The freelance life is a precarious one. Unless you’re a JK Rowling, Danielle Steele, you don’t pull in enough royalties to survive let alone thrive. So writing books full time is out of the question. You have to have another gig to pull in income. Yet you want to remain a freelancer.
For some writers, that means signing up with one of the so-called “content mills,” which hire freelancers to write blogposts, web ads, and ?? for a low fee. If you’re good at what you do, the work might be reasonably steady, but the pay rate is low.
For others of us—and you’ll find me in this camp—freelancing our writing (and for some of us me included, not just writing but editing isn’t done through content mills but through ads on CraigsList and other such platforms. The work isn’t nearly as steady, but the pay rate is much higher, and if you can land a gig ghostwriting a book (or editing a book), BINGO, we’re talking real money.
Then there are freelance indexers, a publishing specialty skill set that I would quickly go batty trying my hand at, but to each their own.
Always, though, if you’re living the freelance life, there are times when work is slow, money is tight, and you wonder whether you’ll be able to cover the rent/mortgage this month, or how you can get some money together to buy groceries. The freelance life is indeed a precarious one. But for all that, I love it. I left the 9-to-5 world behind me many decades ago, and I’m never going back!