Tips To Become A Successful Freelancer
Most freelancers entertain the notion of ditching the 9 to 5 routine and composing full-time. Only you are able to determine if this is the right sort of life for you. First, remember the daunting statistics from the National Writers Union study. Much more than half of the writers surveyed had to maintain a non-writing-related job to create ends meet.
For those who worked outside of their writing career, the average work week was 52 hours. In addition, writers worked in an average of 4.6 different writing fields and genres (business writing, books, articles, poetry, etc.).
Despite the fact that writers are a very well-educated breed, they earn far less on average than equally-educated workers in other fields. Still interested? There are no hard-and-fast rules to help you determine when it’s time to quit your day job and take up writing full-time. The best I can offer you is some good, old-fashioned common sense.
Don’t take your first sale as a sign that it’s time to make the leap. Or your second sale. Or your 10th sale. As a general guideline, I’d advise that you don’t consider making the leap until your freelance salary equals at least half of your day job salary.
Freelancing is a scary business, and there are periods of extreme financial highs and lows in most freelancers’ lives.
You must have enough money saved up to be sure that you can get by for several months with little or no income in the beginning. Or, then again, you could just do what freelancer Skip Press, columnist for Scriptwriter magazine Different writers have different “rules” for how many queries they like to have in circulation at one time. This largely depends on your success rate and will change through the years. In the beginning, you may have to send out 25 queries before you get one acceptance letter; in later stages of your career, a full half of your queries may land assignments, so you’ll know to send fewer queries (or risk being swamped!).
You might choose never to go full-time, even if you feel you have the capability to do it. Keeping a day work allows many writers to maintain enjoying writing, because it feels like a hobby. It takes the pressure off, simply because they’re not depending on their freelancing checks. Also, they retain the social outlets of work and nevertheless have a creative outlet when they want to use it.
If you are able to and wish to quit punching a clock, though, I wildly encourage you to go for it. Working from home could be very satisfying, and it can supply you with a brand new kind of independence. By setting your own hours, you are able to hang out on the beach every day, as long as you’re committed to putting in lengthy nights at the computer. Or you are able to carry breaks to meet friends for lunch. Or you can operate around the clock for three days and take the rest from the week off. Your work is portable, and it should provide you the opportunity to learn about lots of interesting topics, events, and individuals.
Kyle is a freelancer and often writes articles for http://e-articles.info, a well known article directory. If You want to find out more about article directories, then visit Kyle’s directory of articles and use it for your needs.