2007: Writing Year In Review

This year has certainly been a busy one and I’ve made some progress towards achieving my career goals for this year. Not only have I increased my writing income, but I’ve been able to spend more time with my family, helping me to achieve a good work-life balance.

One of my new ventures this year was to start working more with other writers. I put a small team together, increasing the number of writing commissions that I could accept. That’s proved successful, though there are challenges in working with writers whom you don’t know that well. Overall, I’ve gained a few good friends and several colleagues whose work I respect from around the world.

This year, I was more selfish. What I mean is that when I accepted jobs I thought not only about whether they were good for my clients, but about whether they were good for me. Sometimes you have to know when you should turn down a new writing job or say goodbye to an existing client. I also thought about what happens when clients leave and you need to replace that income.

While managing my freelance writing career, I was also supervising occasional house repairs and dealing with other essential tasks, so it’s probably not surprising that I had a short term burnout. However, it was soon time to get on with other projects, such as launching this blog on its own domain in June. Within a week or so, the blog was listed on Google.

In July, I took a short break in Orlando, and left the blog in the hands of some very capable guests. One of them, Suzanne James, contributed one of the year’s most popular posts, How To Pick A Publisher.

August saw me considering some of my usual preoccupations of promotion, research and the writing life. I’ve continued with all of those for the rest of the year with posts such as: Are You Sabotaging Your Goals?; The Reluctant Expert and How To Build Your Own Buzz.

In October I took part in Blog Action Day with an eco friendly writing post. In November, I wrote a number of posts that I was proud of, including My Two Year Adsense Experiment; Is It Time To Quit The Day Job? and Are All Your Eggs In One Basket?

This year I’ve increased my income from blogging , in part by gigs on Daily Writing Tips, Piggy Bank Pie, Writing White Papers and others. This has led to posts on other sites, and I’m hopeful that this will continue in the coming year. I’m now thinking about setting out my goals for 2008, but that will be another post.

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