Writers don’t typically write to become rich but after twelve years of freelancing full-time, I’ve discovered that those who ignore money do so at their own peril. Because money gives you choices and the lack of it rips them away from you.
Imagine the scenario: You pitch a 1,000-word story that you care deeply about and an editor gets back to you thrilled about carrying it in her magazine’s pages. She assigns it at $1 a word and you set about reporting the piece. You build relationships with sources, you spend hours refining it and making it perfect, and then… then you get back the edits. All your wonderful work has come to naught because the editor has sensationalized the title, deleted half the quotes, and reworked the piece to a point where you absolutely hate it and don’t want your name on it.
You now have two choices: You can have it published without a byline or you could walk away, pull your story, and start sending it out elsewhere. But if you’re a cash-strapped freelancer, you can’t walk away, because this is $1,000. It’s rent money. Work you’ve already done, money you’ve already allotted to a future expense. If you walk away, you risk not being able to make that rent money back. So you take the money. You compromise. You lose creative control.
Further, when you’re depending on income from article and book contracts to feed your family, buy chew toys for the dog, and keep the liquor cabinet stocked, you lose negotiating power almost immediately because you’re less willing to walk away. Maybe if you had a good month, but what if you didn’t? What if you had a crappy, sucky, horrible month when that editor offers you less money for your second article than he did for the first? If your bills depend on that income, how quick are you going to be to say no?
And if you say yes, are you going to get caught in the low-pay spiral, as many of us have been?
The media world is changing. We need to be more aware of what’s going on with publishing, with writing, and with freelancing. We need to be able to experiment with new things that may or may not give us the income we need right away and for that, we need to build a bit of flexibility into our finances. If you’re going through each month barely paying the bills, it becomes really difficult to take a new idea and just run with it. But if you have that leeway, that little bit of flexibility, you can experiment with new ideas to see how they fit into your long-term career plan. If they don’t, you haven’t suddenly become homeless.
I wrote The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Making $1,000 More This Month to help writers build in that leeway, to earn themselves that flexibility. I wrote it so that you, yes you, can add $1k to your income quickly and easily in order to buy yourself the time and freedom to pay an extra bill, put away some savings, or buy yourself time to work on that novel.
None of us are immune. My husband and I are just beginning to recover from one of the worst financial years we’ve had in our lives, and the techniques and strategies in this book are what we used to get ourselves out of what seemed, at the time, like an untenable situation.
Should you be earning more?
Could you?
Will you?