Devising your Editorial Calendar

Exhortations to “publish, publish, publish” forget the most important advice: publish something worthwhile. To communicate in a meaningful way build an editorial calendar and stock your content pantry.

Building blocks for an editorial calendar

Seasonality. The US tax season drives business to accountants, but also  drives a spike in calls to financial advisors and some attorneys. Surely there is seasonality in your business, too. What seasonal issues do your clients face? Can you come up with one for each month of the year?

Key Messages. One of my clients is a JD-CPA who specializes in estate and succession planning. His newsletter’s target audience are accountants and financial planners. He writes about triggering events in their clients’ lives that might cause them to consult with an estate planning professional, making liberal use of case studies. What are the top ten things your clients need to know? What are the top five mistakes your clients made before working with you? What are the three most expensive errors your clients make when trying to go it alone?

Political calendar. Here in the States, 2010 is an election year, so candidates will be talking about change. Seize the momentum and prepare a series of articles or posts on topics likely to get news coverage. If you play your cards right (or hire a public relations pro) you might have the good fortune of being quoted by mainstream media.

The 24×7 news cycle. You can’t plan ahead for all breaking news, but you can capitalize on it. Once you know your key messages you’ll be surprised how often something in the news prompts you for a blog post or newsletter article.

Build a content pantry of key messages

Back in ye olde days (before 1980 or so!) people stocked “staples” in their kitchens/pantries including flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, herbs, spices…you get the idea. This made it easy to whip up a myriad of dishes with the addition of items that can’t sit on the shelf as long.

Think of your key messages as a “content pantry.” One of my clients, a mortgage planner, has this in his content pantry:

• A written mortgage planning philosophy
• Case studies of how people in various phases of life can apply his philosophy
• A recommended process for people to find and finance the right house
• Case studies of refinancing strategies gone well and gone badly
• Some mortgage planning tools like a Household Blended Debt Rate calculator
• A list of mistakes people often make when house/mortgage shopping

Add a seasonal calendar

The mortgage planner’s calendar includes:

• First Quarter:
  • Good financial/budgeting hygiene
  • Planning ahead to making deposits on colleges (refi may be in order)
  • Tax season
• Second Quarter:
  • People start thinking about selling their home
  • Get a mortgage plan before falling in love with a house
  • Local stats on home values, appreciation,  school boundary changes & other things of interest to shoppers
• Third Quarter:
  • Basic financial advice (evergreen topics)
  • Reminders to come in for an annual mortgage review
  • Looking ahead at funding college
• Fourth Quarter:
  • September is Life Insurance Awareness month; he talks about the role of insurance in an overall mortgage strategy
  • Year-end/first-of-year planning topics (might include refi)

Ready to publish

This client is basically ready to go. When something hits the news, he already has key messages from which to base commentary. How’d he get to this point? I helped.

You can do this, too. What are you waiting for?

November Book Lust

Spent some time in a REAL bookstore last week.  I’m daydreaming of a Nook…

Connected: The Surprising Power of Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

This looks particularly intelligent.  Here’s a PDF excerpt.

Publishers Weekly says: Harvard professor and health care policy specialist Christakis (Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care) became interested in social connectivity when observing that the mortality rate of spouses spike after a partner passes away. Christakis sought out a collaboration with Fowler, a health systems and political scientist, and together they compare topology (the hows of a given structure) across different social networks to better explain how participation and positioning enhances the effectiveness of an individual, and why the “whole” of a network is “greater than the sum of its parts.” Five basic rules describe the relationship between individuals and their networks—including mutual adaptation, the influence of friends and friends’ friends, the network’s “life of its own”—but the results do more than promote the good of the group: they also spread contagions; create “epidemics” of obesity, smoking and substance abuse; disseminate fads and markets; alter voting patterns; and more. A thorough but popular take on a complex phenomenon, this volume offers an entertaining guide to the mechanics and importance of human networking. 13 b/w illustrations, 8-page color insert.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Malcolm Gladwell wrote aboutChris Anderson’s book this past summer. Here’s the Publishers Weekly take:

