Celebrating 10 Years With TWFH’s Erin Larson

10 years ago, an online “want ad” grabbed the attention of Wisconsin-based writer and editor, Erin Larson. Little did she know, her decision to respond to the ad would eventually propel her into a fascinating new career with an up-and-coming writing agency.

In celebration of her decade anniversary with The Writers For Hire, we sat down with Erin reflect on the past 10 years. Here’s what she had to say.

What kind of work did you do before you joined The Writers For Hire?

I was a managing editor for health care associations’ publications (continuing education textbooks, industry journals, member newsletters, etc.).

How did you first get involved with The Writers For Hire?

It was all very fortuitous: I responded to an online “want ad” for writers, but Wintress (Owner and Senior Editor at TWFH) explained that they were keeping it local. After seeing the same ad a couple months later, I decided to press my luck and try again. Wintress said that one of the lead writers had just relocated to my area and she was willing to try out having another remote writer. (Thank you, Stephanie!)

What is the best part of your job?

Being able to do what I love in the comfort of my home office, while still being part of a wonderfully supportive team.

What’s the most unusual project you’ve done?

Writing copy for soda bottle labels for a start-up craft brew – it was pretty hilarious to write “food” copy.

What have been some of your favorite projects over the past 10 years?

  • Research/writing about dredging the Mississippi River and the Panama Canal – those were my “trial” projects. This was a topic I had never even thought about but learned some fascinating facts.
  • Interviewing tribe members and writing about the history of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe of Minnesota – I traveled to the reservation to meet with members of the tribe for a compilation of personal stories.
  • Editing a book about one woman’s struggle to find answers to her health problems – I really enjoyed helping her bring closure to her experience.
  • Editing a “self-help” book about wealth accumulation – the client wrote the compelling, witty copy, and it was fun to be part of the team that brought his work to fruition.

What is the most challenging project you’ve worked on?

An SOP project for a power company in the Southwest – the topic is very “nuanced,” as the client continues to tell us, which means it’s very difficult for the SMEs to articulate what they want us to write.

How has the company changed since you started with TWFH?

The pool of writers has expanded significantly. Other than Wintress and Kathy, there were only a handful of us at the time. The client roster was much smaller, so Wintress was integral on almost all projects. As TWFH grew bigger, introducing the role of the Project Manager was a smart change to give all clients a dedicated PM-and-writer team.

Establishing our project management systems (with Wrike and SharePoint) and adopting Skype for TWFH team communication have streamlined our processes.

What advice would you give to new incoming writers?

Be open to critique. Be open to new topics. Take advantage of the TWFH team approach – we have a fantastic group of administrators and writers who can provide extra support when you need it.

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About Erin:

With a Bachelor of Science in Language Arts from Georgetown University and 20 years of editorial experience, Erin brings a passion for words and well-crafted writing to every project. As a writer, she revels in the opportunity to create vibrant original copy and rejuvenate tired text. She has written on a range of topics, in a variety of styles, and for an array of platforms. As an editor, proofreader, translator, and trusted second set of eyes, she has helped clients from around the world enhance their writing. A self-proclaimed editorial perfectionist, Erin once canceled a credit card because of a grammatically incorrect form letter, which she edited and promptly sent back to the company. (Incidentally, she wasn’t surprised to receive no response.)


Rebranding: 3 Ways a Writing Agency Can Help

Every business needs an upgrade once in a while. Whether you’re integrating a new philosophy or undergoing organizational changes, rebranding is necessary to make sure the improvements within your business match the message you want to portray.

With so much research, planning, and strategy involved, it may seem like a daunting process. If your company decides to rebrand, hiring a writing agency to help with content creation is a great way to ensure that all of your content needs are met, while setting your business up for success in the long run.

What is rebranding?

(Photo by Eva Bronzini: https://www.pexels.com/photo/text-on-white-paper-7661590/)

Rebranding is a marketing strategy that involves a company undergoing changes to some aspect of its identity and creating new materials and processes to reflect that.

Whether it be a new concept, name, design, or all of the above, rebranding intends to change the corporate image of a company from the perspective of customers, investors, competitors, and stakeholders.

Partial Versus Complete Rebranding

Businesses rebrand for different reasons. Some of the common ones are:

  • Market repositioning. A business may need to shift its brand identity to target a new audience. This requires rebranding of some sort to follow suit.
  • Acquisitions and mergers. Two companies coming together means discovering a brand that represents the new entity.
  • A change in vision, mission, or values. A company’s core message needs to be reflected in its branding to attract the right customers. If your brand’s philosophy changes, rebranding is necessary to ensure your new message resonates in the best way.
  • Expanding to new markets or locations. When a business ventures into a new market or location, rebranding promotes a new image for audiences to identify with.

When a company is just looking to freshen up its brand identity, it will likely change some aspects while keeping the brand’s heart.

A partial rebranding is a way to redefine a company’s place in the market with refinements in visual brand identity, services, or marketplace. Minor “facelifts” like redesigning company logos, reworking mottos and catchphrases, or upgrading color schemes are involved.

A complete rebranding includes changing all aspects of a company, resulting in a new organization. All of a company’s internal and external structures are revamped to fit the company’s new identity. Complete rebranding is common with companies experiencing mergers, acquisitions, and product overhauls.

What role does content creation play in rebranding?

Wintress Odom, owner of The Writers For Hire, explains: “Handling content when rebranding can be difficult for a company to take on alone. It’s an overwhelming process, and many don’t know the best way to attack the problem. The biggest challenge I see is one person has been put in charge of reworking, rewriting, and revamping a huge amount of content—on top of their everyday job!”

For every business, content is king. It’s easy to underestimate how much new content needs to be created and updated when rebranding. Along with new designs, marketing strategies, and style guides, rebranding requires vast amounts of content—especially for companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions.

Some of the most common types of content needed when rebranding include:

  • Internal Communications
    • Emails
    • Processes
    • SOPs
    • Day-to-day operational content
    • Policies and procedures
    • Reports
    • Stakeholder communications (internal and external)
  • External Communications
    • Website copy
    • Ads
    • Blog posts
    • Social media posts
    • Email newsletters
    • Direct mail
    • Style guides
    • Brochures

You may not know the first step to tackle when working on content rebranding. Every department within your company has different content creation needs, and it might feel like they all need to be met at once.

So much time and effort go into creating one piece of quality content. And content creation is only one part of the grand scheme of rebranding. Instead of overwhelming yourself trying to keep up with content, you might want to consider hiring a writing agency.

3 Ways Hiring a Writing Agency Can Help With Rebranding

Deciding to hire a writing agency ensures you will have quality content that reflects your brand appropriately, prevents issues like employee burnout, and ultimately saves time and money.

Agencies have experienced writers who specialize in the task at hand.

When you hire a writing agency, you can be confident that the content creation process is in good hands.

Writing agencies employ skilled writers who are experts in creating the types of content you need.

You can be at ease knowing that the end product will be quality content that is creative and well-written without common mistakes.

It also helps to have a different set of eyes on your marketing content. A writing agency can offer suggestions to improve your strategy and ensure that your company gets the right message across.

Agencies take over content creation, so your employees don’t have to.

According to Odom, “Content is almost always an afterthought. Because of this, some of it never gets done at all. Pieces of it will get done, but the pieces that don’t, become this mess of legacy content that just sort of stays around and confuses people.”

Rebranding can leave you and your team swamped with unfamiliar writing tasks on top of a typical workday. A writing agency takes over the process, so you avoid adding too much to your employees’ plates. This way content becomes a priority in your rebranding process instead of something that will get done eventually.

Handing over content writing to an agency means subject matter experts (SMEs) can be involved when it matters while still getting their actual jobs done.

When you hire a writing agency, you’re investing in your business.

