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The Blogger Abides
The Blogger Abides is an ebook for freelance writers, written by longtime freelancer Chris Higgins. If you want to get paid to write, this is the book for you. But let's be clear: this is not about getting rich, or even getting paid particularly well; it's about how to find and manage your first gig, how to incrementally improve your work and your paycheck, and how to manage both the business and creative aspects of a writing career.
- GenresNonfictionWriting
293 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 31, 2012
7 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 18, 2013
Higgins understands. He understands that you're frustrated. That you have no idea how you're going to break into this business. That writing for a living on the internet (and beyond) is still new profession, uncharted and confusing. He's here to help.
His advice comes quick and easy, written to be easily digested by writers who love the internet and want to have a voice on it. He's funny and self-deprecating, which makes everything he has to tell you go down even easier. And he's practical. Realistic.
AND...he covers EVERYTHING. He's thought of all the little things that haven't even occurred to you to worry about yet, like tax forms and privacy, and he leads you through those choppy waters with detail and simplicity.
It's the easiest to read, most up to date, painless how-to writing guide I've ever read.
His advice comes quick and easy, written to be easily digested by writers who love the internet and want to have a voice on it. He's funny and self-deprecating, which makes everything he has to tell you go down even easier. And he's practical. Realistic.
AND...he covers EVERYTHING. He's thought of all the little things that haven't even occurred to you to worry about yet, like tax forms and privacy, and he leads you through those choppy waters with detail and simplicity.
It's the easiest to read, most up to date, painless how-to writing guide I've ever read.
December 21, 2013
I read this book over the course of two days and Chris has filled my brain with so much applicable and valuable writing knowledge that I could probably kill a bear with a typewriter at this point and then safely find a publisher willing to present my series of posts about said topic all while making sure my ass was 100% covered from the standpoints of credit, copyright, tax, self-respect, and straight-up getting compensated. I highly appreciated this book.
April 12, 2014
The cover of this book is – there’s no other word for it – atrocious. The kid-making-a-goofy-face image, the superimposed-eyeglasses design, and the retro-70’s faux-computer for the main title scream “amateur.” The title, with its sideways nod to The Big Lebowski, conjures images of bloggers as amiable slackers who go to “work” in their bathrobes. An aspiring writer, encountering it “cold,” would have every reason to run away.
And that would be a mistake, because underneath the atrocious cover is a solid, thorough, practical introduction to the ins and outs of being a professional writer. Chris Higgins is a blogger, and the book is primarily a guide to blogging for money, but much of what it says is applicable (and valuable) to any professional writer. Higgins covers the basics of pitches, of contracts, of finding salable ideas, of getting paid, and of dealing with the tax man after you do get paid. He reinforces, from multiple angles, the central truth that every professional writer learns eventually and the successful ones learn early: Writing for money is a business, and to do it successfully you have to learn to think like a business owner.
Higgins is graceful, unaffected writer, and he avoids both the “Gee whiz!” casualness that robs many self-published e-books of their authority and the messianic “You—Yes, You!—Can Get Paid for Blogging!” tone of some how-to manuals, with its echoes of used-car lots and late-night infomercials. Always practical and often very funny, he comes across like the experienced guy who, on your first week at the office, patiently walks you through how everything works—including the stuff that got left out of the New Employee manual. The 80-some cross-linked chapters fly by, and by the time you’re done with them, you’ve had the best introduction I’ve ever seen to writing for money in the twenty-first century
And that would be a mistake, because underneath the atrocious cover is a solid, thorough, practical introduction to the ins and outs of being a professional writer. Chris Higgins is a blogger, and the book is primarily a guide to blogging for money, but much of what it says is applicable (and valuable) to any professional writer. Higgins covers the basics of pitches, of contracts, of finding salable ideas, of getting paid, and of dealing with the tax man after you do get paid. He reinforces, from multiple angles, the central truth that every professional writer learns eventually and the successful ones learn early: Writing for money is a business, and to do it successfully you have to learn to think like a business owner.
Higgins is graceful, unaffected writer, and he avoids both the “Gee whiz!” casualness that robs many self-published e-books of their authority and the messianic “You—Yes, You!—Can Get Paid for Blogging!” tone of some how-to manuals, with its echoes of used-car lots and late-night infomercials. Always practical and often very funny, he comes across like the experienced guy who, on your first week at the office, patiently walks you through how everything works—including the stuff that got left out of the New Employee manual. The 80-some cross-linked chapters fly by, and by the time you’re done with them, you’ve had the best introduction I’ve ever seen to writing for money in the twenty-first century
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January 13, 2013Tons of awesome information/ideas. The chapters on grammar were hilarious.
July 11, 2013
If you would like to get paid for writing a blog, Mr Higgins here has a few tips, but not a heck of a lot more than that. This can be an interesting read because of some of his experiences, though it's annoyingly repetitive. If you read this you will be well-versed on the fact that he wrote a piece for NPR's This American Life. You will also read several references to the blog entry he wrote that has gotten something like two million hits. I think the chapters were written as stand-alone pieces for sharing on other blogs. His blog is on the Mental Floss website. If you're serious about becoming a professional blogger (which I'm not), he does offer some usable information, and you should read it. However, the book could have been a lot shorter.
December 30, 2015
Basically just a fix-up of blog posts, and it shows. Some good advice in here, but no overarching theme or argument, just a couple fistfuls of advice. Also, much of this might be badly outdated, due to how media has developed in light of the new dominance of social media and easier embedability of video.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews