Interview with a Freelancer: Ed Tittel, Writer and More

Welcome to the 15th interview on Freelance Survivor! You can reach Ed Tittel at his web site and at ed AT EdTittel DOT com.

DEE-ANN: Why did you choose to use your own name or start your own business to work under?

ED TITTEL: Using my own name--or at least an abbreviated version (I go by Ed Tittel rather than my full legal name of "Edward Richard Tittel")--seemed to be the best way to build a recognizable identity as a freelance writer/author. Seems to have worked so far!

DEE-ANN: What type of freelance work do you do?

ED TITTEL:

• Short answer: "Whatever pays!"
• Longer answer: Books (mostly revisions these days, not many new book deals out there for me lately), Web articles, online training, online course development, white papers, technical editing, and occasional outright consulting work (expert witness work, mostly). 

DEE-ANN: Out of all of these, which would you say are your favorite?

ED TITTEL: Although I still enjoy working on books, my favorite kind of work remains those Web articles that involve hardware reviews or information security topics.

DEE-ANN: Which of these types of projects would you say is the most difficult?

ED TITTEL: Anything that involves building PCs and/or executing lengthy test or benchmarking drills are not so much difficult as they are incredibly time-consuming. I always have to keep an eye on the ratio of "hours worked" to "dollars earned," which helps me stay focused on my return on time invested which is my most important and valuable resource.

DEE-ANN: Do you tend to focus most of this work around a single theme?

ED TITTEL: Not really. Rather, it clusters around a set of themes that include PC hardware, networking, information security and markup languages. Occasionally I'll get projects that let me combine two, or very rarely, three of these areas.

DEE-ANN: How long have you been freelancing?

ED TITTEL: I wrote my first free-lance article in 1986, but didn't become a full-time freelancer until May, 1994. Since 1994, I've had two stints of full-time employment: for about 6 months in 1997-98 at Tivoli Systems/IBM, and for about 7 months at NetQoS in 2006. 

DEE-ANN: What did you end up doing in your full-time positions?

ED TITTEL:

• Tivoli: Job Title "Technical Evangelist" where responsibilities involved educating large customers about a specific family of network management products.
• NetQos: started out as Director of Training in which position I helped to develop a training curriculum and outlined a certification program; ended up as a Senior Technical Researcher, in which position I worked on an in-depth TCP/IP performance analysis project.

DEE-ANN: Can you describe a typical, or at least recent, project for us?

ED TITTEL: This weekend, I finished first draft submission of a 9-chapter chunk on a revision of a book about Windows, to be entitled "Windows 7 in Depth" for Que/Pearson, under the lead authorship of Bob Cowart and Brian Knittel. My topics included a general Windows introduction, disk management, troubleshooting, installing and upgrading, keeping Windows up to date, installing and replacing hardware, and protecting Windows from Viruses and Spyware. It was a very compressed time schedule--about three weeks in all--but a great opportunity to dig into the new Windows while getting paid for the work. 

DEE-ANN: Is that one method you use to choose your projects? An excuse to experiment with something while being paid for it?

ED TITTEL: Yes absolutely.

DEE-ANN: About how much of your time do you spend on the business side, and how much on creating?

ED TITTEL: 75% on writing, editing, or otherwise creating content / 25% on new business development, asking current vendors for more work, concept development & outlining, and chasing money. 

DEE-ANN: How often are you provided a concept to develop, and how often do you approach someone with a concept?

ED TITTEL: These days, it's about 50-50, but that may be because I'm no longer aggressively pursuing book contracts (where one will normally create the concept 80% or more of the time a proposal gets written).

DEE-ANN: What are some tips you might offer for concept development?

ED TITTEL:

1. Choose a topic that interests you, because you're going to have to spend a lot of time at it if it sells.
2. Do your market research thoroughly and dispassionately: just because a topic interests you doesn't mean others want to learn about it, too.
3. It's good to get in on a market or trend early, but even better to provide the best coverage and information about the topics involved. First books generally do well; "Best" books generally do even better, as long as
   they're not too far behind the rest of the pack.

DEE-ANN: What is the most important piece of advice you could give to someone starting out or transitioning into your specialty?

ED TITTEL: Start out with at least a 90-day supply of cash (120 days is better) so you can give your pipeline time to fill up before you have to start chasing payments. Otherwise you'll waste too much time running around after money, and not enough time doing productive work. 

DEE-ANN: What’s your favorite part of your work?

ED TITTEL: I enjoy doing research, especially messing around with hardware: building and troubleshooting systems, customizing systems, and figuring out how to make things work, or work better. 

DEE-ANN: What was one of your interesting projects?

ED TITTEL: Ironically, it was a project that never came to fruition. Gigabyte developed an astounding hi-def audio card for HDMI that takes the HDMI video stream from a high-end graphics card as input, and interpolates HDMIT audio into that stream in real-time. This involved solving several incredibly thorny technical issues, and had to be tempered with input from thousands of technical forum posts from early adopters who functioned as an extended beta test team for the card. The issues involved were quite complex, and it was just fascinating to see how early adopters developed solutions and workarounds through sheer dint of trial-and-error effort. I've considered trying to sell this story as a modern-day technology chronicle in the spirit of Tracy Kidder's famous book "The Soul of a New Machine."

DEE-ANN: What would you rather farm off on someone else?

ED TITTEL: I've often employed help to do more mundane and routine business upkeep: filing paperwork, contacting vendors to track or request payment, find co-authors or project staff, and do other project management duties. Fortunately, I'm lucky enough to have worked with and remain associated with some very talented project management professionals who remain ready, able, and willing to help me out with such things. 

DEE-ANN: What should people look for in a good project manager?

ED TITTEL: At least three qualities:

1. Good people skills, especially in communicating goals and feedback to content creators, and in obtaining information and feedback from customers or publishers.
2. A keen attention to detail and quality control.
3. Strong organizational skills, especially in creating and managing schedules/deadlines.

DEE-ANN: Anything else you’d like to share with Freelance Survivors?

ED TITTEL: Given recent economic conditions, I've recently weathered the first major downturn in income I've experienced since going full-time freelance in the mid-1990s. In retrospect, I realize now I probably didn't react quickly enough to cutbacks from long-time customers by immediately going out to aggressively solicit more work once the income stream started falling off.

As a consequence, I dipped down in workflow below where I wanted to be from November 2008 through January 2009. Right now (May 2009) I'm actually busier than I like to be, but have decided to work 7 days a week for a while to try to make up for the income losses in the preceding slack period. All of this points to the importance of projecting cash flow, and monitoring levels to make sure you go out to solicit more work at the first sign of a drop-off. Had I done that, my down period wouldn't have lasted so long, and I wouldn't be over-worked right now.

DEE-ANN: Do you have any tips for keeping the cash flow steady without burning yourself out?

ED TITTEL: Several hard-won "lessons recently learned" include:

1. Always keep looking for more work and new customers (set at least 10%-20% of your time aside for marketing and customer development/recruiting).
2. Try to avoid putting too many of your eggs into any single basket: I always try to maintain at least 4-5 active customers at any given time.
3. Whenever you get a reasonable chance, ask existing customers about new work (it's a delicate balancing act to stay between "irritating pest" and "incommunicative supplier/vendor" but it's a vital balance to find and maintain).

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