How to be a Freelance Writer Part One: Starting Out

This is Part One of a five-part guide on freelance writing. Check out the Introduction here.

Setting up as a Sole Trader

A freelance writer is a sole trader. That means that you’re running a small business in which you are the only staff member. Usually you’ll have to register as a sole trader with your government’s tax department or equivalent. I’ve done it in both Australia and the UK and the process is quite different between them (though both are straightforward) so I’m going to refrain from giving more specific advice on registering — the information should be on an official government website anyway.

You can still be in full or part-time employment — or a student — while you are freelancing, but when you write for publications, you’re not an employee, you’re providing work to a publication under a contract. While you’ll be paid for your work (at least, ideally — but more on that later), you will have to look after your own tax. Everything you earn from freelancing is added to your taxable income, so make sure you have a plan for putting aside enough money to meet your tax obligations. You need to keep an eye on how much you’re earning. Ideally, it would be great to have a savings account that you don’t touch until tax time that you think would comfortably cover everything. For a lot of people just starting out, you might not need to put money aside for tax payments (if your total income is under a certain amount — again, check with your jurisdiction — you won’t need to pay tax). Keep an eye on it anyway. Be a little optimistic about your potential earnings.

If you’re looking to be a full-time freelancer, there’s even more to save for. Freelancers don’t get paid vacations or sick leave. You’ll want to think about putting money aside for holidays and in case you become ill, for retirement, and for health insurance (if you live in an odd country *cough*US*cough* that pairs employment with health care coverage). I’m not really here to give life advice, but most people I know who freelance full-time say that having a few existing well-paying clients, and considerable savings or a reliable partner who brings in a regular income is a good idea. Setting up as a sole trader brings with it a cool, excited feeling of tearing off the shackles of 9-to-5 drudgery, but it’s a mistake to quit your day job before you’re confident you can handle the financial pressures of freelancing.

Freelancers may be able to claim business-related expenses as tax deductions. I can’t give specific advice because I’m not an accountant and what counts as deductable can vary from jurisdictions. Still, I want to flag this fortuitous financial reality. If you buy a desk and stationery for your home office, those may be tax deductable. Same goes for writing-related conference fees. If you intend to be working from home, you may be able to deduct a portion of your rent as well as your electricity/internet/water bills. If you use your phone for writing-related calls, you could also deduct a portion of your phone bills. If you buy a new laptop — you guessed it. In general, if you use your laptop half for work and half for leisure, 50% of its cost is deductable. Again though, you’ll need to look at your local tax laws.

If that all sounds unexciting to you, you may be able to hold off on registering as a sole trader if you really want (again though, actually check this for your jurisdiction). If you’re only doing small amounts of work, your writing business could count as a “hobby”, in which case you may be able to avoid business-related paperwork. But if you’re not intending to be a hobbyist, I think you should register as a business as soon as you intend to get started. It’s free and may save a headache down the line. Plus, there’s a psychological benefit to that as well — when you’re registered as a business, you’re probably more likely to treat your work as a business.

Getting clips

I’m going to assume that if you want to be a freelance writer you already know you enjoy writing and you’re already pretty good at it. People who like to write have a tendency to write compulsively. You may already write for publication. You may have a blog, or maybe you’ve written for a student newspaper or a local press. In that case, good! You’ve already got some clips.

Clips are just examples of your previous work. When you start looking for freelance work, it’s ideal to have 2–3 clips you’re really proud of that you can show editors to make them desperately want to work with you. If you’ve already written publishable stuff (even if it’s only published on your blog and has like, two hits), you’ve already ticked this box. You can go to the next section.

