CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCER
by
Chris Stokel-Walker
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PUBLISHED BY:
Chris Stokel-Walker on Smashwords
Confessions of a Freelancer
Copyright © 2011 by Chris Stokel-Walker
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. After all, once you read this you’ll realise that through my confessions, I’m quite poor, and it’s the cost of a cheeseburger. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
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CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCER
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INTRODUCTION
I’ve been freelancing in some shape or form for nearly five years now – but it doesn’t feel like it. That’s nowhere near as long as most, but I feel that in that time I’ve learnt an awful lot about the profession, and that I need to confess some things that I like (and that I dislike) about it.
Hopefully, from my frank and honest confessions, people can learn where I’ve gone wrong and do things differently. It may even help them take heart at what they could do in freelancing, and the compromises that sometimes must be made in order to make enough money to survive doing what is an incredibly perilous job in an incredibly parlous industry.
Even if you don’t learn anything, think of it this way. It only cost you the price of a cheeseburger.
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#1
I DON’T ALWAYS LIKE THE WORK I’M DOING
but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. You learn fairly rapidly that in this game, you need to be pragmatic and follow your head rather than your heart. Sure, you might go into it thinking that you could pick and choose whatever jobs you want, and decline the seedy or boring ones, but that’s not how the laws of supply and demand work.
There are plenty of jobs out there – too many to count, at least for me – but there are also plenty of other freelancers out there who are willing to do the jobs they might not have set their hearts on. That means that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty and do the jobs you might, in an ideal world, not take on.
After all, the world wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have garbage collectors or people manning production lines at the sausage factory. We’d end up with a rat infestation problem and wouldn’t have anything to put in hotdog buns at ball games. Yes, they’re not the high-prestige jobs that you had in mind when you started freelancing, but they’re the ones that are plentiful and most importantly, pay.
That means that yes, I have taken on soul destroying work. It’s been a long, hard slog, and I’ve not been happy while I do it. But I still earned a paycheque at the end of it.
You have to become realistic at some point. Pragmatism is perhaps the best skill that a freelancer can have – way beyond writing skill, personal personality or the ability to sell themselves like no-one’s business. The freelancers that work in cloud cuckoo land…well, actually, they don’t work at all.
The amount of jobs that I’ve pitched for mean that I can’t possibly like all the things I’m offering to do. I’m not really sure I want to be a masturbation aid, but I’ve offered to write erotic fiction collections. I’m not crazy about getting into the intricacies of the aerospace industry’s approach to hiring contracted workers, but I was getting paid for it, so I did it. The fact that this particular job had to be rigidly pro-SEO meant that I was often limited to writing in certain sentences, and had a client who didn’t seem to understand that you couldn’t tweak the copy too much otherwise you lose its interface- friendliness with Google. That meant a lot of man hours (on a pre-agreed flat rate, irrespective of time taken) shifting words back and forth in a sentence when the first lot I’d written was best suited to both legibility and good Google rankings. Freelancing can be demoralising – in fact, it often is – and you will usually not have a co-worker to whom you can grumble in the lunch hour. You have to suck it up and get through the jobs you’re not interested in until the jobs you are interested in turn up somewhere.
A broke freelancer will be infinitely unhappier than a freelancer with money and a job they don’t like. Think of it that way. You can’t get by in life without money. Sometimes you have to do things you wouldn’t necessarily like to do in an ideal world to get paid.
You need to think of the long game. By doing the menial writing jobs now, you’re bringing in money which will allow you the luxury of waiting on a better job in the future. You’ll also have the bonus of content to fill out your portfolio.
There’s an added benefit too. A freelancer who only writes about sports is only ever going to be able to show sports writing clippings to potential employers. There’s only so many sports writing jobs out there, and I’ve heard that you might not want to work at ESPN anyway. That narrows it down more.
If you’ve written about sports, and about science, and about homeopathic medicine, as well as reviewing stand up comedy and ghostwriting the memoir of a famous clown, for example, you’ve got a lot more strings to your bow and you can go into a meeting with a potential new client with a bright shiny button on your lapel that reads adaptable.
Plus you broaden your horizons of knowledge. You might not think that learning how to apply clown make-up is all that important, but when it comes to face painting your child at their sixth birthday party, or impressing a crowded dinner party with your knowledge of homeopathy, you’ll be thankful. You might hate it while doing it, but it could come in handy in the future.
I’m aware this goes against what a lot of people advise for freelancers. “Get a niche!” they crow, “and stick with it!”
That’s good if you’re in a really specialist niche where there isn’t already plenty of experience. In general, you only get to become an expert at something after decades of work. For most people though, the thing they think they’re an expert on has an overload of knowledgeable people who can produce facts and figures from their mind while you’re still warming up your fingers. Getting yourself into a niche is good so long as you’re willing to devote a lot of time and effort into being the very best person that any potential client could employ for that niche. If you’re not, then diversity is the key.
So take shoddy jobs that you don’t like, because every job is experience to add to your list. Plus you never know – you might hate writing your first erotic story, but end up liking the second and third, and know how to push a reader’s buttons by the fiftieth. If you’d been snooty about the jobs you took, you’d never have found your real calling.
