Our recent post on the potentially disheartening level of income most authors can expect to earn, spoke of the need for a long term outlook. Long term is important, but author John Shore is of the opinion most freelance writers give too little consideration to editors.

Writing is a creative process, right? Genuinely creative writing is a very small part of the total effort required to be successful. The rest is editing (lots of it), promotion, marketing, and - you cannot deny - plain old-fashioned, understanding your client’s needs and business.

Removing the ego from your writing is key, in Shore’s opinion, to having a mindset that offers a stronger potential for success.

Nobody cares about you as a writer. Magazines rip through writers like … well, like elephants rip through hay. You don’t want to even care about you as a writer. What you want to care about is the editor of whatever magazine you want to publish in

I find it hard to believe that writers who aim for the freelance magazine market - at least those who are serious and not simply looking for some extra cash - do not have a business-focused, professional motivation, even if they do get the implementation of that motivation a little off-centre. But Shore clearly has a contradictory experience.

Over at his blog, Shore offers his professional advice on how a freelance magazine writer can be successful. It all comes down to a clear and professional attitude towards your work and, most importantly, your client (the editor). In what reads more like a rant at inexperienced - or genuinely incapable - freelance writers, John wants a simpler life, calling for writers to give editors much more consideration and make their lives easier.

Your job — your goal, if you’re starting from the outside — is to make [the editor's] job easier. Because everything about an editor’s life is working against his job being easier.

Make their job easier? It is an odd way of looking at it, but the sentiment runs true: professionalism in freelance writing is in providing what was requested, in the correct format, by the required time. It is the same for any industry, surely.

Most authors never hit the big time, but a great many to manage a solid and comfortable income from their writing, while the majority will always need to supplement their writing earnings with other jobs.

The Crafty Writer has added to figures released by The Times recently about how much average authors earn in the UK - and it will likely not surprise you that it is not a rosy picture. Most authors, it seems, earn a third of the UK average wage and two thirds of them therefore have to hold down additional jobs to continue writing.

Fiona Veitch Smith at The Crafty Writer, has some interesting experience to impart related directly to this issue. In her seventh year as a writer, she has experienced a noticeable increase in income, which she attributes to a number of specific factors outlined in her article: Can You Earn Money as a Writer?  The article is well worth the read as Fiona goes on to offer some practical to help you start earning as a writer, and provides a stack of links which you will almost certainly find useful.

Very few of us will shorten that ten years of graft and poverty to establish ourselves as writers, and many of us even then will not manage more than a low level income, but we don not do it for the money, right..?

This clip from an interview with screenwriter Harlan Ellison, on the attitude of Hollywood studios expecting writers to offer themselves up for free - very timely. In case you haven’t come across him, Harlan’s writing credits include the original Outer Limits, Star Trek, Babylon 5 - see his Wikipedia page for more detail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE]

Credit to the Renegade Writer Blog for popping it on our radar.