Resources for freelancing, children's book writing and job searching
Plus a handout of resources for freelancers and aspiring authors
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Early this week, animal welfare writer Lavanya Sunkara moderated a panel —Dynamic dog writers: Turning passion into profit — with myself, author and animal writer Arin Greenwood and freelance journalist Jen Reeder (who filled in for author and Wirecutter senior staff writer Kaitlyn Wells) about how we leveraged our love of animals into new revenue streams.
While the panel wasn’t recorded, I’m sharing a few of my own answers to questions from the session as well as the resource sheet the group put together to help those who weren’t able to make it.
How were you able to merge your passion for animals and storytelling?
I had a tough time landing my first full-time role. During that job hunt, I applied to more than 100 openings at dozens of organizations across the U.S. After five months of intense searching, I landed just three in-person interviews. Luckily, two of those led to job offers. Thankfully, that first position helped me land others.
In January 2018, I launched this newsletter to give back to those navigating the difficult journalism job market. In addition to recent job openings, industry readings and trainings to help journalists grow, I also strive to include uplifting messages that have fueled me.
Plus, I include a photo of one of my pets because they always make me smile.
What advice do you have for others wanting to turn their passion into revenue?
Experiment, try new things and find what works for you. For some this might look like freelance writing articles. Others might try authoring a children’s book. And still others might prefer to work in audience strategy.
For me, I took a passion project supporting other journalists and added value with additional subscriber-only Q&As from industry leaders, career advice and more.
If you want to start a paid newsletter, consider these questions:
Who specifically is this product for and how will it help them?
What does success look like?
Is this work sustainable?
What strategies have helped you market your work in order to grow revenue?
To grow this newsletter, I’ve worked to first create a product that solves crucial problems for journalists. Then I slowly grew the newsletter list over years, meeting readers where they were in Facebook groups, industry Slack channels, on Twitter (before it became X), through collaborations with other newsletters and in conversation IRL. Soon the list began to grow by word of mouth.
I continuously published with brief pauses for vacations, holidays or major life events. Eventually the list was so large that I started to receive bills from my newsletter provider, at which point I moved over to Substack and added a subscriber-only edition to compensate myself for all the hours of work that went into the newsletter weekly.
Send me your feedback and your job openings!
I’d love to hear from you with any questions, feedback or job openings you might have. Hit me up at mandy.hofmockel@gmail.com.