So, it is big news when one of the most ubiquitous coffee shops on the planet introduces a new drink.

Wait. Scratch that.

It is big news when the biggest coffee shop in the world introduces a new drink that is palatable and does not involve the word "frappacino," which as all serious freelancers know, is Latin for blech!

One sip of anything remotely frappacinoed, and a whole day of freelance writing can be flushed down the drain in the ensuing search for something, anything, that will take that taste and its memory away forever.

Starbucks Introduces New Drink – And You Might Actually Want to Drink It!

Let’s be fair. Starbucks has plenty of coffee variations that are good. If you are new to freelance writing, you might also be new to coffee, although that isn’t always the case. If so, you might have confused various seasonal varieties such as Pumpkin Spice Latte, Gingerbread Latte, and Peppermint Latte, as "new," when, in fact, these drinks show up every holiday season. Last year’s Salted Carmel Latte was quite good, if overly decadent and sweet, but it failed to arrive this year.

The Starbucks Blog is reporting, there will be a new latte to wet your taste buds with while writing in the cozy confines of your local Starbucks. Of course, economics, and weight management, demand that the freelancer drink primarily regular coffees and not calorie infused milk add-on versions of espresso, but, for that bright sunny day when everything seems just a little bit happier, more productive, and just plain better, a more exotic drink can be in order.

This spring, that alternate drink choice may include (Bum, bum, bum-bum!) Dark Cherry Mocha!

Now, I know what you are thinking. You can always ask the barista to put whatever combination of syrups you want into your java, but the whole point of Starbucks is complete consistency. If you liked it at the downtown Starbucks, you should like it at the Cherry Creek Starbucks too. This isn’t always the case if you have your barista go all rogue on your drinks.

But, with a corporate mandated recipe thoroughly tested across numerous test markets, you can be ensured of an unsurprising meeting with your caffeinated beverage to start (or continue) your freelance writing day.

Seal of US Copyright Office

Ironically, after recently writing about how complicated copyright law is and how many people constantly misunderstand it, an attorney read our freelance writing blog and noticed a copyright error right there at the bottom of every page. We’re no experts, but copyright law for writers fools everyone sometimes, it seems.

The freelance writing business of ArcticLlama has been around for a few years now. Most of the online content we produce for our own website started showing up online in 2008. Naturally, we placed a copyright notice at the bottom of each webpage in the footer. While this is not 100% neccessary for copyright purposes, it is typcially considered goo practice. As you can imagine, the notice read Copyright 2008 ArcticLlama, LLC.

When 2009 started, we updated, the copyright notice. After all, an out of date copyright notice looks unprofessional and gives people the impression that your website or your content is out of date, and that is something we don’t want. However, since our copyright notice was displayed automatically by our WordPress theme every time any webpage or blog post was viewed, we knew that sometimes the intellectual property on that page would be from 2008. Thus, we changed our copyright notice to Copyright 2008 – 2009 ArcticLlama, LLC.

If you are a copyright attorney, or have real world experience with intellectual property law, you already know where this is going. For the rest of you, read on…

This year, with the dawn of 2010, we once again updated our copyright notice. With content on this website now ranging from 2008 to 2010, we figured the best way to adjust our copyright date was to acknowledge the whole date range and our new blog footer contained the copyright notice Copyright 2008 – 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC.

What’s the problem?

As it turns out material is not copyrighted over multiple years, per se. While something may have been first copyrighted in 2008, that fact is immaterial for 2010.

In other words, there is no way to infringe upon the 2008 copyright today. So, the only copyright that matters in the present day is the one currently in force, or in other words, Copyright 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC.

Copyright Multiple Years

If you’re like us, just getting the simple one-liner answer isn’t always enough. To satisfy the curious, intellectual mind, a deeper understanding is required. While we have abandoned any efforts to fully understand copyright law, like many writers, we are also active readers, and we have seen plenty of books with more than one copyright year in them. What gives?

All artistic works are copyright by their creators from the moment of inception. (Technically, it is from the moment of publication, but if anyone else sees it, that becomes a publication, so the point is moot.) There is a frequent misconception that writings or other art must be submitted to the government in order to get a copyright. That is not true.

However, materials CAN be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. The purpose of this registration is primarily to establish evidence of copyright in the event of an actual copyright dispute. Keep in mind, this is not of any help for anyone purposely infringing on copyrights or ignoring the copyright all together. Website content thieves, for example, are no more or less guilty if the materials they steal have a registered copyright.

What a registered copyright does do is prevent someone else from claiming to be the original author. In other words, registering the copyright for your screenplay doesn’t make you any more protected from theft, but it does keep some big shot Hollywood screenwriter from saying that he wrote the script.

