My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [34]
Having a specialty doesn’t mean you have to pigeonhole yourself. In fact, to stay in the black, cultivating an assortment of skills, services, or products within your niche is a must. “Most illustrators that I know also do web design or animation or teach or some combination,” says illustrator Nina Frenkel, who does everything from illustrating children’s books to animating music videos to teaching at the college level. “And I don’t find that a bummer or a sell-out or a sad thing. I find that very exciting that all of these different things feed each other.”
It all comes back to that bread-and-butter safety net I’ve been talking about. “Though I feel spread thin at times, I try to keep a diversity of beats—even if I’m just doing the occasional off-topic article, in the event I need it later—to keep myself recession-proof,” says Seattle-based business reporter Jane Hodges. “I consider doing this a very minor gesture compared to getting stuck and having to go back to some full-time job I don’t want. So I write mostly about business and real estate, but I also write on mergers and acquisitions, astrology, and personal finance. If one of those industries shrinks editorial demand for coverage, I can shift emphasis and spend more time writing about the other topics without a lot of upheaval.”
Diversifying also means keeping on top of the latest tech innovations in your field. Forget publish or perish—today it’s blog/vlog/pod-cast /download or perish. Considering how rapidly the delivery media of film, music, software, journalism, visual arts, broadcasts, and anything else you can create is changing, we freelancers would be fools not to keep one foot in the digital pool. If you’re not up on the latest business trends, start skimming the business pages. Or use Google alerts to get pinged with news stories on your industries of choice. If you’re only targeting dying business models like pay phone companies for clients, it won’t be long till you’re SOL and out of work. Look to the future, my fellow Luddite, and make sure you have a healthy amount of sustainable customers on your dance card.
Channel Your Inner Nancy Reagan (Just Say No!)
Part of strategically shopping for clients and cultivating a specialty (or three) is learning to turn down the gigs that don’t fit in with your master plan. This should come naturally when someone offers you minimum-wage pay or asks you to work on an ad campaign for, say, keeping teenage girls barefoot and pregnant (believe it or not, it’s happened to me). Usually, though, the distinction between “right up my alley” and “not really my thing” isn’t so clear-cut. The pay might be good, the client might be reputable, but the job is longer, shorter, bigger, smaller, more technical, less technical, duller, or more vanilla than what you normally do. Or it’s a one-off gig for a one-time client in an obscure industry that doesn’t warm your heart and won’t pad your portfolio in any way. Or you used to do that kind of work but are trying to move away from it now.
Wedding photographer Anne Ruthmann, who lives in a small Indiana town but shoots all over the country, gets a lot of calls from couples who want traditional, posed, supermodel-for-a-day shots. Since she’s more a candid, action-shot kind of gal, she refers those clients to a photographer who does what they’re looking for. “I am not their photographer. I may show them at their most embarrassing moment. But I’m going to paint a very realistic and loving picture of them,” she says.
Turning down some of the gigs you’re offered might be scary at first. And if you haven’t worked in three weeks and haven’t eaten in three days, I wouldn’t advise it. But if you’re not starved for work or sustenance, remember that twenty hours spent on a “not really my thing” project is twenty hours you could have spent looking for a gig that’s more in line with your master plan.
“Saying no has become one of my greatest strengths because I’ve been able to work by and large with people