Job Hunting Part 2

This is the second part of my job hunting experiences. Read the first part here.

I wrote a really touching generic cover letter, re-wrote it a little to cater to the specific requirements of the job poster (thus the line 'has excellent creative writing skills' became 'has excellent technical writing skills' in some versions while it turned into 'has excellent copywriting skills' in others). I sent out about 12 emails in a span of ten days and I was really elated to receive replies from eight prospective employers.
I promptly responded to each, careful to satisfy all the requirements being asked: sample clips or actual writing of articles in a given topic, resume (not attached but pasted into into the email itself), correct subject lines, etc.

From the eight, I got praises from seven and got accepted by five employers. Well, six actually, but I didn't like the arrogant way the sixth employer asked me to submit two articles within twelve hours from receipt (their first email stated that turn-around time is 1-2 days). I was quite pissed with that so when I submitted the articles within the time specified, I promptly told them what I felt. I told them it was a rather bad start and I would not care to write for their group.

The seventh prospective employer is altogether different. Their first email asked me to visit their website and I found it's a rather good prospect: they sell sports memorabilia and I'm supposed to write blurbs for their web pages. Unfortunately, sports writing is nowhere near my inclinations and I had to decline the work. But that did not end there. The employer asked me to reconsider, explaining that I don't have to be knowledgeable in sports to do the blurbs. I tried anyway but I just don't have it in me.

So now I'm left with five. Since I am fully employed, I had to carefully manage my time to be able to meet the deadlines for each work. After the initial assignments with two employers, I politely asked them to defer new assignments as I had to focus on prior commitments (which is true, as the remaining ones were the first writing jobs that I had been accepted to).

My very first assignment was writing test questions for a natural therapy school. It was the first response I got when I sent out my application emails and it was a much needed booster for my flagging spirit. The director was rather nice, gracious and generous with her praises. I passed their initial test - visiting their website and writing a few test questions from their home page and was accepted immediately thereafter. However, it took sometime before the first book from which I would lift the question arrived. So in the meantime, I kept on job hunting.

I don't know much about my second employer, except for his name and email address. I suppose he is a business process outsourcer providing content for websites mainly in the US. Our first interactions was quite informal and brief. Or much too brief I would say. His first email simply said 'Send me samples' and that's it. So I sent him a writing sample and pointed him to a link where a writing sample can be found. I also asked him to just assign a topic I would write about as a test but he wouldn't. Instead he gave me my first assignment, a 1,500 word article, divided into seven sub-topics, about a European city. I passed that test and was promptly given three more topics one after another. On the fifth assignment, I bothered to ask for payment terms (as I said our mail interactions are quite brief, consisting of one or two sentences only). I told him I wouldn't write further unless payment is arranged so he promptly paid me through Paypal.

The third work I have now is writing product descriptions for the website of an American firm doing business in China. They have thousands of products in their catalogs and only a few of these have descriptions. It seems a not-too-difficult job at first; I even told myself that making product descriptions would be easy. But it turned out it is not that easy after all. First, I only have the photos in their website on which to base the descriptions - no specs, no additional details given, except for a general guidelines on how to write the descriptions.

I'm therefore left to my own devices describing the products in the images. It is difficult because at times, it is not even clear what the items are, much more glean from the photos what these are made of. One has to be really creative to create product descriptions, for items one could barely identify. And it takes a lot of creativity making separate descriptions for items that are almost, if not indeed, similar. But after a week or so of writing, I found my rhythm and now I can do 30-50 per day, for an hour or two of work.

One more thing about this job is that no one reviews or edits the descriptions. Thus, when I submit a batch it is immediately on their website just a couple of hours later. It's a double-edged sword: it gives me some freedom but at the same time a great responsibility, as I had to ensure that my descriptions are error-free. Still, there may be errors out there, not glaring ones but errors nonetheless.

These are my initial experiences in my job-hunting and freelancing career which, incidentally, I just started a month ago. I'll write more about about new things I encounter in my freelancing career in this blog, and other subjects related to job-hunting and freelance writing.

I guess I found my topic at last.