To share your experiences of freelancing in a recession leave a comment or contact us with an email. Alternatively take the Journalism.co.uk poll.
Carlton Reid
I've had to diversify to protect my income. Travel writing doesn't pay terribly well and I have three kids and a mortgage to feed.
Publishing is the obvious route for me because it allows me to stay wholly independent, including being able to keep working from home. I can make my own decisions, make my own mistakes, and reap my own rewards without any third-party cuts.
I'm a micro-publisher in a niche market. I know the bicycle market inside out and have been podcasting and blogging for a number of years. With tools like Twitter, podcast hosting services like Libsyn, and truly remarkable web 2.0 sites like Issuu.com I can look, act, and feel like a mainstream publisher. But mainstream publishers often fear to tread in truly niche markets, leaving the way open to individual journalists who can multi-task. I also take pix and work with InDesign on page layup and design. I also shoot video and my bike vids have had 1.1 million views on YouTube.
Print on demand services like Lulu.com mean I can 'publish' books without the risk and waste of printing thousands.
I put a 50-page taster of my Bike to Work Book online and within days it had approaching 10,000 document views. In book terms this would be a bestseller. Of course, I don't make money from people looking at the free sampler, but I made the decision to take display ads in the book and this is funding the project.
I'll also upload the whole 250-page plus book for free in order for it to spread virally within my niche. Social media gurus like Seth Godin have found that such free distribution of e-books makes no detrimental impact on print sales, quite the reverse.
By pre-promoting my book with a website and podcast before I wrote a single word, I could get readers involved in the design and production process.
They helped me refine (and refine and refine) the front cover and have suggested much of the content and contributed many great submissions. They also prevented me publishing some stunningly stupid concepts, picking holes in my ideas as I was going along.
By searching on keywords in Flickr I've found some amazing unpublished photographers and will be paying them their first ever payments for photography.
Via the targetted, yet scattergun, approach of Twitter I've made loads of contacts I wouldn't otherwise have made. The American artist who did the Bike to Work Book 'squiggle', now a theme throughout the book, was first a contact on Twitter who agreed to proof read the text. She then suggested a few of her paintings and I leapt at the chance.
My travel writing has had to go on hiatus while I concentrate on projects that make more money than I could ever make by being a travel writer alone. Work I had lined up in papers like the Guardian has dried up because of print cut-backs.
I'm still doing lots of writing for the trade mag I help to edit and for other websites. I'm also writing a children's book for another publisher but having my own project totally under my control gives me core financial stability in a fluctuating freelance market.
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
