When Colleen e-mailed me the other week to assure me that, even though she hadn’t reported numbers recently, she was still in the Query Challenge, I just had to ask her to write an essay about it (and fortunately she wasn’t offended by the title I came up with). Here’s her unlikely success story.
How Sucking at the Inkthinker Query Challenge Skyrocketed My Freelance Career
by Colleen Vanderlinden
www.inkthinkerblog.com — It’s true. I suck at the Inkthinker Query Challenge.
I signed up in February, full of determination and motivation. This would be the year I finally became a real writer. A writer who gets paid. A writer who is read by someone other than her family. The Inkthinker Query Challenge would just be another way to keep me on track, stoke my competitive drive, and finally make this dream a reality.
Almost five months later, there I sit at four queries.
Four.
The really weird thing is, I’m a real writer anyway. I get paid, regularly. Not enough to send my kids to Harvard, but it’s a start. I have bylines. Quite a few people (other than family!) have read me. How did it happen?
Well. The four queries did net me one job: a contract for a short article for Mother Earth Living. Sweet. I was totally on my way. And then, my querying activities just kind of…stalled. I applied for a job to be a Contributing Writer for Suite101.com, and got the job. All of a sudden, I had deadlines. I signed a contract with another website to write regular content. More deadlines, a second (small, but there!) paycheck.
I’ve been writing my own content for my garden website and blog, In the Garden Online, and while that’s been great, I added another project into the mix: the Mouse & Trowel Awards for gardening websites and blogs. That took a good two months of my life, but put me in contact with a couple of editors and got me written up in my hometown paper, The Detroit Free Press.
I was really sailing along, but still bothered by those measly four queries. I promised myself, week after week, that I’d send out some queries. Every week, that task was left undone. My freelance life changed a little more. I was promoted from Contributing Writer to Feature Writer at Suite. Now I had more deadlines, and a topic all my own to build. I got accepted into About.com’s Guide Prep program, and am still waiting to hear if I got the position of Detroit Guide.
What I’m saying is, there are lots of ways to do this whole freelancing thing. Right now, the bulk of my work is for online entities, and that’s awesome. Some of my projects, such as the blog awards, haven’t netted me a single cent, yet I’d do them all over again for the contacts and exposure they’ve given me. The great thing about being a freelancer right now is that there are so many options available to us. Blogging in and of itself has opened doors that freelancers five to ten years ago couldn’t have dreamed of.
Kristen invited me to write this guest post after I emailed her about the Query Challenge. The subject line of my email read “Query Challenge/I’m not really a slacker.” I wanted to explain my sloth. I wanted her to know that I was still participating, if in a screwy way. She said it sounded like a success story, and asked me to write a post on it. Here I am. Well, after a slight delay. See, I was supposed to have this to her on Tuesday. I emailed her Monday night with the message “Okay, maybe I am a slacker….” (This is, apparently, just the kind of irony Kristen gets a kick out of.)
Either way, here I am, with my screwy success story and the promise that I’m still taking the Query Challenge. I just have my own way of doing things. In the end, isn’t that one of the reasons all of us want to freelance in the first place?
Visit Colleen for more tales of writing suckiness — I mean success! ;] — at Just Write.
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http://www.kristenkingfreelancing.com/
Finalist in 2006 Writer’s Digest Best Writer’s Website Contest
Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King. All rights reserved.
Contents Copyright © 2006-2014 Kristen King
Comments on this entry are closed.
Hi Kristen,
Colleen’s success inspite of having just 4 queries seems to be contagious. Or maybe it is the way of the freelancing world.
I signed up for your challenge and have reported (I think) 6 queries. I despair everytime I look at the updated list on your blog; I’ll never get there. But while I’m sighing and kicking myself into action, I remind myself : only 6 queries, but they’ve all been accepted!
For a newbie, this is great news and it spurs me on to do more research before dashing off emails to editors. I’ll never catch up with Jessica or Susan on your list, but by the end of this year, thanks to the challenge, I will have had more (paying) bylines than ever before.
Chryselle
Wow, Chryselle…I was pretty happy with my 1 in 4 query acceptance rate. Six for six is amazing! I think you hit it right on the head…targeting is everything. I wish I would have focused on that more when I started submitting articles and queries.
I’m with Colleen. My query count for 2007 is pathetic (10 now), but that’s not because I’m slacking — it’s because 99% of my writing work doesn’t require queries.
Thanks for your post, Colleen — it’s nice to know I’m not the only one!