I haven’t found that niche yet, but that’s not a problem. I’m learning lots of stuff about the world that I ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered to figure out or find on my own initiative. Some day I might. If I don’t, what’s the problem? I can just keep doing anything and everything, and still present myself as unique. I’ll be adaptable, rather than a self-confessed expert at something.
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#2
I TAKE JOBS FOR CRUMMY PAY
We all think that we’re worth lots. If someone asks me for my rates, I’ll send them the professionally-designed PDF which outlines my per-word charges (I don’t do hourly rates, because I’m too quick for it to work out well for either me or the client – I’d get stiffed because I can do twice the amount of work at a better quality than a freelancer who charges by the hour, and the client would always have that same client feeling of worrying that they’re paying a freelancer to pad around in his pyjamas to fill up the timesheet).
But that professionally-designed PDF might have different prices on it.
If I’m writing for a high-end magazine, I’m going to charge the full whack. That makes sense: the magazine is backed by a big benefactor, and it’s part of a professional publishing group, and they rake in lots of money in advertising and sponsorship. They can afford to pay me what I think I’m worth.
But if it’s some guy running a blog, then I’ll charge less. Partly, that’s because writing blog posts takes less time and research, but partly because the guy running a blog from his basement doesn’t (most of the time) have a massive bank of finances to pay for my full rates.
That might sound like a bad idea. If I’m charging comparative peanuts for my work, it devalues it. But it’s still money in my pocket, and it’s steady work. Who knows? That guy running a blog from his basement might have hit a niche, and it might be immensely popular. He might need 300 posts a year, and he might get a good set of sponsors who are willing to pay for online ads. He might then bump up the amount he’s willing to pay me, and he might give me a bonus come Christmas for sticking with him back when he could (by his own admission) only pay me pennies.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying go out there and sell yourself for nothing. I’m saying don’t think that you can get the amount you want every time.
If we could, then you’d have supermarket bagpackers earning $100,000 a year and driving around in a Ferrari. If we could set our own wage (which is essentially what picky freelancers do), then the world would come to a stop, we’d be in an even worse depression than we currently are and there would be no menial workers because everyone overvalues themselves.
Don’t lowball yourself: that’s stupid. But don’t dismiss out of hand jobs that don’t pay what you’ve been charging other people. The big buck jobs aren’t a dime a dozen; the phrase explains itself. The cheaper jobs are.
More than anything, you need momentum. Keeping writing – even if it’s only for a little bit of money – gets you experience and puts your name out there. You never know who the guy you’re writing posts for 10 cents a word knows. Poor people can be friends with millionaires. You’re not going to lose potential clients by charging too little, but you will be setting your standards too high. Likewise, it’s much easier to negotiate up a price with a client after you’ve completed a few jobs for them than it is to go in headstrong on your first meeting and demand a high rate upfront. You have to remember that it’s all about trust: the client doesn’t know you from Adam, so you have to win them onside. If that means maybe operating as a lower price than you ordinarily would for the first time, then so be it. If you end up still stuck on that entry-level pricing tariff after a year of working with them, you can explain that you were really hoping the discount you’re offering them over your normal rates would be temporary, and that you can’t really afford to continue working for the current low wage. They’ll most likely bump your salary up to a level which is more agreeable to you – and if they don’t, then you just avoided getting into a long-term working relationship with a client who doesn’t care for you.
Pride is a pretty bad quality for humans to have. You only need look through the annals of literature to see the number of people who’ve been brought down by overteeming pride. Oedipus was one of the first, and the Greeks from the off had a phrase for it: hubris. Complete and utter self-belief to the extent that you’re blind to reality isn’t the best way to sell yourself (in fact, if you’re pricing yourself out of the market, you won’t sell yourself at all). You need to be humble and yes, sometimes you have to give a little.
Good clients will pay a fair price for top quality. They know it’s in their interest to pay dollars for someone who has English as a first language and can write engagingly and with results, rather than cents for a guy based in Bangalore or Bali who will produce second-rate work. You’re competing with those at the bottom of the freelancing food chain, true, but don’t think that you’re necessarily above it. If the gulf between the piranha and the plankton is too steep a price, then the client might be tempted to take the risk on the cheaper worker. Don’t give them that option. Narrow the price differential just enough that they can’t possibly in their right mind turn you away.
Rigid pricing regimes are the bane of any client’s life. Clients think they have a talented potential freelancer on their hands and are eager to work with them, only to realise that they can’t – in their current budget at least – afford to take them on for anything.
With a little leeway that freelancer could have struck up a good relationship which could potentially last years, but for the fact that their rate card is fairly immobile.
You have to look at it sensibly: you wouldn’t make massive demands on a friend if they were pressed for time. You’d understand their predicament and try and help them out by not bothering them as much. So the same should ring true with any potential clients. Yes, I know that you do need to stick to your guns because clients are out there to drive the best deal just as much as freelancers are. But you can’t be hardheaded. Compromise needs to be the key. If a client knows that you’ve come down on your pricing structure for them, they’re much more likely to look favourably on your work (and they’re much more likely to remember that you did them a favour when they’ve got a juicy piece of copy to be written six months down the line and free reign to pick the writer they want).
Being strong on keeping your prices – your self worth, really – in line with what you think you deserve isn’t a bad thing. But being intractable on them is.
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#3
I’M REALLY ANTISOCIAL
but I know that if I kept myself to myself then I would be poor and out of work.
Maybe I should rephrase that. I’m not antisocial per se, I’m just shy. I have a strong group of friends who I see very regularly, and I’m fine extending that group to incorporate new people. I’m just not good at walking up to someone, introducing myself and saying that we should be friends.
I think I used to be: but then most people are when they’re 4, 5 or 6 years old. You don’t have the years of experience to make you paralysed with fear that the person you want to go up to and chat might just knock you back and think you’re weird.
Therefore I’m very talkative with people I know, but with strangers, not so much. They have to make the first move.
That’s not the way that freelancing works, though. You have to constantly be ‘on’. You need to be a smiley, happy person who’s constantly going up to people and striking up conversations.
That can be at professional networking events (though I hate them), or, thanks to the internet, it can be remotely. That way if someone does take a dislike to you, they’re just likely to ignore your email or phone call rather than actively walk away from you mid-conversation.
Some freelancers seem to have the antisocial gene but think they’ll be alright with it. Coincidentally, they’re the ones that don’t work that much. If you think that stuff is going to fall into your lap, you’re incredibly wrong.
I’m from the north east of England. We’re known for being brash and outgoing. ‘Gregarious’ is perhaps the best word I’ve seen to describe the Geordie spirit.
There’s a phrase in Geordie (which is also the name of the local dialect) which is perfect for any freelancer to follow as a creed: Shy bairns get nowt.
A little help for those of you who can’t quite translate the intricacies of Geordie into usable English (if you’re reading this in the United States, you might have even more difficulty than most Brits): ‘Bairns’ is a local world for children. ‘Nowt’ is a contraction and bastardisation of ‘nothing’.
Shy kids get nothing. Don’t ask, don’t get. It’s all the same thing, but it doesn’t have the same homespun ring to it. Therefore, shy bairns get nowt is what I prefer. Think of it as my calling card (well, think of ‘dependable, fast and efficient freelancer’ first, but shy bairns second).
You might be wondering now how shy bairs get nowt combines with what I told you at the start of this chapter. You wonder correctly.
Just because I’m shy and antisocial, it doesn’t mean that I don’t put myself out there. Just like you have to take up the sausage grinding or garbage collecting jobs, you sometimes have to do things you’re not overly comfortable with. And yes, that means that therefore you have to get over your insecurities and send out emails. Lots of them.
You have to expect to get very few replies too. But like I said: shy bairns get nowt.
Everyone else is sending out pitches and trying to make contact with commissioning editors and directors of PR companies and design agencies, so you have to too. The number of times that a magazine or PR company will come to you and say they’ve got a great piece of work they want you to do is almost minimal. No-one is psychic, least of all editors. They don’t know that you’re at home twiddling your thumbs and looking for work. You need to be brazen – shameless almost – and let them know that you’re in the business of looking for new jobs. That means you have to suck it up and get over your fear of insecurity. People will say no. So what? If you don’t ask, you’re almost certain not to get.
Here’s a case in point. Recently I was on Twitter on a lazy Sunday morning. One of the people I’m following tweeted a link about a video which claimed to show the product page for the new iPhone 5. It was a hoax (albeit a convincing one) that I’d seen debunked before. This guy thought it was real. He’d also involved someone else in the tweet – they were having a conversation about it online. And I was about to butt in. “That German site was outed as a hoax about a month ago - bad Photoshopping of what an iPhone 5 might look like” I tweeted to both of them. I got a reply from each of them, talking about the site and the iPhone. The guy who had been copied into the original tweet about the iPhone – a guy who I wasn’t originally following – followed me on Twitter.
I’m not a social demon online, but by the same token I have numerous people follow me in a week. But I’d been in a conversation of sorts with this guy, so I took a look at his profile. His tagline was “Agency type somewhere between technology and marketing.” He was the Managing Director of an agency: fertile ground for freelance writers.
I took a look at his site and adopted the shy bairns get nowt credo. There was a contact page, with a form to fill in. I put in my name, my email address and my phone number, and explained that yes, I knew it was cheeky and yes, I’d only chatted to the guy about a fake iPhone site on Twitter a few minutes earlier but that I was a copywriter and here was my online portfolio and I was wondering – if it wasn’t too forward – whether they were interested in sending some work my way (or at least keeping my details on file if they didn’t have anything right now).
Let me paint a picture for you. Doing that is the equivalent to walking up to someone on the street, saying that you really think that they should become your best friend and that we both should go to the movies right now, then follow that up with dinner and drinks and a night out at a bar. I don’t know anybody that would do that in real life. You’d be thought of as insane, and the other person would run as far as they can, as fast as they can, in the opposite direction. But it’s the internet, and shy bairns get nowt.
I got a reply back about 20 minutes later in my email inbox, with another guy – this person’s business partner – copied in under the subject ‘Copywriter’. “Hi Chris, nice to meet you. We're always on the lookout for talent. Could you send us your CV or portfolio so we can get an idea of your style? Please also send you day rate and we'll be in touch.”
I quickly sent an email back selling myself, amazed at my luck.
Then it all went quiet.
But a week and a half later, I got another reply (you didn’t really think I was going to go to all the trouble of telling this story for it to have an unhappy ending, did you?):
“Hello Chris, I hope you are well. I so apologise for the delayed response. It has been rather busy here. I have reviewed your portfolio and I will certainly keep you in mind for forthcoming work. There is one thing in particular which may work, so let’s keep in touch over the next couple of weeks.”
Actions which might be considered the realm of the serial killer in real life are, for some reason, much less threatening online. You have to be the person constantly working the contacts – and if there are none, you have to try and make some. You also have to ride your luck: I didn’t reply to that initial tweet about an iPhone 5 hoax site in the hope of parlaying it into a paying copywriting job. In reality, I did it because I was feeling smug about seeing something tech-related before someone else, and knowing something that this guy didn’t – that it was a fake. I was replying to the original tweeter more out of a sense of superiority than anything else. It’s not a great facet of my character to have, but then through a strange set of circumstances (and the willingness to be balshy and push my luck, putting myself out there) I got a paying job with a successful and rapidly-growing agency.
You can sit around doing nothing at home and be successful with your private life. You can’t do that professionally. You have to put yourself out there and be confident, presenting yourself as the answer to everyone’s dreams, whether you want to or not. The guys on the other end of the phone, or the ones reading your email to them at work, don’t know that you’re someone who sweats buckets at the mere notion of being sociable.
You have to be outgoing, because freelancing is, by definition, a remote working set-up. You’re not directly employed by a single employer: you need to court lots of different potential clients, and you need to step carefully to make sure you keep them all happy. You’re not sat in an office and you’re not forced to see these people every day. It’s not convenient. You have to make an effort to keep in touch, and to keep you and your work in clients’ minds. It’s difficult, especially if you’re not overly comfortable in presenting yourself to strangers. But you have to do it. So even if you’re as timid as a dormouse in real life, your professional freelancing face has to be bold, brash and friendly. You’ll find freelancing a lonely and poor-paying experience if you’re not.
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#4
I COULD BE BETTER AT SELLING MYSELF
My website has a footer on it which tells you how little time and effort I put into it nowadays. It’s got a copyright notice dating back to 2010, and a ‘Terms of Use’ link which doesn’t work.
That’s pretty shoddy, really.
The rest of the website is good, I think. It gets updated as and when I complete projects (that I can publicly claim credit for – a lot of my stuff is ghostwritten) and I think it looks engaging and professional. But the footer doesn’t get changed, and probably won’t as 2011 rolls into 2012.
There are various reasons for that: I hand-coded the site myself, and don’t have a smart content management system like Wordpress which would allow me to change the date at the single click of a mouse, so I’d have to change every single page to make sure the date’s right. I’m also too busy with proper writing work to get around to it.
The problem is that people make quick first impressions, and though I’m sure they’d understand the reason I haven’t been able to constantly keep on top of my site, they often wouldn’t get to the point where I’d be able to explain. To the unknowing eye, it would be easy to presume that I freelanced in 2010 and have lain dormant since. Of course, the opposite is true – I’ve too much work to be able to change the site – but they’re not to know that.
I also have a whole box of business cards which haven’t been taken out of their container yet. If I were to be the perfect freelancer, I’d constantly have a ready supply of cards at my disposal in a neat carrying case so that they don’t get dirty, bent or torn (like the three I keep in the card section of my wallet, in amongst old train tickets and receipts). If I somehow lucked upon meeting a potential client on the train, I’m not sure I’d be willing to dig into the deepest recesses of my wallet to bestow on him a tattered remnant, with a smudge where my logo should be. That’s a pretty big failure for a freelancer.
You need to keep a keen eye on your personal branding: almost anywhere is a good opportunity to sell yourself. If you’ve done something special in your life which could possibly parlay into a job, broadcast it. For the longest time I thought that Twitter was little more than a plaything from middle-aged professionals who wanted to network but didn’t have the time to tear themselves away from their children on cold winter evenings (researching and writing The Revolution Will Be Tweeted?, my book of reportage on the 2010-11 Twitter uprisings in the Middle East and Africa, changed that), and I still think that a large part of it is purely for that. So use it to your advantage – it’s proved useful for me. If you made a particularly good cake, tell people. Tweet it. Your followers might not know that you’re interested in baking, and they might just happen to have a friend who runs a baking magazine that’s looking for new contributions. At worst, what’ll happen is you’ll get a small flurry of new followers (some of whom might be tangentially connected to what you tweeted about). Those people will help you build new connections, and grow the potential audience you’re pitching to.
There are people who seem to spend their days on Twitter, searching the latest tweets for anything and everything related to their chosen subject – and each and every one of these strange freaks is a potential client of yours. You just need to optimise your tweets.
I unwittingly gained a cohort of reiki healers by putting out a tweet that I had “healing hands” for fixing a printer. The context would be clear had these people (and no, they weren’t bots) bothered to read the entire tweet but they didn’t. No problem for me – I’ve got a bunch of new audience members who would potentially get me work.
You have to treat everything as a potential lead for a job to be a successful freelancer. I’m not that good at that. I tend to be passive (that’s a posh word for lazy), but the rare times I do follow up on people taking a gamble on following me on Twitter (see confession number three above) it seems to work out well.
Learn mostly from my mistakes, then, but also from the odd success. I know that I do it too rarely for it to be a rule, rather than a possible lucky exception, but you’re not going to lose anything by sticking your neck out and promoting yourself.
You need to promote yourself coherently, though. Start off with a clear idea of what separates you from the rest: for me, it’s the fact that I’m faster and more dependable than 99% of the freelancers out there. That’s going to be your main hook. Everything else is basically just dressing to the main course.
From there, you need to figure out how you’re going to promote yourself to others, and what you’ll need to achieve that. You’ll almost certainly need a website to house your portfolio (I’d suggest using Wordpress or something similar, rather than hard-coding your site with dates that can easily become old without you realising it) and possibly business cards. Flashiness is a good trait here. You need a logo, a website design, a business card that is memorable.
Just as I’ve said in the previous three confessions, there are countless people out there who are vying for the exact same jobs as you. You need to differentiate yourself and ensure you stand out from the crowd. Any little thing you can think of to help you do so will be a boon.
Make sure you keep everything up-to-date (don’t fall into my trap!) and stay active. Even if you’re not getting paid work coming in, keep a blog. For a long time my blog only got a smattering of readers every day. But no-one else knew that. I was the only person who had the analytics in front of me. If you’re blogging every day on different engaging topics, the natural assumption is that you’re doing so for an audience. It makes you a bigger deal, and makes clients who are unsure about committing a large share of their budget to a stranger more likely to trust and pick you. Eventually, if you’re good enough, your readership will grow and your name will become more frequently used in the freelancer community. You just need to constantly be promoting yourself, even if it’s not directly going out there and pitching for work. That ties in to the confession above: you can’t be a shrinking violet in this game. Out of sight is most definitely out of mind, and out of mind is out of work. Sell yourself well; make sure your website is up to date. You want to give off the impression that you’re at the cutting edge of your game, because potential clients know that they can’t be. They’re employing freelancers – contracting out their work – because they believe that someone else can do it better than they can. Having a constantly updated website, or a blog that has recent posts, helps give off that impression. You’re engaging with a community, and with that comes the assumption that you’re abreast of everything that’s going on in that community. It really might not be the case: it might all be for show. But clients don’t know that. They assume, and that assumption can work to your advantage.
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#5
I SOMETIMES WANT TO SHOUT AT CLIENTS
It’s very rare, but it’s true. Sometimes clients annoy me.
I worked with a big recruitment agency which gave me a large chunk of my work for about a year. Like many big agencies, things fell through the cracks. For example, I was owed about six months worth of pay at one point, which was a not-insignificant amount. I’d sent plenty of emails reminding them about this huge wodge of money they hadn’t bothered to pay me, and attached the invoices that referred to each pound I was owed as a gentle way to remind them.
I was always polite, even though at this point I was concerned that I wasn’t going to get paid (for the work I’d done for them in the past and the work I was in the middle of writing for them at that point).
Then I got an email from the accounts department, querying my invoices.
They wanted them sent again.
I exploded.
Well, I exploded as much as a polite English boy can. In reality, I sent them a withering, snarky email which explained that given I was owed so much money and given I was still continuing work for them in spite of monies owed, I thought it was an insult to me personally and professionally that they wanted me to resend the invoices as if they thought that there was a problem with them. I said I didn’t like their tone, and the implication that I – I! – might be trying to swindle money out of them.
I’d had enough.
You might expect me to say that as soon as I sent the email I regretted it. But actually I didn’t: I felt pretty great about it.
I got an apologetic email back saying that wasn’t the impression they were trying to give off, and they certainly weren’t angling that I was trying to con them. They were sorry, and they paid the money right away.
Luckily, they kept contracting me for work.
But looking back, I know that really that email could’ve been career suicide. Supply outnumbers demand in the freelancing game, and once you open up a relationship, you need to make things as easy as possible for the client to keep employing you. You can’t give them an excuse to look for one of the other people who would kill to be in your job, with continuing returning work from an agency. Those sorts of relationships shouldn’t be thrown away easily. In retrospect, I gave them one big reason to wash their hands of me. I could just as easily have had them turn around and give me the reputation of being difficult, and never use me again.
Shouting at clients is really a dumbass thing to do. You have to be sociable and personable, and you have to remember the old adage: the customer is always right. That basically means don’t be snarky towards them; don’t insult them and don’t shout and holler when they don’t do things just how you want. After all, they’re the people who write your paycheque on completion of the work you do. You wouldn’t shout at your boss at work, so don’t shout at these ones.
The best decision I made was to hold my tongue (well, sort of) on a separate occasion.
I was about a month into what could be a potentially great long-term arrangement writing blog posts for an American ‘humour’ website. The work was fun, enjoyable and easy, and while the pay wasn’t quite magazine-level, it was still decent for the amount of time I could knock out good quality copy in. Plus I find that a shortfall in financial return for work can be quite happily made up by enjoyment doing that work.
It was really going great: the guy I was writing for seemed keen to keep receiving my work in a constant stream, and in return I was directing good traffic to his site. All in all, it was pretty much perfect.
