by
Robert W. Bly
I started freelancing full-time in 1982, and except for that year and the next, I have earned more than $100,000 a year as a freelance writer for 20 consecutive years. Last year, I grossed $500,000, as I did the year before that.
I tell you this not to brag, but to illustrate that making a 6-figure income is a realistic goal for even an average freelance writer like me (I’ve never written a bestseller, nor have I sold a script to the movies or TV). Following are some suggestions to help you achieve and exceed the $100,000 a year mark:
1. Get serious about making money. “Before we can accumulate riches in great
abundance, we must become money-conscious until the desire for money drives us
to create definite plans for acquiring it,” writes Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich (Fawcett Crest,
1960).
If money is not a concern,
you can write whatever you want, whenever you want, as much or as little as you
want, without regard to the fee you will be paid, how long it will take to
write the piece, or the likelihood that you will sell the piece.
If
you want to consistently make $100,000 a year as a freelance writer, you need
to avoid the “poverty mentality” that holds so many writers back from earning a
high income.
A doorman in New York City
earns around $30,000 a year. If an unskilled laborer can make $30,000 just for
opening a door, surely you can earn $50,000 to $100,000 for your skills.
2. Have a daily revenue goal. To make $100,000 a year, you need to earn $2,000 a
week for 50 weeks. For a 5-day workweek, that comes to $400 a day -- a quite
modest and achievable sum.
The question then becomes: What writing-related work can you do that people will pay you $400 a day for? Proofreading won’t hit the mark, but ghostwriting books, annual reports, fundraising letters, speeches, or ad copy probably can.
Do you have to make $400 each and every day? No. Some days you’ll be writing queries or doing self-promotion, and earn nothing. Other days you’ll get into a writing groove, finish a $1,000 article in 6 hours, and still have time to write more queries. You’re safe as long as your average revenue is $400 a day, or $2,000 a week, or approximately $9,000 a month.
Of course, the higher your average project fee, the easier it can be to meet your $400 a day goal.
Robert Otterbourg specializes in annual reports, with an average price tag of $10,000 per project. By doing several of these jobs in a month or two, he can get way ahead of his income plan, leaving him time to write the career books that are his avocation.
3. Value your time. If you earn $100,000 a year and work 40
hours a week, your time is worth at least $50 an hour. You should base
decisions about how you spend your time on that figure.
For
instance, if you spend an extra half hour to go out of your way to save $10 in
office supplies, it costs you $25 in lost productivity, and you are $15 in the
red.
My
time is worth at least $100 an hour. Therefore, virtually any service I can buy
for under $100 an hour -- including lawn services, handymen, and tax
preparation -- I outsource.
Of
the two resources, time and money, time is the more valuable. You can always
make more money. But time is a non-renewable resource. Once it’s gone, you
can’t get it back.
4. Increase your personal productivity. Except
for royalties and product sales, writers are paid only for their time. So the
more efficient and productive you are, and the faster you write, the more money
you make.
Develop
habits that help you get more done in less time. The easiest is simply to get
up and start work an hour earlier than you do now -- say at 7 am or 8 am
instead of 9 am. That first hour will be your most productive, because you can
work in peace without interruptions before the business day starts, the phone
begins to ring, and the messages come pouring into your e-mail box.
“I
am most productive at 5 in the morning,” says travel writer Jennifer Stevens.
“It means I can get into the shower at 7 or 8 having made a dent in whatever
I’m working on.”
Nancy
Flynn, author of The $100,000 a Year
Writer (Adams Media, 2000), maximizes her productivity by avoiding
in-person meetings unless absolutely necessary. “You can accomplish a
tremendous amount -- including establishing and maintaining successful business
relationships -- via telephone, e-mail, and fax,” says Flynn.
5. Outsource. I have not gone to the
post office in 8 years. Why not? Because doing so is an absolute waste of time
I could be using to write and make money.
The
only thing you get paid to do is write, research, and think for your clients
and publishers. All other activities are non-paying and therefore should be
farmed out to other people who can do them better and more cheaply than you
can.
You
do not need to hire a full-time secretary to outsource routine office work and
administrative tasks. There are plenty of bright high school and college
students eager to work with writers for the glory, glamour, and a relatively
modest fee of $10 an hour or so.
