How to be a Freelance Writer Part Four: Tracking What You’ve Done and Imagining the Future

This is Part Four of a five-part guide on freelance writing. Check out the Introduction and find links to other parts here.

Tracking your income

Now that you’re in business and earning money, you’re going to want to keep track of how much you’re earning. The main reason to do this is so that you can keep track of your tax obligations, but it can also be a really useful way to see how you’re progressing and figure out your future goals (see the Setting Goals section below for more on that). Excel or similar spreadsheet software is pretty much perfect for this purpose. I like to track both monthly and yearly earnings, and also look at pretty graphs of my performance over time. You might like to track other aspects of your earnings.

If you get busy or are planning to be a busy freelancer, you’ll want to track at least some of the following:

· Each piece you’ve been commissioned

· Each piece you’ve filed

· When you’ve submitted your invoice

· When you’ve gotten paid

Here are some spreadsheet templates which could be a good start. Over time, you tend to have a better idea of what you want to track and you can adjust accordingly.

Building a portfolio

Aside from tracking how much you’re earning, it’s also a good idea to make a centralised collection of your published articles. A lot of freelance writers have their own website where they list links to articles they’ve published, or have posts of the full text of articles they’ve published (Wordpress or Squarespace are both good hosts for this purpose, and these and other opinions are discussed in this blog post). Different writers have different opinions on the necessity of a web presence. My experience is that it’s useful, and I’ve had enough opportunities emerge for me because of my website that I’d recommend the effort (although sometimes dealing with the public, which I’ll get to in part five, can be a little tough).

Aside from listing your published pieces, an online portfolio will include a bio of you, a picture, and your contact details (including social media accounts) at a minimum. On top of that, it’s really up to you what else you’d like to include. A lot of writers keep blogs, which may work for you.

Regardless of whether or not an online portfolio is for you, it’s a good idea to keep copies of what you publish on file. A sad truth about online publications is that they often fold. Eventually, the owner stops paying the web hosting fees and your old clips will no longer be easily available online. To protect yourself, you can make pdf versions of your online pieces — all you need to do is go to the url of your piece, select “print” and then set the printer to “print to pdf” (if you don’t have that option on your computer, you can install cutePDF for free) and save it to your hard drive. That will capture your piece for your own records and you will no longer be at risk of losing your writing history to the vicissitudes of the twenty-first century media environment! If only we could protect our incomes so easily.

Setting goals

Plenty of advice already exists on goal-setting, so if you need additional guidance, you can seek it out through a basic Google search. My advice here will be brief and specific to freelance writing. As a freelancer, your writing goals will likely fit into these categories:

· Income goals: how much do you want (or need) to earn in a year, a month, or a week?

· Publication goals: What publications do you aspire to be in one day?

· Goals for pieces: What do you really want to write about? What kinds of pieces do you aspire to write?

Income goals are tricky to advise on because what they are will depend on how much you rely on freelancing as a source of income, and your individual aspirations. It may also depend on what kind of rates you’re getting paid at this stage of your career and how much time you can dedicate to writing.

Once you’ve figured out how much you need to earn from freelancing (to pay for food and shelter) and how much you’d like to earn from freelancing (to pay for shiny things and your retirement fund), you may like to start thinking about what your life will need to look like in order to meet those two (possibly very different) goals. It’s obviously the case that in order to earn more money, you will either have to write more, be paid more for each piece you write, or both.

To write more often, you’ll need to pitch more often, and you’ll likely need to expand the pool of publications you write for regularly. You may need to work on productivity techniques such as the Pomodoro method.

To be paid more per piece you’ll either have to negotiate the rates you currently get paid or look into pitching higher paying publications.

All this is commonsense, but I point it out because it isn’t enough to say, (for example) “I want to earn $1000 a week”. You have to plan how that’s going to happen, and to do that, you need a strategy.