You can see the value by considering that if Susie Homemaker from Smalltown, Kansas writes a script that Sally Superstar later claims to have authored, most courts, and indeed most people, are more likely to believe Superstar in the absence of any other evidence. But, if Superstar claims to have written the script in 1997 and Homemaker produces a registered United States copyright from 1996, Superstar is sunk.

(Typically, this scenario doesn’t happen. Most authors and agents have no need to steal scripts, but if they did, chances are very slim that they would just copy it word for word. Re-writing it, even a little bit, makes it very difficult to win a copyright case.)

Book Publishers Register Copyrights On Everything

Professional book publishing companies register a copyright on every single thing they publish. Ironically, they may have the least to worry about since there would be numerous channels to prove when the published something, not the least of which would be the records of thousands of book sellers, royalty payments, author contracts, and tax records. Even so, nothing is quite as clean as a registered copyright.

Do book publishers need more than one copyright?

Not really, if the material stays the same.

That is the rub, however. Book publishers frequently publish multiple editions, sometimes with changes made to the text, or pictures, or other things. When they do so, that material is still copyrighted under the same rule that covers all artistic works, registered or not, but the originally registered copyright would not necessarily cover material that was substantially altered.

So, whenever a book, or other work, is changed enough, the publisher will register another copyright. Typically, this will be done with the original work included in the new copyright as well. Therefore, the original version of the book is covered under multiple copyrights from multiple years.

Proper Copyright Notice Formatting

Even if material is copyrighted more than once from multiple years, it is still incorrect to notice that fact with a date range. Rather, the year of each registration of copyright should be listed individually. Thus, an item with four different registered copyrights would be noticed like this: Copyright 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010.

For freelance writers and other writers publishing materials online or off, however, it is not necessary to list every year the material has been published. Only the years that a copyright was registered need be listed.

Good writing, everyone!

And, by the way, this article is Copyright 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC

Not that that stops everyone. Especially when it comes to the online world, writers need to stop people from stealing their content.

Unfortunately, it seems that no area of the law attracts more armchair lawyers than copyright law. Check out any writing forum, writers group, or webpage about writing, and sooner or later, you’ll see Joe Writer turn into Joe Writer Expert in Copyright Law. Maybe he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Copyright law is actually very complex. It can also be very arcane. That is because copyright and other forms of intellectual property law were actually included from the very beginnings of the United States of America, which co-opted a great deal of English Common Law into its first legal codes. So, in some ways, copyright law is older than America itself. As you can imagine, that can make it tough to apply everything to modern times.

What makes it even more complicated is that while the actual copyright laws span volumes of books, the majority of how copyright law works is actually created and enforced via case law, which is the how the laws grow to be applied to a constantly evolving world via court rulings and subsequent reliance upon those earlier rulings (known as precedent) by courts in future copyright cases. In other words, even if you read and understood every word of copyright law as published, you STILL wouldn’t understand copyright law worth a darn.

Ironically, most people can’t even grasp the published law as demonstrated by a fun article on ARS Technica about how you can’t have a Superbowl party with a television bigger than 55 inches.

This article should be required reading for anyone looking to spout off about how copyright law works. In it, the author notes how a friend determined that using a TV bigger than 55″ to display the Superbowl or other programming violates copyright law, by saying, “It’s in there.”

Indeed.

Copyright Law Is Complicated

The law is all about context, pulling out a single sentence is bound to produce all manner of legalistic junk. In this case, while the sentence is indeed, “in there,” it also not applicable to private viewings because of other sections of the law.

A good way to understand it is to think of the law like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, those books where you read along and then either go to page 124 if you want to go left, or go to page 187 if you want to go right. By choosing to go right, you never read page 124; whatever is on that page never happens in your reading of the book. Similarly, as you go through the copyright laws, you come to a page that says if you are having a private showing in your own home go to page 22,820. If not, then go to page 13,283. The sentence that is “in there” is only there if you go to page 13,283. If you go to page 22,820 (private showing), that line never comes up.

Ah, nothing like a quick bit of pontification on a Monday morning. Cheers.

Sure, I understand the structure of a For-Next Loop and I can work through an If-Then-Else statement, but I’m typically much better at sorting through someone else’s code than I am at writing my own programs. It is sort of the programming equivalent of being able to read a foreign language, but not speak it.

Recently, Coding Horror weighed in on the subject of what value netbooks have. Netbooks, in case you aren’t much of a techie, are small, lightweight laptops that are typically both low-end power and low-end pricing. In other words, you end up with a very portable computer that is not designed for power computing tasks, all for a very low price.

For example, I got my Acer Netbook for just over $200 including shipping and tax. It weighs close to 2 lbs and can fit inside of my 6 inch x 9 inch notebook that I use. (It’s a little thick though.) The trade-off is that it uses a slower than the typical desktop Intel processor called Atom, and it only has 1 GB of RAM. Incidentally, these lower level limits are the result of Microsoft’s tight fisted control of the Windows XP license that can actually run on a netbook versus the recently demised bloatware known as Windows Vista.