In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama’s campaign billboards on Xbox Live, Webkinz dolls and Radiohead’s name-your-own-price experiment with its latest album. A generational and global shift is at play—those below 30 won’t pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption—to the delight of artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the mental transaction costs that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. As in Anderson’s previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

Before I went to the bookstore I heard the author of Googled interviewed by Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

From Publishers Weekly: Two Googles emerge in this savvy profile of the Internet search octopus. The first is the actual company, with its mixture of business acumen and naïve idealism (Don’t Be Evil is the corporate slogan); its brilliant engineering feats and grad-students-at-play company culture; its geek founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two billionaires who imbibe their anti-establishment rectitude straight from Burning Man; its pseudo-altruistic quest to offer all the world’s information for free while selling all the world’s advertising at a hefty profit. The second Google is a monstrous metaphor for all the creative destruction that the Internet has wrought on the crumbling titans of old media, who find themselves desperately wondering how they will make money off of news, music, video and books now that people can Google up all these things without paying a dime. The first Google makes for a standard-issue tech-industry grunge-to-riches business story, its main entertainment value being Brin’s and Page’s comical lack of social graces. But New Yorker columnist Auletta (World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies) makes the second Google a starting point for a sharp and probing analysis of the apocalyptic upheavals in the media and entertainment industries.

The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System

Jim Gobetz offers this review:

The book provides a very in depth history of the events and conditions that led up to the current economic situation. The profiles of the people involved are evidence of Mr. Gasparino’s inside access to these individuals, and illustrate his skill as an investigative journalist.

The book begins with an historical look at events as far back as the 1970’s that in Mr. Gasparino’s opinion led to the corporate culture that would eventually result in an inability of the entities involved in the current debacle to accurately assess risk. As it progresses towards the present it gets very detailed and again points up Mr. Gasparino’s research and tenacity in interviewing the participants in the events he portrays. He offers a good portrait of the players in the events and is occasionally brutal in describing the personalities of these individuals. I imagine it will be very difficult for him to get any face time with some of these folks who get a particularly harsh treatment from him. My own experience in the business biases me towards the position of having little sympathy towards those individuals. Corporate big shots with huge egos and more money than sense deserve the harsh treatment Mr. Gasparino metes out to them.

The book does go into much detail that folks familiar with the corporate workings of Wall Street, and the market, will find a bit simplistic. I guess this is due to a desire to not scare off the lay reader with wonkish jargon. Also there is a lot of repetition of events and explanations that I found somewhat annoying. The book is certainly long enough that it didn’t require what I saw as filler. This may be a function of the editor rather than the author but there was enough of it to rise to the level of notice.

If you are looking for an in depth illustration of the events and personalities involved in the current economic crisis, you’ll certainly find it here. If you’re looking for Hemmingway and a perfect execution of authoring and editing this book will come up more than a bit short. If you are looking for a hero you won’t find it here, there were no heroes in these events, and the book does not have a happy ending as the events are still playing out.

As a serious wonk who can’t get enough of this stuff I am able to put aside the blemishes and feast on the detail. If you are in the same camp you will find an enjoyable read here, if not it may be overly detailed and you may get mired in those details and bog down.

Five Minds for the Future

Publishers Weekly: Psychologist, author and Harvard professor Gardner (Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons) has put together a thought-provoking, visionary attempt to delineate the kinds of mental abilities (“minds”) that will be critical to success in a 21st century landscape of accelerating change and information overload. Gardner’s five minds-disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical-are not personality types, but ways of thinking available to anyone who invests the time and effort to cultivate them: “how we should use our minds.” In presenting his “values enterprise,” Gardner uses a variety of explanatory models, from developmental psychology to group dynamics, demonstrating their utility not just for individual development, but for tangible success in a full range of human endeavors, including education, business, science, art, politics and engineering. A tall order for a single work, Gardner avoids overly-technical arguments as well as breezy generalizations, putting to fine use his twenty years experience as a cognitive science researcher, author and educator, and proving his world-class reputation well-earned. Though specialists might wish Gardner dug a bit more into the research, most readers will find the book lively and engaging, like the fascinating lectures of a seasoned, beloved prof.