Choosing to hire a writing agency may be a costly upfront expense, but it will allow you to save time and money in the long run. A writing agency helps you prioritize the most urgent items to ensure that all efforts are consistent and organized. Since the agency’s primary focus is content, you can concentrate on other parts of the rebranding process.

Outsourcing writing tasks can help increase business efficiency and profits over time while reducing operating costs. Since everything related to content creation is handled by the writing agency, the end product will be cohesive and your key messaging, tasks, and goals will be clearly expressed in your content. The improvements in internal and external content will result in less wasted time, effort, and business costs.

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What to Consider When Hiring a Writing Agency

Consider and prepare a few things before you hire a writing agency to help with content rebranding. To ensure the company you are hiring produces the best results, consider:

  • Performance versus size. Just because an agency is large doesn’t mean it’s always the best option. Make sure to dig deep into the history of the agency you’re thinking about hiring and base your decision on the strides they’ve made in the writing industry.
  • Portfolio. Checking out an agency’s portfolio is the easiest way to assess their work, reputation, and processes and see if they align with what you want to achieve with your rebranding. Look at their testimonials and see if they have previous experience working with companies similar to yours.
  • Track record. If you’re on the fence about a particular agency, speak to one of their former clients. You’ll be able to get unfiltered insight into what it’s like working with the agency and discuss the client’s overall level of satisfaction. It could be the deciding factor in whom you choose to work with.

Once you choose the right agency for you, prepare your team. Each department head should set goals to attain and create a plan, itemizing materials that need to be created and updated.

What does the content rebranding process look like?

“Every company’s rebranding process will be different, depending on factors like deadlines, preferences, who they are, etc.,” says Odom. “It also depends on the type of rebranding. Mergers and acquisitions usually need the most content. When two companies are merging, we take the best from each company’s processes and services to create new content.”

When you hire a writing agency, all content needs are taken care of, but communication between SMEs and writers is necessary to complete specific tasks.

Making your employees available for integral parts will ensure the content creation process is straightforward and that the writing agency has the information they need to produce the best results.

Some essential steps in the content rebranding process are:

  • Data collection. Data collection is necessary for the agency to learn more about your company. You may be asked to provide legacy content, and some agencies will sit in on training sessions and interviews with new hires. This way, the agency can understand your company’s culture and processes and create content to reflect that.
  • Content audit. The writing agency and your team will band together to conduct a content audit to assess your content needs. This will involve analyzing and cataloging all of your company’s content for strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.
  • Gap analysis. A gap analysis will determine your company’s content requirements and assess the performance of your current content. The agency will figure out what’s missing, what needs to be updated, and how, based on the results of the content audit and suggestions from SMEs.
  • Mapping out workflows. Does the new process differ from the old one? Mapping out workflows deciphers what steps should be added or omitted based on your new business processes. The agency creates an actionable improvement plan so accurate content for each new process can be created.
  • Prioritization of tasks. The agency will prioritize which content to tackle first. Some content poses a higher risk than others. High-risk content that is poorly constructed is most important to address.
  • Content creation. A skilled team of writers creates the necessary content, and your SMEs offer revisions. Groups of writers who are experts at interviewing SMEs and know the best questions to ask to understand and write about your business processes will be in charge of creating content.
  • Signoffs. Different companies have different requirements regarding signoffs. Once revisions are complete, you’ll want the leader in each department of your company to review and approve documents.
  • Quality assurance. The quality of each document is assessed to meet the specified requirements of your business. A front-to-back edit is conducted to ensure the new content for each process is working together in harmony.
  • Style guide edit. All content is edited and proofread against your brand and style guide. The final touches such as fonts, color schemes, and word usage are added to ensure the content accurately reflects your brand.

Final Thoughts

Choosing to hire a writing agency might be your best option to streamline content creation in your rebranding process—especially if you’re experiencing a merger or acquisition. Not having to focus on your content needs frees up your time to concentrate on other aspects of rebranding.

When you correctly approach content rebranding, it’ll benefit your business in the long run. Investing in good documentation ensures quality results and reduces wasted time and effort. This eventually increases profits by improving stakeholder communications, marketing strategies, and credibility.

Always remember to focus on an agency’s work and reputation when choosing the best option for you.

For the Love of Words: A Writing Agency’s Story

“I’ve always loved writing; I really had a passion for it all my life,” says Wintress Odom, owner and editor-in-chief at The Writers for Hire (TWFH), a Houston-based writing agency with clients across the U.S. and the world.

When she started out as a solo freelance writer over 20 years ago, Wintress Odom didn’t know that both adversity and success lay ahead. She would need to meet challenges and make changes during those years to grow her writing business and keep it growing.

http://thefreelancewriter.com/

A Writer by Nature

Wintress Von Mayer graduated cum laude from Rice University in 2000 with a Bachelor of Arts in Evolutionary Biology. She’d considered other majors and had excelled in language early on.

Throughout high school, Von Mayer had stayed at the head of her class in English, and her early ambitions involved becoming a science fiction writer. “I have a few half-baked books still hanging around,” she muses.

During college, she says, writing was the only part of the science labs she enjoyed:

I kept messing a lab up so badly that we had to keep redoing it. It was a big deal because we had to refill the pipettes and re-centrifuge them. Eventually, I asked my very brilliant lab partner if I could just stop touching things and write the report instead. I think she was relieved. She finished the lab perfectly and I got to write the report, which she seemed more than happy to get out of.

Getting Started, Becoming a Writing Agency

Unsure which career direction to take, the new graduate searched for an answer with her fiancé Sean Odom while she worked as a bartender and waitress.

“We were young,” muses TWFH’s owner, “and we talked about [owning] vending machines. At one point [he] wanted to be a talent scout for baseball, or we were going to inherit his family farm and run that. We were all over the place.”

Even as they worked through the options, her penchant for writing was never in question.

While his future wife had finished her degree, Sean had taken courses in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

After her graduation, he landed an internship in the emerging field of attracting customers via the internet.

“He had just started in SEO,” she remembers, “so I put up a little website, and it kind of coincided with me graduating. I didn’t really intend to start a writing business. I intended to freelance while I was figuring out what to do with my life. So instead, what happened was I started to get busy with writing.”

The two were married in September of 2001, as the new writing business was taking off.

Ranking on search engines was “a lot easier” in those days, Odom reflects, “so I put up all sorts of stuff and I was getting leads all over the place from the Internet.” Enhanced by Sean’s knowledge of SEO, one website had become two: thewriterforhire.com and thefreelancewriter.com.

“He was absolutely instrumental in getting the business going,” Odom says of her husband’s role. “It was because of the websites and the fact that he was able to get me leads that started the whole thing, really.”

Too busy with writing to keep her bartending and waitressing gigs, she gave them up. When a satisfied client had to be told there would be a three-month wait for a newsletter, he took his business elsewhere. Odom decided it was time to get some help.

Posting an ad in her alma mater’s newspaper, she found fellow Rice graduate Meghan Whitmore and hired her as a co-writer. Soon, she also hired Julianna Amim and Holly McReavy as copywriters, planting the seeds of a writing agency.

Writing Excellence and Customer Service

An early TWFH homepage told prospective clients: “I believe any piece of writing is worthy of perfection, be it a three-hundred-page company handbook, a vacuum cleaner manual, or the back of a box of macaroni and cheese.”

On the same page, Odom added, “I have always gone the extra mile for my clients. You will find that I am meticulous, that my work is original, and that I will consistently produce above and beyond expectations.”

The young writing agency’s site became thewritersforhire.com, and TWFH blossomed, adding more writers as it added more clients.

Happily, Odom remembers, “one of our largest customers for a while, one that I was super excited to get, a huge customer for me … was a serial entrepreneur [who] would put up websites on all of these crazy things. I wrote all of his websites on funny products like deer whistles and covert coolers and emu oil.”

