I'm Nicole Dieker. I've been a full-time freelance writer since 2012, and I published my first novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, in 2017.
You might be familiar with my work at The Billfold, The Write Life, or Lifehacker. I've also written for Reviews.com, Popular Science, Wing World Magazine, and more. (So many more.)
I know a lot about earning money as a writer. I earned over $87,000 from my writing in 2016—that's gross, so I didn't get to keep all of it, but we'll talk about taxes and business expenses on the podcast.
We'll also talk about how to pitch, how to build relationships with editors and publications, how to conduct interviews when you're on a tight deadline, how to track (and grow) your income, how to track (and manage) your time—and for those of you who want to be authors as well as freelancers, how to write and self-publish a novel.
Interviewing is often one of the hardest parts of freelancing — it involves asking people for help, dealing with rejection, and PHONES — so I've broken the interviewing process down into a series of easy-to-manage steps. This episode deals with everything you need to do before you ask someone for an interview; the next episode will be about how to ask, how to do the interview, and what to do after the interview.
Show notes!
- Seattle's Hugo House is a great place to take writing classes,
and I'm not saying that just because I used to teach there.
- The
"visit Enya's castle" story is Anne Helen Petersen's "The Keys to
Enya's Kingdom," at BuzzFeed. Read it. It's SO GOOD.
- The Billfold
has a Patreon! (You know I'm the editor of The Billfold, right?)
