The Slow Times for Freelance Writers
If you’ve been working in this business for a while, you know a few things – first of all, you can never count on there being work for any definitive period of time. Freelancers are nervous people. We tend to ebb and flow with the surges of work as best we can. Ideally there is some money set aside for those times – no one wants to be broke in hard times.
Second, we begin to learn when the business gets lean and when it surges. For example, this year December was the slowest month I’ve seen since I started this business. That’s not to say there wasn’t some work out there, but it wasn’t the right kind of work. People were asking for the moon while paying peanuts and while I’m not above scaling back my operations and taking lower paying jobs when the times are tough, no one is going to get my services for $5/article. I did my penance at the bottom of the pile, taking those rates, and there’s no reason to go back to it.Â
That said, December was full of Project Managers with no budget left at the end of the year looking for people to write things at a slashed prices. I don’t know what kind of quality they ended up getting for that kind of money, but I’m not guessing all that much.Â
Which of course brings me to my point. There are always slow times out there – anytime a holiday rears up (almost any holiday btw), your clients will start ignoring your emails or disappearing for a few days at a time. Toss in the end of the year and you’re going to get low paying jobs in between poor communication and lean work. But, if you know this is going to happen you can plan for it. Most of all though, you need to remain confident that when that time is over, you’ll be able to find work again. It comes back – it almost always come back. Being a freelancer on the Internet is like working for the largest corporation on the planet – there’s always something to do, you just need to keep at it. The work will come to you if you’re there to take it and do the footwork to find it.Â
I did my job though – kept from complaining about how slow things have been and even offered a bit of sage advice (if I do say so myself) in the process. Here’s to a prosperous New Year and some new jobs in the not so distant future.
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