Photo credit Gualtierro Boffi I have the secret. The never-fail secret to making sure your client is thrilled with the web copy you write 99.999% of the time. Gather round me, children, for I am about to speak a word…

The other day, I got an email from a client whom I like very much. He’s a cool guy, profitable business, generally fun to work with, pays on time, all the good stuff. His emails are usually brief, casual, and…

Do yourself a favor and look around the blogosphere. Look at the people who have almost obsessive cult-followings. The people who have started their own movements and revolutions. The people whose fans would knife you if you said an ill…

As your readership grows, it’s easy to think you’ve got this blogging thing down pat. Everyone likes you, you have lots of subscribers, and your posts are Tweeted and Dugg and Stumbled all over the place. You can kick back…

You’ve heard the old saying, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission,” right? It may be easier. But it’s still not a good idea. I’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately. I’m on a…

Don’t fret, good people. I’m not here to tell you that you should consider going back to school for a second degree. Most freelancers have enough trouble scrapping together money for the rent without having to worry about paying another…

Recently, we did some work for a couple of folks with a product marketed to rock fans. Specifically, fans of one particular band. These folks needed a sales page to sell their product, and since James is a ridiculous rock…

I’ve only taken to using Twitter as a regular thing fairly recently, so it’s entirely possible that Dave Navarro (@rockyourday) has been doing this for years and I never knew about it, but I’ve been kind of taken with the…

We recently started a side project working with people who have never had a website, a blog, or anything that requires more than opening an email – and sometimes they can’t even do that. They’re all small business owners. When…

We often get requests to write ebooks, and most of them are a fairly moderate 5-10 pages in length. Little ebooks. About the amount of information you’d get in five decent-lengthed blog posts. But we also get requests for huge…

A little-known fact about me is that when it begins to get cold, the holiday season is over, and the New Year is on the horizon, I disappear into the woods for a sacred rite. By “sacred rite”, I mean…

I recently went to my very first rodeo, and I have to tell you, it’s kind of an awesome time. It’s a roomful of young men showing off what balls of steel they have, and trust me, watching them get…

As a professional writer, your vocabulary is literally your stock in trade. Other businesses have huge stockrooms full of whatever they sell – frozen food, Gucci shoes, leather satchels… You, you have words. If you’re anything like me, you’ve taken…

So there have been a lot of other posts around the blogosphere lately about the Star Wars Guide to Blogging and the Bridges of Madison County Guide to Marketing and I realized that at Men with Pens, we don’t really…

Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was purported to have one of the best minds of his generation. In one of the first Holmes stories ever written, Holmes described how he came to have…

Feminism is starting to piss me off. So unless you’ve been living under a rock for last few days, you know that James Chartrand, mon esteemed capitaine, has recently come out as a woman. I’ve known about James’ true gender…

This discussion we’ve been having about whether bloggers should get paid for their work is fascinating, and I think it’s pretty great that the whole MwP community here has been so level-headed and thoughtful about it. There are lots of…

I have discovered something about myself. I’m terrified of success. Not just terrified. I’m willing to put my health at risk, my reputation, and my financial security. I’m willing to do just about anything, if I can avoid being successful.…

When the holidays roll around, we people worry about packing on the pounds. But your blog has a tendency to lose the ability to throw its weight around. More distractions, parties, and yeah, good food means we’re more prone to…

In honor of the super-exclusive offer for Men with Pens readers only in regards on the Gamer Lifestyle Course, we’re turning our attention in this latter half of the special fiction week towards how to write realistically in fantasy worlds.…

If you’re one of those people who writes copy for a living in order to make enough money to support your fiction writing endeavors, then this series is for you. This week, Men with Pens offers a full six days …

If you’re one of those people who writes articles or ebooks or website copy for a living in order to make enough money to do the other kind of writing – yes, fiction – then this series is for you. …

New freelancers make a few mistakes that no one will tell you are mistakes, because they don’t want to offend you, or they may have already disregarded you because of this stupid mistake and don’t wish to become mired in…

There are days when I don’t feel like writing. If we’re going to be perfectly honest about it, there are many days when I don’t feel like writing. In fact, there hasn’t been a single day in recent memory in…

This is the final installment in our series on how to fight the dragons of writing. We explained why being a writer is like getting commissions to go out on an epic quest in exchange for monetary reward, and why…

Welcome back, you epic writers, you. For the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about why it’s necessary to make every project into a big bad dragon you have to fight, and what you can do to make yourself better…

Todoodlist isn’t your ordinary to-do list. Nick Cernis, by his own admission, writes on bananas for fun. Nick Cernis creates analogies that take advantage of helpless kittens, Russian parrot astronauts, and the fine and much-maligned art of blowing one’s nose.…

For those of you who are writers and hang about this place looking for tips on writing, I say good for you. This is a smart move, for this is indeed what we do here. Excellent. However, this week I…