Why Netbooks Suck For Techie Blogger Types

The author of Coding Horror is a regular reader of another blog called Global Nerdy, where a recent article suggested that Netbooks occupy the arena between Smartphones and Laptops. While Coding Horror comes to the defense of netbooks, their reasons are different from my reasons.

The original article author apparently looked around at his needs and found no need for a netbook. His contention is that Netbooks are too big to fit into your pocket and thus inferior to Smartphones as a portable device, and less powerful than laptops, and thus inferior to laptops as a computing device. This is not untrue.

The mind boggling part of the recent backlash against netbooks is that the, overwhelmingly techie, authors of these articles assume that people purchasing a netbook are actually trying to replace either a Smartphone or a Laptop at all. If that were the case, then these writers would have a point. However, that is almost always NOT the case, and the myopic vision of those who are power computing users, are just missing the point.

Netbooks are NOT a replacement for laptops or smartphones. Indeed, they are something else entirely. I cannot speak for why other people purchase a Netbook, but one need look no further than the freelance writer to understand how great a Netbook can be for the right user.

Why SmartPhones and Laptops Suck

As a professional freelance writer, I have many needs. This is not unlike most other professions. A carpenter needs a hammer, or a nail gun. I do not. But, I don’t go around saying that nail guns are worthless and that no one ever would need anything other than a hammer.

For a freelance writing business, there is no tool more necessary than a Netbook. In fact, for most of my particular uses, it is the SmartPhones and Laptops that suck, not the netbook.

The best iPhone or top of the line Android SmartPhone, and every other phone out there from Blackberry, to Palm to Windows Mobile all suffer from one fatal flaw; they cannot be touch-typed on. I write 500 words in my sleep. I often write 2500 words, 5000 words, or even complete 300 page books or manuals. Not being able to touchtype is like cutting my salary by 75%. For typing on the go, a Smartphone is worthless, no matter what kind of keyboard it has.

Which brings us to laptops. While certain techie types might consider carrying around a five or six pound laptop with a 17″ widescreen to be perfectly acceptable, there are, I would wager, quite a few more of us who find the idea of carting around a laptop and accompanying laptop bag less than appealing.

Sure, if I’m headed to the local Starbucks for a little java and writing, then I wouldn’t mind at all. On the other hand, if I’m headed out to meet up with friends, or to drop my daughter off at dance class and I just need to have something along with me so I can use some of my down time to write, I really don’t want to be lugging around a big old laptop computer and then wondering when I’m done if it is O.K. to leave it in the trunk of my car. (Is it too cold? Too hot? Will it get stolen?)

A netbook on the other hand serves this function beautifully. It is small and very portable. Instead of being the dad with the huge shoulder bag, I’m the dad with a small backpack or even just a portfolio case. I can whip out the netbook virtually anywhere and write an article, jot out some notes, or do a little research on the Internet when I find a Wi-Fi hotspot. When I’m done, it really isn’t all that big, so I can pretty much take it with me anywhere. If not, it fits in the glove box, under the seat, in a locker. Heck, it even fits in a friend’s purse!

In the end, people who bag on netbooks are completely missing the point. Netbooks are not for replacing phones or for replacing laptops. Netbooks are made to replace and improve upon that centuries old tool, the notebook; not the computer kind, the paper kind. A netbook eliminates carrying around paper and pen along with a file folder with all of your reading or research printed off. Use a netbook for what it is made fore, and you will find that netbooks are not worthless, they are priceless.

While everyone understands that a freelance writer, or any other contractor, only makes money when the work (and bill hours for projects), most people have a little bit of difficulty understanding that the making money freelancing is only part of the trick.

Someone with a regular corporate job with an office and a cubicle and multiple coworkers wants to take time off, they just put in a request with management. A good manager will ensure that there is adequate coverage for all of the duties required of his employees and then, typically, will approve the vacation request as long as it isn’t during a critical time or otherwise not feasible. If a project comes up the day before the employee is scheduled to leave, it just gets assigned to someone else, or a coworker covers for the employee by doing just enough to keep the project afloat.

A freelance writing business works a bit differently. Most freelancers who are professional writers have a solo operation. There are exceptions (like Arctic Llama) to the rule, and some freelancers are lucky enough to have another professional freelancer that they can count on to cover for them a little bit. But, when it comes to business writing, the client usually wants a specific person (you) to write it. That is why they called you in the first place. So, subbing it out isn’t typically a very good option.

Additionally, while most clients with flexible timetables are more than understanding about a trusted pro taking some time off, clients with hard deadlines don’t have a choice. So, when a very good, long-term client calls on Friday with an important project that they have to have by next Tuesday, the last thing they are interested in is letting someone else you know do it, or waiting for another week.

