I have been freelance for a year and this is what I’ve learned

Save 25 per cent of everything you earn, and put it in Premium Bonds. Even if you only win £25, once, it’s much more than you would have made through interest. (And you can withdraw from your account pretty easily if you’re desperate.) By telling you this, I am minimising my chances of winning by 0.0000000001 per cent or something, so you know my advice is both sincere and legit.

Keep a spreadsheet open on your desktop at all times, in which you log work (columns: assignment, publication, fee, invoiced? paid? payment method? deposited tax into Premium Bonds y/n?) and expenses (item, assignment/purpose—e.g. office equipment, “research”—date, cost). Do your receipts once a week so you don’t have to try and remember how you were going to justify that midnight KitKat. Put them in a folder, in individual plastic sleeves, one for each month. It’s anal, sure, but it makes filing a tax return significantly less painful. (Or so I imagine. Another lesson: use an accountant. I paid mine £200 and he saved me £800. Don’t use a London accountant. Find a nice rural one. They’re cheaper. And they’ll tell you if you’re take the piss by putting too many midnight KitKats down as “gig sustenance.”)

Read up on everything you can expense. As a freelance culture journalist, that means: any money you spend on music (records, gig tickets, trains/cabs to the gig), film, theatre, talks, books, magazines, newspapers. If you’re working from home, figure out what percentage you can claim of your wifi, heating, electricity, rent, mobile phone bill, car if you have one. All that Skype credit you use for phoners. If you get paid by a foreign company and your bank/Paypal charges you for the transfer, put it on the spreadsheet, now.

If, like this dehydrated husk of a woman, you work from home and“forget” to drink water, stock up on your local supermarket’s value 2L bottles of sparkling water. They cost 18p each, contain all the H2WHOA you’re meant to drink in a day, and you can have fun burping dramatically in the comfort of your own bedroom/office/whatever.

(Related: get friendly with the smell of your own farts.)

For panels, radio talking heads bits etc, ALWAYS ASK IF THERE IS A FEE. And if someone asks you what you’d like to be paid, flip the question back at them. Someone asked me that recently: I would have said about £50, when it turned out their budget was £200 + travel expenses.

Share information with fellow freelancers. They need you now; you will need them later.

If you are not a white man, and you get asked to do a radio/TV/panel-type thing and you can’t/don’t want to*, recommend several other non-white non-men in your stead. (*and if you don’t want to because FEAR, that is 100% valid, but you should totally give whatever it is a shot, because you can so do it. And people will be nice. And if they’re not, those nice freelancers you helped above will help you kick their ass on the internet afterwards.)

When I had a staff job, I assiduously avoided networking. It felt so schmoozy and fake and I wanted nothing to do with it. (Also, social awkwardness.) When I went freelance, I realised that I had been very shortsighted. As morally objectionable or whatever as it may be, industries run on favours, and who you know, and things will be easier if wheels are a little greased. Going for lunch with a PR is not an attack on your unstained integrity. ALSO LOTS OF THEM ARE REALLY NICE, YOU STUBBORN MULE. (Me.) I love what my colleague Brandon Stosuy said about networking, inspired by the writer Samuel Delaney:

…he talks about the difference between contact and networking. He thinks networking is this kind of poisonous thing where you go to a conference and give someone your business card. And contact is more — when you share interests, or you’re working on projects and you meet someone new and develop these meaningful relationships.

For me, I enjoy that, being surrounded by people who you’re actually making these lasting connections versus like — people who are just trying to rise up and promote themselves in this false, really empty way. When you meet people, you can tell when their interests are pure, and it’s easier to be friends with those sorts of people versus people who are clearly just trying to get something out of you.

Read.

Keep your friends close. Inevitably, when you first go freelance, you will take on too much work because you’re freaking out about not having a regular wage, and you will cancel hangs with friends to get things done. (Also true of generally being freelance.) Eventually, they will tire of you cancelling, and just stop inviting you out. You will then spiral further into a hole of anxiety/despair/rejection, and decide that YOU DIDN’T NEED THEM ANYWAY. Which is clearly nonsense. Sometimes being freelance means working like a dog. But let your dudes know if you’re struggling, and ask them to check in if you’ve gone to ground for a week. Not to put all the burden of responsibility on them, but if you, reader, are a friend to a newborn freelance ghost, ask them if they’re okay.

Tho, the moral of that story is, don’t take on too much work. It kind of ruins your life.

There are perfectly good pitching guides all over the internet, so I’m not going to bother with those. But, and as apocryphal as this may sound, I recently found out that approximately 87 per cent of my emails to one editor went straight to his junk mail because of his company’s over-zealous filters. This is someone I’ve worked with a lot, and after several emails with no reply, I started getting paranoid about what I’d done wrong. One very tentative Facebook message later, he delved into his spam, and found them all. Commissions happened, the world did not end.

When work isn’t coming, or you find yourself in the Twitter—Facebook—Tumblr spiral of death, have a break routine at the ready. I stole this habit from the great cartoonist, Tillie Walden. Mine (in theory, rarely used) is doing a Yoga With Adriene video, or reading a chapter of whatever book I have on the go. (I maybe manage this once every six weeks, because I have no self-control. I don’t even have the self-control to turn on the Self-Control app that glowers at me from my computer’s dock.)

Similarly, for about six weeks at the end of last year, my mind just gave up. I would sit at my computer every day as if that was going to make work happen, when really I just swirled in the aforementioned social media death spiral. After panicking about where my GOD-GIVEN TALENTS (lol) had gone, I realised a few weeks in that I should just let my brain be, and give it some space to put itself back together. Once I got back to work after the New Year, things were a little easier, and I realised that I had burned out like the gearbox on a 17-year-old boy’s car. Also, and of course I’m only speaking from my limited personal experience, but the times I’ve had to tell editors that I couldn’t work because my mind was broken—through grief, or some less specific crushing feeling—they understood. Deadlines were extended, or reviews reassigned. They were extended again when it turned out that grief doesn’t stick to a tidy “I just need a week”-window.

Free your ass and your mind will follow, i.e. do some exercise every day, if you can. I am not going to pretend I do this, but I feel slightly less shit when I do. If you are too busy, remember that Obama exercises half an hour every day. I remember that every day as I tell myself I am too busy to put my trainers on and go outside.

IN CONCLUSION: Going freelance is the best thing I ever did. I hope it is for you, if you try it.