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This article by Kathleen McGinn Spring was prepared for the September 18, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Non-Fiction Writers Profit From Collaboration

<d>Robin Rapport earned degrees in both visual and performing arts and cultural anthropology at Syracuse University, and then went on to earn a graduate degree in media ecology from New York University. "I wasn't able to put in it words at the time," she says, "but what I was really interested in was ways of communicating."

After working as a director in New York, Rapport realized that writing was the way in which she wanted to communicate -- and that writing and the performing arts share a common goal. "I look at who my audience is," she says, "just the way an actor or director would." Having built a career, and then a business, on her writing skills, Rapport is set to take over the presidency of the Professional Writers Alliance (PWA), a Mercer County-based organization of working non-fiction writers. A founder of the five-year-old group, Rapport takes over the reins from Robin Levinson, a co-founder, who has led the group from its inception.

The transition takes place on Thursday, September 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the group's monthly meeting at the West Windsor Library. Also on the agenda is election of other officers, information on a new website the group is having built, and discussion of the possibility of a new meeting structure, with networking meetings alternating with business meetings. Rapport says the group prefers to speak with prospective members before they begin to attend meetings. Call Levinson at 609-584-9330 for more information.

There are lots of groups for fiction writers, and other groups for those considering a career as a writer, says Rapport. Her group regularly gets calls from people in both camps, but restricts membership to professional, published non-fiction writers. She says a good number of PWA's 60 members, probably more than half, are employed full-time as writers, and most of the rest freelance as everything from medical writers to marketing writers to authors of non-fiction books.

A few, like Rapport, are small business owners. She started Rapport Communications LLC (609-434-1141; www.rapportcommunications.com) after a nine-year stint as a senior medical writer with Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield in New York City. Before joining Blue Cross, she had written on the entertainment field and for area businesses, and the health care giant considered this background a plus. "Health care was changing," she recalls. "They were getting into managed care, and they wanted someone with larger vision."

She credits Blue Cross with teaching her about medical and corporate writing, but after nearly a decade with the company, she was ready to ditch the commute. "It was a lifestyle decision," she says of her resolve to go into business for herself. She asked Blue Cross if she could continue part time or as a consultant. The response? "`You either work for us full time, or you don't work for us,'" Rapport recounts. She had been doing a little freelancing, and had a couple of clients, including Colgate, and so she decided to make the leap. Soon thereafter, Blue Cross called her, and within three months was her biggest client.

In the nine years since she has been in business for herself, Rapport has specialized in corporate communications. She produces everything from sales training materials to web content to meeting materials for clients in a number of industries, including healthcare, document management, telecom, human resources, and education.

She contracts work to other writers, and recently took on a business partner -- her husband, Greg.

"I was so busy. I needed a partner," she says. "We should have done this years ago." Her husband specializes in business and technology writing, and had worked for Scholastic and for a number of publications, including the Village Voice and New York Magazine. He handles a lot of the marketing for the company, and would have joined it sooner, but, says Rapport, there was a concern over health care and other benefits. Creating a limited liability corporation eased that situation. Business insurance is less expensive than a family policy, Rapport discovered.

The partnership is working out well, even though Rapport says "most couples can't work together because of power issues." She and her husband each have their own specialties, which keeps power struggles out of the equation. "Greg and I work together beautifully," she says. Business challenges are met head on -- often at the breakfast table.

The situation not only benefits the business, says Rapport, but is a boon to the family as well. They have a 10-year-old son, Gavin, and a six-year-old daughter, Jackie. "If I'm on a crash project, he can pick up some of the home slack," she says, "and vice versa."

Many of those crash projects -- along with steady, monthly assignments -- have come from PWA. "Three out of my top five clients I've gotten from the group," says Rapport. PWA publishes a guide, Pens for Hire, which lists members and their areas of expertise. She has gotten some work through the guide, but most of the work she has found through PWA has come directly from other members.

"I frequently get a call," Rapport says, "`I can't do X, can you?'" Members of the group, she says, hand off assignments that are outside their area of expertise, that will take more time than they have, or that pay less than the rates they want to accept. One of her biggest recent projects, for example, came to her from a PWA member who realized how time-intensive the work would be, and didn't want it to interfere with her summer plans.

Job leads like this are an important part of PWA. Other advantages include getting out of the house to meet other writers. "When Robin and I started the group," says Rapport, "we were both working at home and we had no idea how many other writers were out there." As the group evolved, monthly meetings, recently alternating between the West Windsor and Lawrence branches of the Mercer County Library, addressed topics including marketing, tax planning, Internet research, using an agent, ethics, and setting up a home office.

At some point, Levinson introduced an "agony and ecstasy" session at the end of each meeting. It gives members an opportunity to share triumphs -- book deals, new clients, and the like -- and problems, things like deadbeat clients, pathetic pay rates, and shrinking markets. The feature has become so popular, says Rapport, that it is one of the main reasons that the group will consider, at its upcoming meeting, the possibility of holding every other meeting at a restaurant or other social venue and giving members more time to crow, kvetch, and call upon the collective wisdom of their peers.

In writing, as in nearly every other industry, these are times that call for wisdom. Here is some Rapport has gleaned from her own experience and from the PWA.