I’ve talked quite a lot lately about when to say no, when not to accept low-paying work, when to walk away. And today I want to talk about when to accept that low-paying work, when not to walk away, and when to say YES.
And the answer to that is pretty simple: When it feels right for you.
There is no limit, no bottom line that I can draw out for you because your life, your goals, your skill set, your desires, all these things are different than mine and so what I might say yes to may sound insulting to you. Or what I think is far too much work for too little pay may actually be simple for you because you’ve already got expertise and expertise in the subject.
Just as you should never be bullied into accepting a lower wage, so too, should you never be bullied into turning down an assignment you believe is right for you.
I got asked on Twitter recently how to value your worth. I can’t tell you how to value yours, since a lot of factors come into play, but I can tell you how I’ve been valuing mine lately. When my husband quit his job and I went full-time, we figured out how much money we needed per month to survive, pay our bills, and basically not dip into our savings. To illustrate this example, let’s say that number is $4,000. Now, how many full-time days was I going to be able to work per month? If you work part-time four days a week, that’s two days. But I’m working full-time, five days a week, so that number for me is 20. So now, I took my desired income and divided it by the number of days I needed to work, and in this example, that works out to $200. That’s the absolute minimum needed per day in order to survive. Now my worth may be about five times that (and I believe it is), but when I have to accept an assignment, this daily target is what helps me figure out whether an assignment is profitable or even feasible in the time I’ll have to complete it.
This means then that I can’t accept anything that takes three days, for instance, and only pays $300, because that would work out to $100 a day and that’s only half of what I need. So even if I have no work on those days, it’s preferable to market and get higher-paying assignments than it is to sit around working for a wage that won’t pay my bills. On a free day, I can market, I can network, I can do other things that might bring in work that pays $1,200, which is double of what I need, but if I take that $300 assignment, I’ll be so busy with that I won’t have the time or freedom to scout for something better. I won’t have the time when someone comes to me with a better-paying job. I won’t be desperate enough to find that better-paying job. And I’ll have devalued my own worth.
Many of you wrote to me last week applauding my decision to turn down a book deal, but I’m neither brave nor arrogant for doing so. I’m someone who has to pay bills and writing is the way I choose to do it. And because I’ve chosen writing to be my profession, my only profession, I can’t afford not to bring my business sense into it.
You have to write for love, not money, because otherwise, when everyone is coming back to you and saying repeatedly that there’s no market for your work, you’ll believe them and throw your manuscript in the bin. In order to be able to push back and say yes, of course there’s a market, watch me prove it, you have to believe in your ideas and your writing. And you can’t do that without love, without passion. So write for the love. But when you go out to sell, sell for the money. And make it the highest money anyone will pay you.
Because you work hard at this. You deserve more. You’re worth more. You’re worth more than you even know you are. And no one other than you should ever be allowed to define how much that is.