Growing the Agency, Writing Through the Challenges

From 2003-2005, the writing agency’s client base grew to more than 50, including firms like Mitsubishi and Caterpillar Forklift Trucks. Its writing and office staff grew, too.

Kathleen Kimm had worked as an auditor at Yellowstone National Park, where she met her husband before moving to his native Houston and Odom’s neighborhood.

The women became friends, and then co-workers when Kimm-Rinchiuso took over bookkeeping and accounting at TWFH as Administrative Assistant.

She is still with the agency as Office Manager.

Rinchiuso remembers those early years: “We had hired several full-time, on-staff employee writers and we had a house we were using as office space, and everybody was coming in person.”

Much of that would change with the coming economic storm that crushed many U.S. businesses.

Economic Crash Brings Changes

“The economy was just doing awesome up until about 2007/2008 when we had that big financial crash,” Odom recalls. “When that crash happened, it was like the phone wouldn’t stop ringing with clients who just weren’t doing business with us anymore.”

Some clients didn’t even notify TWFH about dropping its writing services, she says, “Like [when] the entire department of a Fortune 100 financial company that we were working with got canned. We had some really exciting accounts, and then everybody just left. It was rough.”

The economic downturn meant that Odom would need to make some tough decisions. “We put everybody on contract except for two people,” she remembers. A lot of people didn’t want to be on contract. It was a heartbreaking ordeal. Some people found other work.

“We got rid of the office; everyone went back to their homes. I always thought we would go back to the office, but after a few months, I was able to get a little bit of perspective and rethink it. I’d talk to people, and they’d say, ‘I’d rather stay home,’ so I said, ‘Well, just stay home then.’”

The agency’s home-based writers continued to craft personal pieces like autobiographies and memoirs; along with business pieces like website copy, press releases, business proposals, manuals, or almost anything else a client needed.

A bright spot appeared in the darkness of the failing economy when TWFH was awarded the 2007 Better Business Bureau Gold Star Award (it would again win in 2012).

Despite the poor economy, the writing agency grew. “We have really grown organically,” says Odom. “It seems like every year we add two or three more writers.”

A 2008 webpage offered “copywriters, ghostwriters, editors, proofreaders, scriptwriters, journalists…writers.”

The same page described the company’s uniqueness:

Amazing, but true: The Writers for Hire is one of the only firms in the nation to offer writing as its sole service. Writing and information marketing are our core focuses—that means we build your projects around thoroughly researched, solidly planned, no-filler-fluff content. We craft the words that quarterback your ideas, close your sale and do the legwork for your branding.

Building Client Relationships, Refining the Team Approach

The collaborative approach that began to take shape when Odom hired her first co-writer became central to the writing agency’s methods. TWFH began using writing teams and objective proofreaders and editors to complete and refine each project.

From its beginnings, the agency was versatile, offering a variety of writing services for businesses and individuals. Its versatility grew as the writing staff grew in size and diversity—writers’ prior specialties in various industries enabling them to speak the professional “languages” of their clients or pick them up quickly.

Teamwork and versatility have been important pieces of TWFH’s customer-oriented viewpoint since the early years.

“I’ve really worked hard to keep the clients happy, and that’s been really important to me,” Odom reflects. “I don’t understand not having good customer service. I care too much. We still actually have one client that’s been with us for about 20 years. In general, we try to build lasting relationships with our clients.”

The writing agency’s website affirms: “The vast majority of our business comes from repeat customers, many of whom we’ve worked with for more than 10 years.”

Writing Agency, Technical Writers, Ghostwriters – The Writers For Hire

Current Portfolio

Today, TWFH’s client list numbers over 500, with Fortune 500 companies among them.

The company’s large portfolio showcases work across a spectrum of industries and forms of writing.

The agency’s work has appeared in over 40 well-known publications, among them:

  • The Denver Post
  • The Boston Globe
  • Smithsonian Magazine
  • The Philadelphia Inquirer
  • Los Angeles Times
  • The New York Times
  • USA Today
  • The Washington Post
  • Business Insider
  • Houston Chronicle
  • Rolling Stone
  • Breitbart

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Still Writing, Agency Owner Loves Her Business

With about 25 current writers and staff, TWFH writing teams produce an array of writing projects for individuals and businesses. Odom says she likes tackling her favorites in both categories:

On the personal side, I really love doing the family histories and autobiographies. I love the genealogical work; it’s just so much fun. And the autobiographies are great because you really get to hear about people’s lives and experiences, and oftentimes you get to learn really neat stories. We’ve had some fascinating clients from different cultures, and different heritages. One of our stories was about a lady who was in the Nazi Youth, and after the war, she fell in love with a soldier. She didn’t speak any English and came to New Mexico. She was tough. That is completely different than the other thing I love doing, which is solving big, complex problems like campaigns. I like putting together thought leadership campaigns with all of the moving parts to achieve a goal with a lot of different types of content. I like solving problems with content.

For her part, Rinchiuso’s role at the writing agency has expanded. While still handling invoicing, collections, HR, and payroll, she says she also manages certain writing projects:

I do a lot of project management as well, especially anything involving programming or website design projects—I will often manage that portion of it, and I kind of work with the website developers to make sure they’re doing what the client wants. Also with the bigger projects I help coordinate and make sure all of the writers are hitting their deadlines.

Odom and Rinchiuso have shared the writing agency’s successes and challenges through the years while ensuring it’s delivered consistently for clients.

The owner’s unintentional “decision” to start a writing business as a new college grad seems to have been the right one. As she explains: “I like the journey, I love the clients, I love the work, I love the team. I’m happy with the organic growth. I don’t necessarily want to run a venture capitalist start-up, a massive-growth company. That doesn’t sound like fun to me.”

Summing up the reasons she loves her business 20 plus years down the road from its small beginnings, Odom says:

I think it’s just the fact that I always loved the written word; writing is like a puzzle to me, I like putting concepts together in the most optimal fashion for whatever the format is. I just like learning about stuff; I find so many things fascinating, so really, it’s kind of the perfect job for somebody that couldn’t decide what to major in. You get to major in all of them.

A Proofreader’s Checklist

Proofreading can be scary at times because it carries so much responsibility.

The proofreader must deliver a product that is as perfect as humanly possible.

In some businesses, the proofreader is the last person to touch a document, making the final changes before it is published.

Like editing, proofreading can require a light or a heavy hand, depending on the subject matter and the complexity of the text.

Some drafts require only minor fixes – typos, missing punctuation, misspellings – while others require extensive fact-checking in addition to correcting grammatical errors.

The Writers for Hire team has worked through a few kinks in its own processes, and shares the results here.

These tips, which focus on generally accepted best practices, are intended to ease most – but perhaps not all – of the anxiety sometimes surrounding the proofreading process.

1. Begin with a Discussion.

The proofreading process should begin with you, the proofreader, and the editor or client talking through how the project will proceed.

At the outset, you should agree on the preferred style guide and any deviations from or in-house exceptions to the preferred guide.

Most companies use a preferred style guide.

The Associated Press (AP) Style Guide, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Chicago Manual of Style are the most common.

Despite the preferred style, some documents may require adherence to different guidelines, such as a client’s own style guide.

  • Project-specific guidelines could include:
  • Using European date format (day/month/year)
  • Using 24-hour clock time (0930 versus 9:30 a.m.)
  • Using only words or only symbols for monetary units
  • Abbreviating or spelling out titles
  • Keeping industry-specific usage, capitalization, or punctuation
  • Using specific transliterations or spellings of foreign names and places
  • Making exceptions to AP style, such as using the Oxford comma

But, of course, these are only a few of the various elements that you, the editor, and your client must agree on up front.

Otherwise, you could end up in a vicious cycle of editing each other’s changes back and forth.

2. Print and Read Out Loud

Proofreading the hard copy of a text and pronouncing or mouthing each word can catch many more errors than reading it on a computer screen.

Reading each word out loud identifies missing and repeated words – a very common occurrence.

Checking for consistency in formatting is also easier when you page through a printed document.

  • Other mistakes this best practice helps identify include:
  • Incorrect subject verb agreement
  • Incorrect antecedents
  • Complex sentences that are confusing or too long
  • Commonly misused homonyms and other words (their/there, its/it’s, and affect/effect, for example)

3. Check the Facts

Not all drafts require fact-checking, but for those that do, this is a critical step in proofreading. At a minimum, you should fact-check the following:

  • Official country names and names of individuals, places, and organizations. Enter each into Google to confirm the correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
  • Ages, birth dates, and death dates. Check for errors such as someone turning different ages in the same year, or an event involving someone before they were born or after they died.
  • Dates of events. Check all references to a specific day and date in a specific month and year to make sure they are accurate.
  • Captions of photos and graphics. Make sure they match the text exactly, paying close attention to names, dates, places, and subject matter.
  • Math in tables and graphics. Check what you can calculate using simple math, such as percentages and totals.

4. Look for Internal Inconsistences

Consistency in longer documents can be especially challenging because of the human tendency to read what should be on the page instead of what is there.

As you read, make a list of items to check for consistency against the agreed guidelines. Such a list might include:

  • Formatting, grammar, and punctuation of bullets, headings, and subheadings
  • Capitalization and use of titles
  • Use of first names, last names, or both
  • Capitalization of captions
  • Chronological consistency
  • Use of colons, semi colons, en dashes, and em dashes
  • Formatting of dates and time
  • Symbols or words for numbers and currencies

5. Use the Spell Check and Find Functions

The Spell Check and Find functions are very helpful, but a proofreader cannot rely on them to catch everything.

“ABC Spelling and Grammar” in Microsoft Word, for example, automatically identifies misspelled words, sentence fragments, and common grammatical errors, but it also can suggest changes that are wrong in the context of a document.

Spell-checking will, however, catch all unusual names and terms – because it doesn’t recognize them.

After you have confirmed that the spelling of a word is correct, click the “Ignore All” option.

If spell-checking catches another version of the word, then that word is spelled different ways in the document.

When proofreading on a PDF, use CNTRL A (to highlight all) and CNTRL V (to paste all) into a Word document.

Word will identify misspellings, but it also will catch words that aren’t misspelled because of the way it cuts and pastes in.

This is still better than no spell check at all, however!

Along with spell-checking, the Find function helps ensure consistency by checking for all instances of style choices in spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, and punctuation.

Searching for specific word and editing choices is easier using Microsoft Word’s “Advanced Find,” which has several options, including “Match case” and “Find whole words only.”

On a PC, click “Find,” then “Advanced Find,” and then “More” to see all the search options:

The “Navigation” pane in Find offers the choice of searching “Headings,” “Pages,” and “Results.”

Searching “Results” returns a list of results within their surrounding text; this option could be useful when checking for consistency in long, complex, documents.

On a Mac, be sure that your Standard Toolbar is open. Do that through “View” at the top, then scroll down to Toolbars > Standard:

The “Advanced Find” can be accessed from the top right “Search” box:

Click on “List Matches in Sidebar” to call up the “Find and Replace” window down the left-hand side of your document. Insert the word you’re looking for into the “Search Document” field:

Choose the gear icon to access a pull-down menu of advanced search options:

Once you’ve entered all your changes, spell-check the entire document a final time to uncover any glitches that escaped your attention.

Take Your Time

Proofreading takes time.

If your client only has a limited amount of time – or budget – to complete the proofreading phase, be sure to find out what the most important elements are, so you know how to focus your time.

And be sure to let the client know if the expectations aren’t reasonable. A rushed proofing job inevitably leads to further corrections

End with a Discussion

Once you are done proofing, be sure to review the changes you made with the editor or client, and discuss any remaining areas of concern that require your attention.

If the document contained tracked changes and comments, bracketed text, or highlights, make sure to remove them if you have addressed the issues.

If not, insert your own comments and raise them with the client or editor.

Write Your Book Without Writing a Word! How to Hire a Ghostwriter to Get Your Book Written

There’s a fairly well known saying, attributed to the influential journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), that states, “Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”

Whether he meant the idea or story isn’t actually worth telling, or not everyone has the ability to tell the idea or story in a compelling way, or both, is hard to say.

Many people believe they have a book inside them just waiting to come out. You may be one of them.

If you have always dreamed of writing a book or seeing your ideas in print with your name on the cover, yet you aren’t a writer and don’t know the first thing about the process of writing a book, do you have options?

Can you still see your book completed and in print with your story written in a compelling, interesting way?

If you are reading this, you have a book in you and you just need to know how to move it from idea to the written page, all without having to learn the necessary writing skills and the months (even years) it could take to produce it.

Getting Your Book Written

The most obvious way to write your book is to pen it yourself.

Writing your book on your own is a great option if you are a hands-on person and you want full control of your book.

But it does require having the knowhow, time (a book can take anywhere from a few months to a year or more to complete), and desire to write and complete your project.

You also have to enjoy writing.

The benefit of writing your book yourself is certainly the pride you gain from accomplishing the task.

It also helps build your skills as a writer and you get full control of the words and how the book turns out.

It is also the least expensive route.

The alternative is to hire someone else to write your book – a ghostwriter.

This is a professional writer (or group of writers) who will organize and outline, write, and edit your book from beginning to end.

Ghostwriting is a great option: you get your book written by a professional who knows the process and will work with you to make sure you get the book you’re envisioning.

You get your name on the book, and the ghostwriter takes no credit.

How to Hire a Ghostwriter

Once you’ve decided to go the ghostwriting route, the next step is finding the right ghostwriter.

Your choice will depend on several factors, including your budget, timeline, goals, and even your personality and preferred working style.

There are several ways to find the right ghostwriter:

1. Use a Freelance Bidding Website

There are many freelance bidding websites where you can hire anyone for just about anything.

Writers are a particularly popular commodity on sites like Upwork, Guru, and even Fiverr.

On Upwork alone there are an estimated 12 million registered freelancers (in various industries, not just writing) with only an estimated three million jobs posted annually.

Just type “ghostwriter” in the search bar and you’ll get tens of thousands of writers from all over the world, ready to bid on your project to write your book for you.

This option allows you to be as involved as you want: You can simply give your ghostwriter an idea and let them run with it, or you can provide detailed information and direction.

Using a bidding site is a cheaper option, with many writers available to ghostwrite books for as little as $100.

You can pay by the hour or by the project, and you can often put the project fee into escrow to ensure the project will get done or you won’t have to pay, with milestone check-ins along the way.

Remember, though, that most of the time you also get what you pay for.

Quality can be an issue when hiring freelance ghostwriters from such sites.

There is no guarantee that the writer can actually write, or that they can write your project in the way you envision it.

There might be more limited contact with the writer and you might be hiring someone who speaks and writes English as a second language.

If you choose this option, it’s important to perform a bit of due diligence to make sure that you don’t get an end product that’s unusable, or in need of extensive editing and rewriting.

Always check writer’s reviews from past clients and request a writer with experience fluent in your native language.

If you want to be more involved, make sure the writer is easy to meet or have contact with.

And get periodic updates using the milestone features on the site, scheduling to get sample chapters to review before going too far into the project.

2. Hiring a Turnkey Book Writing Service

A step up from a freelance bidding site, this option is ideal for people who know what they want in their book and who can explain their ideas clearly and easily.

