When I heard about a colleague who had recently edited a set of journals for the U.S. Government, I wanted to know how to get in on that kind of  job! It took me three days, but I slowly worked my way through the process of becoming a registered government contractor, and I took notes for fellow freelancers the whole way through. How To Register for Freelance Writing Jobs with the Government tells you how to get through the contractor registration process, too. I now make checking the bid opportunities available a regular part of my search for freelance writing work.

TechCrunch is reporting that AOL's Seed.com (content production site for freelance writers) is making its grand debut at Austin's SXSW festival. The article at TechCrunch describes a handful of freelancers being assigned interviews with SWSX musical talent, but what it fails to mention is that Seed does not generally assign articles in this manner.

As I revealed in this blog post about AOL's Seed.com, any article that a writer chooses to write does not belong solely to that writer. Any number of writers can choose and write the same article. At deadline the editor could possibly choose your article, or they could possibly choose the same article from one of the several others turned in. In addition to that, the fine print at Seed also notes that the editor can choose NO ONE!

What Seed gets you, then, is a whole lot of low paid on spec work which you may or may not be paid for.

Another galling part of TechCrunch's piece is the line  "Seed writers are held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. AOL Music's managing editor Melissa Olund and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what doesn't."

Seed is trying to sell this as a "normal" way of functioning, and it's not. Most editors assign out one writer to cover one subject and write one article. That article is judged on its own merits, and is either killed (sometimes for a kill fee), sent back for editing, or ran as is. Articles written on spec for bottom-of-the-barrel pay are not the norm.

Seed needs to just admit and be clear about how their model works, and stop pretending that it's anything better or different than Helium's marketplace, or any other content mill. If freelancers choose to work for Seed anyway, that's fine, but Seed and AOL are not being clear and honest about HOW this model works and the true risks that freelancers are taking in writing these assignments. At least Demand Media assigns one writer to one title and has a well-advertised system for editing, killing and paying for a piece.

A confession of sorts: I had no idea that Odesk uses proprietary software to track freelancers actions while they are working on Odesk, until today, when I read about it at Deb's writing blog. My freelance work has exploded to the point where I very rarely have to go looking for work, and when I do, I am fortunate to be able to skip places like Odesk. However, in doing so, I feel like I"m getting more and more out-of-touch with the beginner roots that I am charged to educate here. So, to help solve that, I apologize, and am inviting guest blog posts specifically from newbies. You may email me for details.

Until then, feel free to leave me a comment-- are you a new writer? What info, specifically, are you looking for? Or, did you already know about the Odesk system? How crazy is it?

Today  I received an email from an editor about a pitch I'd made 4 months ago! I had pretty much given up on it, even though I was keen to write for this magazine, as it's education-focused and that's one of my niche areas.

This was a blind pitch- that is, I didn't have a contact or introduction of any sort to the magazine. There was also not one of those notices that that you see on freelance writing job boards ("Hey, we're looking for ideas and writers, please pitch us at xxxx") which are a good way to get into a magazine.

No, this assignment went like this:

1)Idea

2)Writer's Market

3)Pitch

4)Wait

But I was patient, and finally got the assignment!

What kind of turnaround times have you experienced in pitching magazines?