Book Review of "How to Start Your Freelance Writing Career From Scratch"

The title is aptly named! As someone who has wanted to write for years but kept putting it off to earn a living writing software, reading this was like meat for a starving man. Simply stated, if you aspire to write for a living, getting this book is a great first step towards making that wish a reality. There is so much information here, I’m not sure where to begin.

That said, I’ll review its style and presentation first. From the first paragraph of the introduction, it’s obvious a professional wrote this book. I’ve recently read other works where reading the material was painful; not so with this, it’s crafted by someone skilled in the art of writing!

The secondly, it has a great deal of helpful information presented in a matter of fact manner: no hyperbole here! Instead she simply lets her words speak and they speak with the clarity and power of experience. While talking with a few other software engineers several months ago, we talked about where we wanted to work. Someone quipped he didn’t want to work where he was the best engineer in the company. I agreed with him. I’m inherently lazy and selfish in that regard, I like having someone around more knowledgeable than me on a given topic. While I would never write a book on writing because I’m not a good writer, Karen is, she’s doing what I aspire to do. For that reason alone, her book is worth reading.

It’s short, as long as a novella, but don’t let that dissuade you from buying it. Like Shakespeare, I aspire to the saying, “brevity is the soul of wit.” You’ll read the book in an afternoon and spend years mastering the material. If you are a writer or an aspiring writer, you deserve and need to have it in your library.