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Inspired by Thursday Bram's recent post on FreelanceSwitch, which explored next steps in a freelance career, I wanted to broach the topic here. Fellow freelancers, do you see yourself freelancing for the rest of your career? Do you ultimately hope to open a creative agency? Retire to some sunny, exotic locale? Or eventually reenter the work world once the economy rebounds? I'm curious.
Some people assume that freelancing is a temporary thing for me (especially with so many pink slips going around these days). However, I have no intention of going back to an office unless I were making major bank and working for a company I absolutely adore. It would have to be a pretty sweet gig to lure me away from my freelance life. My hope is to continue freelancing, find bigger and better paying clients, and eventually land a book deal. And although it's kind of anti-feminist in some circles to admit this, motherhood is important to me, too. And the freelance life seems more conducive to that than the alternative. So I'm sticking with freelancing, at least for the foreseeable future.
Leave a comment and let us know about your future plans. Do they include freelancing? Or another form of self-employment?
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Comments
03.04.10
to write a book that sells 50 million copies worldwide in its first year, retire at 27 with my own tropical island with a gaggle of beautiful Swedish ladies in tow... Anything else? Nah that should do :)
03.04.10
The only reason I consider dropping freelancing and returning to the office (or school district, in my case) is health insurance. This is another issue entirely, but it is what is holding me back.
03.04.10
Susan, I totally agree with you. In fact, when given the opportunity, I try to make it clear that I'm freelancing by choice and it's not just something I fell back on or something I do for fun. I think that adds a lot of legitimacy to your business. I'm like you though - willing to work for the right people, but only if doing so truly betters my financial and personal wellbeing. I think eventually I'll feel too old to pound the pavement for my next paycheck, but I'd love to have a couple young people like us working for me by then. :)
03.04.10
My freelance work, at least so far, has been non-fiction. So my goals for it are different than my goals for fiction.
My goal is to build a large and diverse enough portfolio that will allow me too look good to virtually any publication to which I would choose to submit work or pitches. That way I could carve myself out a nitch. The medium I think I'd prefer would be magazines. The content would be the arts.
If there would be a fulltime capability in doing so, than that is what I would want to do. If I ever get a laptop, and enough work that pays enough of the bills between gigs, I could "work" basically anywhere. I could travel and not have to miss work to do it.
I've never been hired for an office job, (and in life only got one interview for one), so I doubt I could get into that if I tried. And I don't think at this point I could go back to the whole mopping floors thing. (Thanks for nothing, bachelor's degree.)
However, if my freelance writing portfolio were to help me land a regular salaried job involving writing with an arts organization, (preferably one that would let me continue some of me freelancing) I would accept that.
So, I suppose the Twitter sized summation of my goal as a freelancer would be "To establish my writing talent to such a degree that I can use it to financially sustain my way of life."
03.04.10
Hi everyone, thanks for commenting!
I read an interesting post a few years ago about a travel writer whose goal is to "live above the sushi line." I think some of you would enjoy this one, especially Ty: http://killingbatteries.com/2007/10/the-poverty-line-has-lost-its-pizzaz...
03.04.10
Thanks for that link, Susan. And you are right. In a different style than my own that link does some up basically what I am looking for. Well, I am not into sushi, and I might want my line to be a bit higher, but the point is just the same; I don't require a very high level of living. Even if I were to stumble upon the elusive cash cow in writing, I'd still be apt to be modest in my possessions, and high in my experiences. (Something I plan to blog about soon.) I would not have much need for luxury most of the time.
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