Archive for the Category ◊ Ask Mridu ◊

10 Jun 2010 How do You Stay on Track with Goals?
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Tags:  | Leave a Comment

Do you change your goals mid-year, for example when you break into a new publication, start getting regular work or making more money? Also, how do you differentiate long-term goals from short-term goals, and how do you make sure you’re staying on track?


This is one of my favorite questions because I’m a geek, very ambitious, and aggressively go after what I want, which means I think about goals a lot. In reality, I reevaluate my goals every day. Every day that I haven’t had a good, productive day is a day when I think about how I could have. Every day that I do have a good productive day is a day I think about how to repeat it.

I have long-term life goals, I have yearly goals, I have your normal monthly goals, and then I have the day-to-day, which I don’t really consider goals as much as I do things to get done. They’re what keep me working towards the long-term goals. I don’t have daily or weekly goals because my days and my weeks are too dissimilar to each other for me to consider having any kind of structure to them. I put things on my to-do list and I do them. These things help towards my goals. For instance, on my calendar I’ve marked out each day that I have to blog and make a marketing effort. Those are two things I do each and every day, without fail (unless absolutely necessary). In my week, I’ll do what needs to be done in terms of the assignments I have, extra pitches I need to send out, research for my personal projects, etc. I put those in my calendar, in my to-do list, and I do them. These too, aren’t goals, but help me get nearer to them.

My monthly goals mostly have to do with productivity and income. I have an income goal that I try very hard to meet each month. I may or may not meet it, but I do try my best, and each month, I find that it gets easier.

The yearly goals take a bit more planning, and those have certainly changed from back when I started out to now. In my first year, I just wanted to write. Anything and everything. What that needed was that I pitch with reckless abandon– to ezines, to small publications, big publications, magazines, newspapers, absolutely anything. I wanted to write, get experience, get credits, and while I wanted to make money (of course), that wasn’t my primary consideration. I wrote 100 articles that year (some short, some long, none more than 1,000 words), and achieved my goal. Since then, I’ve been trying to reach income goals. For the first five years, I tried (and succeeded in) doubling my income each year. 2006 and 2007 were tough years for me, so all I did during those years was to try and keep afloat, figure out what I wanted to do with my career, and learn.

Over the last couple of years, my goals have been to focus more on personal projects and not have to do stories I’m not interested in, for the money. I’ve worked on bringing bigger publications into my portfolio, writing longer stories, and only doing the work that appeals to me.

My goals for the next couple of years, as we begin thinking about starting a family, are to reach a certain income level, keep it steady, and reduce my work hours. So I’d like to be making a little more money than I do now, which is more than enough to live very nicely in India, and reduce my work hours by half. (I only work 6-8 hours a day now, which is half the time I used to work when I started.)

Your goals will most certainly change as your life situation changes, and in my case that’s been year to year, but for you might be month to month or decade to decade, who knows. The important thing is that you do keep evaluating how happy your work is making you and whether the path you’re walking on is the right one for you. I think the best way I manage to keep on track with my goals is by really keeping them top of mind (I have a post-it on my computer that reminds me of them daily) and knowing how near or far to them I am. Any time I look at them and find that they’re no longer relevant to what I’m doing or want to be doing, I have no hesitation in wiping the slate clean and beginning all over again. For instance, one of my goals this year was to work on a book and while that started out fine, my other work has kept me so busy (and happy) lately, that I haven’t minded that I haven’t got a chance to work on it yet. When this slows down, as it will, or I find that it isn’t giving me the satisfaction it once did, I will sit down and re-evaluate.

So, in short, yes, I reevaluate my goals all the time, my short-term goals are really only items on my to-do list whereas my long-term goals are more about having a fulfilling career, and I look at my goals list every day, which is how I stay on track with them.

09 Jun 2010 Bye Bye Bollywood?
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Tags:  | 2 Comments

I’m a fairly published journalist from Mumbai. All my work is current Bollywood news and features. Now though, I’m working to shift my focus from Bollywood news for newspapers to stories for magazines. (I am not too rigid on the subject, except that I am tired of Bollywood now and do not want to do anymore of it.) My final goal is to write for international publications. I am finding it difficult to break away from Bollywood news, as that is all I have as published experience. And no editor is open to have me write anything other than that. Pl guide me on how to make the transition from something as local as Bollywood news to magazines stories.

