Getting Down to Business Installment 1

The semester is over, which means summer is upon me--which adds up to two things: 1.) extra free-time and 2.) the need for money. My excuses for unemployment that I use during the school year are all running out, which means I actually have to do some kind of work over the summer--or at least try to. Also, my bank account is also running out, which means that if I have any intention of pursuing a Master's Degree--or eating regularly--I'll need a source of income.

So the yearly Work Scrounging begins. And I say to myself, the sooner I launch a successful freelance career, the sooner I'll be able to avoid relying on burger-flipping or secretarial work. So I should get on that.

The theory is this:
I start building up credentials and clips now, so that I can augment my minimum-wage-income while gaining invaluable work experience. Not too long afterward, I'll have enough publishing cred to query higher-paying markets. If I can get regular writing jobs with those markets, I'll be able to devote more of my time to writing fiction, and less of my time to scrounging for work. By the time I'm in grad school, I might be able to land a book deal; definitely by the time I get my master's. If I play my cards right, I can make a living from freelancing and fiction-writing by the time I'm done with school, and if I pick up a day job it will be more to pay off student loans than to keep me fed from day to day.

The Money Aspect:
Okay, so I'm not totally sure how to make this work, but this is my rough guestimate, more for inspirational purposes than building expectations. Say I get your average college-student job--I'll be working part time, about 20 hours a week. We'll say they're paying me $6.00 an hour. That's $480 a month, roughly, a little over $5,500 a year, assuming I can actually work 20 hours a week every week in the year.

Average low-end freelance/magazine markets pay about .10 a word. We'll say the average article is between 500-1,000 words. This is $50-$100 a piece. Which means I should average about 10 published articles a month, or 120 articles a year, in order to make the same amount of money as I would working the job above. If I did my math right (always questionable) the part-time job would take 960 hours a year; that means I should be spending no more than 8 hours a piece writing the articles in order to make the two jobs equitable.

It doesn't sound like that great of a deal, does it? There's no way you can actually support yourself on less than$6,000 a year...but look at this--well before I've written 120 articles, I'd be able to query bigger markets. Some markets pay .50 or $1 per word--I could definitely be into those markets by the end of the first year. That's $30,000 if I publish a year's worth of .50 markets, and $60,000 if I publish a year's worth of $1 markets.

So if I start now--while I'm in college and still have parental support and student loans to live on--I can build up enough cred to make up to 60k a year by the time I get out of undergrad. Not mentioning any money I make publishing fiction, or any money I get from reprinted articles, or any money I make doing any other kind of odd writing job. It could work. It really, really could work.

In addition to writing articles, I'm also fully qualified and willing to do parttime freelance web design. I have experience with both Dreamweaver and hand-coding, and I have work experience as the tech-designer and content-editor for a professional website. I'm researching fees for that now, and apparently the common practice is to charge a flat fee--I'll get back to that in a sec. I emailed a friend of my mom's who does webdesign, and I'll also be emailing Jennifer sometime in the near future to ask her the same questions--how do you get into the business, how do you find clients, etc. etc.

Right now, my big goal is to figure out how to operate the business end of the job. Freelancing isn't quite like writing fiction--I'll have to keep good records, and probably pick up a couple of books on running a home office/business and filing taxes. Apparently when you're a writer you can get tax deductions on paper and printer cartridges--how cool is that? So I'll look into that, and hopefully get my ass in gear.

According to some quick, sloppy math, in order to reach my quota of Freelance Articles, I'd need to spit out an article every 3 days. Hmm. Let's see what I can pull off, eh?

There's another entry to follow that's less Nuts & Bolts...this one's running a little long for my tastes.