The Kids are All Right: A Memoir

Publishers Weekly: In a memoir rendered eerily dry and scattered by emotional distance, the four Welch children, orphaned in their youth in the mid-1980s, recount by turns their memories and impressions of that painful time. Growing up in an affluent community of Bedford, N.Y., to a glamorous mother and a handsome father who was the head of an oil company, the children—Amanda (born in 1965), Liz (1969), Dan (1971) and Diana (1977)—were devastated first by the sudden death of their father in a car accident in 1983, followed by their mother three and a half years later after a long, wrenching bout with cancer. The two eldest girls, teenagers at the time and initiated into the drug and rock and roll scene, remember most vividly the details of that era when their mother, already diagnosed with uterine cancer, discovered that their father left a large debt; the family had to consolidate by selling their big house and their horses. After their mother died, the children were put in the care of others, mostly with disastrous consequences, especially for Diana, farmed out to a controlling neighbor family who initially hoped to adopt her, but decide otherwise after she hit her awkward teens. Each struggled to forge an identity within harrowing circumstances, with numbing results. Dan became a troublemaker and bounced out of boarding school, while Amanda, heavily into drugs, dropped out of NYU, and Liz traveled to get out of the house.

Other Economics/Current Events books

• It takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street
• Hoodwinked
• Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets
• The Meltdown Years: The Unfolding of The Global Economic Crisis
• The Selling of the American Economy: How Foreign Companies are Remaking the American Dream
• Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of how Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession
• False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World
• $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better
• How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
• The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward
• In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic
• Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
• Gods at War: Shotgun Takeovers, Government by Deal, and the Private Equity Implosion
• A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

If you’ve read any of these or want to recommend something for the December Book Lust post, please comment below.

The Company you Keep

Mom’s advice still holds: you’re known by the company you keep. Since 15% of all reported spam  last month was finance-oriented, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are scrubbing emails with references or offers related to money, the stock market or other financial “opportunities” including investments, credit reports, real estate and loans.

What’s this mean for legitimate financial services emailers? You’ve got to fight harder to keep your own reputation intact. The good folks at Listrak give great advice including pruning your subscriber list and asking subscribers to re-opt-in from time to time.

Here’s the exciting news for legitimate emailers:  ISPs have added a new metric to the reputation measurement – level of subscriber interaction and engagement. ISPs can tell who opens and clicks on a message and who ignores or deletes it. More importantly, they monitor how many subscribers click “this is not spam” if the message is delivered to the junk mail folder instead of the inbox. Monitoring subscriber engagement lets the ISP know which senders are delivering relevant content that subscribers want and which ones, like spammers, are continuing to blast out message after message even if no previous action has been taken (emphasis added).

Takeaways:

• Keep email content brief. Link elsewhere for the full story
• Engage subscribers with surveys, downloads and linked graphics
• All email templates have a built-in forward feature, but it can only help to suggest specific possible recipients, for example:
  • A coworker whose spouse was recently laid off
  • A neighbor whose house has been languishing on the market
  • A relative whose adult children have moved back in

If your content isn’t engaging, it’s more likely to be trapped in a spam filter. Call me to develop a content strategy that keeps receivers engaged and sending you referrals.

Private Equity and the Next Credit Crisis

My September Book Lust column included a preview of Josh Kosman’s book, The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis, which was released this month.

Monday I heard Kosman interviewed by Fresh Air’s Terry Gross (on NPR affiliates everywhere).