If you don’t have clips, or if you don’t really have clips you want to show editors, you need to make them! Here are some ideas as to how:

A lot of people advise writers starting out to create a blog on a topic they care about. This isn’t necessarily bad advice — it gets you writing regularly, it will help you explore topics of interest (the next part of this resource is titled “what to write about” in case you’re feeling stuck on this), and it can help you connect with writers on similar topics. However, blogging is not for the faint-hearted. Some people seem to see blogs as frivolous hobbies, and I suppose they can be, but blogging can also be a serious, money-making business as well as a way to gain a ‘following’ and to ‘get discovered’. For a blog to really work for your writing career, it requires a great deal of dedication and a regular posting schedule. For a lot of people this will be hard to do. Happily, it’s not your only option.

If you want your own place to post your work and get others to see it, but you don’t want to deliver regular content on a single theme, I’d suggest creating a Medium account. Plus, Medium is pretty-looking, user friendly, etc. If you have a Medium account, you can just post your pieces as you write them without too much pressure. Unlike a blog, you can write about a range of unrelated topics rather than sticking to a theme. You can also reach audiences that are interested in what you have to say.

You can also become part of a publication that features the voices of brand new writers. For example, I wrote for my student newspaper back in the day, as well as for lip magazine. You could also volunteer to help out with a blog for a cause you care about, or with a literary journal. This is not a bad way to do it even though this work is invariably unpaid. If you’re not sure what to write about, you might be assigned ideas, and if you want to write reviews then often these publications will be able to offer you free books, CDs (do music reviewers still get CDs?), movie tickets, and so on. I was able to go to a political press conference because of my involvement with my student newspaper, which I found really cool. More importantly, you’ll get editorial feedback to make your clips even better and less typo-ridden than they would be if you published them yourself. If you stick with the organisation for a little while, you may also get some responsibility like becoming a subeditor — then you get to experience what it’s like to provide editorial support to others. I’d highly recommend looking into this if you have the time, and once you get your clips you may well decide to keep going with it anyway because it can be fun.

You can also bypass the whole clips thing by just submitting complete pieces to publications. I’ll talk about this a later in the guide, but if this is your chosen avenue, my advice would be to start out by submitting to columns that specifically ask for submissions from the general public. The New York Times’s “Modern Love” (aim big, friends) is a good example. Alternatively, many newspapers accept op-ed submissions (on that, here’s some good advice from Andrew Leigh — geared towards Australians but relevant for everyone — and Dalton Conley — geared towards academics but also relevant — for op-ed submissions). This is a somewhat risky strategy in the sense that you’re writing something and there’s no guarantee that it’ll be published, however, I think it’s worth it. If you’re starting out, you could probably use the practice of writing entire, publishable pieces. If it gets rejected, you can just slap it up on your Medium account, no problem. The potential reward is pretty amazing too — you get published in a mainstream publication, which is an awesome clip to have at this stage.

Along a similar vein, you can also enter a competition. This sounds risky too, but my first mainstream publication was as a result of a competition I entered. When I was in high school, a state newspaper was running an opinion writing competition, which I won. My prize was an iPod shuffle and a clip in a major newspaper. It actually helped me when I was 22 and pitching the same newspaper— I mentioned that they’d already published me before, which made it easier to publish there a second time. I actually now regularly write opinion for that same publication, so that was a super-effective path.

What’s interesting about competitions is that they sometimes aren’t all that competitive. If your entry is suitable (i.e. if you’ve read the publication, the conditions of entry, and written your submission accordingly), your chances of winning often aren’t too bad. For people interested in getting literary work published, it’s possible that you actually have better odds of doing well in a writing competition than having success with a regular submission! Rachel Thompson writes for the Room (a Canadian lit mag) blog that contest submissions are often smaller in volume than regular submissions and that it’s an unspoken rule that established writers shouldn’t enter contests so you’re up against emerging writers like yourself.

Clips are your currency in writing. Where they were published does matter, but what matters more is that you have them and that they’re pretty good. They show editors that they can trust you to write for them.

What to write about

Picking what you want to write about is an obvious process for some people, and a tricky one for others. I’ve always been part of the latter group.

