Every creature seems to be in competition—even the hummingbirds in my yard.
Truly, I’ve never seen such a phenomenon. Usually, we have a few hummingbirds around the feeder outside my office window. There’s Bully Bird and a couple of other hummers who spend every waking hour trying to outsmart the bully. In all of the dozen or so years that I’ve had hummingbird feeders, I’ve rarely seen two birds sit on it at once. If a second bird comes near when Bully is eating, he chases the intruder off.
This year is different. We have an infestation of hummingbirds—and I mean this in the most positive way. Our feeder has maybe a 15-bird capacity, if they were all to sit shoulder to shoulder. Instead of feeding holes, our feeder has a trough. And, during the last several weeks, we have seen as many as 9 hummers sitting and eating calmly at one time. I’m filling the four-cup feeder every three—sometimes, two days. Bully Bird is still around, but he is not effective when the masses arrive and he is learning to relax, share and get what he can out of the situation.
My cats are in competition. Eleven-year-old Max enjoys curling up in my lap each morning for fifteen or twenty minutes. Lily, 4 ½ months old, is the new kid on the block and she loves a spot on my lap after breakfast, too. So each morning the two of them use all sorts of cunning maneuvers to get their special time in my lap.
There’s a lot of competing going on in the job market—with more and more people being laid off.
And the competition for writers and authors is greater now than ever before. There are more healthy retirees writing the books of their lifelong dreams. There are more businessmen and women writing calling card books. And there are more unemployed folks trying to earn some extra cash writing for magazines, corporations, etc. So what does this mean for you?
If you are an author pitching a book to publishers or considering self-publishing, it means taking extra responsibility to create the best product that you can. It means making sure that you have a book that is well-written and needed—a viable product.
If you are an author who is promoting a book, you will need to be more proactive and creative than ever before. Do more of what you’ve been doing if it’s working. Try some new promotional tactics. Expand your horizons by participating in a webinar or teleseminar on book promotion, for example. Study good books on the topic. Sign up for my Book Promotion Workshop. http://www.matilijapress.com/course_bookpromotion.htm
If you are a freelance magazine article writer, continue submitting your work to familiar publications, but also reach out to new paying magazines, newsletters and websites. Revisit those publications that rejected you in the past. Some of them may have new editors who will love your style.
If you work for corporations, organizations and agencies, approach them with new ideas for promo material, brochures, etc. Ask your contacts to recommend you to other companies. Spend time researching other businesses that might need the services of a freelance writer.
Join SPAWN and meet authors who need help with their manuscripts or promotional brochures for their books.
Speaking of SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network), our new website is up. You’ve gotta check it out. Let me know what you think: Patricia@spawn.org.
http://www.spawn.org.
We’re still working on it, so let us know if you see something out of line so we can fix it.
For the rest of this week, I want you to think about the competition you face in your writing work. How have you overcome some of the obstacles? What are you doing differently in order to make your writing pay? Leave a comment here. We’d like to know.
For me, in between all of the work involved with the SPAWN transition, I am just doing more of what I do—submitting articles (to promote my books and my editorial/consulting services). When things settle down here at SPAWN, and I know that all of our members are happy, I will be contacting clients and customers to see if they need any help. I’ll be setting up speaking engagements at various writers/publishing conferences throughout the U.S., to name a few.