From this option, you have two choices.

You can handle much of the work yourself by organizing your information and then dictating your book into an audio or video recorder.

Once done, you can hand your recording over to a service company; they’ll take your recordings, transcribe them into written form, and send you a book.

If you’d like more of a back-and-forth working relationship, you can hire a service company that offers a more personalized book writing experience.

You meet with one of the company’s ghostwriters and they familiarize themselves with your book idea and the style of book you want.

They then do in-depth, recorded interviews with you to not only get all the information you want in your book, but also to get a sense of your voice.

From there, they transcribe the information they collected on audio and edit the recordings, completing the transcription of your book into written form.

Companies like Scribe Writing or Radius Book Group are examples of this option.

And some of these types of companies not only provide the interview, transcribe, and provide you with a written book, but they will take your finished project all the way through to the layout and printing and offer a marketing plan as well.

Keep in mind, in this process, the service company is basically transcribing the words you speak with minimal or limited editing or revising.

3. Hiring a Professional Ghostwriter

The third option for writing your book is to hire a freelance ghostwriter.

A freelance ghostwriter is a single individual, dedicated to your book.

The right match with a good ghostwriter, can be a rewarding experience, and the arrangement carries a certain amount of romanticism.

Celebrities, political figures, athletes and VIPs from all walks of life are known to hire ghostwriters to write their memoirs or autobiographies.

Good freelancers can be hardworking and dedicated to your project.

Unfortunately, other freelancers can be fickle and peevish if things don’t go their own way, and you won’t necessarily know that until further down the road in your new relationship – sometimes after dozens of hours of interviews.

When choosing your freelancer, a good tip:  A freelancer’s ability to sell themselves to you has little to do with their ability to write your book.

So, don’t jump at the one that sounds the best simply because he or she gave you a good spiel.

Call their references.

Without proper due diligence, you can invest a lot of time and money before finding out the writer doesn’t fit your project or your own working style.

Another tip:  Be sure to ask how much time they can devote to your book, and if they have had success completely projects on deadline in the past.

Remember that when you hire an individual, you are at the whim of his or her timeline.

While some individual ghostwriters spend most of their time writing, others may consider it a part-time job, meaning your project will need to work around their life.

On the other hand, if your writer makes a living ghostwriting, you may have to wait for an opening in their schedule — and even then they may be juggling you and several other projects which can make for a long process.

4. Hiring a Ghostwriting Company

If you want a more hands-on experience with more options, hiring a ghostwriting company might be the best choice for you.

You will still have the opportunity to develop a one-on-one relationship with your writer (complete with frequent in-person interviews), but you’ll also have the safety net of company management if a problem ever arises.

Plus, with a senior editor available for all stages of your book, those closest to the book (you and your ghostwriter) will always receive objective editorial feedback.

When you are done, the firm will consult on all of your available publishing options – from traditional publishing to print-on-demand services – so you can choose the option that is best for your story.

A ghostwriting company allows for the ability to “go where the project takes you,” in a way that may be difficult with another writing model.

Want to scan hundreds of photos?

Need to track down hard-to-reach expert sources for interviews?

Maybe you want genealogy tracked back to 10 generations, or you are determined to find a needle-in-the-haystack research item only available on microfilm.

You might need a team to sort through hundreds of pages of old legal and medical documents, chronologically sort every piece of material, cross reference it against topic categories and cite it all.

Quality ghostwriting companies are used to receiving out-of-the box requests, and they have the manpower to make them happen, without distracting from your book’s progress.

Finally, because a writing team can share the workload, ghostwriting companies can often take on rush projects and maintain quality, in a way that is simply impossible for a one-man show.

If you’re looking for attentive, white-glove service, lots of interaction with your writers, and an end product limited only by your imagination, this last option may be the best for you.

What Kind of Editing Do I Need?

“Can you edit this?”

It’s arguably one of the vaguest requests heard in the world of editing and publishing.

That’s because there are multiple types of editing, and they often mean something very different to each party in the editing relationship – the writer and the editor.

A basic Internet search of “types of editing” can send you into a flurry of terminology controversies and confusion.

As an example, the Grammarly blog breaks apart developmental and substantive editing into separate definitions, while the Institute of Professional Editors uses another term for developmental editing (structural editing), and lumps substantive editing into that category.

The list goes on and on.

The growing popularity of self-publishing, has only served to contribute to the confusion.

Whether you’re an author seeking to self-publish a book or a corporate communicator finalizing a marketing brochure, determining what level of editing your project needs and effectively communicating expectations to your editor is key to a satisfactory process and end result, says Wintress Odom, owner and editor-in-chief at The Writers for Hire.

“I cannot tell you how many times we get a piece of copy and are asked to, ‘Just proofread it,’ or, ‘Please edit this,’” Odom says. “Most of the time, our clients have a very specific idea of what this means to them, but a lot of people don’t realize that those terms are used vastly differently by different people, so you really have to clarify, or you could get something back from an editor that was not what you expected at all.”

So how do you, as a writer, navigate the editing portion of the process to achieve your desired result?

Let’s explore the types of editing, consider overlapping terminology, and look at some ways to ensure you get what you want out of your editor.

Editing and Proofreading Are Very Different

First, let’s clear up some editing basics.

Editing is a process that shapes and modifies your manuscript or piece of copy to prepare it for publishing.

This can mean many different things, as we will go into below, but it typically involves fundamental changes to aspects such as flow, grammar and consistency.

This can mean many different things, as we will go into below, but it typically involves fundamental changes to aspects such as flow, grammar and consistency.

Proofreading, on the other hand, is a final step to review your copy as it will be printed, with the intent of catching any mistakes that may have been made during editing.

While proofreading is considered part of the overall editing process, having your piece proofread is not the same as having it edited.

Levels in the Editing Process

Most editing authorities use somewhere between three and five levels of editing, including proofreading as a final step in the process.

Let’s review the main categories and some of the terminology you may encounter.

1. Developmental editing

Developmental editing (also often called structural and substantive editing) is the most intense level of editing and could involve vigorous rewriting, so you may also see terms such as heavy editing or content editing used. This is a bigger-picture overhaul of your manuscript for style, structure and flow.

For nonfiction, you need developmental editing if your material is lacking logical flow.  In fiction, you may need developmental editing if you need assistance improving plot and/or character development.  Developmental editing will typically include reworking:

  • Book organization and topic flow.
  • Big-picture transitions.
  • Overarching stylistic choices.
  • Plotline and characterization (fiction).

2. Line editing

Line editing is sometimes lumped in with copy editing below, but it’s a more detailed, sentence-by-sentence edit.

Line editing isn’t focused on the big-picture aspects of the book as in developmental editing, but it may include sentence rewording to address areas such as:

  • Flow or pacing issues.
  • Removal of sections that may not fit.
  • Improving sentence content, style and voice.

3. Copy editing

Copy editing is also a sentence-by-sentence edit, but more technical in nature, focusing on cleaning up your copy to prepare it for publishing. If you are happy with the organization and flow of your piece and think it is ready for technical polishing such as grammar and punctuation, this may be the right level of editing for you.

Not all editors agree on what copyediting entails, but common services might include fixing:

  • Errors and inconsistencies in style (like the Oxford comma or hyphenation consistency)
  • Errors in dates, URLs, page numbers or other pertinent details.
  • Repeated facts.
  • Internal contradictions within the piece.

4. Proofreading

If you speak to a writer, proofreading often includes fixing typos and grammatical errors, as well as all or several of the items listen in copy editing (above).

However for a publisher, proofreading is very different.  Proofreading for publishers occurs only after final layout, and is intended to catch any errors made during the layout process, such as:

  • Missing words or sentences.
  • Odd line breaks or picture formatting.
  • Missing pages or page numbers.