Turns out, you’re in luck. Because Bollywood isn’t local anymore, it’s gone global. And someone like you is much in demand. I speak from experience; at least two editors I know recently hired “Bollywood correspondents” for their US-based publications.

You’re not interested in Bollywood anymore, but that’s something you specialize in. How do you make the leap from Bollywood to non-Bollywood? Simple. Use it as a jumping off ground.

In India, most people are already familiar with Bollywood, so features on it are limited to chasing the stars. But what can you offer an international audience who isn’t all that familiar with this industry and is increasingly hearing about it? I’d start using your contacts and your industry knowledge to sell business, political and current affairs stories to the editors you’re targeting. For instance, this story in Forbes may be about Bollywood on the surface, but really it’s about smart businesspeople and a clever marketing idea. This story is a personal narrative, and this one is a travel piece.

I’d use angles like these to break into the publications you want to write for, and once you’ve proven to be a good reporter and the editor trusts you, there’s no reason you can’t branch out to other subjects.

You could start with those right off and there’s absolutely no reason that you wouldn’t be successful in non-Bollywood subjects, but you’ve got such a huge vat of gold in front of you just waiting to be tapped. Why not use your contacts, your industry knowledge, and your years of experience to break into the publications you really want to write for? Once you’ve gained the editors’ trust and worked with them a couple of times, you can start pitching whatever it is that you now want to write about.

08 Jun 2010 What is The Ideal Client Balance?
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Leave a Comment

Do you have a percentage, say no client should take up more than X% of your business? What is the ideal client balance?

That’s a very interesting question, and always a good thing to ask no matter whether you’re in your first or your tenth year of freelancing. I think most of us have income goals, productivity goals, and even publication goals, but few of us stop to think how much that publication should feature into our scheme of things. If an editor gives us a low-paying assignment, we rarely try to figure out how a regular relationship with the publication might work into our productivity and income goals.

I’ve only recently started thinking about client percentages. Like with everything else, there’s an ideal in my mind and a reality. For me, I look at the ideal from a yearly perspective. I’d like to have ten regular clients and each of them would have no more than 10% share in my income, so that if one of them went under (as has happened) or decreased rates (also happened) or tried to take advantage (of course it’s happened), 90% of my business would be still hum along smoothly and even if I didn’t replace the client immediately, I’d be okay.

The reality, of course, is that I have about four or five regular clients and each time I’ve finished a piece for them, I almost immediately start work on another one. In addition to these, I have about six or seven more clients who I’ll work occasionally for (say once or twice a year) and only pitch them when I have a story that works for them. And then of course, finally, there are the one-offs, people who write to me for a story for a particular issue, editors who needed someone at the last minute and came across my website, or publications that don’t typically run India-based stories but might be making an exception for something that needs covering.

I always try to have regular clients. If there’s a publication that pays poorly, for instance, I think hard about whether or not it’s worth the effort of working for them, because do I really want them to govern 10% of my time or income?

Right now, though, each client represents approximately 20% of my yearly income, and of course, that is a little problematic, because if one of them were to go under, I’d be struggling to fix it. And if two or more did, I’d be in big trouble. I’ve been in this situation before, which is why I really believe in diversifying my client base, and taking full advantage of being a freelancer in terms of number of clients.

You CAN have too many clients, though, and that’s one of the pitfalls you should look out for as well. I hesitate to add more clients to my mix at this point, because at some point, when you’ve found your ideal number of clients, you’ll have to replace one with the other. It’s hard to juggle too many clients (and some may say that ten regulars is way, way too much) and you can’t possibly please everyone if you’re writing for them all each month, or if they’re all in the news business.

For me, I have two news-based clients, two that need analysis when major news events are over, and the rest are all feature-based. I don’t think I could handle any more news people at this point, because if a natural disaster or terrorist attack happens, I really can’t write for more than two publications at that point. Or be available to them. So I think about that and plan it out accordingly.

No two people have the same client mix though, and how many clients you have does depend on how long you’ve been working, what kind of writing you do, how often you write for them, and how efficient you are with your marketing. But what would be the ideal situation for you is definitely worth thinking about.

