The Renegade Writer Blog

Rachel Weingarten (middle in photo) is an author, freelance writer, marketing maven, and all-around cool person. Recently, the chichi New York City department store Henri Bendel ran a huge promotion surrounding her new book Hello Gorgeous! Linda interviewed Rachel to find out how scored this coup, how she markets herself and her work, and how [...]

This week I bought three magazines at Borders I may be interested in pitching. Total cost? $14.48. Ouch! To riff off Leona Helmsley, only fools pay newsstand prices, but I really needed these magazines, and I consoled myself that I’d be able to expense them on my taxes.
I don’t think I’ve ever read any money-saving [...]

I am a fan of Anthony Bourdain’s writing, as well as his food shows, so I eagerly dug into his Salon article about his thwarted experience filming in Beirut.
The surprise, for me, came at the end. My younger brother, Matt, is a Marine who’s stationed in the Mideast. We just found out a couple weeks [...]

This week I’m re-reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. OK, I’m fibbing. I’m attempting to read it for the 11th time. Not that it’s boring or poorly written; there are paragraphs in there I want to etch on the inside of my eyelids! Everything he writes makes perfect sense. [...]

We writers always talk about how to turn off our inner critics. In my opinion, completely turning off our inner critics is how we churn out a lot of crap.
True, some of us have inner critics that are so harsh that they make writing truly painful for us, and even keep us from getting anything [...]

As magazine writers, we often get pitches from PR people looking to snag some prime magazine space for their clients. And some of us freelance writers also do corporate/PR writing. So I loved this post by John Scalzi about the worst PR pitch he’s received as a blogger. The post is hilarious, and it may [...]

If you’re curious about a certain agent’s selling record or you want to keep tabs on what your favorite book editors like to buy, Publishers Marketplace has a handy new tracking tool called Deal Tracker. Deal Tracker lets you specify a list of agents, agencies, editors, and/or publishers/imprints to track. Each time you visit the [...]

Yesterday I received an e-mail from an editor at J. Morgan Magazine inviting me to send articles to his publication. Ah, once again my charm and beauty have attracted work. But wait…the e-mail included lengthy writer guidelines, at the very end of which was:
1. J. Morgan Magazine offers no financial compensation for published articles. Authors [...]

Diana’s post “Some rules are good,” below, links to a great article by GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons. In his “rules to live by,” Parsons mentions the concept of Kaizen. I thought I’d post an oldie-but-goodie bit about Kaizen from the July 8, 2004 issue of the Renegade Writer Newsletter.
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I have a new resolution (warning: salty [...]

On Wednesday, July 26, from 10 pm to 12 am ET, Diana and I will be the guest authors at The Writer’s Chatroom. Join us in the chatroom and ask your pressing questions about writing for magazines. We suggest you ask:
* Where can we buy a copy of The Renegade Writer — right now?
* What’s [...]