freelancing

Are You an Overworked Freelancer? 10 Key Moves to Avoid Burnout

by

This post by Carol Tice originally appeared on Make A Living Writing.

Many writers tell me they wish they could find even one client. But today, I want to talk about the other side of the coin.

Once you get rolling in freelance writing and word starts getting around about your talents, you can quickly find yourself overbooked, overworked, and exhausted.

I recently had a chat with freelance writer Alyssa Ast about this on my Facebook chat — she was getting overloaded, and her personal passion writing projects were sitting idle. She’s got a passel of young kids to care for, too.

And she was nearing her breaking point.

 

A tale of overwork

Here’s Alyssa’s story:

“Basically, things have taken off, which has left me working 16 hour days — and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.

“I’ve cut all of the small fish and narrowed it down to three well-paying clients– two full-time contracts and a part-time one. I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket [and cut down to one client], as the main breadwinner. We NEED my income.

“I refuse to outsource, because I don’t trust anyone to produce the quality I expect or my clients expect. I thought cutting out the small clients would help more than it has. I’ve scheduled everything out to a T, but as soon as I start to get my head above water, I get slammed again.

“How can I keep my sanity without losing my income? I am open to just about anything at this point.”

This is a good problem to have — you’re in demand! But we all need a personal life, too, and some downtime.

How can you turn this around and stop being an overworked freelancer? Here are my tips:

 

Read the full post, which includes specific tips for coping with burnout, on Make A Living Writing.

 

Why Writers Are Opening Up About Money (or the Lack Thereof)

by

This article by Anna North originally appeared on The New York Times Opinion Pages on 7/21/14.

Writers may always have worried about money, but now seems a particularly fertile time for writing about it. Scratch Magazine, launched last year, takes as its purview “Writing + money + life.” The Billfold routinely runs stories on how freelance writers and other creative types “do money.” The novelist Emily Gould opened up about her financial life in a popular Medium essay and subsequent interviews, and The Guardian’s Alison Flood recently reported on the sorry state of writers’ incomes (which, in turn, inspired some critique from Gawker’s Michelle Dean).

This spate of talk about writing and money has opened up broader conversations about who can afford to enter the profession today, and who gets shut out.

Manjula Martin, the cofounder of Scratch, told Op-Talk that “there has always been this tension for writers around how to make a living and how to make art.” However, she said, growing job insecurity in writing professions and beyond may have led to a new wave of anxiety: “As the economy is changing and as things just feel more precarious in our culture, that bleeds through to the literary culture. And I think a big part of that too is a question of, ‘is literature and are the arts going to continue to be valued in ways that we have perhaps always just assumed they would be?’”

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Opinion Pages.