Making a living as a freelancer

I would add that I think more and more publications are turning to freelancers specifically because of their tightening budgets. Freelancers are a lot cheaper than full-time people. Sadly, our newspaper keeps turning to "correspondents" for more stuff, especially features. They pay lousy and, of course, there are no expenses or benefits involved. Some of the correspondents are pros, like my wife who has worked in the business, but others are just hobbyists who think they have a flare for writing (some do, some don't).

 

that's the best way to really go about it. luckilly my freelancing is year around with baseball, hockey and basketball.

 

FJ:

Man, this thread is right in my wheelhouse. Thanks for starting it. It's rare that I can contribute anything to the site other than lame one-liners and an almost unhealthy love of hockey. And Sarah Chalke. Always Sarah Chalke.

Anyway, it is a good time to be a freelancer. Newspapers are cutting back on travel, so there are opportunities to get work. It's just a matter of advertising yourself.

In my case, I tell potential clients that I am available to work all over the Northeast. I think that makes me somewhat more attractive for them to hire me or keep me in mind for future work.

There are many questions that you have to ask yourself. Can you get on Dr. J's benefits--which, I am pretty sure that you can. You'll have hot streaks and cold streaks with work; can you handle that?

If you need more advice, feel free to PM me.

And good luck!

 

How do you manage traveling gigs? A lot of freelance work comes because clients don't want to pay for travel for their employees. Why would they pay for your travel?

 

HM,

There are five major cities close to where I live, so it's easy for me to travel to Boston, NY, Philly, Baltimore and DC.

 

Well, that explains it, I guess. I rarely get more than $100 for any newspaper story. So I don't often travel more than 50 miles. But I'd like to get into some overseas work, such as covering the Olympic Games in China.

I haven't done much magazine work. I'd like to grab some of that money, but it seems like such an ordeal to land a gig. Plus, while it would be nice to land a big feature story for a magazine, most editors are cautious about handing out big assignments to new people.

Of course, there are a lot of questionable publications out there today, too. It took me months to get a check the last time I wrote a magazine piece. For another, they said yes to my query, then, after I had filed the story and accompanying photos, they requested that I re-shoot photos. Then they stopped responding to my e-mails, including a request that they pay a kill fee since they weren't going to run the article. I wrote it off as a loss on my taxes, and I will never to deal with the lower end of the magazine industry.

 

Mrs. Editude has done a lot of freelance and contract work over the years. She gets more work than she knows what to do with sometimes; publications keep going back to people who produce. That holds true in writing and editing. Gigs are on Craigslist as well as the dozens of journalism-related job sites, colleges and even specialty magazines and Web sites.

 

My question is how much paying freelance work is available for writing on websites?

 

Not much, I covered a game for an on-line site for $75 once. Lucky for me, that's almost three times what the local rag pays.

The really sad thing about the book is that I have a backer for it. I only get one day off every two weeks (between two jobs), so it's really difficult to find time to do anything, let alone start a huge project.

Just wait a couple of years, someone will be posting the same thing about you.

 

Can you budget an hour or two into each day for writing?

I know you're already wicked busy, so that may not be a legit option.

But I heard Lupica interviewed once, and he told me he treated it like a job: 1,000 words each day, until it got done.

Of course, maybe those 1,000 words (25-30 inches, by my count) don't go anywhere but the circular file. So it may take a while to get it done.

I don't have anywhere near this much discipline, otherwise I'd be doing it myself.

 

I think there's probably a lot more than you might imagine. There's MaxPreps, YahooSports and their Rivalries.com and Scout.com, just to name a few major ones.

Plus, there are national sites for just about every sport. Here in Florida, there's a site for running, a site for track and field, a site or two for football, a site for soccer, a site for volleyball, a site for surfing. Heck, there's actually a site just for football in Central Florida. I know there's also a site for soccer.

And don't forget that Deadspin surely is profitable, as are several other sites whose editors and writers hang out in these parts. And most of the big national guys hire people just for the Web. Plus, there are live-bloggers for lots of sports, and these are people who are blogging for the big national sports media sites and the sports organizations themselves.

There's more money online than one might think. And the thing is that a lot of these sites have been started by someone with no actual writing experience. So they welcome the involvement of someone with a professional take. If you're not hitting the web, you're losing out on a great new revenue source. The fact is that the fewer people working there makes it much easier for people who do work there to find jobs. After all, the competition is still relatively thin.

What's bothersome for me, though, is that a lot of the big columnists and top dogs in sports journalism hog all the jobs, especially on the web. It's one thing to jump to Yahoo Sports or to ESPN.com. But some of these guys also hold down newspaper jobs. And then they're doing magazine stuff on the side and columns for Web sites, etc., etc.

There are guys out there who can't even find one full-time job, and these guys have two of them. I'm all for free market forces. But shit! Share the wealth! How many people have been pushed out the door in the last two years?

 

Wicked: Stephen King used the "1,000 words a day" goal. King's book on writing (I'm not sure of the title - it might have been "On Writing") was the best I have ever read - it gave some unique advice and didn't just rehash stuff which is typical writing advice.

Even if you write what turns out to be one page of a book each day, if you take off one day a week in one year you will have a 300-page book.