The phone call with the professional freelance writer usually sounds a little something like this:

Client: “Hi, Brian. I have a really important project that I need on a really tight deadline. Do you think you can handle it?”

Freelancer: “Actually, I’m just heading to the airport. My family is going on vacation. I’ll be out of the office all next week.”

Client: Silence…

For those of you new to the freelance writing world, that silence translates into: Please tell me that you will do my project anyway while you are on vacation, because I don’t like my other options. As most professional freelancers will tell you, depending on who the client is, how important the project is to them, and how forgiving your family is, in a lot of cases, a freelance pro will offer to do just that.

The exception to this state of affairs occurs every year during those glorious four to six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years. During this time, no one is surprised to hear you will be out of the office on vacation. Not only that, most projects that come up during this short time of year are not attached to make-or-break deadlines, since whoever initiated the project in the first place is also very aware that plenty of key people will be out on holidays at that time of year.

That is why experienced freelancers build up a solid January pipeline at year end and then work extra hours in November to earn extra money and pad the bank accounts so that come Thanksgiving, they can take as much time off as possible to make up all of those other hours that didn’t end up quite as “free” as they had hoped.

So, that is why on January 6th, 2010, I am here to wish you all a Happy New Year.

There are a lot of exciting things coming this year for Arctic Llama and our clients. Stick around. Things are going to be very interesting.

One of the top drivers of readers to this writing website is search engine traffic. This is not surprising since Arctic Llama isn’t exactly a household name and we don’t spend much time advertising, marketing, Twittering, or otherwise promoting this blog. (This is something we look to improve upon in 2010.) However, some of the search terms that drive users here are a bit more unexpected.

We’ve written before about how much freelance writers make per hour, or how much a freelance writer should make. These articles bring in search engine traffic from all manner of keywords, but the one that pops up repeatedly is how much do freelance writers make? I doubt there is much interest in this topic from a purely research perspective, so the assumption must be that people are wondering how much a freelance writer makes because they are potentially interested in doing some freelance writing.

What makes this unexpected is that we don’t really optimize our site around these keyphrases, and there are a lot of much bigger and better known websites that have written on this topic repeatedly. In other words, we aren’t the number one search result for some huge search keyword, and yet, here is this traffic. It boils down to either, a) people are not getting the information they wanted so they keep looking, or b) people are getting a lot of different information and they keep looking for some definitive answer about what freelance writers get paid. We can see this in how many of the searches on the topic also include a word like "average," "usually," or "typical."

How Much A Freelance Writer Earns

In an effort to serve all of our readers to the best of our ability let me provide an answer to the question about how much an average freelance writer earns. First, the short answer (which you won’t like), then the longer answer, which if you are willing to read should help give the answer people are hoping to find.

So, how much money does a freelance writer earn on average?

It depends. (See, I told you, you wouldn’t like it.)

Like the computer Deep Thought suggests in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problem is that the wrong question is being asked.

There are two main issues with framing the freelance writers earnings question in this manner. The first is that freelance writing income varies widely. There are some exceptions (which we’ll cover in the long answer), but for the most part, unless you are writing consistently for just one or two clients (which is really more of a contractor than a freelancer), the income will vary depending upon the projects and the clients.

To "solve" this problem, some resort to asking how much a freelancer makes per hour on average. This too is problematic in that, even that number varies depending upon circumstances. Furthermore, there is the issue about how to characterize "per hour."

For example, are we talking about the amount billed per hour or the amount made per hour as the result of dividing income over the amount of time worked? Anyone who thinks that the amount of hours a freelance writer works and the amount of hours a writer works are equal is sorely mistaken. (Again, pseudo-contractors being the exception.)

Changing the length of the time interval only helps a little. Freelancing income varies week to week, month to month, and even year to year. A big contract that once provided 80% of writers income comes to an end and there can be an enormous swing in earnings. This is part of what makes having a business plan for freelance writing so important. It is this concept, that finally provides us with a way to answer the question about how much a freelance writer makes. Instead of creating an arbitrary chart or table of freelance writer earnings or agonizing over how accurate the average, whatever that means, is, examining a freelance writing business plan, would provide the insight that people are looking for when they search for information on freelance writing rates.

So, that is what we will be doing here in the next month. The start of the year is a perfect time to review any business plan or strategic objectives. We’ll walk through how a freelance writing business works, where the income comes from, and how cash flow, expenses, contracts, clients, and so on all drive a bottom line that is not easily summed up in a search engine optimized post of 500 words. Along the way, if you are wondering how much a freelance writer earns per year or per month, you’ll get the real answer you are looking for.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. As many other freelance business advice writers have pointed out, one of the perils of working from home is implementing proper time management and avoiding interruptions. All too often, however, these articles make it sound as if the only people you need to guard your time against are the inconsiderate and naive people in your life who either don’t understand what working from home means, or who don’t care. If only it were that simple. If we were only talking about your drinking buddy showing up in shorts and a T-shirt asking you to take off for a day at the beach, preventing work day disruptions would be easy. After all, your days of crumpling under peer pressure like wet tissue paper are over. The true difficulties are much harder to resist. As far as your own distractions like television, PlayStation, and goofing off in the sun, hopefully you love being a freelance writer enough to get in plenty of work in the face of those things.