Then the massive snag in the road came. I was away from home and sporadically checking my emails when I got a breathless email from the client. He included a link to a post on another site which was, word for word, the same as a post I’d just completed and was online. “I just talked to the webmaster of this site,” he began, “who is actually a friend of mine for about 10 years...Please tell me you are not reselling these posts? In the email I sent you when you started I said these are posts only for my site and should not be reproduced anywhere. Maybe someone else took them but I need to get this straightened out with you and him.”
Hulk smash.
“Of course not.” I began. “I'm quite offended by your tone, actually. If you think I'm stupid enough to throw away what is a decently paying job here for some other site, then that's a bit strange. They seem to be copying my posts, and I've never heard of that site before. I'd suggest you tell your 'friend' that he shouldn't steal your copy. Working on the rest of the due posts - but I'm disappointed by your reaction to something that isn't my fault and the accusations you're levelling against me.”
The first draft wasn’t quite so diplomatic. In fact, the first draft cussed out the guy, made imprecations against his so-called ‘friend’ and demanded that if I were to continue working for his site, I’d need a pay rise. Pronto.
But I figured that escalating the situation – even though I was totally in the right – wouldn’t have been beneficial for either of us. I thought back to the previous time I’d exploded at a client, and how lucky I’d been to dodge the paintball that splatters you with ‘awkward’ on your back. I didn’t think that the same thing could happen again. I really wanted to keep this job (yes, I thought that maybe I could leverage the situation for more money, which would make the job even better), so I thought that I should tread lightly.
The client apologised. It turns out that his friend had someone stealing posts for him. In the end, I decided not to push my luck and ask for a pay rise: he’d already hinted in earlier emails before the whole situation came to light that he wasn’t averse to giving people bonuses. But I was clear, and if I didn’t exactly shout, I did speak very clearly and loudly. “I trade on my reputation, as well as my skill,” I told him. “So for future reference, if anything like this happens, presume I know nothing about it.”
Luckily, because I reined in my initial anger at the slander against my personality, I didn’t totally blow a really good gig. We’ve patched things up, he learned to trust me and not necessarily the people who he’s known for longer that claim to be his friends, and I’m still producing copy for him. That pay rise might come soon. The bonus might arrive eventually. But at least I’m not one client down because I couldn’t hold my tongue.
A client can be the most infuriating person in the world: they can avoid your calls and emails, be late at paying you, give you poor-quality briefs and get your name wrong. But you still have to smile and do their bidding. Because they’re the ones with the power. The one thing I’ve learnt more than others is that 99.9% of the time, you have to shut up and smile.
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#6
I BADMOUTH OTHER FREELANCERS
Big confession time. I slander other people.
Not specific people (I’m not that much of a bastard), but straw man freelancers. I feel bad about it, but the simple truth is that you need to do some form of professional bitchslapping if you want to separate yourself from the pack.
I think that coming out and saying “Mr. X is a bad worker” would be a bad thing – and I’m nowhere near connected enough in any industry to be able to do so – but I think that if you have a niche then it’s okay to exploit that and compare yourself favourably to other freelancers.
For example, I write really quickly. That’s not a boast: it’s just fact. The number of clients who have said those exact words to me is large. It’s a good thing – it means that I can present myself specifically as a troubleshooter, who comes in when things are on deadline, and gets them done well. (It also means that if things are on a tight turnaround even for me, I can say quite justifiably that I’m worth something of a premium.)
Because I write really quickly, I don’t charge an hourly rate. It just doesn’t make sense for me. If I charged hourly other freelancers, who are infinitely slower than me but produce the same quality (or worse) copy could earn two or three times what I would for doing the same job, simply because they’d take longer. That doesn’t make sense to me.
So when prospective clients ask me to send them my hourly rate, I explain very politely and very tactfully that I don’t charge by the hour but by the word. I explain that it’s because I’m very fast, efficient and effective, and that other people aren’t as fast, efficient and effective.
I explain, as I just have to you, that it’s in neither my interest nor that of theirs for me to charge hourly. I proffer to them the situation where if I did, I would complete the work in half the time of any other freelancer and only get paid half the amount for doing a better job. Charging by the word, I explain, means that I can get a fair rate for what I’m doing, and it means that they’re not going to be swindled by unscrupulous freelancers who might try and balloon their paycheque by charging 8 hours for a 2 hour job. I point out that I’m not in the business of ripping people off, and that I’d rather get paid well for the work that I do in a way that works well for me. I say that I’d rather not be tempted to dawdle in order to squeeze an extra hour’s pay out of the client, because that’s not the way I want to operate. I explain that I’m often worried that other people do do that, and that it gives people like me a bad name.
I genuinely do think that people often sit around watching TV and say to their clients that they were slaving over a keyboard instead. I don’t see how they don’t do that, because it’s far too easy to lie and there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to get caught. Were you working in an office you couldn’t cheat the system, but you’re working remotely. There’s no way that a client can come and check on you without you having some sort of forewarning about it. Even if they rang you during the day, all you’d have to do is mute the television and say yes, you’re busy crafting them their perfect copy. If I were an average speed copywriter, I think I’d probably do that. I don’t think there are many people who wouldn’t. It’s just too easy a temptation: it’s the low-hanging fruit of freelancing. The perfect crime.
