Hello fellow Children’s Writers and friends,
If you’re serious about your writing career, whether you like it or not, it will become a business. So begins part two of what I learned from the Aleesah Darlison workshop I attended last month. If your creative passion leads to a business it follows that you have to be business-like in your approach. Your approach to the marketing of your stories not the writing of them. One important aspect of this is your Writer’s CV. Like any other job you’re interested in you need to start building a CV for your writing career. Record any writing related achievements and of course any publications. Writing related achievements can include things like book reviewing, blogging and editing. Publications can be in magazines, anthologies, infographics, books of course and even online publications. If you’re established Aleesah suggests your top ten and most recent achievements would suffice although you can refer interested persons to a webpage where all your achievements can be found. If like me, you’re new to this then just put down what you have, we all have to start somewhere right?
All businesses, if they want to be successful need to have a budget and we as writers are no different. We need to plan our writing year, find out which conferences, competitions, workshops, mentorships, residencies or writing retreats are on and which of these meet our needs at this stage of our careers and then we need to decide on a budget for the year and cut (or increase ha ha ha) our lists accordingly. This was something new to me as I’ve generally seen what’s around when it’s advertised, checked finances and then said ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ if everything aligned. This hotch-potch method hasn’t always meant that I have been able to attend the events I have wanted to. In my case as I mainly write Picture Books and they’re aren’t many, at least that I’ve discovered, specific PB competitions around, it hasn’t caused a problem on the competition front. I can certainly see how it would though, if you write in a variety of genres and even in my case, if we consider the last paragraph a few short story publications would still definitely do me no harm. So it really is worth our while to draw up a plan and a matching budget to ensure we make the most of our writing for publication year. 
How do you go about finding this information? Well you can certainly do a Websearch and spend many valuable writing hours doing so, or you can say a huge ‘thank you’ to those who have gone before you and already done it. Thank them by buying or subscribing to their diary, journal, newsletter, website. I’ve recently ordered the Pilot Writer’s Diary pilotpress.com.au for this purpose and I’ll be sure to let you know about it. There’s also Writer’s Marketplace hard or soft copy in most countries, including here awmonline.com.au and then there are of also industry magazines with a wealth of up to date information. Aleesah like many others recommends Buzz Words buzzwordsmagazine.com and Pass It On https://jackiehosking.pio.wordpress.com 
Short and sweet, but hopefully helpful this week as I bid you 

Farewell fellow travellers

Savour the Quest

Journeygirl