You can’t spit in the street in Shanghai these days without hitting a venture capitalist trying to give out money. The economy is growing so far, and there are so many opportunities, that it’s a tempting target like no other.

However, only a small proportion of businesses actually need VC funding. If you have customers and a good product, you can grow organically — just plow the profits back into the company. You don’t have to give away equity, or take on debt.

Other companies get funding from strategic partners, from family and friends, you name it.

Plus, VCs need to see big ideas — anything small isn’t worth the time it takes to invest in it — and a clear exit plan.

I’m working on launching a magazine now about business and infrastructure in the undiscovered parts of China — the provinces that are all trying to catch up to Shanghai but where no foreign business journalists are posted. Since there’s little local business journalism (at least, as we know it in the west) this is a huge untapped opportunity. I’m going to have to hire an outside publisher to handle the advertising sales (I don’t want to get into a conflict of interest situation with the editorial side of what I’m doing). But I’m not going to need any outside money — though that isn’t stopping people from trying to offer it to me. It’s a nice situation to be in.

On Wednesday, I gave a talk about influence and marketing to the Shanghai Entrepreneur Group (I was its president last year) and, as is often a case, there was a venture capitalist there as well, asking us if we had business plans. And who in Shanghai these doesn’t doesn’t have a business plan in a back pocket ready to whip out at a moment’s notice?

It reminds me of when I was covering the whole dot-com thing. I was at Computerworld, writing about everything happening in the banking and online brokerage sector. It’s hard to be a mere reporter if you have any imagination and energy when all around you people are launching new businesses.

Today, in Shanghai, the situation is the same. Fons Tuinstra is the perfect example of this — he’s a former foreign correspondent, in fact the founder of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club — and author of a book about business in China. But now he’s running China’s first, and only, profesional speaker’s bureau.

One of my financial reporters quit recently to go into business development. And a former freelancer left to start her own business providing musical instruments to schools.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Nobody becomes a print journalist to make money. Even the world’s most talented writers probably make more money from the movie rights to their articles and books, or from speaking fees, than the articles or books themselves.

It’s just a fact of the profession — we’re competing with people who are willing to work for free. It’s almost as bad as being a drummer in a rock band, or an aspiring actor.

So if you’re a journalist, good pay and decent hours don’t matter to you.

Except that they do.

I want my work to be read. And valued. I want to provide a benefit to society and get respect for what I do. Money is an indicator of all of this.

It’s not an automatic relationship, but there’s a very strong correlation between the number of readers you have and how much you get paid.

Similarly, if people read your articles then go out and take immediate action, whether to buy — or cancel — a $1 million technology purchase, or write a letter of protest, or change their minds about a political candiate, or just laugh out loud — then that article had value to them. And people will pay more money for articles that are valuable than for articles that they read and immediately forget.

Sometimes readers pay directly, by buying a book or supporting your blog, or indirectly, through editors, by buying a magazine or newspaper.

In either case, as your work has a bigger and bigger impact, your income goes up.

Sure, not as much as it would in other industries — investment banking, say, or waitressing — but still nice. You get to eat, and pay rent. Very handy, money. Even if you’re above these kinds of material concerns, it’s still pleasant to get a check once in a while and know that the money represents other people telling you that you improved their lives in some way.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Tonight I took two would-be freelance writers out to dinner at the local Russian restaurant. (The Flying Elephant, at 525 Guangdong Lu.)

There was a Russian band playing, and a party in full swing (the Russians do love a party). One of the writers, Wang Lili, a well-known local novelist, described as important — starving, of course — gave me a copy of her latest novel as a present. The other was a starving international relations student from South Africa.

On the pretext of demonstrating the publication for which they would, potentially, be working I took them both back to my apartment. Very average, by US standards — tiny kitchen, lots of traffic noise, swarming with cats and a dog. But huge by Chinese standards. And I showed off pictures of my house back in Massachusetts.

Only the Chinese writer was impressed.

Now my plan is that they both go back to their friends and talk up the single rich American woman, and maybe introduce me to some other starving writers, who are not potential employees and thus would be available for dating.