So I say that I’m above that, and I turn it to my advantage. Yes, there is a practical reason why I charge per word rather than per hour – and it’s not fabricated. I really wouldn’t feel comfortable lying about the amount of time I spend on any given project, and I wouldn’t want to lose out on money I think I deserve for doing work. (The other alternative, charging twice the hourly rate of others for doing work in half the time wouldn’t work: clients would just look at the headline figure and not read the rationale behind it and how it might actually save them money and would balk at it.) It also just so happens that I can use that reasonable rationale to portray myself in a good light. It reminds people that I’m quick, and that I’m good. It reminds them that I’m honest, and they’re going to get a fair day’s work out of me for their money. It also gives me a unique selling point, because when they enquire about rates they’re expecting a bog standard $x/hour and instead they get an explanation of why I’m not going to play that game.
It forces them to sit up and pay attention. It’s the perfect antidote to those eyes glazing over. They’re engaged, they’re paying attention, and they’re interested.
If it gives them the impression that some other freelancers aren’t whiter than white, so what? A lot of them aren’t. I’m not singling out any single person for criticism, nor am I telling a lie. What I’m doing is differentiating myself from my competitors, and explaining my fears about the shady practices some of my colleagues might engage in. I’m saying I’m a safer bet than some, not that anyone else isn’t worth working alongside.
It’s all part of personal branding: you have to separate yourself from the pack. My unique selling point is my speed, all while retaining a high quality. That means that I do anything I can to point out the speed with which I operate. I aim to reply to emails within minutes, rather than hours (provided it’s during office hours); I make sure to turn around projects as quickly as I can while keeping them at the same high quality that clients demand of me. If I can take another opportunity to remind prospective clients that I’m quick by differentiating my pricing policy from others, then great. It’s a necessity, otherwise I would be much worse off than other freelancers. But it also has the unexpected bonus of being a subversive marketing opportunity. Every time someone asks me for my hourly rate, I get the chance to say “well actually I don’t do hourly rates, because I’m so efficient.”
* * * * *
#7
I’VE HAD SOME BIG FAILURES
Not everything is gold and roses in Freelancerland. A lot of these advice books try to portray freelancing as simply doing the right thing; once you’ve followed their tips, you’ll find it plain sailing, will constantly be fending off new potential clients who are willing to pay top dollar for your work and everything you do will be perfect. It’s the Midas effect, and people fall for it all the time.
But this is Confessions of a Freelancer, not Delusions, so I’m going to give you a reality check. A lot of the time you’ll be doing nothing at all. You’ll be crying out for work, desperately needing the cash to pay a bill, and it just won’t come. When you do think you’ve got your big break, it’ll often fall through because the potential client will have had a busy week and forgotten about you and by the time you’ve got back in touch to chivvy them up the moment’s gone and they don’t need your services anymore. Sometimes you’ll write something that you think is great and then get a massive ego deflation when you realise that actually, no-one wants your product. Theoretically, it could happen to this. Apart from the value of my time taken to write this, I’ve also spent £8.38 on a domain name (which is about $13.25). I’ll discount the time taken to design the site that most of you will have clicked through to purchase this book alongside the cost of labour for writing it. That means I still have to sell about 25 copies to break even.
You can’t necessarily guarantee that. This might go on to be a roaring success, with tens of thousands of downloads (you can only hope). But then it might die dead in the water. It’s happened to me before.
I like writing books. They’re big, they’re weighty, and you can tell that a lot of work goes into them. I like everything from thinking of a subject to write on, to actually researching and finding out as much as you humanly can about the subject, to putting the words down and then designing the book. Even picking a font for the body copy is exciting.
I wrote my first book when I was 21. It came about by accident: I started researching for something far smaller, then realised I had a book in me. Buoyed by that I produced another book (on the revolutions going on in North Africa and the Middle East, powered by Twitter) and felt pretty good about the end result.
But I wanted to do something else. The two books I’d written were both in my name, and they were both sober, historical non-fiction. I didn’t want to get into the realms of storytelling, but I did want to tell a realistic story. I wanted to ghostwrite an autobiography.
I knew just the person too. I’d encountered a guy on Youtube who became famous for producing strange videos about his past – it seemed a chequered one – in which he alternated between strict religious scripture, blue jokes and bad singing. It was difficult to tell, watching the videos, whether the guy was a convincing actor or just actually that insane.
People liked him, though, and thousands of them subscribed to his Youtube channels. Even his most poorly-watched video would get at least a couple of hundred views, which in a sea of thousands of uploaders, is not inconsiderable. I’d already written a blog post about him, asking whether he was a Youtube phenomenon, which spiked my hits a lot. It turns out that he has an equal number of fans and haters – though the haters could be quite vociferous, and my blog post (in which he admitted he’d made some mistakes) stoked the fire of their anger.
To me, the controversy over him could’ve been a good money spinner – and besides, it would be interesting to try and delve deeper into his life and be able to claim another thing on my CV. So I got in touch with him and made him an offer.
I knew the guy was on social security, so I followed confession number two: I took the job for crummy pay. In fact, I took it for no upfront pay at all. We arranged that we’d split the profits, 50-50 between us. Because there were bound to be profits, weren’t there?
