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Welcome week three of our month devoted to publishing and media. If you haven’t previous posts, what’s stopping you? So far, we’ve looked at book publishing and on-air meteorology (television weatherpersons). This week, it’s time to look at writing. Today you’ll meet Craig Guillot, a freelance writer in New Orleans, who specializes in finance writing, among other things. Craig is the author of Stuff About Money: No BS Financial Advice for Regular People, an ebook, which he says will be available in April. (I’m a source for one section!)

Bottom line? Math helps keep Craig profitable. So if you’re a budding freelance writer–or looking for ways to leave more on your bottom line–listen up.

Can you explain what you do for a living?

I’m a non-fiction freelance writer. My specialties include business, personal finance, retail, real estate, travel and entertainment. I’ve written for publications and web sites, such as Entrepreneur, CNNMoney.com, Washington Post, Nationalgeographic.com and dozens of trade publications. I also have a personal finance book Stuff About Money: No BS Financial Advice for Regular People.

When do you use basic math in your job?

In the actual writing, not much. Just like any other writer or journalist, I interview sources, research, take trips out in the field, gather information and write. I occasionally do a little photography and video too. I do use math on occasion in some of my personal finance work to demonstrate and calculate different things related to retirement and investing.

But I use math a lot in the background. Writing just happens to be my trade. Like any other self-employed person, I am ultimately running a business. As a freelancer I sell my services to editors and corporate clients. I have a lot of regular clients, but I’m constantly taking on new projects and new deals. I need to be able to carefully estimate my time and expenses to give a client an accurate quote.

To me, everything is about the hourly rate. I need to use this as a basis for building my income. And while my overhead isn’t much, I do have to know what’s going out to pay taxes, what’s going into savings, retirement and everything else. It may seem like part of my personal life but I consider it all part of my job. When you’re self employed, you have to constantly think about all of these things.

Do you use any technology (like calculators or computers) to help with this math?

I’m not sure I even have a calculator in my office anymore, but my main tool is Excel. I use it for everything, and I mean everything. It’s a calculator but so much more. There is no problem that can’t be solved, no analysis that can’t be made, in Excel. When you learn how to use it and how to write the formulas you need, you can do anything with it. I use it to analyze my revenues, analyze the profitability of certain assignments. Like everyone else, I use Quickbooks, but I also use Excel for background stuff.

I break everything down to a formula or percentage. This includes my monthly income goals. It doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t imagine it’s that way for many other writers but it works for me and helps me make the optimal decisions. I’ve used Excel to track, analyze and compute things in my regular life as well. I used it in the remodeling of our house, in tracking my net worth, in monitoring my investments, planning retirement, planning trips. I sit down, make up a spreadsheet, build some formulas, input the data and then use it to help make decisions. I run marathons and even use it to track my training runs and races. The more you learn how to use Excel and write formulas, the more uses you find for it.

How do you think math helps you do your job better?

One way it helps me is with analyzing my hourly rate and profitability. Whenever I take on special projects for a corporate client or a custom publisher, I use it to give a quote. I prefer to work on a project rate. I give them a single number but behind that is a lot of math that I have used to arrive at that number. They don’t need to know any of that.

I may also build in a variance. It will let me know if I might be able to live with a cut in that number. So if they want to try to negotiate that down a bit, I know that I can drop by 5%, 7%, 10% or whatever it might be for me to still make what I need to make.

I also need to factor in opportunity cost. That is what else I could be doing with my time. Do I take this project which will tie me up for three weeks or do I decline it and go after smaller but potentially more lucrative projects that will make my time more flexible? I use math to figure all this out.

How comfortable with math do you feel?

In relation to personal finance and business math, I feel very comfortable with it because I use it so much and see the value in it. But all the standard stuff you learn in school? I really don’t remember any of that. I’d have to pull out a book and look up some formulas if you wanted me to calculate cubic volume or something like that.

What kind of math did you take in high school?  Did you like it/feel like you were good at it?

Just the basics. Algebra, geometry, standard high school stuff. I wasn’t particularly good at it, I was just average. But I majored in business in college and took a lot of accounting, finance and business math classes. I always excelled at those and had a stronger interest in them. Math dealing with money just felt real to me. There was an instant connection of “Oh, I could actually use this someday.”