Some people advise that freelancers should pick a niche — one or two topics that they know a heap about so they can establish their expertise on it. When I say niche, I don’t mean a broad topic like “science”, I mean something even more specific like “marine life” or “stethoscope manufacturing”. Often, the main market for super-niche topics is trade publications (trade publications are directed to a specialised, professional audience rather than the kind of thing you’d find on a newsstand — definitely worth looking into if you have such a niche interest, plus they tend to pay commensurately with your unique expertise). However, if your niche topic happens to become newsworthy or otherwise relevant to a general audience, editors of general publications will wet themselves when they read your pitch (more on pitching in part two). This strategy works really well for some people. I would particularly recommend it for people with very focused interests, especially if they have a relevant qualification and contacts in the area.

The next level of specialisation is broader categories or verticals — people who are science/tech writers, health writers, money/finance writers, crime reporters, sex/love/relationships writers, human interest writers, personal essayists, opinion writers, review/critical writers, and so on. If there’s a specific category that appeals to you, it’s a good idea to think about story ideas that fit that frame.

The opposite of a niche writer is a generalist writer. A true generalist would feel comfortable writing about anything. On the plus side, this means you could generate ideas on any issue that’s relevant to a publication you want to write for. On the down side, changing between topics a lot can make it harder to establish your expertise.

I’m a generalist writer. I write a lot of feature articles about health and technology, I’ve previously had a book review column, I’ve written many personal essays, I write a monthly column about social enterprise, and I write a lot of op-eds.

However, even though I write about disparate things, I have common threads throughout most of my pieces: I am interested in the intersection of technology and society, in clever ways to solve social problems, and in how people deal with imperfect information. Most of my writing engages with one or more of these themes. What’s interesting about developing thematic interests as a generalist writer is that you can argue, over time, that you have expertise in these areas. Sure, your expertise is not easily categorizable in a way that an interest in ‘health’ might be, but you’re a professional communicator! You can learn how to make people see the connections between what you’ve done so far and what you intend to do next.

Consider what you know, what you want to know, what you’re passionate about, what you like to read about, and what you’re able to uniquely offer the world. These are excellent starting points for figuring out what to write about.

As for generating specific ideas, reading a lot can be really helpful. Often others’ work can spark ideas in you. You don’t write in a vacuum — you’re going to be influenced by world events, your culture, your peers, as well as what you read. Sometimes it’s easier to see the work of a writer as participating in a conversation rather than a quest to fill a completely blank page.

Another strategy I use sometimes is going to Google News and find an article that piques my interest, and somehow I usually get an idea from that process. Articles which tend to be most engaging are responding to the world in real-time, so even if you don’t have any interest in reporting on the news, being able to take notice of what’s happening in the world and offer some fresh perspective on it can be a good ideas-generating strategy.

Here are some other questions you could ask yourself to generate ideas:

· What stories could only I tell?

· What is a common opinion that I think is bullshit?

· What’s the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me?

· Are there any recent news stories, anniversaries, awareness days, etc. that grab my interest?

· What bit of information/news story/event has surprised me recently?

Your answers may have nuggets of awesome ideas.

Not enough? Google “what to write about” — there’s heaps of stuff to help you.

Now I’m going to assume you have an idea for a topic you want to write about. That’s great, but writers don’t write about topics per se, we write stories. Say you want to write about pigeons (just for the example, I expect you don’t). You really don’t want to just write some pigeon facts like a weird Wikipedia article. You want to write about something about pigeons. Here are some pigeon-related stories:

· Op-ed: People shouldn’t be so mean to pigeons (calling them ‘rats of the sky’ or ‘symbols of the alt-right’) because they’re actually really smart, sensitive creatures.

· Human interest feature: Meet this person who illegally keeps 400 pigeons in their backyard because they’re worried about how those pigeons will fare in the upcoming superstorm.

· Review: This pigeon ate my sandwich, zero stars.

· Science feature: It’s been discovered that the dodo was related to the pigeon (actually true), so now I’m going to explain the paradox of the fact that these two very dissimilar birds are practically cousins.