Determining Which Level You Need

As you can see, even within these four categories, there are many overlapping and interchangeably used terms within these levels, and your editor may break them down differently.

In his work with indie authors, Friedlander finds it useful to simplify by dividing editing into two areas of need – the information and the copy.

“If you think your book has problems with the way it flows, it isn’t quite complete and you’re not sure how it compares to other similar books … in the market, then consult with a developmental editor about what you need to shape your book,” he says. “If you’re already over that part, you know what should be in the book, you’ve written books before and you’re satisfied with the way the information flows, then talk to your editor about preparing the book for publication with a copy edit.”

Odom agrees that a consultation with your editor detailing your needs is the best approach.

The key is understanding the general terms out there, and clarifying what that means to your editor as it relates to your specific project.

To help guide your conversation, Odom recommends asking yourself these questions:

  1. What are my goals with the editing process?
  2. What are my biggest concerns?
  3. Am I happy with the book’s overall chapter organization?
  4. Does the logical flow need help (i.e. does it make sense)?
  5. Does the stylistic flow need help (i.e. is it clunky to read)?
  6. Am I comfortable with an editor rewriting large portions of my manuscript?
  7. Would I prefer that the editor stick to fixing egregious errors, leaving the manuscript essentially as-is?
  8. Do I want my editor to fix style inconsistences (such as writing out numbers or consistency in capitalization choices)?
  9. Does the editor need to fact check for me? If so, what types of facts (e.g. spellings of places, historical dates, specific magazine quotes)?

It is true that the editing process can be confusing.

With an understanding of the nuances and variants that go into editing, though, you can arm yourself with the necessary tools to make the relationship with your editor a successful one.

This will, in turn, result in a more successful outcome for your project.

How to Write a Blog Post That People Will Want to Read

Have you ever passed a house that had a really cool front door? It could have been some cool glasswork or just a color that popped. It immediately gives the whole house a more interesting vibe, and it makes you want to see what’s inside.

Your blog is the front door to your website.

Don’t settle for basic brown or white. Give it some thought. Let it add some flair to your site. If you want your website to have that “curb appeal,” you want to make your blog stand out and say, “Come on in. There’s cool stuff here!”

Blogs can be fun or informative, or even profoundly personal. Some draw you in and keep you reading to the very end, while others you barely notice or, even worse, make you bounce out from boredom or disgust. 

Whether you are writing blogs for other people or creating your own, there are a few things you can do to ensure that your readers will actually want to finish reading your blog post. Here’s what you need to know.

Define Your Audience

Who do you want to read this blog? Once you know that, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What does my reader care about?
  • What are they looking for that brought them to my blog?
  • What emotions are in play?

Understanding your audience is crucial to creating a blog that will give them what they need and keep them coming back for more.

Think about everything, including age, gender, and even financial status. As you put your blog together, consider any factors that may affect how and why someone is on your site and reading your blog.

Choose a Topic Carefully

The topic of your blog is paramount. This goes for the overall concept as well as each blog entry.

Whenever possible, choose a topic you care about so that your passion comes through in your post.

If you’re writing for someone else, though, it may not always be something you care deeply about. However, once you try to understand the audience and why they care about the topic, you’ll find that it usually becomes interesting pretty quickly.

Now, before you can settle on a great topic, you need to clarify what you want to accomplish with your blog. It’s kind of like picking your destination before you choose a car to get you there.

What is your ultimate goal for the blog post? Do you want to entertain, inform, or sell? Knowing your blog’s goal can help you find a topic that will help check all of the boxes.

But no matter what your goal, it’s important to remember that readers want to be informed, and they need to be entertained. That doesn’t mean that it has to be amazingly witty or dramatic but keep it interesting enough to retain their attention.

Find Your Angle

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When you find your topic, you may think, “It’s already been done!” You’re probably right. The internet is vast, and most subjects have been touched on, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have something original to contribute.

Twenty people can all write about the same topic, and all 20 can be interesting if they each take a unique angle. Consider this example:

(Topic) 

The Amazing Honeybee 

(Potential Angles)

  • The Intricate Social Structure in a Beehive (They can “create” a new queen if the old one dies!)
  • How Bees Pollinate the World
  • Bee Keeping in Ancient Egypt (This was a real thing!)
  • How One Kid is Trying to Save the Honeybees
  • 10 Ways You Can Help Honeybees in Your Backyard

By finding an angle that is new, interesting, and relevant to your audience, you’re creating something that is unique – and adds value to your blog and your website.

Create a Structure

Good blogs have structure. And the best way to get that structure is by starting with an outline. Some people may not be big fans of this step, but doing an outline first is crucial.

An outline helps you plan out your blog post so that you know where everything goes and how much space each section gets. Once you have an outline in place, it can help you spot gaps where you may be missing information. It can also help make the writing part easier!

So, do yourself a favor and outline. 

When it comes to the content, it’s important to note that people read on the internet much differently than they do when they pick up a novel.

Readers want articles to be broken down into sections that they can easily digest. And to help them identify what they are going to be reading about, each section should be divided by a header that tells the content of the section. 

Your audience also wants content that flows logically, transitioning from one section to the next while using short paragraphs, bullet points, quotes — anything to make it easier for them to consume information quickly.

Craft a Great Opening

The internet is full of content. To keep your readers on your page, you must hook them right away.

Your opening identifies your style and tone. It tells the reader what you’ll be talking about and why they need to read it.

If your opening doesn’t evoke curiosity, amusement, or some other emotion within the first couple of seconds, your reader will click away and find someone else’s blog to read. 

Let Your Voice Shine

Don’t be dull. Blogs aren’t the place for stuffy, academic writing.

Even if you’re tackling a technical topic, handle it like you are talking to a friend. Use the first person to convey your own experience or use the second person to speak directly to the reader. Avoid using the third person as it distances the reader from the blog.

Your readers want to feel like they’re getting to know you. So, let them in!

If you’re worried that you’re going a little overboard with your voice and it’s bordering on obnoxious, stick with it for a bit. Your blog is fighting for attention on a crowded internet. That bold voice of yours may be just what you need to cut through the noise.

If, after a few tries, you see too big of a bounce rate, it may be time to dial it back. Go big first. Besides, you can have a lot of fun writing that way.

Do Your Research Right

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Unless your topic is a first-person narrative of something from your own life, you’ll probably need to do some research.

Don’t fake it. Do your due diligence and get it right. If you get things wrong, you will get called out. That’s pretty much guaranteed. But for every reader who has the guts to point out your error, dozens more will say nothing and just click away from your page.

The worst part is that you’ll lose credibility with those readers, and you may not get a second chance. 

Speak to Emotion

Regardless of what you are writing about, find a way to connect your topic to emotion.

What if you are writing about a technical topic? Then it’s even more important. People are driven by emotion.

A good example of this can be seen in effective advertising campaigns. Take Michelin, for example.

In 1986, Michelin ran an ad for car tires that didn’t tell us about the tread, or the special rubber used. The ad never even showed us a car. It just had a baby resting inside of a tire and a dad talking about tires: “Michelin. Because so much is riding on your tires.”

Or even better:

The Dawn dish soap ad that shows people using their product to clean baby ducks at an oil spill. Think about how those images affect the viewer. Is Dawn…powerful? Check. Environmentally conscious? Check. Aww…baby ducks! Check. 

The same is true for your blog post. It doesn’t matter what you are writing about, if you speak to emotion, you’ll take your blog from good to amazing. 

Finish It Strong

Have you ever been to a live concert and heard a band completely nail a song only to flub the ending? No matter what came before, that ending ruined it. It’s what you’ll remember.

Find a good way to end your blog post that ties the information together and hammers your point home. One great way to do this is to find a way to tie it back to your intro. 

Edit!