Did you have to learn new skills in order to do the math you use in your job? Or was it something that you could pick up using the skills you learned in school?

I did pick up some new skills, but a lot of the business and personal finance math I used today can be traced right back to college. The fact that I actually enjoy this kind of math really helps.

Anything else you want to mention?

Yes. I believe that many of our growing financial problems in this country—like people getting into mortgages they couldn’t afford, our lack of savings, our failure to put enough money away for retirement, our problems with credit card debt—can be traced partly to our failure to use math in our financial lives. People buy homes and cars on emotion but rarely run the numbers. They wouldn’t use debt to overspend if they really knew the long-term consequences. There is a numerical answer for everything in your finances. You have to know why that number is important, how to calculate it and how to use it.

Any questions for Craig? I’m sure he’d be happy to answer them!

Today, I’m the guest poster at Word Count: Freelancing in the Digital Age, the terrific blog for writers by Michelle Rafter.  I’ve talked about why writers need math here Math for Grownups before.  At Word Count, I get down to brass tacks.

Hope you’ll take a look!

Hey, that’s me!

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad: You do need math, even as a writer. Whether you’re reporting on a business, interpreting statistics or managing your freelance career, math is a big deal.

The good: You don’t have to like it. The better: Forget about finding cosine or using the quadratic formula. A few basics are all you need. You can start with these:

1. Calculate a percent. You learn that a company’s revenue has fallen by $2.5 million over five years. That’s a lot of money, right? Well, actually it depends on the company’s revenue over the last five years. If total revenue was $5 billion, the company lost 5 percent. To calculate that, divide 2.5 million by 5 billion. But if the company’s total revenue over five years was $5 million, the company lost a whopping 50 percent. Using a percent gets to the meat of those numbers.

Read the rest of the post…

If you’ve ever visited the website of a prescription medication or picked up a brochure from your doctor’s office, you’ve seen the kind of work that Kim Hooper does.  And she’s proof that math and writing are not mutually exclusive endeavors.

As a senior copywriter for an advertising agency, Kim writes brochures, websites and other copy that helps promote a brand or a product.  Since her agency’s primary client is a pharmaceutical company, much of her writing is science-based.

When do you use basic math in your job?

Much of my job involves scanning through research papers about specific drugs and interpreting clinical data in a “sexy,” Madison Avenue way. This tends to involve a bit of math. For example, let’s say we want to point out that our drug is really successful with women over 40 years old. I will look through the demographic tables in the clinical study to create a compelling factoid. Let’s also say that out of 100 women, 60 are over 40 years old. So, when writing a piece, I may have a big headline that says something like, “60% of women in the clinical study were over 40 years old.”

Most of the math I do involves basic addition or subtraction and percentage calculations. Very often, I’ll do percentage calculations for side-effects data. So if 3 patients out of 150 in the clinical study experienced side effects, I’ll take this fact and make sure to call out that 98% of patients did not experience side effects.

Do you use any technology (like calculators or computers) to help with this math?

I do use the calculator built into my PC to double check my work. But I almost always have to do “margin math,” meaning I show my calculations on paper so the client’s regulatory committee can review them.

How do you think math helps you do your job better?

Math keeps my left brain strong. In advertising, the right brain is very important. This is a creative business. We’re trying to find interesting, compelling ways to communicate product messages that may not be that thrilling at first glance. My left brain can help make the messages thrilling. Numbers are very appealing to consumers. If they can see information broken down into easy-to-understand percentages, for example, they may be more likely to try our medication over another one.

How comfortable are you with math?

I’ve always been a bit of a math nerd, and I went all the way through Advanced Placement Calculus in high school. In fact, it was really difficult for me to choose a major in college because I loved math and science and I also loved the arts. For a short time, I double-majored in genetics and psychology. I ended up majoring in communications, which seemed broad enough for me to explore a number of career options. I just happened to fall into a career that makes use of both sides of my brain, which I love. I really enjoy sifting through data and doing the math necessary to make facts come to life.

I think we all get a little rusty if we don’t use math regularly, but it’s been part of my job for a number of years now. There’s no way I could do calculus again, but I have no problem doing basic math. I enjoy it.

Kim Hooper is an advertising copywriter by day, novelist by night. Get to know her work at KimHooperWrites.com.

Do you have questions for Kim?  If so, ask them in the comments section!