FASCINATING STUFF, including:

• How interest tax deductibility allows private equity (PE)  firms to dodge about $70b in federal taxes
• Why you can’t buy a two-sided mattress any longer
• Why PE  likes the hospital industry (and what it could mean to you if your local provider is bought by PE)
• PE firms (including the companies they own) are the largest employers in the country; even larger than Walmart (by a mile)
• Four of eight former treasury secretaries now in PE.  John Snow (under G. W.  Bush) is now at Cerberus which finagled bailout funds for its company, GMAC, by turning it into a bank (even though it didn’t have capital reserve requirements of “real” banks)
• Buyouts are facilitated by Collateralized Loan Obligations  (CLOs), the private equity version of the mortgage industry’s Collaterelized Debt Obligations (CDOs)
• Returns to PE  investors are below that of the S&P 500

SCARY STUFF, including:

• The conservative Boston Consulting Group estimates that half the companies owned by PE will default on their loans or go into bankruptcy
• If these companies lay off half their employees (which is reasonable) another 1.9m people will be out of work, which will ripple through the economy in consumer spending, mortgage foreclosures and so forth
• The trillion in bad debt will freeze lending everywhere
• Of the current 11% corporate loan default rate, 50% has PE involvement. Tsunami of defaults has begun

Prescription

Kosman would like to eliminate interest tax deductibility for corporate takeovers. This would make LBOs unprofitable and end the industry.

Why is the end of private equity considered a good thing?  Don’t buyout firms improve companies? According to Kosman,  PE firms only put down about 20% of the purchase price, then use CLOs to fund the remaining 80%. The acquired company has to service the debt out of profits instead of spending that money on R&D and other capital expenditures. PE has a 4-5 year horizon on its exit, so they’re not running companies for the long haul.  Theoretically, everyone’s supposed to win with PE, but the record shows that few do.

The Obama administration is reportedly looking into this.  Paul Volker is charged with considering the whole tax code, including tax deductibility of interest for buyouts.

Writing Prompts for Blogs and Newsletters:

• Here’s your chance to defend PE, and the enabling triumvirate of i-bankers,  hedge funds and ratings agencies!
• Do you work for a pension fund that invested in CLOs? How will you assure participants that YOUR CLOs will perform in spite of the 11% corporate loan default rate Kosman cites?
• GMAC fired its CEO this week. Do you regret giving TARP money to this non-diversified auto lender-cum-bank?
• Do you have a better idea for recouping the estimated $70b in federal taxes lost to PE deals than dis-allowing interest deductibility? Are we in for a national value-added tax or sales tax?

Low-Jargon Financial Blogs & Newsletters

I write blogs and newsletters for attorneys, advisors and accountants. These professionals often need to provide complex information without making their clients’ eyes glaze over.

Professionals  with compliance/malpractice concerns  too often navigate the middle of the road where nothing meaningful is communicated. Some admit they hope readers will pick up the phone and call for clarification “on the clock.” Bad strategy.

Everyone faces this challenge of writing thorough-yet-understandable communications  from time to time. Here are writing tips for newsletter or blog writers who aspire to communicate without using jargon on one hand, or dumbing down the message on the other.

It’s a conversation, not a treatise

• Provide links to jargon, technical definitions and 50-cent SAT words like “treatise.” This way, everyone can get as much info as they need on their own and your writing doesn’t bog down
• Don’t mistake your articles for term papers!
  • Use headers, bolds and links to enable (gasp) skimming
  • Avoid passive voice; use active voice
  • Write to the appropriate reading level of your audience
    • Run your copy through a fog index calculator (tells the number of years of education needed to understand what you’ve written)
    • If you use Google Docs, click Tools>Word Count and find the analysis at the bottom
• You’re not a professor
  • Don’t try to tell everything you know about the subject. Pare it down to the essentials
  • For weighty topics, write a series of short articles
  • Provide an intro to the topic in your newsletter and link to your blog/elsewhere for details. If you can find a video (or make one yourself) your audience will be grateful. Here’s how one of my clients does it
  • Leverage industry videos and handouts (be sure to comply with licensing and copyrights)

Engage readers

• Invite them to leave comments and comment on those of others
• Offer a free worksheet to help them apply the information to their lives — invite them to review the information with you off the clock, if appropriate
• Ask readers to weigh in on a topic by linking to a survey that gives them the option to see how their answers compare to those of other respondents
• Poll readers for future articles on similar/related subjects

Brains need variety

• 

  This infographic is from a parody site

  Use stories – our brains are wired for stories -and people “find” themselves in them.

