Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life where you were not expecting a screed about generational differences in expectations for life but you’re going to get one anyway. I hope you are enjoying pleasant weather where you are. We’ve had several nice days in a row here and I almost believe it’s going to stay warm for the spring and summer. All my daffodils have bloomed. This means I will be disappointed by at least one more cold snap before the weather fully turns. It is known.
Today’s Shelf Life is for all the folks who want to abandon their crummy day job and write for a living. People who want to write words in exchange for enough cash money to continue their existence and perhaps even maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed.
This is a very relatable want. I talked with a friend earlier today about a friend of theirs who is starting their own editorial business and that’s why the topic has been on my mind all day. My friend asked: Why do millennials all want to start their own business? I think the answer to that is, many of us watched our parents stay in their jobs for years on end, getting raises and maybe promotions, earning a pension, enjoying job stability. Many of us, on the other hand, have not seen the same kind of stability in our working lives and we know that you can never trust a company to treat you humanely. Given the choice, many of us would prefer to work for ourselves because while you can’t guarantee that your boss will treat you humanely even if you are your own boss, at least you will have no one to blame for that but yourself.
Generational expectations of the right to work aside, who doesn’t want to earn their living doing what they love? We’ve all heard the phrase “find a job you enjoy doing and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Everyone wants to be doing what they are passionate about or enjoy most. Most everyone has to do some kind of work to survive. If you have to work for a living, you can maximize the time you spend doing what you enjoy or are passionate about if you make whatever that is your paid labor.
Most people who read Shelf Life are probably passionate about writing.
I’ve talked about writing as one’s day job before (in Write to Life) and I recommend you read it if you haven’t because it covers a lot of important subtopics like finances—for instance, if you work for yourself, you need to earn more money (sometimes considerably more) than you did at your W2 job, to have the same amount of income. This is because before you even get into paying for your healthcare or funding your retirement, you have to pay 7.5 percent more in taxes as a self-employed person than you do as a company-employed person. Anyway, read that article.
Today I want to talk about what it can look like to write for a living. Many people picture writing novels and selling those and living on the royalties. That’s not most working writers. That’s like the least likely way to “earn a living writing.” First of all, the startup investment of your time before you can even potentially begin to earn is huge. You have to write a whole novel up front first and then shop it around to agents or self-publish to see if anyone is buying.
But what if I told you—in my Morpheus-from-The-Matrix-voice—that there are writing gigs out there for the taking. That you can go try your hand at one today to see how it goes for you—without quitting your day job.
A word about gigs. A gig isn’t the same as a job. I mean, it is and it’s not. A gig is a type of job. A job is a regular occupation that earns you money. It’s something you do regularly. It might not be a full-time-employment situation—you can do a job as an independent contractor if you’re doing that thing for a long period of time, and not be a full-time employee of any company (FTE).
A gig—in the sense that we’re using it today a la the gig economy or gig workers—is a short, temporary paying engagement. Like eating potato chips, most people don’t do just one gig. They do a string of gigs. For instance, driving an Uber. You don’t pick up one passenger and drop them off (a gig). You probably drive passengers for hours, but each one is “a gig.”
What differentiates these “gigs” from what we think of as “jobs”—I mean I’m pretty sure it’s mainly semantics to divide the working class and to create a loophole through which workers need not be paid. But the idea is that a gig worker is paid a fee or commission on a per-gig basis and by the consumer of their service instead of receiving a salary, or hourly pay, or even pay based on deliverables. The Uber driver is paid a fee by each passenger they drive in exchange for the driving (with Uber handling the monetary transaction and taking a cut).
Gigs are everywhere. Today I learned about a laundry one, where you pay by the pound of laundry to put your clothes outside in a bag and a gig worker comes along, picks up your laundry, takes it to their home or the laundromat to wash, dry, and fold, and then returns it to your doorstep the next day. You can get your laundry done, your groceries purchased, your leaves raked, your dog walked, your lightbulbs changed—anything you need. There’s an app for it and someone will come to you and do the task and you will pay them (with the app taking a generous cut for the privilege of matching you with your gig worker, of course).
Writing is just another gig like doing laundry or chauffeuring someone—or their McDonald’s order—around. Is it necessarily writing what you want to be writing? Probably not. We all want to be writing our romantic sci fi/fantasy detective story murder mystery alternate history novel—but will that pay the bills? Big gamble.
If you want to try your hand at writing for cash without making a change to your current employment situation—whatever that may be—and without having to write an entire novel up front and then throw it at the wall to see if it sticks—consider one of the following writing gigs to dip your toes in and see if the writing-for-profit lifestyle suits you.
Pitch An Article to an Established Blog or Magazine
Why write articles for free for your own blog like Shelf Life when you could write articles for somebody else for cash money? Personal blogs like the one you’re reading right now are usually written by the owner but there are tons of blogs and online magazines that source their content from freelance writers. You pitch them an article—that is, you approach them with the idea for what you want to write—and they give you the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to go ahead (or not) based on your idea. Then you write the article they greenlit, they pay you for it, and they publish it.
This is a writing gig where your name goes on the byline of published content, and that’s a nice perk. (“Wouldn’t my name always be on the byline of something I’ve written?” Absolutely not, grasshopper.)