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Most writers don’t really enjoy editing, but it separates the good ones from the rest. If you’re not great at editing, make use of the grammar tools available to you like Grammarly or the Hemingway Editor. Or, even better, find someone who can help you out.

Typos and goofs all through your blog will guarantee that you lose credibility, and people will stop reading it. It looks sloppy and unprofessional. 

Come Up With a Compelling Headline

Wait. What? Why is the headline so far down this list? Because your best bet at writing a compelling headline that captures your blog post perfectly is to do it after you’ve written the post.

Don’t fall in love with a headline and try to shoehorn your blog post to fit it. That’s backwards, and while it may lead to a lot of clicks, people will be disappointed when they get there. 

You don’t always know where a blog post is going to go as you write it, even if you outlined it in detail.

Writing is an organic process, and every project tends to morph a little bit as you go. And, sometimes, those changes are the best part. Once you’re done, you’ll have a lot of good ideas for headlines. Write them all out and then choose the one you like the best.

Add Great Images

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Take the time to add a couple of strong, emotion-evoking images. They help to break up the text and leave a memorable mental picture for the reader.

Be sure to use high-quality images that will look great and fit the size you need on your screen. Hazy, pixelated images will give your blog the same appearance as a bunch of typos. It looks unprofessional. 

If you have the eye and the equipment to take your own photos, that’s fantastic. But not everyone can pull that off, and that’s okay. There are a number of duty-free image websites where you can source pictures for free or for a small fee. Just be certain to credit where you got them. 

Optimize for SEO

If no one can find your blog, how will they read it? Luckily, today’s search engines put the most value on content that meets reader expectations, so having a great headline and a blog post that follows up on that headline is a great start. 

Here are a few of the other basics you should consider:

  • Do a little research on keywords for your topic and incorporate them into your blog organically.
  • Use subheads and work the keywords in there, too, when you can.
  • Optimize your meta description to describe your blog post accurately.
  • Create a few links to other internal web pages or a few highly reputable external websites.

You don’t have to obsess over SEO to make your post SEO friendly. Focus on writing great, useful content, and you’re most of the way there. Then, add the other elements I mentioned to make it work even better.

Now, Go Forth and Blog!

A great website needs to be constructed thoughtfully. From your landing page to your opt-in or sales pages, you need to look at it from your website visitor’s point of view. Is it easy to navigate? Does it make sense? And most of all, is it interesting?

Your blog can be a tool that helps people find your website and start their exploration. It’s your front door. Make it smart, interesting, and well-written so your visitors will be intrigued enough to come in and stay for a while. Then, when they leave happy, they’ll keep coming back and maybe even tell their friends.  

The Writers Behind Your Fortune Cookie Aphorism

It may come as a surprise to you that fortune cookies are not actually a Chinese invention.

While their true origins are widely debated, it is a common belief that the first fortune cookies appeared in California sometime in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

The real question is, though, who is behind the messages on those tiny pieces of paper hidden inside of the cookies? Is it some kind of all-knowing psychic?

According to this fascinating article from Mentalfloss, many fortune cookie companies actually rely on the wits and poetic words of freelance writers to come up with the witty sayings inside those sweet treats.

In fact, several successful authors actually got their start writing fortune cookie messages!

Don’t be fooled by those seemingly simple prophetic one-liners, though. While writing them may seem like an easy gig, it actually takes quite a bit of talent.

After all, the messages must appeal to a wide global audience, while not being overly specific or scandalous. (Nobody wants to crack open a cookie, only to read that they are going to lose their job or go break their neck!)

So, next time you get Chinese take-out, be sure to take a moment to appreciate the talent and thought that went into your cookie’s fortune.

Who Owns Intellectual Property?

For writers, marketers, content creators, and businesses alike, intellectual property laws can make a huge impact on your company’s livelihood and protect you from having someone else benefit from your work.

This means that someone else cannot publish a copy of your book as their own or that another company cannot steal your proprietary software to improve their own market competitiveness.

However, intellectual property laws aren’t always straightforward.

Who owns work created by an employee of a company? Who owns a published article that heavily relies on an interview of another person?

Navigating intellectual property laws means understanding what is and isn’t protected, as well as what you can do to protect yourself.

Intellectual property is work or an invention that stems from creativity. This includes songs, books, white papers, and ebooks.

In some cases, it is possible to get a patent, copyright, or trademark for your intellectual property.

Intellectual property rights enable you to financially benefit from your work, and to protect it from unauthorized use from others. In the event that someone takes your work and uses it for their own gain, you can hold them legally responsible.

In the past few decades, intellectual property has become murky due to an enormous amount of collaboration and innovation.

Who owns the invention an employee or independent contractor creates for your company? If you interview a source and quote them in your article, do they own part of the finished piece?

In this guide, we dive into the topic of intellectual property and how it could potentially impact your business’s creative work.

What Counts as Intellectual Property?

In general, intellectual property falls into four protected groups:

  • Patents: Patents cover unique processes and inventions.
  • Copyrights: Creative works in tangible mediums, such as music, writing, books, films, choreography, architecture, and art.
  • Trademarks: It protects a product or service from what’s offered by competitors.
  • Trade secrets: Confidential information about a business and its internal workings.

Who Can Claim Intellectual Property Rights?

Any creator can claim intellectual property rights. This includes companies, writers, photographers, musicians, inventors, architects, and choreographers.

Intellectual property rights aren’t infinite.

For instance, in the United States, patents last between 14 and 20 years after the filing date. Copyright protection (since 1978) lasts through the author’s lifetime until 70 years after their death. Trademarks and trade secrets are active as long as you continue to renew them through the appropriate government offices.

Consequences of Intellectual Property Infringement

The consequences of intellectual property infringement can be dire.

If another company steals your trade secrets, your ideas and processes could be used to overtake your market segment and put your company out of business. And the penalties for copyright infringement are up to $150,000 for each and every work that someone infringed on.

The penalties for trade secrets, patents, and trademarks could be even higher, depending on the case.

In some situations, an author could make more money by winning an intellectual property infringement case from someone who stole their work than they originally made from the work’s book sales.

Common Law Precedents

Even without taking official action to protect intellectual property, certain types of content have intellectual property rights established by legal precedents.

This includes when you finish a novel, movie, computer program, or poem.

These are called common law precedents based on previous legal cases. Typically, this includes intellectual property protection for:

  • The person who created it
  • The person who paid for it
  • Improvements made by one party, such as adding new technology to a non-technological product, which are owned separately from the original party that owned it

Subject Matter Experts, Sources, and Interview Subjects

Journalistic interviews are one area of the intellectual property laws in the United States where the ownership distinction is blurry.

In some cases, the interviewer and writer own the resulting content, whereas in other cases, the interview subject does.

While not a guarantee, past cases demonstrate that your source may have ownership of an article if most of the words came from what the source said, word-for-word. In this case, the source would likely own the copyright for the article.

However, giving a single quote or an idea for an article does not give ownership rights.

Social Media

On social media, you generally own the content you post. However, the platforms themselves gain some control of your content once you post it.

Depending on the platform, the social media network may be able to limit how you use your own content.

For instance, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have terms that you agree to by posting content on the platform that gives the social media companies the right to use and sub-license your images.

Right of Publicity

Some states, such as California, Florida, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, have the right of publicity laws that protect against a person’s name and image for commercial purposes.

This includes writing a story about a subject that doesn’t want coverage or using a person’s photo in an advertisement without their permission.

If someone violates this and publishes your picture or personal content, you can ask them to take it down and file legal action against them if they don’t.

Right of Privacy

In some states, privacy laws protect someone’s right to be left alone. This includes not exposing confidential information about a person or giving false information about them.

If false information is given about someone, the person responsible could be charged with right of privacy violations and libel.

