I did a fun interview last month with Grace Bello, who is a journalist, copy writer and writing teacher who writes for the Freelance Strategist. The (very smart!) piece is now up over here. If you don’t know about Freelance Strategist (I, um, did not) — it’s a cool blog run by Contently, which is a free portfolio site for journalists to showcase their work and connect with editors and what have you. I haven’t used Contently myself yet, but a prospective client was just telling me last week how he finds it pretty useful for finding new writers. So I should probably get on that. There is, as they say, buzz, and maybe you should check it out (and tell me how it works for you!).
Anyway, Freelance Strategist has all sorts of interesting articles and I’m on a deadline today so I can’t fall down that rabbit hole any further but you should check that out too, especially Grace’s stuff.
Also, as it happens, we did the interview via email because I was traveling on assignment for what felt like forever in April and Grace was nice and accommodating like that. So since, of course, only a few snippets of what I said in the interview made it into the piece, I thought it might be fun to post the rest of the exchange here for your perusal. Warning: I did this while operating on not enough sleep, too much airport food and second trimester pregnancy hormones.* In short, there is rambling.
GB: A lot of new freelancers think they can land four-figure projects right out of the gate. So how much money did you assume publications would pay you, and (approximately) how much did they actually pay? Any tips on meeting one’s financial goals in one’s first year of freelancing?
VSS: My very first two freelance assignments actually were (low) four figures. One was a feature for (now defunct) Modern Bride about using a palm reader to predict the future of your marriage (yes, really) that paid… $2500? And the second was a god awful quote round-up from women talking about “the craziest way I dumped him!” (I had to find the woman who broke up with her boyfriend during sex, let’s never speak of this again) for a lady magazine that is still a client so we’ll leave it at that. But I think that story paid $3000. Of course, by the time I was done trolling bachelorette parties at Times Square bars for quotes, my hourly rate was down below minimum wage.
All the same, those were obviously good out-of-the-gate assignments because the checks were of the caliber where you can pay your rent — but definitely still entry-level freelance work because the stories involved a lot of grunt work and weren’t topics that particularly light my fire. The key reason I was able to land the paycheck part: I had been an editor on staff at magazines for about two years, so I had a lot of contacts who knew my work. If you don’t start out from the “inside” so to speak, then yes, you are going to have to lower the bar of what kind of work you’ll get. (So in that sense, my very first freelance assignment was an interview I did with a visiting author for my hometown newspaper back when I was in college and picking up clips any way I could — I think that paycheck was $35?)
As a general rule, glossy magazines will start new writers at around $1.50 to $2 per word — but you’ll be writing the shorter stories, so the checks are smaller. As you work your way up, the word rates may climb a bit but the word counts jump a lot, and that is how you get to the bigger checks. Online pay rates are all over the map and can be truly obnoxious (I had one gig that paid me $15 per post; I’ve also had gigs pay $200 per post).
But the other important thing to realize about freelance work, both out of the gate and even once you’re pretty seasoned is that it’s ALWAYS a mix of bigger and smaller paychecks. While I was working on those first two features, I was also doing some short news items for various women’s magazines that paid around $300-$500 a pop. Plus I was pitching as much as I could, which is work you do for free until you land the assignment (and when you first start out, you don’t land very many of those cold pitch assignments!). Now let’s fast-forward to the present day: I’m currently working on two very big (and work-intensive!) features that pay high four figures each, plus shopping an essay I wrote on spec (so again, free until I place it). And I just told another editor that I’d do a quick service story for $500, because I know it will only take me a day to turn that around and I value that relationship. So it’s still a mix — though the ratio of big assignments to small assignments had shifted favorably. But the smaller gigs are still worth doing, whether because you like the editor and want to keep her happy, or because you can turn them around quickly and thus, it’s an easy $500 versus a tortured $5000.
