling in content work. …

I’m a writer who wears different hats. In my day job, I do commercial copywriting and content on behalf of brands for a marketing agency; in another part of my life, I write short stories, novels and articles about fiction.

It got me thinking. What’s the best way to go about managing these diverse writing identities?

Start by setting clear dividing lines

I found it helpful at the outset to keep my writing identities quite separate. I blogged and commented a lot about content and copywriting for work, and this felt very different to the tentative steps I was taking to develop as a fiction writer. …

If you’ve looked at any recruitment pages recently, you may have noticed a lot of jargon creeping into job titles. Here we strip the acronyms and buzzwords away to reveal the — often quite straightforward — roles that lie underneath…

UX writer

UX stands for user experience, and what a UX writer does is to craft the little bits of copy that steer users through key journeys on an app or website — opening a bank account, for example, completing an insurance quote form or upgrading your access to a product. You’ll be writing the little bits of ‘microcopy’, such as button names, navigation labels and calls to action. This is a growing specialism, and often involves working alongside specialists who are testing customer behaviour, but a lot of it is common sense for the right kind of writer. …

The issue of freelance pay is a sensitive one, but there are good reasons to benchmark your rates. Knowing what your work is worth gives you ammo to negotiate better rates and helps dive up industry rates overall. Here’s how to work out what you should be paid…

Ask around among your peers

Talking to fellow freelancers about how much they charge and how much they get paid is the first step to benchmarking your own pay. The more transparency freelancers have with each other, the more power they have to drive up rates for all. …

For about 30 years, I slogged away trying to write a novel. But I just never had the plotting smarts or the emotional stamina, and I became like a madman running again and again at a brick wall, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Then, one day, and only a couple of decades overdue, I had a rather marvellous thought. You’re used to writing short things — articles, web pages and the like. You’re a sprinter, not a marathon runner. Why don’t you have a go at short fiction?

As a journalist and content writer in my day job, I like a deadline. Deadlines concentrate the mind, deadlines force you to finish things. So I googled ‘short story competitions’ and found that, surprise surprise, there were actually quite a few out there, and all with a deadline. …

In a short story, where a whole world or emotional journey can be summoned up and dramatised in the space of a few pages, every line and word has to count — and that’s especially true of the way you begin. Here, for inspiration, are a range of starting strategies from some great exponents of the form…

1. The telling detail

ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas. …