My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [1]
Not for one minute did I think that someday I’d be trapped in a 9-to-5 (or 5-to-9) job, fielding thirty dozen emails a day and straining to stay awake during staff meetings. Not even for a nanosecond.
Then I finished school and cruel reality set in.
Occasionally, my older, wiser coworkers would stop debating whose carpal tunnel was worse long enough to share their hard-won pearls of workforce wisdom with me. “I used to be like you, thinking that one day I’d pursue my own writing or take up painting again,” they’d say. “But eventually, you learn to let go of those silly dreams. You gotta grow up sometime and get a real job like everyone else.”
Why? I remember thinking. What’s so juvenile about actually liking what you do for a living? What’s wrong with designing your own career if you can’t stomach the one you’ve got or can’t figure out what kind of a job you want in the first place? Isn’t that a better bet than hanging on to a 9-to-5 that makes you feel like you’re crawling over broken glass sixty hours a week?
I’m guessing you can relate. You want more control over the work you do, who you do it for, and where you do it. You don’t want to be told what the pay range for the job is—you want to set it yourself. You want a flexible schedule so you can devote more than fifteen minutes a day to your family, the canine couture empire you’ve been hoping to launch, or the screenplay you’ve been nursing for the past decade. You want to work in your bunny slippers with your dog lying at your feet. Most important, you want off the corporate hamster wheel and you want it now.
You certainly wouldn’t be alone. Only one in two Americans are happy with their jobs, reports The Conference Board, one of the world’s leading business think tanks. Not surprisingly, in 2007 the U.S. Census Bureau found that almost twenty-one million Americans work as self-employed professionals or independent contractors.
Some of us turn to freelancing in the wake of a layoff. Others turn to it as a way of easing back into the workforce after having a child. Others have simply found that traffic snarls cause them to froth at the mouth and fluorescent lighting gives them a bad rash.
This isn’t one of those “I am perfect and you can be too” books where I tell you how rich and slick and esteemed and redeemed I am (don’t I wish), or how I did everything right when I first fled the cube in 1992 (nothing could be further from the truth). If you’ve read my first book, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, a guide to fleeing the cube farm for flexible, temporary, overseas, social service, or self-employed work, you know I was hardly the poster child for self-employed success during my early freelance years. When I left my day job in the dust at age twenty-four, I had the business sense of a beagle, the paltriest of portfolios, only one client to my name, and no money saved.
Thanks to a crazy little thing called trial and error, I fortunately got with the freelancing program and figured out everything from naming my price and structuring my time to wooing clients and whipping my contracts into shape. To help you do the same (only without all that fumbling in the dark), I packed as much of my freelance know-how as would fit into this book. So consider this your crash course in becoming gainfully self-employed.
Every great story has three acts—even the story of your shiny new freelance life. In this book, I’ve laid