It has been awhile since
I released anything to my blog and that is because I have been blessed with a
career change that was not so draining upon my ability to think. After spending
six months in total as a freelancer, I have made quite a few discoveries that
anyone thinking about the job should consider.
It sucks trying to hunt down new gigs
The hardest part and what
I hated the most was hunting down gigs that I could apply for as many times the
gigs out there are from people who do not understand how much an author really
costs and so has high expectations for little to nothing in cost.
For every ten
applications I submitted, maybe two or three would be nibbles and then one
would be for sure but the problem was for every one job I picked up, two
finished leaving me behind by one. As I was unemployed and doing this as a
means to live, it was a challenge to get all the bills paid.
People demanding masterpieces for a Pittance
This irked me the most.
Not because I was greedy and expected people to pay me a lot (as of 2016, the
minimum a freelancer should expect is .02 cents per word or $10.00 for 500
words) but there were people contacting me who wanted a 50,000 word novel for only
$100 dollars and a timeline of one week including second draft and editing.
Every time I said, “You
do realize a good piece of work can take up to six months to write, especially
when you are only providing me with a 50-word
description of the entire story”. The usual response to this was both silence
and a lost job or “We can find someone else if you don’t want it” which had me
respond, “Go ahead and good luck getting anything decent.”
I can understand people
who want to get a decent deal and are usually funding out of their own pocket
but at some of the prices offered, it's
downright robbery and an insult to a writer.
All the Extra Fees
As a beginner freelancer,
I am forced to work on projects like freelancer.com or upwork.com and there
they charge you a percentage of your income just for getting a job. A lot of
these places even charge the client who is trying to hire and so both sides are
losing money for the third party service. This, in itself, is not a bad thing
because third party companies need money to keep going but it is very hard when
you’re hired to write a 500-word article at $10.00 and have to give 20% of that
to Upwork for their services. (Take a
look at their sliding scale for more information).
The only place I ever
found that never did that was writeraccess.com and as of 2017, I highly recommend
them. They have a steep application that proves that you can write before
letting you onto their program but they
only charge the client and not the freelancer for work.
It’s great as a side business
Freelancing is fun, do
not get me wrong. I just struggled with it as a full-time
occupation and it gave me a lot of nights where I just stared at the ceiling
trying to figure out what to do the next day. I still do it as a part-time hobby because I could never truly get
out of that world but I know longer feel the need to apply to some job because
I need the money they are offering.
So, if you are still
considering getting into the world of freelancing, try to take these things to
heart because at one point you will find yourself staring at the screen
wondering a lot of these questions yourself.
What do you think? Did
you have a good/bad experience or advice for others? Share it in the comments!