Well, that’s what I thought as I interviewed him, gathered little tidbits from his family albums and did research about the area he lived in, which I wasn’t familiar with. It’s what I thought as I sat down and began typing out 60,000 words – a weight of words which is quite hard to bear when you’re not guaranteed to see any money off the back of it, and it’s what I thought as I put the book on-sale. This was going to be good. I believed that the content was compelling, and that people would want to read it. Unlike anything else I’d written before, there was a built-in audience who already followed the minutiae of this guy’s life. They’d be bound to put down a $10 bill to get in print a book which outlined his life.
The book got finished and released on the world – stutteringly. Because the guy had learning difficulties, he didn’t manage to do much useful PR for it. But even still, I expected that the bungled announcement of its release would get through to people anyway. Hundreds of people had watched the video where he (sort of) announced it was out. They were big fans, I reasoned. They’d hunt it out and buy it in their droves. Even if they didn’t quite catch the URL of the website it was sold on, they had a clear picture of the cover of the book from which they could find out where to get it. I wouldn’t necessarily get a decent working wage for all the work at the end of it, but I’d have a small sum with which I could go out with my head held high and say “well, that wasn’t a total embarrassment and waste of time.”
The book has been out for two months now, as I write this. Five copies in total have been printed (neither of us wanted to stump up the relatively large up-front fees for getting a small print run done, so we elected to go down the print-on-demand route – and boy, am I glad we did). Two of those are a personal copy for me and a personal copy for him. We’ve sold three books. The creator revenue to split between the two of us from those three sales? $14.41.
Split 50-50, that $14 and pennies becomes $7.20 (I guess I’ll be magnanimous and let him have the spare penny) each. Now, for doing little else than talking to some guy who wanted to write your story and came to you unsolicited, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’ve just got a free $7.20. It might get you a decent Burger King meal. But for me? That $7.20 really needs to be divided by 60,000 words. Freelancers are notoriously bad at maths, so I’ll assume that you’re still working it out as you read this sentence. I’ll put you out of your misery (and put your deep into mine). For all that work, all that time and effort, I got paid 0.012 cents per word. Convert that to my local currency, and it’s something like 0.008 pence/word. A chocolate bar at the local corner shop costs 70 pence. I would have to write 8,750 words (a decently-sized chapter, or, if you’d prefer, one and a half times this ebook) to be able to afford a sweet treat.
I don’t particularly enjoy telling you that I was involved in one of the worst commercial decisions I think anyone could make, or that I put in a lot of time and effort for 10 cents a day’s pay. But I think it’s important as an antidote to the relentlessly positive spin other books put on the freelancing world. No-one is perfect, and no-one has a problem free freelancing career. Someday you’re going to have your own nightmarish moment where you put in a lot of work and get little or nothing out of it. It might be that you make a foolish business decision like I did and do a lot of work on a performance basis which ends up not performing at all. You might deliver 10,000 words of copy without a retainer or deposit to a client you thought you could trust who simply turns around and runs with your hard work. The important thing is to be able to move on and learn from your mistake, in order that you make the right decisions next time.
* * * * *
#8
I HAVE HAREBRAINED IDEAS, AND PUT TOO MANY EGGS IN ONE BASKET
The number of projects I’ve started and never finished is astounding.
The number of projects I’ve started and never really got going, never mind finished, is even longer. That book I talked about above which totally flopped? That was a rare project that actually got completed. This ebook? It started by me just writing, and eventually thinking that it might be a good idea to get my name across a wider base in the freelancing world. I tend to do this.
But the more pies you have fingers in the better chance you have of some of them coming off and working. They don’t necessarily have to be anything you share with other people – they don’t have to be client-facing tasks – but on the off-chance that you actually make a success of it, it allows you to point to the finished product when you’re trying to line up further clients and say “There, look. I deliver.”
It all ties into the very first confession in this book: by doing some things that you might not ordinarily do – by trying the extraordinary – you might just find a good niche. Likewise, by taking on as many harebrained ideas as you can possibly think of, the very worst thing that’s going to happen is that you gain a little bit of experience in all of them and leave a smarter person than you started. At best, you’re going to become an expert at something entirely new to you, and have yet another string to your bow.
Harebrained ideas that I’ve conjured up in my brain (or other people’s mad notions that they’ve got me involved in) are responsible for pretty much everything that I’ve done in freelancing. They’re the foundations of my skills.
I wouldn’t even have got into the business (or at least not as early as I did) were it not for a friend of mine who’s exactly a year younger than I am approaching me when I was just 19 and asking if I’d like to be co-director of a little PR company he was forming. That PR company ended up taking on a variety of clients, and got me a lot of work to put into a portfolio. (Interestingly, it worked out pretty well for the friend who created the company, too: he’s now a journalist at a large daily paper in the United Kingdom.) From there, we were approached by another former school friend who wanted to create a small chamber music festival in the region which would return every year. We tentatively said yes, then ended up putting on concerts that played to more than 2,000 people that first year. We secured sponsorship from local businesses, and held a black-tie gala reception to open the festival. We brought together some of the best young professional musicians from around the world to play in our concert halls. We returned again the following year and added a locally based competition for school-aged children. I left (having to complete the final year of your degree will do that for you – and it’s hard to think now that I was doing all this aged 20). All of this shouldn’t have been possible. They weren’t world-changing events, not by a long shot. But they were certainly unfathomable to most sane people.
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(Pages 1-25 show above.)