When you have an office job, there are certain barriers that both you, and everyone else in your life, instinctually respect. You have a boss, who requires certain things from you. You have an office that you have to go to and stay at during certain hours. These things are not negotiable under normal circumstances. Sure, you can take vacation days, and sick days off, but everything else is on the no list, no matter how big of a disappointment or imposition that is on other people.

When you work out of a home office, things look a little bit different. The boss, is you, so if you want to cut yourself a little slack, you can, and everyone knows it. While most people will graciously understand that you have to work a certain number of hours in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, they know that when those hours occur can have some flexibility. In other words, while the regular office worker has to work from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm with a 1 hour lunch, and not much flexibility for anything, no matter how important, the freelancer can, theoretically, work from 7:00 am to 11:00 am then from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm and then again from 9:30 pm to 10:30 pm, which adds up to an 8 hour work day.

If you’ve been working for yourself for a while, you are already cringing.

The fact is that not all hours are as productive as other hours. We’re not talking about whether or not you are more productive during the morning, noon, or night, but rather that getting into the flow of a work day or doing certain tasks at the same time every day, or other activities back to back makes them faster, easier, or more beneficial. For example, writing up a transcript of a conference call might be easier to do right after the call when it is still fresh in your mind. Taking off for three hours to run an "important" errand could cause the same task to take double the amount of time. These factors add up all too quickly for freelancers.

Important People, Important Things, Important Business

It should be pretty easy for most people who were strong enough to become entrepreneurs in the first place to tell a friend that you can’t pick them up at the hair salon because you have to work. What is much, much, tougher is to guard your time against people and activities that are just as important, or more important, than your work.

Consider, the freelancer typing away furiously in the home office while the baby screams in the other room because the spouse is busy with the other child. If you were at the office, there would be no question about whether or not you could help, or if it would be appropriate for you to do so, but when you are working at home, things are different. Should you stop for five minutes to help out while things are crazy? If you don’t, will that cause issues later?

What about the freelancer on a tight deadline when the spouse needs to work late, or go in early or switch days?

What about entrepreneurs with a home office taking part in football practice, school plays, running forgotten items to school and so on?

These are the real issues that everyone who works from home must face, and they are difficult to deal with. Often, the answer should be different than if one works at an office. After all, isn’t the whole point of working from home that it is better than being stuck in an office all day where you can’t do any of these things?

How do you choose between what much be put aside for the business and what the business should be placed on temporary hold for? More importantly, how can you and those critically important people in your life understand each other well enough for the choices that are made to be both understood and accepted without hard feelings? The answers aren’t easy.

Fortunately, there are some work from home rules and freelancing time management tips that can make things run more smoothly. We’ll cover those next.

One way to keep a steady stream of business income coming through the door is to cultivate a writing position with some of the article generation websites out there that pay upfront cash fees to writers. Earning money writing online for these companies provides one way to smooth out the ups and downs of freelance projects and makes for a more dependable writing income.

One thing to note, writing for content generation sites (sometimes referred to as article mills) is the opposite of creating a long-term stream of passive income that so many writers attempt to build. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favor of creating an income stream that comes without any effort, but big monthly income from passive sources doesn’t happen overnight. Anyone who says differently, is selling something (probably something that doesn’t work).

Demand Studios Allows Writers to Flag Titles Update

Demand Studios is one of the content generation sites that allows professional writers to take on writing assignments without any real limitations once you have been fully qualified. If you are interested in the mechanics of writing for Demand Studios, you should probably check out How to Write for Demand Studios, as well as How Demand Studios works. Finally, so you have a realistic idea of how much money a freelance writer makes with them, you should also research, Is Demand Studios Worth It.

One of the most irritating aspects of writing for Demand Studios is wading through dozens, or even hundreds, of crappy titles. These include everything from titles with no answer (How To Get Your Credit Score Reset) to titles that would take an entire book to cover (How To Build a Space Shuttle Step By Step). Just as annoying are those titles that have obviously been misclassified by someone who either

• a) doesn’t understand English well enough or
• b) uses some sort of automated method to edit titles

There were recently a ton of titles under the Investing category like How To Trim A Hedge Before Winter. Obviously, someone is working from a crib sheet or something that tells them that titles with “hedge” (as in hedge fund) must go in investing. Of course, even if you eliminate the plants, there are still plenty of other meanings of hedge that would not be related to personal finance or investing.