The last time I was overseas, back when I was last single, I myself was a starving young writer. Economic disparities were not an issue. In Russia, I drank only Soviet-brand champagne on special occasions, and ate canned eggplant paste on black bread as my dietary staple. I borrowed money from friends as frequently as I was in a position to lend it, and generally avoided pricy bars and restaurants.

In fact, I remember planning to take an Australian TV editor out to dinner, on a date, to a Spanish restaurant for paella – only to find out that the prices were about ten times what I had expected them to be and turning back at the door in humiliation.

I still don’t spend too much time in five-star restaurants, but now it’s from reverse snobbery rather than lack of funds.

Some foreign journalists in town take full advantage of the economics. One copy editor I know makes between 400 and 500 RMB an hour — the rough spending power equivalent of $400 to $500. The guy, who’s in his forties, tells me that he works only a few hours a week and spends the rest of his time dating.

On the one hand, you think, “must be nice.” But then, you think again. And it’s just sad.

***

When a starving writer gets a sudden bit of good fortune, there’s often a tendency to show off and to share. “Look — I got a job with an expense account! Dinner’s on me!” Or, “My editors put me up in a nice hotel for the duration of the conference. They had the best shampoos. Here, have a tiny little bottle or two!”

In the US, I’m solidly middle-class, with a house that needs a new septic system, a tenant that never pays rent, an overhanging mortgage, and old student loans still haunting me. My idea of a fancy night out is the Olive Garden.

In China, I sometimes feel like I’m a millionaire — but I’m not used to it. I know that really, I’m a starving writer who’s experiencing a bit of temporary good fortune.

So there’s a tendency to show off too much, and to buy too many dinners for people.

I don’t know if other foreign journalists abroad feel the same way — that they’re impostors in a way, pretending to be rich and successful when, really, at heart, they’re very average.

And whether this adds a layer of .. I don’t know, fakery? falseness? something .. to their interactions with normal people.

I tell people that I’m not really rich, and can feel how stupid that sounds, coming from someone living in a giant apartment in downtown Shanghai.

Eventually, wages will equilize. I’m certainly not rich in Japan or South Korea — it took those countries just a generation to catch up.

Meanwhile though, it feels as though I’m the ugly American.

I’ve met real rich people, who’ve been with money for all their lives, and they’re used to it and have no hangups about it, they don’t overcompensate one way or the other.

Me, I now know why those nouveau-riche people act as stupid as they do. It’s because you’re literally not yourself. The outside and the inside don’t match and everything you do or say is forced and phony. Do you give your friends money because you care about them, or to show off how rich and generous you are? How often can you pick up the tab at a bar or restaurant?

Some foreigners in Shanghai deal with this issue by socializing only with other foreigners. It’s easy enough to do. You can go for months in Shanghai and never have to say more than two words in Chinese (“Bill, please!”)

Even journalists sometimes fall into this trap, dealing with locals only in the context of formal interviews or — for added distancing — through interpreters. By staying in a bubble you never have to fact this issue of divided self-image.

But it can’t be very good for the reporting.

Signing off in Shanghai,
Maria

Tonight, at our weekly drinking session, a fellow journalist called me on the fact that I was planning to name names and point fingers at companies that gave money to journalists to cover their events. But still haven’t.

Did I chicken out? Almost. A person from company I was planning to name first (see below) called me up two days ago and asked for a favor for a friend. Then his wife called me up to arrange details. To make it worse, another friend of theirs was at our drinking gathering tonight.

A real journalist wouldn’t care, Fons told me. (He’s the founder of the Foreign Correspondents Club here.) Am I or am I not a real journalist — or have I become castrated by the daily grind of financial reporting?

Wel, when you put it like that…

It’s a fact of life here in China that journalists get “taxi money” for attending conferences, money which some are then supposed to share with their assignment editors. In return, they pick up a press release from the company and drop it into the paper.

Foreign journalists don’t usually get handed these envelopes of cash. We usually make a fuss.

A digression: this is not always the case, though. I, along with a dozen or so other Europeans and Americans, was recently given one such envelope at a conference in Singapore, and was surprised that I was the only one of the internationational journalists there who raised a stink. Everyone else managed to rationalize accepting the money — even the Americans. I demanded that the PR guy responsible be fired. I don’t know if he was or not, but he was very publicly embarrassed. Apparently, in Singapore, they actually were intending it as taxi money.

Anyway, in China, it happens all the time.

First, a little primer on Chinese money: a 100 RMB note is like a $10 bill (if you round off the exchange rate). So an envelope of 100 RMB notes — just three or four or five — may not look like such a big deal.

But in terms of spending power, 100 RMB is more like $100. A nice big bottle of beer is 3 RMB. So, say, if you’re a journalist who lives on beer, 100 RMB goes along way. A bus ride is 2 RMB. A Papa John’s pizza is 90 RMB, but a real Chinese journalist wouldn’t be ordering one. He’d be getting the 10 RMB Chinese takeout.

So you can see from this that an envelope of 100 RMB bills is good money.

So here’s what happens at a press conference: at the entrance, the foreign journalists are segregated from the locals.

The foreigners get a press packet devoid of money. The locals get the same packet but in Chinese, and with money inside.

That is what happened at a BearingPoint event not too long ago. The giant US-based outsourcing firm flew in senior executives from around the world to answer our questions.

I don’t know if they knew about the envelopes or not, but the New York PR guy did, and shrugged it off as a local cultural thing.

So we get a tour of their facility, and a question-and-answer session with the execs. We got a presentation that made BearingPoint look as if it was number one in China — but the detailed numbers they provided showed that IBM was ahead.

The foreigners present — an IDG guy, a Reuters guy, and myself — demanded an explanation. (Disclosure: I’ve worked for both IDG and Reuters in the past, and think that these are great organizations.) BearingPoint’s answer was that it’s true that IBM may have more people and more revenues in China, but when you slice the numbers just so, and don’t count hardware, and don’t count software… well, you know.

The local journalists stuck to questions like, “What makes you so wonderful?”

I may be wrong, I can’t help feeling that money was a factor.

It’s doesn’t always have to be this way.

When my ex-husband was working for the local office of Hill & Knowlton, he said that he ran into the same attitude when he was arranging events — the Chinese staff in the office assured him that the journalists would expect money.

Instead, when he invited journalist to come, he told them, “This is an actual news event, not a self-serving fluff thing, so there isn’t going to be any taxi money.”

He reports that this didn’t hurt attendance any.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

If you’re in town in Shanghai on a Thursday night — and now you have an excuse to come visit — join us at Cotton’s Bar on the corner of Anting Lu and Jianguo Lu.

The owner, Cotton, is an old friend of my ex-husband. Tell her I sent you, and that I say “hi.”

She joined us tonight as we were discussing Russia’s right-wing extremists and war reporting (two of my favorite topics).

Wang Lili, a Shanghaiese novelist joined us. In addition to writing novels, she also has an English-language blog.

Other drinkers included folks from Germany, the US, South Africa, and Holland. You know, the usual crowd.

Again, the gathering didn’t break up until the early hours of the morning, though I hurried back to my desk since I had to work. I also stopped drinking after two beers and switched to Diet Cokes. Cotton kept trying to buy me a drink, but I’ve resisted Russians plying me with vodka, Koreans with soju, Chechens with araki. I was not swayed. Also, I had calls scheduled I needed to get back for.

During the winter, I get an extra hour in the evenings — 9 p.m. Shanghai time is only 8 a.m. New York time. But after daylight savings time kicks in, it’s an even 12-hour difference. So 9 p.m. and my editors are already at their desks.

Tonight, I cheated a little bit — I filed most of my stories early, before I headed out. But one story wasn’t coming together and I was supposed to get the info I needed later in the night.

People often ask me about the hours I keep, but I can’t say that I mind. I sleep in on the nights that I work late, and sleep very very late on Saturdays.

The folks I interview are sometimes surprised to find out that I’m calling from China. The connection is almost invariably perfectly clear, so you can’t tell. Three years ago, people were suprised by the fact that I was in China at all, and calling them.

Now, it’s become normal. Everyone is everywhere. I’ve talked to execs of US firms who were in the Middle East, in Europe, and all throughout Asia. Occasionally, the only person on the phone who is in the US is the PR person scheduling the call – and boy, are all the rest of us usually annoyed to find that that we had to stay up in the middle of the night for his or her convenience.

It’s become natural. I cover global securities industry technology — why wouldn’t I be in Shanghai? It’s part of the globe, right?

But, for the most part, I wouldn’t recommend Shanghai to mid-career financial reporters. Go to Hong Kong instead. Life is much easier, the Internet is faster, communications are better (people often have trouble calling into China — Hong Kong is much better). Everybody speaks English and you can buy books, and clothes meant for tall people. Oh, and their Foreign Correspondents Club is fantastic — very British colonial style, a true gentleman’s club (though they let me in last time I was there).

I’m heading to Hong Kong for a conference next month, then for vacation in early May.

I can’t wait.

Still in Shanghai,

Maria

Tomorrow night, Shanghai journalists will be continuing a long-standing tradition of foreign correspondents everywhere: they will go out to a bar and drink. It’s a regular Thursday night event for us here, or we hope it will be.

Last Thursday, we started drinking at 8 p.m. I had to go back to work at 2 a.m., but the party continued after I left.

But to be honest, foreign correspondents don’t really drink very much anymore. We’re scared of losing our jobs, for one thing. But also, the world has changed. We can’t get away with it now.

In times past, you could safely rewrite the Pravda or Izvestiya report, or have an assistant translate an article from Beijing, and happily pass it off as your own product. You could go to a party or two, pick up some gossip, and file it as information from “knowledgeable inside sources.” You could tell editors that this was China, or Russia, or wherever, and people just did not speak on the record. And they, being in awe of you and a bit scared of your ability to report overseas, would buy it.

Now, any editor can simply Google your story subject and the original People’s Daily article would pop right up. Ouch! Major buzzkill.

But it gets worse. The editor would Google your competition. Ten years ago, it would have been too hard to find the China stories written on the same subject by diferent reporters, unless it was the one big story that everyone was writing that week.

Now, editors can Google anything, and ask you, “Why couldn’t you get any sources when Plkj Zslkjp over at Bloomberg got six people to talk on the record?”

I do that routinely to my writers. If anybody else has more sources than us .. well, we’ve got some explaining to do.

I expect my editors to do it to me. After all, it takes just a couple of seconds, and it’s great for quality control.

For State-side stories, reporters have always had to keep an eye on the competition, and would get chewed out when they didn’t.

Now, we have to do the same overseas, as well. And for every one of us hanging out at the bar last Thursday night, there were ten slaving over their computers.

So the days of wine and baijou are over and done with. It’s a good thing, of course, but it does take quite a bit of the romance out of the profession.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

The initial inspiration for me to become a war correspondent was to be like Hemingway. I wanted to drink, smoke, and write novels.

I tried doing some of this while in Chicago (I was covering the northern suburbs for the Chicago Tribune). But I discovered that I didn’t like the taste of alcohol, couldn’t get the hang of inhaling smoke, and when I reread my literary masterpiece, I fell asleep a quarter of the way through it. Literally. It was astoundingly boring. It was called “Barton Obler” and it was somewhere between “A Confederacy of Dunces” and Gogol’s “Dead Souls” — or so I had hoped.

So I went to Russia, and Chechnya and Afghanistan… I learned to drink large amounts of vodka and still file intelligible copy. And got hooked on sidestream smoke (but never did get the hang of inhaling).

I never did finish any of the novels I started, though.

I could say that I discovered that the actual reality of covering tank battles, refugees, economic reversals and the occasional spot of ethnic cleansing turned out to be more important and significant than putting my name on a novel. Or that I became determined to understand the root economic causes of conflict and dedicate my career to figuring out why some countries are able to grow their economies and achieve peace and stability and others are not.

But I have a suspicion that the actual turning point was in Abkhazia. I was on the front lines, and met a young, attractive nurse near the trenches on the banks of the Gumista River. (On the front lines, all nurses are beautiful and young, but this one, as I recall, was particularly so.)

She told me that I was very brave to be out there, covering the war. Why, yes, I was.

And she said she admired me very much. Well, yes, I was admirable.