How much do you get paid, on average, per piece? Let’s say it’s $250. To earn $1000 a week, you’ll need to be filing and invoicing for four articles each week. Is this realistic? If yes, good, you have a good goal and a strategy. For some of us, actually writing four articles a week is a piece of cake, but actually getting that many pitches accepted may be tricky. Other writers work a bit slower or juggle a billionty things in their life, and there’s no way four articles a week is manageable. People in these groups will have to either reassess their income goal, reassess their schedule, or will have to find a way to earn more money per piece.

To complicate things a little, what you earn per piece isn’t the be all and end all. Obviously not all pieces are equal in terms of time commitment. Something that’s 700 words and involves only light reporting clearly is going to be written quicker than a long-from, in-depth investigative piece. Some publications pay what seem to be pretty measly rates, but then when you look at the work involved and when you consider the fact that you don’t have to go through many rounds of edits, your actual hourly rate ends up being rather good. Likewise, sometimes you’re offered a really large sum for a piece but it’s a long slog that never ends. So, another option is maybe figuring out how you can make those $250 pieces quicker to write, if possible.

You may find that in order to meet your goals, you also need to invest more in your skills. Taking writing workshops that are targeted to your interests and to the areas you want to develop can be a strategic mode of writing more and earning more. Obviously though, the upfront investment costs can be prohibitive. It can also be a good (and less expensive) option to connect with writers and editors through their blogs and through social media and even meeting up with them. Networking can be an effective strategy for building a client base as well as connecting with people who love writing as much as you.

Publication goals are a little less complex. It’s a great idea to have a list of publications that you’d love to write for. When you’re coming up with pitch ideas, you can look at the list and see what’s going to work for different publications, or maybe you can use the publication list to help you generate ideas (for instance, one of your publications might have a regular health section, and you could think about a health story you’d like to pitch as a suitable feature). Have a mix of publications that are in reach, publications that are a stretch, and publications that are ‘in your dreams’. To meet your goals, keep pitching to all of them, at least every so often. Sometimes our success is nonlinear — writers can and do get commissions from publications they never expected would ever publish them (or even respond to their emails) because their idea was good and it was perfect for that publication.

I approach goals for specific pieces I want to write similarly to the way I approach my publication goals. I have regular pieces in mind that I could write up within a couple of days if I was commissioned (these could be pitched now or as soon as I have the time to do so), I have topics I want to tackle but I’m not sure what approach or angle to take and I’m waiting for the ideas to stew before pitching, and I have ideas for longform pieces I’d love to do that I occasionally pitch to publications I think would like them. These goals are really important to think about and to set because they set the tone for who you want to be as a writer over the coming years and what kind of work you want to end up doing. However, often what we want to write isn’t as important as paying rent. Ergo, don’t feel bad if you don’t feel like you’re fulfilling your calling as a writer quite yet. Besides, writing about less lofty stuff can be incredibly fun too.

Managing ideas

In freelance life, you’re going to experience peaks and troughs in your inspiration level. Sometimes you’re bursting with ideas, sometimes you have absolutely nothing. The only way to manage it is to write down any idea you have. Even if it’s ridiculous. Have a place where you build a nice store of ideas which you can revisit when you need (using an app like Trello or Evernote is perfect).

You do not want to censor your ideas. While there’s definitely a skill in sorting out bad ideas from good ones, sometimes bad ideas can spawn good ideas. It’s not helpful to tell yourself off for thinking up something insipid. Judging an idea before it’s had any oxygen will only just discourage you from coming up with ideas. Be gentle. And know that nobody ever has to see what you write down!

Sometimes you have to actively look for ideas. I wrote about some ways of doing this in part one, but another thing I’ll add here is that if you wait around for inspiration, you could end up waiting a really long time. Writing is great when everything is flowing and easy, but I think what separates hobbyists from professionals in creative fields is that the professionals work even when things aren’t flowy and easy. Sometimes you have to force it. As Chuck Close says, “inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” Morning pages (where you just write whatever comes to mind until you’ve filled up three pages) can be an effective way to get the hang of a regular writing practice, regardless of whether or not you’re inspired and have zillions of ideas. It requires a lot of discipline at first, but eventually it does get easier. Really.