Even if it’s just for the purpose of doing an exercise, it can be really helpful to come up with a range of stories about a topic. Sometimes I do this and choose the best one, sometimes I do this and realise that I actually have multiple stories I could follow.

When choosing your story, have a think about the following things:

· Is it unique? (have I seen a similar article? And if so, can I offer something the existing one doesn’t?)

· Is it interesting? (bonus points if it’s surprising too)

· Am I well-placed to write this? (do you have the skills and expertise and/or could you get them?)

· Is it possible to actually tell this story? (sometimes we embark on projects that are too ambitious and set ourselves up for failure. Consider if you may have done this).

Once you’ve chosen what to write about, you just write about it! And then you keep repeating the process and keep writing more and more! It’s a really good idea to carry a notebook or phone around with you constantly so that you can note down new ideas as they come to you. And as I alluded to before, read lots. It doesn’t just make you better at writing, it also helps with generating ideas by getting you to consider different places and perspectives.

Quick caveat before we move on: If you’re just beginning, I’d recommend doing pieces where you don’t have to do too much reporting work — personal essays, op-eds, and reviews are perfect because you have most of the knowledge you need already and you don’t have to complicate things by conducting interviews. However, if you’re up to interviewing people, that’s great too!

Who to write for

In an ideal world, you should aim to write for publications you most like to read. This may be unrealistic if you’re just starting out and your favourite publication is the New Yorker or something, but keep this ideal in mind. You want to write for publications that:

· You know pretty well (you know what kind of stories they do, what topics they cover, what their section headings are). You might not have read everything they’ve ever published, but you’re more or less across it.

· You like.

· Accept freelance submissions/pitches (it’ll involve a little research on your part to see if all their writers are in-house staff or if they’re open to freelancers).

· Will renumerate you on time and in accordance with your expectations.

· Will edit your writing and provide feedback so that you develop your skills in accordance with your expectations.

Build a list of publications that are appropriate for you. Be bold. Don’t be afraid to approach those publications that seem like a stretch (or seem impossible). You may well be rejected by them, but if you know the publication well, chances are you’ll be able to generate ideas they want.

Of course, very few people are accepted by their publication of choice when they’re just starting out. You may want to expand your reading to include more realistic but nonetheless great options — you can explore different online publications about your topic of interest, local papers and presses, and blogs. There really are quite a lot of paying markets out there (Who Pays Writers is an excellent starting point to explore them), even though they can be difficult to find at first.

For some people, there is a huge prestige gap between online publication and print publication. That is, print is somehow ‘realer’ and online is ‘just blogging’ (which isn’t just offensive to online writers, but also to bloggers). I personally don’t feel there’s a big difference, especially since audiences seem to enjoy the convenience of reading online content. There can be a difference in terms of pay (print tends to attract better rates), and you may have other reasons for preferring print, but I’d mostly encourage people not to worry about the form their writing is published in as much as the quality of the writing and of the publication in general.

It’s also a good idea to have several publications you’re aiming to write for and there are a few reasons for this. For one, unless you’re writing for a daily trending news site or really in-depth long-from, a single editor probably won’t commission enough of your work for you to maximise your pay. You also may have a range of interests and different publications will be more or less suitable depending on what you want to write about and how you want to go about it. Finally (and sadly), the media is a very precarious industry. Publications go defunct or shrink or restructure all the time. If you only rely on one publication for all of your income, that puts you in a precarious position too. All this means though is that when you’re brainstorming where you’d like to be published, you can cast your net widely and imagine all kinds of possibilities.

Indeed, you don’t even necessarily have to write for publications based in the same country as you. While some publications prefer local knowledge, or have funding arrangements which mean that a certain proportion of their contributors must reside in a certain geographical area, most are open to pitches that are relevant to their readership from writers from across the globe. Not only does this expand what opportunities are available to you, it may also offer favourable exchange rates and higher pay.