Or you can hire a word
processing or typing service; most advertise in the local town paper.
I once had a secretary on
staff. When she quit about 6 years ago, instead of hiring a replacement, I
started calling word processing services advertising in the classified section
of my weekly town newspaper. I said, “I will buy 40 hours a week of your time,
every week of the year, and pay you a month in advance. In return, I want a
better rate.”
All were eager to take me up
on this offer. I chose one, and she has been with me ever since.
6. The secret to eliminating Writer’s Block.
Profitable writers are productive writers. We write consistently, every day,
whether the mood strikes us or not. “The professional writer must establish a
daily schedule and stick to it,” writes William Zinsser in On Writing Well (HarperResource, 2001).
The best way to maintain a steady output and avoid Writer’s Block is to have many projects on various subjects and in different formats. The variety keeps you fresh and prevents you from getting bored or fatigued, which are the key causes of Writer’s Block.
This is the method I use, and it has never failed me. If I am writing a magazine ad and get stuck on the headline, I can put it aside and switch to the direct mail package I’m writing for a software company. If I get to the point where I need more information from my software client to proceed with their sales letter, I can put that aside and work on an article or book.
You
can decide the mix of assignments and workloads that works best for you.
Personally, I always like to have half a dozen projects in the works at any one
time. Less limits my variety and my options.
“My
interests remain varied,” says Robert Lerose, a freelance direct mail
copywriter. “I try to go after work in other areas, such as speechwriting and
editorial writing.” Another freelance copywriter, Sig Rosenblum, has written
poetry, novels, short stories, a musical comedy, movie music, “and a few other
forms.” Gary Blake, a book and magazine writer, branched out into teaching
business writing to corporate executives.
7. The secret to getting paid more. I have read at least 100 articles and letters
in writers’ magazines that go something like this: “I was writing for a long
time for a magazine that paid 10 cents a word. Finally, I told the editor that
I could not work for less than 15 cents a word. At first he said no, but I
stuck by my guns and, by gosh, he paid it. See ... you can get paid more for
your writing!”
To
me, the practice of going to low-paying markets and trying to convert them into
high-paying markets is unproductive. Even if you get an extra 5 cents a word --
which in my example represents a 50 percent pay hike -- we’re talking about
only $50 more for a 1,000-word article.
If
you really want to get start making big money from your writing, don’t haggle
over nickels and dimes. Don’t try to get a penny a word market to pay two cents
a word, and then feel pleased that you doubled your fee. It’s still pennies.
Instead,
target high-paying markets and assignments -- large-circulation consumer
magazines, Fortune 500 corporations, and mid-size businesses. These folks are
used to paying top dollar, so you won’t have to do a song and dance to get the
fee you deserve.
Moving
to higher-paying assignments accelerates your climb to the $100,000 a year
mark. It’s much easier to meet your goal of $400 a day when you get $2,000 per
project instead of $200.
When
considering the profitability of assignments, calculate your earnings per hour
rather than per project or per word. If it takes you 10 eight-hour days to do a
$2,000 feature article for a glossy magazine, you make $25 an hour. If an
industrial manufacturer hires you to write simple press releases for the trade
at $500 each, and you can do two per day, you make $125 an hour.
8. Royalties, sales, and mark-ups. Dentists have a saying: “The more you drill
and fill, the more you bill.” That means, despite their high pay, they are
still in essence hourly laborers, getting paid only for their time -- just like
writers.
Dentists get around this by hiring other dentists to work for them in their practice, and collecting more in revenue from the work of these dentists than the salaries paid to them.
For
writers there are basically three options for escaping from the limitations of
“drill, fill, and bill”:
* Royalties. When you write books or
music, you get a royalty for each book or CD purchased. You can make thousands
of extra dollars a month from products on which you are paid a royalty --
without doing any more work. Direct mail writer Dick Sanders, for instance,
charges his clients a mailing fee per package mailed in addition to his flat
fee for writing copy. If a publisher pays him 3 cents per package mailed, a
mailing of 1 million pieces earns Dick an additional $30,000 in mailing fees.
