Writing Greeting Cards

By Author: James Keyes
Total Articles: 62
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You might believe that writing greeting cards is a way to make a lot of money. But, writing greeting cards isn’t all that easy, although there are open markets and possibilities in the greeting card industry. You will have to compete with other writers for your share of the greeting card market, learn about the industry, and study the markets.

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The greeting card industry is worth 7,000,000,000 a year. The three companies that control 85 percent of the market are Gibson Greetings, American Greetings, and Hallmark. Remember that only a small part of the 7,000,000,000 is paid to freelancers. Much of this money pays for artist’s costs, printing costs, and paper costs. In addition, that money also includes the sales figures for winter holiday card sales. There is no new writing involved in many of the holiday greeting cards because that are the same from one year to the next. In this industry, you probably won’t sell freelance greeting cards to one of these big three companies. Hallmark and American Greetings ...
... won’t accept submissions that are unsolicited and the competition is tremendous in the higher and larger paying markets. If you want to work for one these companies you may want to consider a staff position at the company. There are websites for these companies' that contain the job pages that you may want to watch if you are interested.

But, there are some other greeting card companies that will accept some freelance work. For the creative writer, this creates some interesting opportunities. As opposed to writing, much of the spending for the greeting card industry goes for the artwork for the greeting card. Therefore, if you are artistically capable there might be even more opportunities for you. There are at least 1,500 greeting card publishers. Some greeting cards are sent online. With these electronic greeting cards the user chooses sounds, pictures, or animations and can also write their own messages. Other electronic greeting cards are available with messages that are prewritten that the user can personalize.

Recently Yahoo!’s has incorporated Hallmark’s electronic cards into its website. In addition, a new company known as the Outpost Network provides a service where the user either writes his own or selects am addressee, stationary, and stationery all on the Internet. The selected recipient will receive the final greeting card from the Post Office. The electronic greeting card distributor is also very interesting company has frequently been in the news lately. Gibson Greetings and Greet Street entered into a financial agreement recently where Gibson Greetings will become the content provider for E greeting by Greet Street’s line of electronic greeting cards.

Electronic greeting cards include both free and paid for models of distribution. These electronic greeting cards might have considerable impact on the greeting card industry and shift some of the opportunities for writers to the electronic greeting cards from the standard print format. This might also change the standard submission format to submitting them by email from sending in a batch of index cards that contain verses. But, most greeting card submissions will still be handled the old fashioned way.