otakujournalist.comOtaku Journalist

Start Here About Me Books Courses Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000 Niche Reviewer Crash Course Niche Journalism Workbook Journalism Web Design Contact Earn your first $1000 blogging what you love Sign up for my newsletter and learn how to monetize your geeky blog! Sign Me Up About the course Not According to Keikaku December 21, 2020 No Comments Lauren Orsini Today is my birthday so I’m feeling self-indulgent enough to finally update my blog. I’m doing about as well as anybody could be in this terrible year. Each day I wake up with a primary goal: keep my daughter alive and mostly in one piece. Everything else is secondary. This is all very much Not According To Keikaku, as the saying goes. I never planned to leave my career behind in order to be a stay-at-home-mom, but I never planned for a global pandemic either. Back in February, I wrote about learning to balance being a mom with client work . As the pandemic has dragged on, most of those clients have let me go or even closed up shop. Instead of doubling down on the work that I was still lucky enough to have, I instead did the bare minimum. I will be lucky to break $15k in income this year, which is much less than a year’s worth of childcare costs in my area. Combined with /gestures at everything/, John and I decided that it made more sense for me to parent Eva full time until the pandemic is over. It’s staggering how quickly I’ve forgotten who I used to be. I mentioned to a parent friend that I used to write books while our toddlers played on the playground, and I almost couldn’t get the words out, felt like I was having delusions of grandeur. Did I write books? Did I ever write anything longer or more in-depth than a grocery list? It feels like that was someone else’s life. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we become what we practice? After a few months of being primarily a parent, I feel like that’s all there is to me. But in reality, this year I did lots of self-actualizing stuff while Eva was sleeping. Things like: Wrote 45 new articles for my Forbes blog . I’m especially proud of my reviews for Paranoia Agent and Beastars ; and my interview with Waka Hirako, the author of My Broken Mariko . Built and painted my Trans Rights Custom Z’Gok Gunpla kit. Redesigned Gunpla 101 and published dozens of contributor pieces. Co-hosted a panel on fall anime for New York Comiccon (virtual) with Lynzee Loveridge. Was invited back to judge the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. Wrote a femslash fanfic (and made it public because Georgia went blue ). Wrote an essay for Anime Feminist (OK that was on motherhood). Guested on The One Piece Podcast (OK that was also about motherhood). It’s a shorter list than usual, but getting anything done this year is a win. This was a year in which I only knew what day it was by which of my weekly anime episodes or webtoon updates went live. This was a year full of misfortune both public and personal, one in which I have experienced levels of world-weary, bone-deep fatigue like never before. I’m just glad to have made it to age 34, even if I can’t celebrate it like I usually would. If you’ve made it this far, I just wanted to let you know that I priced down my workbook and books to $0.99 or less. (I’m working to make my books cost $0 on Amazon, but Kindle doesn’t make it easy so I need to jump through a few more hoops first.) It’s not much but I’d like to increase their accessibility at a time when so many things feel more difficult than they should be. Thanks for reading and for supporting me, whether you’ve been reading for one post or all 912 (yes, really). And hang in there. My birthday is the darkest day of the year, and I’ve always gleaned hope from the unchanging fact that after today, the days will get lighter. They really will. Lead photo by Nikhita Singhal 5 Tips For Breaking Into Niche Writing In 2020 July 25, 2020 Lauren Orsini It’s been difficult to find the motivation to blog. As quarantine wears on, my role as a primary caregiver has continued on as the most important and time-consuming part of my life. The traditional gender roles I conveyed in my May post have only become more stark as John’s career gets demanding while I continue to drop work I no longer have time or energy to do. “It’s awful,” I said to my sister about my quarantine life with an increasingly mobile toddler. “All we do is eat, nap, and play with blocks all day. I’m losing my mind.” “That sounds like fun actually,” she pointed out. Maybe complaining about all-day playtime to a very busy and in-demand employment lawyer wasn’t my smartest move. Since that conversation, I’ve tried to embrace my new life as a storybook reader, block stacker, and nursery rhyme singer. Like everything else about this quarantine, it feels like it’s gone on forever. So when, every now and then, I get a request for advice, it jolts me back into who I used to be—a niche journalist with ten years of experience reporting on anime, tech, and fandom. Like I say on my about page, “my favorite part of [this blog] is getting to connect with students and give them the advice I wish I had received.” That’s truer now than it has ever been. As somebody who launched my own career against the gloomy backdrop of the 2009 recession, my heart goes out to anyone getting their start during such a bleak time. I ought to permanently affix “Sorry for the late reply” as a heading to all of my quarantine correspondence, but I have slowly been offering advice to students and young professionals who ask. With their permission, I’ve included some of it here: 1) Get Gigs By Giving Editors Ideas Not only is it a tough time to break into the field, it’s a tough time to be in the field. Though online ad revenue is down , more people are stuck at home and reading news outlets than ever, so clicks are way up and editors need stories for people to read. Just from hanging out on Twitter, I’ve seen requests from places like Crunchyroll News, Funimation, and Anime News Network that are putting out calls for story pitches because they need new content. If I were looking for gigs, I’d be reaching out to these places with story ideas I’d be ready to write for them ASAP. In a cold email, I don’t even think a portfolio of samples is as important as a well-written email with an interesting pitch and the intent to back it up with quick, solid work. It’s less about researching what makes a good story pitch in general, and more about studying previous stories at those outlets and suggesting a story you can write for them that’s both in their wheelhouse and not something they’ve covered in the past. 2) Pitch The Stories You Want To Read Is there anything in your preferred beat that you think isn’t getting good coverage? Do you think you have an interesting idea for an in-depth piece that’s not about immediate breaking news? Better yet, can you make a case for an article that only you could write, involving a personal angle or anecdotal experience? Best of all, can you tie an article idea to what’s going on in the world right now? These are all ways you could get your idea to pique an editor’s interest. I would write to a couple of your favorite niche outlets with one or two ideas (I’d go for quality over quantity, you really only need a single good idea) and see if anyone responds. And if nobody does, I would try smaller organizations next. In the videogame sphere, a good example would be that you’d pitch to, instead of Polygon, someplace like Rock Paper Shotgun. They’re actually a great place for this because their contributor guidelines (always read those first) say that you don’t need to have published work to pitch to them, just an example of prior writing. 3) Find Experts To Guide Your Niche Reporting If you look at my career over the last ten years, it looks like I’ve covered a huge variety of topics. But actually, those topics all occurred in clumps. I’d be assigned a beat and I’d immerse myself in it. For example, when I was at ReadWrite, my editor came to me...