Professional Presentation Is Required

A professional presentation is paramount to your success as a writer. To be a writer, you have to treat your writing like a business, and successful businesses are professional in appearance and service. So what does this mean for you, the writer?

There are many roads to writing success and numerous ways to make your income from your writing skills, one thing is common in all of these areas: a responsible and concise appearance.

Business Writing:
If you you are venturing in the area of freelance business writing, your reputation is the best asset you have. Doing poor work in an untimely manner can hurt your business in the blink of an eye. Whereas, doing professional work in a timely fashion will slowly build your referrals and enhance your reputation. As in all business ventures, you want happy customers!!! The customer who is pleased with your work will pass on your name to colleagues, and use your service again themselves.

Blogging
Blogging by nature feels comfortable. On this site, at least, you are reading others' work, leaving comments, hopefully having some fun. It feels almost like a chat, building friendships along the way, and learning from all of the interesting people that blog and comment. However, noting my own blog short-comings, my better read entries all have one thing in common; they were better thought out than some of the others. There are blogs that get great following even though they were written off the cuff by the writer, most of those are also passionate in their point or controversial... if that works for you, then use it.

Study the higher read bloggers here and you'll find that they are all good writers. You won't find their entries littered with typos or grammatical errors. And, they all have well thought out and formatted entries. They have found their niche. Now study your own entries and see if you can pick out yours... Is it what you are most passionate about, or a certain subject matter?

Queries and Submission
I have seen numerous blogs and postings on the internet about this subject and let me just start by saying, some of these people have no idea what they are talking about!!!! I read one post where the writer's advice was 'just submit, and don't worry how good it is. Submit everywhere and anywhere, you'll never get anywhere if you don't put your stuff out there.'

I am still torn over whether that person was trying to eliminate competition, or was just that ignorant to the subject of which they were writing. Any Editor or Agent will tell you to submit your best, most professional work. If you send them something that looks like garbage, they will treat it as such. These people are busy, they don't have time to sift through everything, you are only hurting your chances by submitting anything that isn't properly formatted and written.

This is your work, do yourself the service of researching the process. And by researching, I mean only trust well respected authorities. Study your market. Don't send your romance novel off to an editor who only publishes Biographies. And when you narrow down your list of places to query, study their writer's guidlines and verify that the agent/editor you picked to query is currently there and still covering submissions in your genre. (yes, pick up the phone and call) Addressing your query to the proper recipient is an easy courtesy to manage.

As far as the advice of baraging any and every publisher out there with less than your best work, remember when I said your reputation follows you? These people work in the same industry, if they are going to mention your name in passing, wouldn't you rather it be as a professional, up and coming author?