It was, therefore, a joy to find out that Demand Studios is testing a new system, at long last, that allows writers to tag stupid titles. Certain titles are still supposed to be reported via other (longer taking) mechanisms, but a great many of the dumbest title errors can be quickly and easily flagged by approved writers.

The reason that this is so important, and such good news, is that Demand Studios pays a relatively low fee for the articles written by its writers. In order to make writing for Demand Studios worth it, it is necessary to complete articles quickly. One of the biggest mistakes new freelance writers make is not accounting for time that they spend working that isn’t specifically writing. One potentially time consuming task at Demand Studios is finding articles to be written that are right for a particular freelancer.

Spend 10 minutes finding one article title, and suddenly the pay rate has dropped to very low hourly rates that are pretty much unacceptable for a serious freelance writer. Being able to flag idiotic titles quickly will hopefully lead to them being cleared out fast which means that finding good titles will be much easier, and more importantly, faster. As an added bonus, hopefully it exposes some of the least diligent title editors as money cranking shills and gets them eliminated as well. After all, nothing is faster than never letting a junk title into the system in the first place.

Flag Poor Titles at Demand Studios

One important note about the new title flagging system at DemandStudios.com. It is not an open system that all writers can participate in right away. The company has wisely limited the title flag function to writers who have proven that they are serious, competent, writers instead of throwing the doors open to everyone. Not that being elitist is always a good thing, but especially on the Internet, if there is a way to abuse something, people will do it.

By making sure that a certain amount of time, effort, and quality has been demonstrated by a writer before handing out the title marking attribute, the company makes it less worth the effort for hackers, bozos, and even deliberately malicious users to misuse the title reporting feature.

I’ll keep you posted, but lets hope this makes writing for Demand Studios even more profitable in the future.

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For a professional freelance writer taxes are a year-round concern. Writers making more than a small amount of money over the course of the year likely owe quarterly estimated tax payments. And writers earning $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 per year have to focus on squeezing every business deduction they can out of any transaction that is even remotely related to their small business or risk being crushed under the burden of taxes.

Self-Employment Tax and Small Business Owners

The worst of all the taxes inflicted upon hard working Americans is the self-employment tax. While millions of people get up in arms about the estate tax, which most of them will never pay, any American who has the nerve to go out, work hard, and succeed in business for themselves will find themselves struggling with the onerous burden of the self-employment tax.

Self-employment tax, also referred to as SE tax, is a bit of a misnomer. What SE taxes really are is the double-whammy of paying both parts of Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes.

Most people are aware that they lose a significant part of their paycheck each week or each month to a wide variety of taxes. There are Federal income taxes, state income taxes, and some poor souls even pay local income taxes to a city or county. Then there is another category of taxes. These taxes are Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes.

The government and the special interests that they serve do a wonderful job of obfuscating, spinning, and flat out tricking the American public into a compliant daze simply by using a little misdirection. The words Social Security never appear on most paystubs, a subtle, but effective way of dissociating the pain of paying taxes from the Elysian Fields of government funded retirement. Instead, Social Security taxes are usually labeled FICA on worker’s paystubs. I’m sure this stands for something in order to make it seem like there is no slight of hand going on, but most people would understand the words Social Security Tax much better, and everyone knows it.

Over the years, the secret of FICA has all but disappeared. There are few people these days that don’t know what FICA is. However, what many people do not know, is that the FICA taxes that show up on their paycheck is only half of the total Social Security tax. The rest is paid by their employer.

As an entrepreneur who works for yourself, you are both the employee and the employer. Add it all up and the SE tax rate is 15.3%. That is 12.4% for social security and 2.9% for Medicare. That doesn’t sound so bad until your realize that this amount is on top of your regular tax bracket rate!

If you do well enough in your business to be in the 30% tax bracket, that means that your tax rate for Federal tax purposes is over 45%. That doesn’t even include any state or local income taxes. In other words, as a successful freelance entrepreneur, you can expect to pay half of every dollar you earn in taxes.

Your only defense is to deduct as many business expenses as possible.

Business Tax Deductions for Writers

Don’t wait until you are earning more money from your writer to start deducting your professional writing expenses. Uncle Same won’t wait to start taxing you, so do wait to start trying to get a little bit of your hard earned money back.