And she may have further elaborated on my looks, and skills as a journalist. And, in the end, she invited me to stay with her for the night.

I blithely declined, explaining that I already had a cot to sleep on in the medical quarters at the Upper Eshera command base.

A month later, when I was back in Moscow: it hit me. She was trying to seduce me, right there on the front line at the Gumista, and I had completely ignored her. I could have had my Hemingway moment — a love affair with a beautiful nurse, in the trenches, with bullets flying above us and bombs exploding in the air.

Instead, I went back to Upper Eshera, where, with bullets flying and bombs exploding in the air, doctors explained to me how they dyed medical alcohol green to keep soldiers from drinking it.  It was educational, but not quite life-transforming…

Soon afterwards, a medical supply helicopter with several nurses on board was shot down by the Georgians, and everyone on board burned to death. I didn’t remember her name, so didn’t know whether she was on board, but a few other friends were.

The Georgians weren’t completely at fault — the Abkhazians had previously used Red Cross-painted helicopters to ferry soldiers and munitions, and bragged about how they got away with it.

The incident was one of those that later inspired me to take a look at the Geneva Conventions. (Thanks go to then-IJC committee chair John Hopkins, for inspiring me to write the guide.)

But I still have this feeling… what would have happened if I had stayed with the nurse at the front? Would the experience have touched me and inspired me to write great works of literature?

I’ll try a hand at that literature thing again when I retire. And if you happen to be that nurse, reading this — look me up. I’m in Shanghai now, but could probably swing by sometime.

– Maria

Okay, when freelance writers call me up for advice, I always have time to sit down over coffee and lunch and get them started. This includes introducing them to three or four editors who are looking for new writers. I’m always happy to see their names in print in a month or so.

So, in that general spirit, here is a very very basic sales checklist – this is where you should be starting with sales and marketing. It is after you do all this that you can start applying concepts like those in Cialdini’s book.

• Know your market.

1. Make a list of all the editors and magazines – with full contact information and rates – that you would like to work for. Getting the Writer’s Market is not enough, since many magazines are not listed, and those that are, are flooded with queries.
2. Prioritize the list. What are the publications you would most like to get into?
3. Sort the list. Do you have what it takes to pitch to particular markets? If not, set those aside until you’re ready. Separate out the ones from directly competing publications — you have to be careful to not overlap in your queries.
4. Group the list. Do some of these markets fall into a particular category such as “business to business” or “consumer electronics”? If so, if you focus on one particular group first, you can more quickly develop a niche and expertise and name recognition than if you scatter yourself around too many different markets.

• Know your competition.

1. Are you writing on topics that other people are willing to write about for free? You can write about puppies and kittens, or on your musings on life, in your spare time. It’s almost impossible to keep a roof over your head that way.
2. If you know your competitors personally, you can pass work their way when you have too much to handle or if there’s a particular conflict for you. In return, you can get leads from them and industry gossip.
3. Join professional organizations such as the SPJ, National Writers Union, ASBPE, and SABEW. Get active on committees.

• On average, you need to make a contact with someone seven times (or so) before you make a sale.

1. Create a system in place for reaching out to your target editors with useful story suggestions and pitches.
2. Share sources and story ideas with editors. They’ll owe you a favor. Stop worrying about your ideas being “stolen.” Who cares. Ideas are free. It’s delivering on them that counts — and takes work and skill.
3. Refer editors to other writers. Again, the editors will be greatful and so will the other writers.
4. Find ways to meet editors socially. Invite them out for coffee and find out what kind of stories they need most. Serve on committees with them. Invite them to speak at events. The more they know you, the more they trust you — and trust is important in this business. They have to trust you not to plagiarise, not to make up quotes, to deliver on time, and not to complain when they ask you to make changes. Basically, they have to know you’re not a jerk. If they meet you personally, it will give them a bit of extra confidence.