The laws are different for celebrities, politicians, and other public figures, as people in these positions accept a certain degree of allowable public interest. For instance, taking a photo of a celebrity around town does not necessarily invade their right of privacy.

Quotes and Copyrightable Works

In most cases, written work automatically has a copyright, but speech isn’t necessarily protected.

If a quote is in the public domain, a review or critique of someone else’s work, generic, or part of a national anthem, you can use it. However, if it is copyrighted, trademarked, or from a recognizable speech, you aren’t allowed to use it.

In every case, it is a good idea to assume that something that you didn’t invent or write is copyrighted and provides credit to the author.

Specially Commissioned Works

If you pay another party to create something, the person that commissioned the work (paid for it) automatically owns it.

If you hire a writing company to draft your memoir or write SEO articles, you or your company owns the work, not the writers that wrote it. A contract that details the terms of the deal is enough to protect the buyer.

Community Property

In some states, property acquired during a marriage is jointly owned as community property.

This means that the work created by one partner is owned by both partners. In a divorce, these intellectual property rights and resulting compensation could be split or shared.

For instance, if your husband receives a patent while you’re married and you live in a community property state, you co-own it as his wife.

Assignments

A copyright owner can give or “assign” a copyright to another person or company.

This can be during a sale or as an employer/employee agreement. An example of this would be when a composer assigns music copyrights to publishers. An assignment must be in writing.

Intellectual Property Licenses

It is possible to grant permission to use your copyright or trademark through a license. Often, the licensor pays the copyright holder money to use their work.

Some examples of this are licensed products, such as shirts and shoes, sold by big box stores. Walmart or Target doesn’t own the rights to a Disney character, but they pay to license it.

Intellectual Property Laws by Country

Countries do not protect intellectual property equally.

Some countries take many legislative measures to thoroughly protect intellectual property, while others are known as large sources of intellectual property theft.

Any country’s intellectual property laws can change frequently, depending on the cases that go through the local court systems.

According to the U.S. Chamber International IP Index, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and France have the strictest and best enforced intellectual property laws whereas Venezuela, Pakistan, India, Algeria, Egypt, and Thailand are known for having the worst.

Surprisingly, China and Russia fall somewhere in the middle, despite having reputations for not honoring international intellectual property laws.

Keep in mind that intellectual property is by country or territory, with some exceptions for copyrights in certain countries involved in international copyright treaties or conventions. 

Filing for a trademark in the United States does not mean that a company in China cannot legally use it.

You would need to file for appropriate protections in other countries, too. If you do not file for protections in other countries, it is possible for other people in those countries to use your work, depending on copyright laws.

Some larger publishers file for copyright protection in the most significant markets, but some countries will not allow you to do this.

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

The World Intellectual Property Organization, known as WIPO, was established in 1967, and is one of the agencies of the United Nations.

WIPO is an important global voice in international intellectual property rights. It hosts forums and helps to shape international policy. It could even potentially help parties resolve large-scale intellectual property disputes.

At the time of this writing, there are no international copyright laws in place.

Intellectual Property Laws by State

In the United States, there are federal and state intellectual property laws.

Some types of intellectual property, such as designs, are only protected by state intellectual property laws. If you live in a state that doesn’t protect designs, you may not have the same level of protection.

Since there isn’t a national database of state laws, the best way to find out your state’s intellectual property laws is to check state statutes.

Employees vs. Independent Contractor Agreements

In most cases, work created by employees is owned by their employer. However, there are some exceptions.

If an employee creates work outside of their employment or working hours, the company does not own it. For instance, if you work as a writer for a marketing company during the day, your employer would not have ownership of a novel you wrote at night.

For independent contractors, the intellectual property rights do not automatically default to the company paying the contractor, unless there is a work made for hire agreement in place. Without an agreement, independent contractors own their own work, in most cases.

For inventions, both employees and independent contractors own their inventions unless they signed a written intellectual property agreement that assigns the work to the company. There are some legal exceptions if a contractor was hired specifically to invent something.

This does not apply to employees that are hired generally.

Founders vs. Third Party Companies

The intellectual property generated by a company isn’t necessarily owned by the company.

For founders, any intellectual property a founder owned before the company incorporates is owned by the founder. This can include buying the domain name or developing brand names, even if the company goes on to use the website or sell the brand name products.

If the founder does not become an employee, ongoing works created by the founder are often not owned by the company but the founder.

A third-party company that helps a company to design, build, or develop assets will generally retain intellectual property rights, even if your company pays for it.

This includes software developers, website developers, and product designers. To ensure that your company retains ownership, it is important to have a written agreement in place.

Stolen Intellectual Property

If your intellectual property is stolen or used without permission, you can try to file a lawsuit against the other party as a way to enforce your intellectual property rights.

First, you need to make sure that you have secured intellectual property rights. Then, you need to speak with an intellectual property lawyer to start your case.

In some cases, the other party may not realize that they are using your property. Sending them a legal letter might be enough to get them to stop.

For intellectual property stolen internationally, your options will vary based on the other party’s country.

It often starts by enforcing your rights through the other country’s legal system. However, in the event that another country doesn’t recognize your copyright, there are government and nonprofit organizations, including the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Standards and Intellectual Property, that can help with intellectual property infringement cases.

Tips for Protecting Your Intellectual Property

There are some ways that you can better protect your intellectual property and ensure that you do not infringe on anyone else’s rights. This includes:

  • Verify that your invention is truly unique before trying to secure protection to increase the chance that you can get a patent by searching for patents, trademarks, and copyrights in the database available from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
  • Have employees and contractors sign agreements that clearly identify ownership for work produced while employed or under contract for the company.
  • Ask employees to identify their existing intellectual property claims in writing before onboarding them.

Having a basic understanding of intellectual property rights can help to protect your interests and ensure that you don’t unintentionally infringe on someone else’s rights.

Determining ownership of intellectual property rights isn’t always obvious. The best course of action includes knowing the basic paths of ownership and having signed agreements in place.

The 108 Most Persuasive Words In The English Language

It’s a long known fact that the secret to persuasive writing isn’t in the adjectives, it’s in the verbs.

Copywriters know power verbs sell and convince.

Internally, we have a list of 108 verbs that we’ve been using for a good decade, and we recently thought we should share it with proper credit to the original author.

We found that although the list is being recirculated (and in many cases claimed as original by several different authors!), the original author is, in fact, nowhere to be found.

So, if anyone knows who wrote this, we’d love to know!

With or without the original author, it’s still a great list…here it is!

The 108 Most Persuasive Words In The English Language

According to legendary advertising man, Leo Burnet, “Dull and exaggerated ad copy is due to the excess use of adjectives.”

To prove it, he asked his staff to compare the number of adjectives in 62 ads that failed to the number of adjectives in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and other age-old classics.

Here’s what he discovered:

Of the 12,758 words in the 62 failed ads, 24.1% were adjectives.

By direct comparison, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains only 35 adjectives out of 268 immortal words – only 13.1% adjective-to-total-word ratio.

Winston Churchill’s famous “Blood, Sweat and Tears” speech rates even lower and has a 12.1% adjective ratio (81 adjectives from 667 words).

Burnett found that similar ratios applied to great works such as The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Conclusion: Use more verbs, not adjectives.

Verbs increase the pulling-power and believability of ad copy.

That’s why it makes sense to keep this 108-VERB “CHEAT-SHEET” close-by whenever you begin to draft your next space ad, sales letter, Website, or email campaign.

Still unsure how to incorporate these verbs into your marketing campaign? Or, perhaps, you just don’t have the time?

Then consider hiring a team of professional copywriters to do it for you! Talented advertising and marketing writers can take mediocre content and use power verbs to turn it into engaging copy that meets goals and produces results.