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Time for my 2020 freelance breakdown. I want to start by focusing on the business side. Here's my income breakdown for the year. 1/x
I made around $80k this year (trust me, I'm as shocked as you are). And this is going to sound corny as hell, but I was able to do it largely because last fall, I quit a part-time dead-end staff job at a magazine that was underpaying me and taking up my time and energy. 2/
I was already planning my exit when I was contacted about writing my book (for a flat fee of $5000, half of which I got in 2019) last August, but that really bolstered my confidence that more opportunities would come. 3/
Before the pandemic, I had anchor gigs in copywriting (product descriptions for a deals website) and "service journalism" (houseplant writeups, ingredient profiles, roundups). I also run a cheese subscription here in Philly from which I get a decent commission. 4/
Starting in March, some of that dried up, and I worried I'd have to go on PUA. Around the same time, a close friend passed away. I threw myself into work and by summer, I had paid off my CC debt and somehow had savings for the first time in my life. 5/
With farmers and chefs in my area adding online sales, I was able to get some one-off and anchor gigs doing web copy, marketing emails, and the like. I also started doing content marketing for Cheese Grotto, which has been a really fruitful and fun gig. 6/
When my book came out in October, I wanted to promote myself as an author but the only way to capture any $ doing that was to sell books myself. I've netted around $1500 (about $4/book) that way. Here's where things get wild 7/
I promoted the book in a cheese industry FB group, and over a weekend, that turned into a gig creating educational cheese content for a client that's around 25% of my income. Teaching cheese classes in 2018 snowballed into a book in 2019 which got me the big account in 2020. 8/
Meanwhile, I've been managing a grant for a cheese org here in PA, doing product writeups and blog posts every week, and picking up (low-paying) editorial work. I've been the sole earner in my household since March, and I'm lucky my financial situation has improved this year. 9/
But my relationship to my journalism is really dysfunctional right now. I get pitch ideas, I even place them sometimes, and I end up being too overwhelmed to write them the way I want to/not spend days or weeks feeling a weird form of performance anxiety about them. 10/
It feels like shit and makes me bad at the work that feels most central to my identity and status as a professional, which just feeds into more self-loathing/feelings of not being good enough/needing more yeses and opportunities to feel like I'm worth anything. Vicious cycle. 11/
I'm working on learning to say no, pause projects when needed, and be realistic about time and energy and money. Working with @jenni_gritters from @TWC_pod this fall has put that in perspective, and I'm trying to make room for some new creative projects in 2021. 12/
Betting on yourself can lead to great opportunities. Grinding can raise your profile and pad your bank account. But if you're not clear on what you want to be doing and unless you have the means to spend time on figuring that out, you can still feel unfulfilled and burnt out. 13/