Top 10 Tax Deductible Items for Writers

1. Computers, Printers, Monitors, etc. – If you need it to write, you can deduct it.
2. Office Supplies – Paper, toner, dictionaries, books, light bulbs. – If your office wouldn’t function without it, it’s deductible.
3. Broadband Internet Service – You need the Internet for research, job hunting, submitting projects. Deduct it.
4. Equipment – Filing cabinets, desks, chairs. These bigger expense items are all deductible. Don’t worry about depreciating them. Unless you are really cranking out expenses, they’ll all fit under your Section 159 exception.
5. Cell Phone, Long-Distance, Skype – If you call clients, talk to prospects, or participate in conference calls, that is deductible. There is an issue of personal use if you don’t have a separate line, but keep records, especially those long-distance bill for a 45 minute conference call. Those are all legitimate expenses.
6. Mileage – Any time you go anywhere for business reasons, that mileage is deductible. Trips to Office Depot for toner count, so do trips to see clients, driving to conferences, even a trip to Kinkos. Get one of those little mileage books and keep one in every car you own. Write down EVERYTHING and deduct every single foot.
7. Parking – Save your parking receipts and deduct, deduct, deduct. Here is a dirty little secret, parking receipts contain very little information, so it is almost impossible to disallow them as non-business expenses. When in doubt, deduct!
8. Eating Out, Entertainment – O.K. not everything qualifies, and going overboard here can get you flagged for an audit. However, anytime you entertain clients or potential clients you can deduct those expenses. You and your buddy went to the ball game? He’s the V.P. of Marketing at a Fortune 500 Company? Deduct the cost of those tickets, baby! Make sure and ask him if he has any projects for you at some point during the game. Again, don’t go crazy, but if you’ve got $50K in revenue and $800 in entertainment expenses, no one is going to look twice.
9. Home Office Tax Deduction – Once upon a time, the home office deduction was an audit flag. Not anymore. Setup a writing office in your home and you get to deduct not only part of your mortgage payment, but part of your heating bill, electric bill, and so on. Technically it has to be for business only, so get some proof. Take pictures of your home office without a single non-business item in it. Make sure you can see a calendar or something else with a date. Take a picture every year. Use them as proof. What if you get audited? There is no such thing as a surprise audit. Clean up your office and make it for business only. Or, if you don’t want to bother, say you stopped using it for business this year.
10. Education, Seminars, Training – Regular wage earners have to meet the miscellaneous 2% floor to deduct these things. Have "the business" pay for them for you and then you can deduct them from the first dollar. Get a business credit card to help establish who paid for it. If you don’t have one, just make sure that the address on the confirmation goes to: Your Name, Your Business Name, Address, just like it would if they were sending it to IBM.

Good luck with your end of year tax planning strategies.

I’ll be back with more tips for year end tax savings and things you can do with your business all year long to save money on taxes.

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Yet, among all the different types of writers, there are some writing essentials that stand out. These things are writing helpers, writing stimulators, or writing tools that every author needs to successfully write great material, whatever that may be. As Christmas time approaches, I’ll be looking to put together a list of the Best Gifts for Writers, or Top Christmas Gifts for Writers, or whatever, the keyword research looks like I should title it. In the end, however, it will be a current listing of some of these items, as well as some great gadgets that writers need. So, without further ado, here are some of the things every writer must have.