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Have a question for me? Leave in the comments or e-mail it to me at askmridu@gmail.com

07 Jun 2010 Should the Publication Pay for My Travel?
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Leave a Comment

My question is, when you have pitched a story that requires for you to fly somewhere, does the publication pay for that or is that your cost to pay? Could you explain that process to me?


The first time I heard this question, I have to say, I was a bit surprised. But I’ve been receiving variations of it for years now, so I think it’s time I answered it.

The simple answer is yes, the publication should pay for the flights, the hotels, even the meals, and each time I travel, the expenses are taken care of by my editors. I won’t travel without expenses, since the only reason I’m incurring them is because I’m doing a story for the newspaper or magazine. Look at it solely from a work perspective. If your company was sending you to say, Mumbai, for a meeting, they’d be paying for it, right? Well, it’s the same for writers and journalists. I wouldn’t dream of going off on my own dime if I were on assignment for any publication.

In fact, even if you’re in your own city, the publication should ideally be paying for transportation, phone expenses and meals. All photographers I know ask for this, I don’t know why most writers don’t.

That said, as writers, as journalists, we do have personal projects, and I will most definitely travel for those projects on my own. If it’s an issue I care about, if I don’t yet have an assignment from anyone, if I’m going without a contract, I’ll definitely pay my own way. The good thing about this is that when I do come back and sell the story, several times, my editors offer to pay back expenses for them. So that’s not completely out of the question either and I do make sure I’ve earned my daily income (excluding travel expenses).

Now all that out of the way, I should warn you. If you’re new to the craft, haven’t worked with any major publication before and don’t have too many credits, there is no reason for an editor to trust you enough to pay for your travel. When I first started traveling for work about four years ago, the travel expenses for the first assignment I did (a one-year follow-up on the tsunami) came right out of my pocket. I did that story for experience, for an understanding of how to go about travel, for the clip. With the money I made from that piece, I broke even with the travel expenses, which means that I didn’t really get paid for the effort of reporting and writing. Which was fine, because that gave me experience, and it taught me how to do things right. It’s a bit like writing for free– you do it once for the experience, the clip and the credential, and then you move on. I have never once traveled for any publication on my own dime again.

The good news is that any decent publication is going to take for granted that they have to pay for your travel, and it’s not something you have to negotiate for. There are certain publications that can’t afford to pay for their correspondents’ travel, and I only do Delhi-based story for those clients. But if it’s something they’re sending you out on, ask about the travel. They’ll probably be booking and arranging it themselves.

Happy journeys!

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Have a question for me? Leave in the comments or e-mail it to me at askmridu@gmail.com

30 Nov 2009 How Does One Meet Editors?
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments

When you suggest going out to “meet editors,” exactly how does one go about that? Should it be an editor I’ve already worked with once? Do I invite them out for coffee to present some ideas I have? I absolutely stink at selling myself in person, so I guess what I’m asking is, can you expand on what you do when you meet an editor in person.

This is a very good question, and now I’m wondering why I didn’t think of answering it sooner. The way I approach my meetings with editors has changed a bit over the past few years as I’ve gotten more confident about presenting myself and my ideas, and also now that with experience, I feel I bring more to the table. Earlier, it felt more like an interview, whereas now, I try to make it a conversation, and do try and see if the publication fits in with my long-term plans as well.

It took me a while to get comfortable with the idea, but you’re feeling out the editor as much as the editor is feeling you out. Know that when you walk in for a meeting. You’re as much in charge as they are, and that you are there not to sell yourself, but to meet this person and see if working together would be mutually beneficial. Is this a publication and editor whose vision you share?

When you do meet an editor, whether for coffee or in her office, I think it’s best to leave the marketing out of it. Have a list of potential ideas ready if she wants to discuss them, but I find it’s much better to talk about other things– her life, your life, how she got into the magazine, how you decided to become a freelancer, etc. This is especially true if this is an editor you’ve already worked with, but even if you haven’t, look at this as a great opportunity to get to know him or her better as a person. What makes her tick? What are the areas that interest him most? Do they use a lot of freelance material? What kind of stories would they like you to keep in mind? What kind of frequency of submissions works best for them?