• Use case studies for the same reasons

• Link to a narrated presentation deck or video to stimulate the story-receptive part of readers’ brains. One of my clients does this very well

• Use  infographics or produce your own charts and tables. FlowingData is a great resource to learn about them and you might find one to use there

What techniques have you or others used to make complex information digestible? What have you seen out there that turns you off? 

Brains Need Stories

Evidently story-loving is a function of our brain’s development. We’re biologically wired for them.

In a Washington Post story I learned: “Roughly around age 4, psychologists say, a child develops a ‘theory of mind.’ The child suddenly grasps that other people have feelings, thoughts, just like the child’s own. From this great mental leap comes a secondary, almost accidental talent: We can get inside the heads of people whom we never actually meet except in stories. This is why fiction works. Huck Finn and Harry Potter seem real enough.”

Is this why Steve Jobs is the world’s greatest keynoter? Because he’s a great storyteller? In the new book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs we learn his three-act methodology:

• Act1 is to create a story with seven tips (chapters or scenes) in crafting a great story behind the presentation
• Act 2, delivery of an experience with six scenes for adding appealing visuals to a presentation.
• Act 3, refine and rehearse and rehearse some more with five scenes discussing body language, verbal delivery, and using appropriate dress

I wrote a post on PowerPoint and effective presentations a couple of months ago that got excellent traction with readers. Join the discussion.

Prompts for Professionals

Next time you’re trying to deliver a memorable presentation try:

• Aesop’s Fables
  • When you want to make a point that appearances may be deceiving try The Cat, the Rooster and the Young Mouse
  • When you want to illustrate the power of positive versus negative influence, try The Wind and the Sun
  • You’ve probably heard the phrase “Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered”– here’s a fresh approach: The Dog and His Reflection
• In this economy, many CEOs and companies could be compared to Icarus
• And when talking about messes that need a dramatic approach, refer to Heracles and the Augean Stables or The Gordian Knot

SPAM Tweetup

Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to talk about SPAM in Charlotte Weds, November 11 at 11:30 :

• Who decides when spam is officially SPAM
• Making sure you’re not mistaken for a spammer
• Best practices for email marketing (including newsletters)
• How to handle spammers

By nature, a tweetup is informal, so drop in at Mama Ricotta’s and meet some great tweeple. Not tweeting yet? This group might convince you to give it a twhirl.

Working with a Ghostwriter

Used to be the word “ghostwriter” conjured images of a wily hack with a battered Olivetti sitting at a Hollywood swimming pool coaxing confidences from a star.

Lately the word has gotten traction in the music world (evidently lots of rappers use them). Politicians have always used ghosts — a recent Christian Science Monitor story estimated 90% of politicians’ books are “heavily ghostwritten.”

Now businesspeople are convinced they need to be content producers to drive search engine results and keep their names top of mind with customers. This makes my job as a business ghostwriter easier to explain, but there are lots of misconceptions out there about what we do, how we work, and how we’re paid. In case you’re thinking about hiring a ghostwriter, this might help you think things through.

Q:  What kind of work can you give to a ghostwriter?

A: There is no professional organization that certifies ghostwriters. Generally speaking we can write anything on your behalf. The devil lies in the details of how well a ghostwriter works with you, whether they know your field well enough to hit the ground running, and whether you can agree on a fee structure.

As a financial ghostwriter I craft presentations and management letters. I write blog posts, newsletters, white papers, articles and (soon) books. Each writer will produce each type of publication with differing levels of proficiency.

Do you want to rough out a topic then turn it over to a ghostwriter? Or does the sight of a blank page drain your mind completely? Working with a ghostwriter is a partnership, so begin your quest by identifying your needs, working preferences and limitations. These will determine the offsetting strengths to look for in your writing partner.

Q: What do I look for in a business ghostwriter?

A: You need to find someone who knows enough about your field that they can focus on production. You might also need to find a writer experienced with Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, etc. That said,  if you find a great writer they can learn the styles. A good ghost won’t upcharge you for coming up the learning curve, provided there’s sufficient upside for the writer.

You might also need help devising an editorial calendar or other marketing/public relations capabilities, so be sure to ask your writer if they can provide that expertise. In today’s social media environment a ghostwriter should have a working understanding of how search engine optimization works, but beware the writer who tries to convince you that writing in a stilted style to feed the search bots will serve you well with human readers.