Top 5 Things Every Writer Needs

1. Computer AND Laptop or Netbook for Writing – It sounds like a luxury, but when it comes to being a serious writer, it isn’t. There is simply no way a real writer can go through life writing in only one place. That means that either the writer lugs around a notepad or note cards or something else to write down all of their writing ideas, or they get mobile with a laptop or netbook. Thinking about just using a laptop? It sounds good on paper, but a power writer needs a powerful writing platform. They need something that will keep up a dozen tabs in Firefox (or Chrome), a handful of Microsoft Word documents, an Excel spreadsheet or two, a calendar application, and an email application (Outlook does them both, but uses enough resources to be two apps), and a handful of other utilities like a clipboard manager, a reference system, and a screenshot capturing utility. Plus, really writing and banging out article after article or 50 pages of a novel each day, takes a full-size monitor and a full-size, responsive, feels good to the touch, keyboard. Do they make laptops with all of this? Sure they do. They cost $3,000 and they weigh ten pounds (with the charger and laptop case you’ll need to carry.) In other words, you can get it all in something that isn’t really very portable, which was the point in the first place. A powerful laptop will let you work from any room in your house, and it will let you work from any Starbucks or coffee shop you like, when you plan to go out and do some writing, but it will fail you miserably when you are strolling across a college campus one morning when inspiration hits while you weren’t really planning to write. That means a run back to your car trunk, or back to that old pen and paper thing.
2. Notebooks, Notepads, Notecards, Journals, Blank Paper, etc. – Being able to whip out a laptop or notebook and write on the go, is the writer’s Utopia. However, that doesn’t mean that a writer never wants pen and paper. Certain things just suck to do on a computer or in some sort of application or utility. There are a hundred mind-mapping utilities out there, and none of them lets you brainstorm as fast or well as a piece of paper and a pen. Sometimes, the words are just flowing out of your brain, and your PC or laptop is just getting in the way with its mouse and keyboard and backspace key. At times like these, you need a pen and paper. Plus, things get lost inside of computers. Microsoft OneNote is a great note taking and organizing program, but its bloated and jammed full of icons. Just starting it up can be a nuisance, even if you let it run its little pre-start icon in the background. Besides, for all of its many features, nothing has ever duplicated the ability to just flip through a notebook or shuffle through a stack of papers giving each page a quick glance until something leaps off the page and slaps you in the face. If you ever need to come up with a gift for a writer quick and cheap, buy them a notebook. Buy a nice looking one with a solid cover and quality spiral rings (or binding if they prefer). Quality spiral notebooks have spirals that are horizontal across the notebook, not ones that wrap their way diagonally up the spine.
3. Wireless Keyboard – When I first saw wireless keyboard I thought they were a waste of money. I didn’t figure they were any worse than regular wired keyboards, I just couldn’t see the value. That scene in the movies where the writer or computer hacker has the keyboard on their lap while they bang away is the creation of someone who only writes an hour or two each day. A serious writer that cranks out hours of writing at a time can only sit like that for a short while. Then your back starts to hurt, your wrists start to feel like they are getting carpal tunnel, and you find yourself blinking a lot to try and get rid of dry eyes and computer monitor eyestrain. A real professional writer has spent a lot of time on an exact setup that positions the light, the monitor, they desktop, and the keyboard in specific places at specific angles and specific heights. (And if you EVER see someone typing with one hand, just call Bulls*t right away. Two hands isn’t enough fingers to write fast enough for most writers and work a mouse, let alone being able to type with one hand. Try it sometime.) While all of that is true, there is nothing better than being able to position your keyboard exactly where you want it at any given time without having to worry about pulling the cord, spilling your coffee, or knocking over your kid’s picture on your desk. Push it back to set down a book in directly in front of you, then bring it back to the edge when you are feeling lazy and sloppy. And, yeah, every once and a while, drop that sucker in your lap and type out some emails or play games. (By the way, get the wireless mouse to go with it at the same time. It’s cord is even more problematic and by getting a matching set, you only have to have one USB wireless receiver plugged into your PC.) Thinking about buying a computer gift for a writer or just a present that is directly related to writing? A great Christmas gift for your writer loved one is a wireless keyboard and mouse set. For my money, buy a Logitech wireless keyboard. The construction is solid, it works well, and the utility that comes with it is functional, unobtrusive, and small.
4. Dictionary, Thesaurus, AP Stylebook, and The Chicago Manual of Style – Any writer with even a year of experience already has all four of these items and is NOT interested in getting a new one. There are plenty of online dictionaries and thesauruses, and we know all about them. They just aren’t the same. Sometimes, it seems like they can’t really be trusted, and other times it seems like they are missing something. Even worse, sometimes they have too much, with things that aren’t really universally recognized. When my Webster’s New World Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for "jackassery", I accept that it isn’t a real word.  When it is missing from webster.com, then I wonder if I just need a "better" dictionary. If it is on some online Scrabble dictionary, then I don’t really know if I can trust it. I will go ten rounds with an editor who won’t let me use a word that shows up in the big 10-pound dictionary I have, but there is no way I’m going stick my neck out for the adverb form of a word that is on ReallyGreatAmericanWordsThatAreSpelledRight.com. – By the way if you are looking for the best gifts for writers, DO NOT buy them one of these books unless you know for sure they don’t already have one. New edition or not, we come to love our resource books like members of the family and we don’t need some new one taking up space on the "books we never actually use" shelf.
5. Fast Internet Connection with Wireless Home Network – To be more specific, a wireless home network that doesn’t get dropped and broken by Microsoft Windows even if our computer sleeps or hibernates! (Jerks. Don’t include a feature if it isn’t going to work with 99% of the hardware out there. We have better things to do than figure out the 1 in a million way you have designed your software to work.) And, we need a fast Internet connection that is always fast and always working, not one that is fast as long as no one is home and not using it. Good copywriters are responsible for that shifty, sneaky, language that the phone companies and cable companies use to market their DSL and cable internet. Good writers know exactly how to read it too, and we are not amused. Up to 7 MB per second does not mean that we get 7MB per second 24/7 and we understand that, but it also does not mean that sometimes we’ll get 1 MB per second or LESS! Up to means that it will peak at and stay close to that speed. If I knew how to do it, I’d set up class action lawsuits against every telecom company in this country that offers "up to" a certain speed and then actually provides something that is half of that. I think one could make a pretty good argument that such wording is both deliberately deceptive, and uncompetitive. Otherwise, where does it stop? I could start marketing Internet service tomorrow at speeds "up to 5,800 GB per second," and when you get 0 (because I don’t have an Internet company) that would just be too bad, because I said "up to." Sounds like fraud doesn’t it? That means that there is a number at which the promise is too high and the delivery is too low. I say we contest where the telecoms choose to set it.