With e-mail, it’s so easy to pitch a story idea, and you’re doing that anyhow. When you’re meeting an editor in a setting where you’re not required to get a yay or nay on pitches, relax a little bit, and try to talk to the editor about how you can each get the best out of the relationship.

Whether to meet for coffee or go to their office doesn’t much make a difference, in my opinion. I’ve done both, and I typically leave the choice up to the editor. That said, if I’m meeting an editor for the first time, I prefer to meet in their office, but like I said, if the editor prefers to meet outside of work, I’m not going to say no!

Finally, the hardest part of it all– the actual asking the editor for a meeting. If you’re an out-of-towner, this is easy. Next time you think you’re going to be in the editor’s city, shoot her an e-mail and let her know that you’ll be around for a couple of days and would love to get to know her– put a face to a name, blah blah. I’ve done this and it works like a charm; I usually get asked to come by the very next day. Call ahead if it’s an editor you’re in touch with frequently.

For a new-to-you editor who works in the same city? I’ve sent pitches or letters of introductions in the past, and in them included a line of the “I’d love to come by your office and discuss how we may work together” sort, and if they’re so inclined, they take me up on the offer.

In my experience, it’s much more beneficial to meet up with editors who you’ve either worked with in the past, or who’ve shown interest in having you contribute to their publication because they’re equally invested in the relationship. The face-to-face meeting simply opens up a new channel of communication and allows both of you to see where in each other’s work, you’d be the best fit.

I’m also opening up the floor to readers. How do you fix meetings with editors? What’s the best way to approach such a meeting?

10 Nov 2009 Ideas and Inspiration
Author: Mridu Khullar Relph |  Category: Ask Mridu  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments

I wanted to know where you find inspiration for topics when you have a blockage?

I don’t like this question. Can I answer another one? Okay, I’m just kidding. The reason I dislike this question is because I’m going to have to admit that in terms of ideas, I very rarely experience a blockage and that I actually have a notebook filled with ideas right now, and most of them, I know, will sell as soon as I send them out. But I’m trying to get a life (people are beginning to forget what I look like), so I’ll let the other journalists get to them, or look at them in my own time.

Anyway, given that I actually do keep a steady supply of ideas, I’ll tell you how I do it. I know where my focus lies, and I try to keep up with a lot that is going on in that area.

1. Read local newspapers and magazines. I’m awed by my fiancé, Sam, who is the India bureau chief of a British media agency. He starts his day reading at least six or seven local newspapers, gets breaking news alerts all through the day and night on his phone, subscribes to every magazine you’ve ever heard of, and actually pays people to read all the local-language papers each day and find interesting stories in them. They routinely end up making documentaries for National Geographic on these stories they’ve found in local-language media, so don’t underestimate the power of what those Hindi and Urdu language papers are reporting.

2. Build your sources. Every time I’ve finished interviewing someone who is an expert, I beg, plead, and urge them to put me on their mailing list, if they have one. If their organization deals with something I’m interested in, say sanitation or wastepicking or refugee life, I’ll let them know very clearly that I’m in it for the long haul, but can’t do it alone and need help in understanding the issues, and finding the various angles. Most people are almost always grateful that a journalist is not interested in a one-off piece (especially if it’s an important social issue) and will happily call to give updates.

3. Express further interest in people you interview. If I have time (and I usually try to make sure that I do), I do a background search on my main source (I’ve found that typically, one stands out among your interviewees)– where has he or she been interviewed? What issues do they care about the most? What kind of work have they done in the past? What are they planning for the future? Call them once in a while to say hi or check in, and keep asking if there’s something new or interesting in their field of work? If you’ve done point no. 2 well, this won’t be a problem, but many people don’t belong to organizations, don’t have mailing lists, and are simply people who happen to know a lot about something. Touch base with them once in a while.

And finally,

4. When you find that something interests you in a conversation with friends or family, file it away for future use. I’ve found several ideas through conversations or surprised revelations by my friends or acquaintances. A neighbor of mine was a doctor and astrologer, who led me to this piece. My father has been talking about the anti-Sikh riots since I was a baby (for the record, we’re not Sikh). I wrote about detectives being hired by parents for arranged marriages of their children after a conversation with friends, decided to look up hymenoplasty when talking to a cousin about repression among Indian women.

Oh, and that detective? He gave me another story that I haven’t seen published elsewhere.

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