Q: Where do I look for a qualified ghostwriter?

A: Tap your professional circles first. With so many corporate communications departments being downsized, domain experts who write well are a LinkedIn search away. Whether they can effectively ghost for you is another matter. My advice is to start with domain experts and then refine the search by chemistry, mutually-acceptable work styles, pricing, etc.

Q: How much will a ghostwriter charge?

A: Your business ghostwriter will charge in the range of a self-employed accountant in private practice.  Specialists in other subject areas will differ, but this will give you an idea of how to budget.

Start by asking yourself the qualifications someone would need to write intelligently about your field. (For example, could a nurse write about biotech?)  Put a number on what that person would make working for an employer full time. That’s just a start. You can’t just divide that by 2080 annual working hours; you must add something for administration and overhead costs, and allow that of a 40 hour week, about 25 is actually billable (the other fifteen are spent in client acquisition, proposals, professional development and administrivia). The accountant study shows similar productivity.

Let’s crunch numbers. Say you want an MBA Who Writes Like An English Major with a background in finance. Let’s assume that person would earn $100k in their field. OK, add the employer-paid taxes, employer-subsidized health insurance and two weeks of vacation and the result is about a 20% bump over base salary. We’re at $120k. Divide that by 2080 “standard” work hours a year and you get $58/hour. For reasons explained above, the $58 would translate to more like $94/hour when they actually get on the clock.

Q: Will ghostwriters work at a fixed rate?

A: When you hire a writer with domain expertise, they’ll likely bid your project on a flat fee or bid a price per (accepted) page. This will take some pre-work on your part defining the scope of the project and giving the writer sufficient source material to get to work.

Q: How will a ghostwriter price my project?

A: The more organized and efficient you are, the less you’ll pay the writer. If you have all your research compiled and outline your expectations up front (number of pages/slides/word count) the writer can adequately estimate their work effort.

Your personal organization and efficiency plays a big role in keeping the project on budget, too. An experienced writer will devise a project timeline with deadlines and expectations for YOU.  You’ll have to uphold your end to keep the contracted price and schedule. If the contract says you get one editorial pass and one line edit pass, you’ve got to make best use of each. If you get to the line edit round and start moving big chunks around or inserting more copy, chances are your writer will need to charge you for that editorial re-work. A line edit consists of tweaking for clarity and correctness, not re-drafting. I find that clients often want to make changes after copy they’ve approved has been handed over to the graphic designer/desktop publisher; such re-work is not in scope.

There are some professional pay guidelines out there for different types of writing/editing on a project and page basis.

Q: Do I have to work with a ghostwriter face-to-face?

A: Each project drives the tactical means for getting it done. If I’m writing a white paper, the client provides me with the source material, we discuss relative weighting of the topics and the general outline and I take it from there, circling back for commentary, elucidation, additional source material, etc. Many of my blog and newsletter clients will forward news updates from their professional organizations for me to base a commentary upon. While I’m pretty flexible, I can’t speak for other writers.

I have to learn the client’s “voice” to emulate it. A client should never sound like a stranger in real life to someone who’s been reading their work. I prefer that my clients use digital recorder as much as possible; the digital file is easily attached to email.  Not only do I learn how they speak, I also glean from their inflection what matters to them most and any key words or phrases that they favor.

Most people say more when speaking than when writing.  Clients may think they have two articles for their newsletter but they start talking, I might “hear” three articles for the current edition and another for a blog post or future newsletter.  Occasionally a client will be in the middle of answering a question when something pops up that we can use later.

Q: How to proceed?

A: I suggest you audition one or two potential writing partners. Already writing a newsletter? Give the writer an earlier version and ask what they’d do differently. Never written one before? Give the writer three news topics and see what they want from you before they begin writing and how they would propose to learn your voice. I will sometimes offer to do an audition piece without charge and then if the client hires me I’ll bill them for the work.

More questions? Give me a call and we’ll discuss your particular project: 704-907-2811