How to Land Your Own Column
With Mary Rose Remington
Dan Janal – Welcome to the PR Leads Inner Club Series. This is Dan Janal, the President and Founder of PR Leads; we help professionals get publicity so they can build their businesses.
Today, we’re going to be talking about how to land your own column. Our guest today is someone who’s learned by doing. She’s my fellow Minnesotan, Mary Rose Remington. She’s a career counselor and life coach, motivational speaker and the owner of Life’s Working Solutions, and the author of Career Quest: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Finding Your Life’s Passion. She taught herself how to become a freelance writer in 1994, and within three years, became an internationally syndicated columnist.
One of her columns ran for over six years and has landed a total of seven separate columns covering careers, work-life balance, parenting, spirituality and alternative health. Today, she is busy writing four columns, a different one every week. Mary Rose is a creative writing instructor at the nationally acclaimed Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and her class on freelance writing articles and columns has a long waiting list of eager students. Today, we’re going to learn how to write those columns, how to make money from them and all the ins and outs about that. Welcome, Mary Rose.
Mary Rose Remington – Dan, thank you ever so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Dan Janal – It’s my pleasure. Let’s start off by just defining the whole term. What is a column and why do we want one?
Mary Rose Remington – Great question. We had a little email exchange late last night—I know Dan stays up as late as I do—and he had the best question of all, he said, “How do we even tell what is a column versus maybe and article or a series of articles?” What I want you to think about, if we were all here in my wonderful loft office, I would have you say, when you think of a column or you follow a columnist in the paper, how do you even know that it’s a column? Well, I think number one, you tend to see a headshot don’t you, with the person who’s writing. It tends to be in the same place in the paper at the same frequency, whether it’s daily, weekly, every Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, whatever. The person who is writing has a certain tone, a certain voice, a certain personality that you come to expect. And we all, if you’re of the age of maybe 30 or 40 or older, we all remember Irma Bombeck, who would write about every day life being a mother and a housewife, with a humorous tone. It’s something that readers come to rely on and maybe they have a love/hate relationship.
The person expresses their personality and their opinions rather than just say like a feature article. They tend to be first person. The person uses the word “I” a lot, what they believe. It could be anything from once month, depending upon the publication. It could be just a local; it could be regional in several publications. We’re going to talk about syndication and what that really means and the two different kinds of syndication. They do have a few different flavors, if you will, but the idea is that the person gets to write on a regular basis and gets to earn income with each one that they publish. I’m hoping that helps sort of define what a column is.
Dan Janal – Definitely. A lot of the people listening on the call are authors. They might be doctors who have written books or psychologists who have written books or speakers who have written books. Why would we want to write a column and how would that help us?