So this leads me to my biggest piece of advice regarding how to meet your financial goals: know what your time is worth. A lot of freelancers think “I’m only getting paid $500 for this assignment, so I guess that is what I’m worth — I can’t get the big paychecks.” WRONG. How long does it take you to write that story? A day? Then you are worth $500 per day which is $2500 per week which is $125,000 per year (and that’s taking two weeks off). If you can book five $500 assignments a week, you are doing just as well as the more seasoned freelancer who is only taking on one $2500 feature that week. (You may have a more frenetic workload and it’s good to shoot for that $2500 feature for a variety of reasons — but financially, you’re on a level playing field.)
So in order to make those smaller checks work for you, you have to have a very clear idea of what your overall income goal is for the year, how that breaks down to a weekly and daily rate, and how quickly you can turn quality work around — so you know how many assignments to take on to hit your goals every month.
GB: There’s a common fear among new freelancers that editors will steal their ideas. Have you ever had an idea “stolen”? What was it like when you first started working with editors? If you previously worked as an editor, what is an editor looking for in a new writer? What can a writer do to seem more enticing to an editor he or she has never worked with?
VSS: OK, everybody who worries about the idea theft thing needs to Get. Over. It. It honestly doesn’t happen. If you are a new freelance writer, chances are that most of your ideas are crap anyway. (Sorry. But this is true — you are still learning what makes a story and you have to have a lot of crappy ideas before you get to the good stuff. It’s okay!) The editors don’t want them — they can’t even really wrap their head around what your story would be. Your job is to keep coming up with ideas because you have to build that muscle and learn how to do it well. And you have to keep shopping them around to editors because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to afford to eat. if you play coy with your ideas and don’t pitch, editors are going to move on, fast.
So what about if your ideas are really great? Editors still won’t steal them. They’ll assign them to you. Occasionally, if you come up with a very good story idea that is more complicated than you’re ready to write, an editor may love the idea, want to assign it to a more seasoned writer instead of you, and offer you a finder’s fee. This stings, I know, but you aren’t getting robbed — you just aren’t ready to write a major investigative feature, or maybe you are kinda ready but the editor doesn’t have the time or resources to mentor you through it. Or (this is the mostly likely scenario) — your idea isn’t actually the unique little snowflake that you thought. We’re all reading the same websites, newspapers, etc looking for new research, new angles, etc. If you got your idea because of a story you saw in the New York Times… the editor read that same story. They’ve been having conversations about it in-house. Or another writer read it and pitched it already. All of this stuff is out in the zeitgeist, on Twitter, etc — so if you pitch something, get rejected, and then see a similar story in the magazine three months later, you have to trust that it was something they were already working on before you came along.
My bottom line with ideas is that you should never be too married to them. Pitching stories isn’t really about selling that one specific story. It’s about developing a relationship with an editor so she’ll think of you when she’s assigning. Sometimes that means she’ll assign you the very idea you pitched, but more often than not, the idea is just currency — it gets you on her radar, shows that you understand the magazine and have the kind of skills she’s looking for. Especially when I was starting out, I’d send an editor 2-3 ideas, land none of them, but then a month later she’d circle back with “hey, we’re looking for a writer for this story…” That’s the point of pitching. So your whole goal is to show through your story pitches that you get the magazine, you understand their readers, you know what they are looking for. Then it won’t matter if you pitch something they’ve already covered (that will show you’re speaking their language) and you won’t have to worry about your ideas getting stolen — because that’s just not the point of the process.
Otherwise, in terms of enticing editors, it’s pretty simple: Don’t be creepy. By which I mean, don’t stalk them, don’t call (most editors never even check their voicemail — email is the way to go). Check your emails religiously for typos and mistakes. (Seriously, now go check it again.) Keep your pitches concise, never send more than 3 ideas in one email (and keep them brief), follow-up politely (every 2 weeks is good — and if you haven’t gotten a response by the 3rd follow-up, let them know you’re assuming it’s not the right fit and will take the idea elsewhere) and keep the ideas coming.
*Oh yeah, have I mentioned that on here yet? Pregnant. August. Excited! Now you can be, too.
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