SLICE & DICE ARTICLES:The Bread & Butter of Writing

If you’re at all like me, you may only be able to write one book per year. Sure there’s NaNoWriMo where you write one book in a month, but you’re still going to need the other 11 months to edit, revise, and polish it into something you can submit. And the advance paid on one book may or may not be worth one year’s income. If it’s the latter, (NOT worth a full year’s income) then you need to think of ways to supplement your income. Have you thought of writing articles for magazines, newspapers or websites? Here’s your ticket to how to “pay the rent.”

A great majority of writers I know, who treat writing as a business, not an aspiration or a hobby, know that article writing is where the money is at. Not only can you write an article, based on a book you’re writing even, but you can do what they call “slice and dice,” which is where you can use the information you’ve gathered, and repackage it in a number of ways for a variety of outlets. For example, I wrote a 240 page reference book on Teen Depression. In addition to that, I wrote an article entitled, How to Spot Depression in Your Regular Patrons for a national magazine for librarians, pitched an article on How to Get Out of Your Funk  to a magazine for teens, wrote a book proposal for Adults on “Depression and Anxiety,” and an article for Parents on How to Spot Depression vs. Regular Teen Angst. 

The point is, if don’t take advantage of all of the files and files of information you gather while writing your book, you’re leaving money on the table. Surely, there is a stack of unused data, just waiting to be parleyed into other written pieces.

Take a broad topic that interests you: for example, cooking. Then find 5 different ways to repackage it.

1.     Meals under 20 minutes
2.     Meals for $20 for a family of four
3.     Meals any child could cook
4.     Meals with low carbs but high tastiness
5.     Meals in a Crock Pot

There you go, you have 5 magazine articles from one subject matter aimed at a few different audiences, or outlets (such as on-line e-zine, print magazine, blog, book, newspaper) and you can submit different ideas to all the outlets.

My goal is to write and market two articles per month to add cash flow to my business (The Purcell Agency, LLC). As a professional writer, and business owner, it’s good to have steady income while you build your business’ assets. 

What way will you butter your company’s bread?

© Tina P. Schwartz, 2016