Freelance 101: Charge What You Are Worth.

A few years ago, I thought I had found a cool side gig: a freelancing website for science writers. The job seemed straight forward: to revise scientific articles in my field submitted by people who were not native English speakers. It paid a certain amount for grammar editing and offered bonus pay for content evaluation and improvement. I had been writing and submitting my research for years; this should not be too difficult a job, after all, I was not invested in the work, so making cold, clinical corrections should be easy enough. They paid per thousand words, and the rate seemed ok to me. Boy, was I wrong.

The company turned out to be a mill, set on grinding as much from their freelancers for as little money as possible. The jobs were tough; in some cases, the language was utterly incomprehensible. Trying to patch a sentence into coherence was a monumental job. And then there was the company itself. They had a million tricks to scam you out of paying the accorded fee: they rounded the number of words on the low end, so 1100 words were paid as 1000; you would receive a piece marked "for grammar editing," but the only way to correct the grammar would be to fix the content too. They claimed to have a rating system to offer the next set of jobs. If your rating was good, you got paid the maximum rate, and it would trickle down from it. I'm an established researcher with my work published on indexed journals; the site gave me a score of 2/10 and sent me the next job with a tag price of pennies on it. I wrote a polite email declining (while muttering to myself that I would use their proposal as toilet paper) and asked for my payout. After days of battling to edit one disastrous submission after another, I got 100 dollars.

On the other hand, I like writing erotica, well, because it's awesome. I currently write three erotic stories a month, one thousand words each, and submit them to a Medium publication. That gets me about a hundred bucks every month, sometimes much more if a story turns into a hit. Doing that is a lot of fun, zero stress, and pays for my car insurance. It's a hobby that brings me money. Talk about a win-win.

If you are reading this story is because you dream of the freelance life. We like that the word starts with free: it means independence and flexibility. So be careful: before jumping into the waters of freelancing, consider what you would really be getting from it. We all need to start somewhere, but you need to be practical and mindful of the value of your time. Picking the wrong kind of freelance work can be quite detrimental. We all have heard that the only way to become a writer is to write. That is absolutely true, but if what you need is practice, you may do better writing for publishing platforms like Vocal or Medium, where you can see how much interest your pieces incite even if you have to supplement with a "day job" for a while. You will make much more progress writing about what you enjoy and positioning yourself on that niche than numbly typing away for freelance clients or employers who don't value quality and are only trying to get the job done as cheaply as possible.

More important than anything else, the most significant danger of mindless freelancing is that you could lose your self-esteem in the process. If the kind of writing you do for them is the basic, fill-up-this-empty-space type of work, you may end up thinking that you suck when you do not. The reason is that bidding on freelancing sites create a hamster wheel:

-A job gets posted.

-Lots of people bid for that job.

-You try to attract the client by doing it cheaper.

-The guy next to you on the listing has a superpower: they can survive on a single cup-o-noodles for a month, so they make it even cheaper until the price range for the work is pennies.

-You bid extremely low and end up getting the job.

-You put lots of time and effort into it and get paid two dollars.

-Now you think next time you better do ten pieces in the same amount of time, but the only possible way to do that is to save time by going to Wikipedia and start copy-pasting stuff.

-This means your next ten job products suck, and you get a shitty review.

-And now you have to lower your rate even more.

-Worst of all, you start believing that your work is only worth pennies.

A fellow writer told me that she had tried hiring someone to ghostwrite part of her work on a specific area, and she went for the affordable guy. The so-called writer sent her copy-pasted pieces from Wikipedia without even bothering to format them to look less shitty. In the end, two things were accomplished: a waste of her money and a crappy rating for the freelancer. He probably did it thinking, "if I do four shitty pieces an hour, then they add up to a decent hourly rate, hence copy-paste." Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, he could have written a good piece for Vocal Media or Medium, enjoy himself in the process and get the same few dollars without stress. Plus, your readership will eventually grow, so two dollars will become twenty and then two hundred. The amount of time invested is whatever you prefer, and the lack of stress over it is priceless.

You may be better off taking a job that allows you bits of time to type ideas on your phone throughout the day, so by the end of your shift, you have a piece that you may polish and post for profit. If you don't believe me, let me tell you the origin story of one of the kings of writing: Michael Patrick King (lame pun intended). A friend of mine had the opportunity to hang out with him at a party. King told him that the most enriching experience he had in his starting years as a writer was working as a waiter for high-end restaurants in New York. That's because of the people he got to meet and the conversations he overheard while serving. Taking notes from those characters and their interactions became an endless source of material that eventually translated into many hits. I doubt anything like that would have happened had he chosen a mindless typing job instead just because it was a "real writing job."

Using a freelancer site is useful when you have a specific ability or niche, something that others cannot claim to have. If you are an engineer, lawyer, or have a particular kind of training and offer writing related to that area, you can probably find clients who need good quality work and pay for it. On the other hand, if you try to break into the "general writing" scene, there is a big downside: everyone in the world that has attended elementary school can claim to be a writer and give a job a go. Likely, most clients wouldn't know that there is a difference and hire whoever bids the lowest price. Find a niche, publish some independent pieces in that niche to build a portfolio, and ask for the right price. Also, remember that cheapskates are usually the worst type of client, trying to get the job done for free and complaining all the way through. They will make you long for the cubicle job with benefits that you left to become a freelancer.

These days I have a posting of services on a tutoring website. I started doing that years ago, and I used to tutor at the average rate, which is pretty low. But then decided to charge what I'm worth. You see, I tutor biomedical sciences. A college senior who is a Biomedical Sciences major may think they can tutor as well as I do, but they cannot compare. So they post for 20 dollars an hour, and I post for 100 dollars for 30 minutes. Most of the time, they get calls, I do not. But when a student contacts me, they get excellent help because I'm great at my job. I can make 30 minutes of their time worth five hours of work with a 20 dollar tutor. My students save a lot of time, and time is money for them and me. When I used to tutor for 20 bucks an hour, I was always cranky and exhausted. My work sucked because I needed five students to sign up to make the same amount of money that I now make with only one person that gets my undivided attention for 30 minutes. I'm more efficient, and I make them more efficient. That's why it's worth waiting for the right client.

Finally, freelancing, like any other business, will require you to go through trial and error. Enter the Little Black Book. Because an entrepreneurial mind is an overactive one, it is good to have a notebook. It functions as a think-tank of sorts where you can keep track of your ideas, and, if you are a compulsive notetaker like me, track the stuff that didn't' work well, so you don't forget the details and try it again by mistake in two years. My notebook is divided into sections: things I'm working on presently. Brainstorming ideas for the future. Lists of resources that I won't use immediately but may be useful for me or someone else in the future. It helps me keep things organized, and I love keeping track of how original thoughts transform into something completely different.

In conclusion: give freelance a try, but do it smartly. Find a niche, and make sure you enjoy it so that you stay with it consistently. And above all, do not sell yourself cheap; it is not worth it.

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