Online blogs and magazines that welcome article pitches will have a page that tells you who (at their mag) you should pitch to (even if it’s just an email address) and may provide specifics on how to pitch to them. Consider this page on pitching to Slate dot com. There’s all the info you need to craft an email pitch to Slate and send it off to the right person. If they like your pitch? Then you write the article. Then you get the money.
What do you like to write about? There are online magazines on pretty much every topic that pay for articles from freelance contributors. Travel, food, parenting, health and fitness, and entertainment are all topics with tons of outlets scattered across the internet just looking for articles to buy.
How to find them? Search out online blogs and magazines that cover the topic you want to write about.
Cruise their website for a page named something like “Submission Guidelines,” “Author Guidelines,” or “Contributors’ Guidelines.” Good keywords are submission, author, contributor, pitch.
If you can’t quickly see how to pitch an idea to them, move on to the next magazine—if a magazine wants article pitches they’ll make it obvious how to submit article pitches. Don’t waste time combing every crevice and corner of the site looking for how to pitch if it isn’t obvious.
Read some articles on the site you’re pitching to. Don’t go in blind. Make sure you understand the content and voice they’re looking for.
Sign Up to Write Content on Demand
It is a truth universally acknowledged that companies need content and they don’t want to pay FTEs to write that content. Companies don’t want to ever pay FTEs if they don’t have to—hence the gig economy. You know how restaurants in the US pay servers below minimum wage and the servers’ wage is made whole by the tips they receive directly from customers? Therefore taking the burden of paying the server off the restaurant and placing it on the customer? Gig work is like that but without even the token $2.00/hour payment that restaurants have to pay.
Anyway, companies need content. They need to fill their websites, their blogs, their social media accounts, they need white papers written on topics, they need words and a lot of them don’t have people who specialize in writing this kind of stuff. That’s where you come in!
There are websites for companies in need of content just like Uber is to people in need of being driven somewhere. Companies who need content come to these sites with their job and the site matches the company with someone to write the content for them.
Some sites that operate this way include:
You will notice when you approach these sites that they are geared toward the people buying content; not you—the person selling content. You may need to dig a bit to find where to sign up. Look for the about page or any links that say “writer”—“writer signup,” “how to write with us,” et cetera.
Fill a Job Request on a Talent-Matching Site
Next suggestion: Browse a list of individual writing gigs and choose the one that appeals most. Sounds too good to be true, right? I’m not making this up.
There are numerous sites that connect freelance service providers to individual service seekers. That’s the heart of the gig economy. There’s two directions from which you can approach, and browsing jobs that have been posted is the first (the other approach in a moment).
Let’s take, for instance, Upwork. Upwork markets itself as the world’s talent marketplace; people who need the assistance of skilled knowledge workers can post gigs on the site and those knowledge workers can bid for the jobs. Let’s say someone out there needs their resume written and they don’t know how to do that. They can post the job—“write a resume” to Upwork for consideration by people who have the skills to write resumes. In fact, you can browse all the current gigs for resume writing on Upwork—but you won’t be able to bid on them unless you join.
People on Upwork are looking for all kinds of writing—academic, creative, technical, and so on. People are looking to pay ghostwriters to write novels; to write scientific articles for medical journals; to write song lyrics; to write grant proposals; to write website content—yes, more content. Content is queen.
How does it work? Find the job you want to bid on. Sign up for an Upwork account and fill in your profile. Create a proposal for the job you want to do and submit it. The job poster reviews the proposals they receive and selects the freelancer they want to work with. Write the thing they want. Get paid.
Hang Out Your Shingle on a Freelance Services Site
The other way to approach the sites that connect freelance service providers with the folks who need those services is to set up your profile and open for business. Instead of (or in combination with!) sifting through the available jobs and applying for them, you can also set yourself up as an available freelance resource and let the service-seekers approach you.
A good site as an example for this is Fiverr, a site that offers to find “the perfect freelance services for your business.” The way Fiverr works is you sign up as a service provider and create an “I” statement that describes the service you are offering to others. For instance, “I will write a white paper for your business” or “I will ghostwrite a short story for you.” You set your fee based on the explicit parameters of what you’re offering.
For instance, let’s say I sign up and offer: “I will write a flash fiction story for you.” I might set parameters such as:
The story I write for you will be between 500 and 800 words.
The story will belong to you for commercial use.
My price includes any topical research required to write the story.
I will deliver the finished story in 5 business days.
Up to two revisions to the story are included in the price, if requested.
If that sounds like a good deal to the customer, they can contact me to “purchase” this service and negotiate the specific terms with me. Fiverr will do me the favor of putting my service out there in front of everyone who searches for “flash fiction” and related keywords.
Whatever it is you want to write, you can set yourself up an account on Fiverr and start accepting jobs to write that kind of thing. All you need to do is join Fiverr and then create your gig (or gigs—you can have multiple).
To be clear, gigs aren’t the only paid writing jobs out there. There are full-time W2 writing jobs, contract writing jobs, and freelance writing jobs that you can secure for yourself by working directly with the client instead of going through a third party. But to start up quickly and see if you like it, nothing beats a gig. You don’t have to leave your day job, you don’t have to find your own clients, and you don’t have to market your own business. You can take a little taste of the writing-for-a-living life and see if it’s to your liking.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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