* Sales. You can create and sell your own
information products, such as books, e-books, subscription Web sites,
newsletters, videos, audiocassettes, and special reports. This is the
“self-publishing” option Dan Poynter discusses in his book The Self-Publishing Manual (Para Publishing) and his columns in Writer’s Digest.
* Mark-ups. Some writers make money by
buying products or services, marking them up, and reselling them to their
clients. For example, a freelance corporate writer may supervise the printing
of the brochure he wrote for his client. The printer bills the writer directly.
The writer sends his own printing bill to the corporate client, with the actual
cost marked up 20 percent to compensate him for his project management services.
On a $20,000 print bill, your mark-up would be $4,000. “Never miss out on the
opportunity to coordinate printing,” says Flynn. “The profit potential is too
great to pass by.”
These three strategies may enable you to make money outside of your own hourly labor, but they are not without pitfalls. What happens if you print 3,000 copies of your self-published book and sell only 100 copies to friends and relatives? What happens when the corporate client declares bankruptcy (can you say “WorldCom”?) and you are stuck with a printer’s bill for thousands of dollars of color printing?
9. The secret to solving the “supply and demand” problem. To earn 6-figures as a
freelance writer, you have to be pretty busy most if not all of the time.
Writers who suffer prolonged periods without work are going to have a difficult
time meeting their revenue goals. If your goal is $2,000 a week and you make
zero this week, you’re going to have to make $4,000 in an upcoming week to get
back on track.
To
minimize downtime and ensure a full writing schedule, you have to create a
demand for what you are selling. And one way to make sure you are always in
demand is to specialize.
You
can specialize in a subject: gardening, content management, wastewater
management, investments, interpersonal skills, health and fitness. Or you can
specialize in a format or medium: multimedia presentations, Web sites, e-mail
marketing, direct mail, speeches, annual reports.
Must
you specialize? No. But as a rule, specialists earn more than generalists, are
more in demand, and have an easier time finding work than generalists.
A few more words about
specializing:
* Being a specialist and a
generalist are not mutually exclusive. You can develop a specialty -- even
several specialties -- and still take on general assignments as they come up.
My friend Richard Armstrong has three specialties: writing direct mail for
publishers; speechwriting; and political fundraising. Dan Poynter also has
three specialties: parachuting, self-publishing, and being an expert witness.
* The narrower and more
focused your specialty, the greater your value to clients and editors who need
someone to write on those subjects. An example of a narrow focus is mutual
funds, a sub-topic within the broader area of investing and personal finance.
* The less popular your
specialty is with other writers, the greater your competitive edge. If you are
only one of a handful of known experts on your topic, the demand for your
writing services will exceed the supply, and you can pick and choose your
assignments.
10. The secret to getting repeat business.
The most profitable assignments in freelance writing are repeat assignments
from current clients.
Why? Because you are
familiar with the client and their organization, your need to learn about them
diminishes with each new assignment. You can charge the same price per job, or
maybe even more if they like you. But you can do the jobs much faster because
of the knowledge you have accumulated.
How do you get lucrative
repeat assignments?
* Give every writing job
your best effort. The more satisfied the client, the more likely they are to
give you another job.
* Provide excellent customer
service. Don’t be a prima donna. Clients avoid working with writers perceived
as difficult or demanding.
* Ask the editor or client
for another project. Often you won’t get the work unless you ask.
Doing
good work stimulates referrals as well as repeat business. Freelancer Charles
Flowers was chosen to write A Science
Odyssey, a companion volume for the PBS series, because the editor knew him
from another project.
May I share a secret with
you? In the aftermath of 9/11 and with the anthrax scare, my main business --
writing direct mail -- got hit hard. And 2002 was the worst year I’d had in
some time. Yet despite that, I still grossed well over $300,000.
The
point? There is no “bad time” or “good time” for freelance writing. There is
only now. And right now, you can make $100,000 a year writing. Just follow the
advice above and watch the checks come rolling in.
About the author:
Bob
Bly is the author of more than 50 books including Secrets of a Freelance Writer: How to Make $85,000 a Year (Henry
Holt & Co.). He can be reached at rwbly@bly.com.
###