• After you make a sale, follow up.
  1. If the story isn’t up to spec when you file it, many editors won’t bother to tell you what’s wrong – they’ll just stop assigning stories to you. If you were on staff, they’d invest the time to train you, but it’s usually just not worth the effort with freelancers. You have to seek out feedback – and improve your product — to ensure that you retain your editors.
  2. Once you made the first sale to an editor, set up a schedule to make subsequent sales. Find out how often they can run your articles. Figure out what percentage of your suggestions they accept. Then pitch the appropriate number of stories. For example, if they can run one story from you a month, and they like, on average, one out of five of your ideas, make sure you have at least five (or seven, to be on the safe side) story ideas for them every month.
  3. If an editor stops hearing from you, they’ll figure you’re out of the business. They won’t bother to call and check, or email you with story assignments. Why? Because freelancing is a precarious business. Most people stay in it for just a short time before they give up and get day jobs.
     
     
• Manage the business

1. Set up a system to track all assignments and invoices.
2. Calculate the average number of days that you file your stories early (or late) — and try to improve those numbers.
3. Calculate the average number of days it takes your editors to pay your invoices — use this to manage your cashflow, and to weed out the worst-paying markets.
4. Calculate the average amount of time you spend for each dollar you bill. Your time is your scarcest resource. By tracking your time, you can figure out which publications – based on their rates, and the time it takes to write (and rewrite) the stories – pay you the most and the least.
5. Calculate your overhead and your profit margins. (I just calculated my profit margins for the first time last week – and discovered that three publications were actually costing me money. Yes, after all my expenses were added up, I was paying for the privilege of writing for them. Oops.)

• Get on the Web

1. Keep your website current and up-to-date.
2. Google yourself and relevant keywords. Does your site come up? Don’t mess around with “search engine optimization” – just make sure that all the articles you write are posted on your website to the fullest extent possible under your contracts with editors.
3. Ask for – and post – testimonials from your editors. Ask your editors to include a link to your website along with your name and email address.
4. Include your URL in your email signature and use it when you contribute to online discussions, forums, and organizations.

I recently hired a business coach, Carlo Wolff (I pay him in coffee and in kind words such as these) to help me with the business management side of things. He’s the one who made me sit down and calculate my profit margins. After all, what kind of idiot runs a business and doesn’t know his profit margin? Well, it turns out, I am that kind of idiot, since for nine years I did just that.

No wonder I never had any money in the bank, regardless of how much work I had coming in or how fast my business was growing.

Don’t make the same mistake — unless you’re my direct competition. In which case, go right ahead.

None of this has anything to do with being a foreign correspondent, except in the general sense. Or sex.

How weird would it be to apply the same principles to sex? Let’s see:

Know your market: Nope, don’t know it.
Know your competition: I don’t really have any single friends — everyone I know is married or in committed relationships.
Make contact seven times: pretty much everything I do is work-related. Everybody I meet knows I’m writing and looking to sell articles. I don’t think anyone knows I’m single. So I’m not really making any relevant contacts at all.
Follow up: Follow up to what?
Manage the business: I’m not sure what this would mean — and I don’t want to speculate.
Get on the web: That would help, wouldn’t it?

So there’s the bottom line folks. If you manage your freelance career the way I do my sex life, it will be abysmal.

From Shanghai,

Maria

Last week, Scott Adams posted an eye-opening piece in his Dilbert Blog, “Today I Will Improve Your Sex Life.”

(My sex life hasn’t improved — it’s as bad as when I was still married! – but I’ve got high hopes).

But the more important part of the post was about how to sell yourself. He suggested reading a book called “Influence” by Robert B. Cialdini. I saw a single copy of the book on a shelf at Chaterhouse this weekend, and grabbed it up. Chaterhouse is Shanghai’s only half-decent English-language bookstore, with a weirdly-spelled name and the world’s most annoying website. But I digress.

Apparently, Cialdini’s book is something of a classic read in the areas of marketing and sales – I don’t know how I’ve missed it so far.

Fortunately, most of my competitors probably haven’t read it, either. I’m always surprised when I talk to other freelance writers about how little sales and marketing training they’ve had, especially since slow sales is usually one of their biggest complaints.

