My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [81]
THROW AN EVENT. “The press won’t write about an unknown artist, but they’ll write about something folks can have fun at,” Molly Crabapple says. The woman knows of what she speaks. The biweekly burlesque drawing event she launched in 2005, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, spread her name around the globe and landed her hundreds of press write-ups. Like an art class on acid, Dr. Sketchy’s has spread to fifty cities around the world, became a book in 2006, and now covers the cost of Molly’s New York rent check each month.
If you want to throw an event, team up with your fellow freelancers (including one with prior event-planning experience), get people drunk (or at least feed them cupcakes), and amuse your audience with your talents. When throwing an event, bring sign-up sheets to collect names for your mailing list, postcards featuring your web address, and any products you have to hawk. Go for the soft sell: Everyone expects a quick announcement that there’s merch, literature, and the like on the back table; no one wants to hear a thirty-five-minute PSA though, unless it’s highly entertaining.
NOTIFY THE MEDIA. Don’t wait till the eve of your book reading, art opening, or concert to contact the press. One to three months’ lead time is what they need. Triple that for print magazines. Likewise, don’t trouble a reporter unless you have a really juicy story or exciting event to share. While thrilling to you, chances are your local Lois Lane won’t care that you just celebrated your one-year anniversary as a freelance interior designer—unless you’re Melinda Gates’s designer and have some tips to share on how you snagged one of the richest women in the world as a customer. For all the suggestions you could want about writing press releases, pitching reporters, and spinning an angle that news hounds are likely to appreciate, see PublicityHound.com and PublicityInsider.com.
The Work You Really Want to Do
I once saw actor John Cusack being interviewed on TV about why he makes movies like Must Love Dogs when he clearly could devote his time to more worthy projects like High Fidelity and Being John Malkovich.
“I do one for them, then one for me,” he said, referring to how he alternates between supercommercial big-budget studio flicks and the smaller indie projects that really turn his crank, so he can afford to make the films he wants to make. Sometimes, ole Johnny said, he even gets lucky and one of his commercial films winds up being a meaningful project he’s actually proud of.
By now you know that I’m a fan of juggling pays-the-bills freelance work with the lower-paying creative work that you love most. This isn’t the proverbial sell-out—it’s survival. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. As the alternatives are to get a day job or live on a park bench, I’ll take this balancing act any day of the week.
“I don’t have a trust fund,” says writer Meghan Daum. “I don’t have parents who give me money. I don’t think people realize that a lot of people who are quote-unquote self-employed don’t have money from secret money sources. And if you don’t, you have to do these other things, and there’s no point in being ashamed of it.”
Besides, do you really think any painter, folksinger, or novelist tells herself, “I’m gonna make damned sure I never have enough money to sleep anywhere but on my best friend’s futon for the next decade or vacation anywhere other than the nearest rest stop on I-90”? Doubtful.
“There are so few ways musicians have been aptly compensated for their craft that it makes my heart soar when I hear that great artists I know have licensed a song to a car or insurance company,” says New York singer/songwriter Erika Simonian, who supplements the income she earns from performing and selling CDs by bartending in an organic restaurant two nights a week. “Frankly, it’s my dream to sell one of my songs to another performer or license my music for a commercial.”
But financial peace of mind isn’t the only benefit of adding some corporate, commercial, or commissioned work to your schedule. You