Being a freelance writer is like being any other kind of small business owner. You need to produce the product (your articles), you need to manage the business (send out invoices, pay taxes, make sure the electricity isn’t turned off), and you need to sell. Unless you hire people to do this, you have to do it yourself. And sales is the last thing you can hire for. Hiring someone for administration is the easiest part, and was the first hire I ever made. At first, Linda Jiang managed my books, sent out invoices, handled government bureaucrats and landlords, paid all the bills, and translated documents. For the past year, that job has been handled by Anna Zhang, who’s been fantastic. Anna even updated my website, until the business started growing so fast that she has her hands full just handling billing and HR.

Then I hired people to help produce the product – first translators, then researchers, copy editors, and finally staff reporters. The sales part is still up to me, though.

When I went freelance when my first second child was born nine years ago, I hit the libraries and bookstores for all the sales books I could find (or could afford at the time). And I took advantage of reporting assignments that let me go out and interview people who were good at sales. Now, with about a dozen other people depending on the business I bring in, I’m starting to realize how little I actually know about this.

If you’re a freelancer and you haven’t taken some sales and marketing classes at your local university or community college or continuing education center, you’re doing yourself a big disservice and a disservice to editors who have to go without your work. And you’re performing a big service for other, less qualified or talented writers, who are getting your business.

Since that could well be me, I should probably shut up about now.

In Shanghai,

Maria

From reading my post yesterday, I guess some people got the idea that it’s all bad news for journos looking for overseas assignments. (Yes, I mean you, Fons — http://www.chinaherald.net/2007/03/how-to-become-foreign-correspondent.html.)

That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all. It takes some work to get there, but if you put in that work — improving skills, connections, and persistence — you can get here.

Yes, the “brand name” foreign journalism positions are getting scarce, but the total number of opportunities available are growing, I believe. There are the trade mags, the newsletters, the online sites.

Here are a few possible paths:

• Start covering your foreign country of choice for a publication, from your home base in the US (or wherever you happen to be now). Use the Internet to find sources, and make your calls in the middle of the night using a cheap long-distance service like Vonage. Email is also great. You can write for trade pubs, your local paper, church bulletin, whatever. Develop a beat, develop your sources, and work your way up the publication food chain until you have enough work to justify a move overseas.
• Get a job that you can do remotely. Both of my last two employers — Securities Industry News and Computerworld — allowed employees to work from home or from one-man remote offices. Then move overseas and take the job with you (you might have to start staying up all night to work) and start adding in local coverage.
• Move overseas and get a temp job. Preferably one that you can do part-time or during evenings, so you have your days free to report. Then write for every local and international publication you can find, trying to get better and better clips and working your way up to larger publications until you can finally quit your temp job and write fulltime.
• From home, call the editors of newspapers and bureaus in foreign countries. Get to know them, find out what they need. Figure out a way to meet their needs and get a full-time job offer. You might have to do something a little different than you expected when you first go over.
• Start your own publication. You think readers are clamoring for more international coverage? Prove it.
• Get professional help. If none of these strategies are working, find out what you’re doing wrong. Are you missing basic skills and and people have been too kind to mention it to you? Are you an antisocial boor? There are classes that can help you with that. You could also hire a career coach or a life coach to figure out what’s wrong. I used to think that was totally stupid but now, in my older, wiser state of mind, I’m coming around to the idea that getting an outside perspective can be the single best thing you can do for your life.
• Leave the industry. If you don’t have what it takes to become a foreign correspondent and, for some reason, you’re unable to get what it takes, maybe it’s not something that you really want to do. Think serious about that — being a foreign correspondent is low paid, hard work, hard on families and relationships, and can be very frustrating and stressful. Other careers might be a better fit, both psychologically and in terms of material rewards. There are plenty of public relations and corporate communications jobs in China for foreigners, for example, and the pay is better and the hours are much more reasonable. The sooner you switch, the sooner you can start making a success of yourself in your new career.

I personally think that journalism is a calling. You should only do it if you *have* to do it, if you are in love with it, if you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else, if you get up every morning and say, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”

Otherwise, there’s no practical reason to stay in it.

Journalism is probably the one big love of my life (thus explaining the string of short relationships and failed marriage. Well, not the marriage — that was all his fault. But the other breakups — definitely).

It’s hard to be a journalist and live a healthy, balanced life.

And, yes, I’m seeing someone about this.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria