How I make money and reflections on my first six months as a freelancer
Because snooping into someone else’s work life is always fascinating
Goodness, I have not written a new Substack in two weeks and I’ve missed it. Last weekend I was incapacitated with a horrid flu-ish virus that left me flailing around in bed for 48 hours, shivery and headache-y and blowing my nose through two boxes of tissues until the skin around my nostrils was red and dry and painful. But now I’m back and glad to be back and thankful for every one of you and here goes…
I’m gearing up to submit my first ever tax return and I’m absolutely shit scared about it. It feels daunting and I’m already so petrified of HMRC and its mean brown envelopes, that instead of actually filling in this tax return, I’ve spent my time learning how to make pie charts in Google Sheets which, actually, I’ve decided is a very useful life skill.
I got the idea from this substack by
and can I just tell you how addictive sorting your own data can be, especially once you’ve worked out how to highlight cells and add them all up #humblebrag. I’ve been breaking the data down every which way - by month, by when the money came in, by when I sent invoices out - and, well, who knew how satisfying making pretty little graphs and charts and order out of chaos could be!Now I’m not going to share the figure I’ve made so far because, well, this is still the worldwide web and, in truth, I’m not very happy with the figure. I want it to grow. I need it to grow, really. Instead I want to show you the pie chart where I broke down exactly how I make my money with each slice showing a different thing I do as a freelancer. To the uninitiated, these are called revenue streams and here are mine:
This exercise is so interesting because it really shows me things I’d been blind to. I always thought I wasn’t getting commissions and that I had to pitch for every piece I wrote. But, the pie doesn’t lie. It shows that while the majority of my published work starts life as a pitch, a good chunk is editors coming to me and asking me to write something.
The chart also shows something that ain’t great news for me. I made almost as much money doing shifts (working for the day at a newspaper) as I did pitching stories. This is particularly bad news as I stupidly - STUPIDLY - chucked in a regular gig shifting at a newspaper which would definitely have eased my financials, plus (as I’ll go into later) I think going into an office a couple of days a week would have helped my head these past few months.
The pie also gives me some information on what I want. I definitely want to add in a couple more slices to the pie - I really want to try my hand at copywriting - but it also makes me think about how the slices relate to each other. The book reports slice might not be very substantial (i.e. the last six months it accounted for just five per cent of my salary) but I love reading manuscripts and preparing reports on them. Also, it’s wonderful to have some work that doesn’t rely on me writing something for publication or having an idea. Sometimes I just want to read someone else’s words and give my poor brain a rest.
Anyway, we’ve done the pie chart, what has the first six months of being freelance been like?
It’s been a ride. I feel so walloped over the head by the experience that I can’t make it out. Has it been good? Yes. Has it been bad? Yes. Have there been days where I’ve been elated and felt seriously sorry for people who don’t do a job they love? Yes. Have there been days when I’ve come face-to-face with the realisation that I made a terrible, terrible mistake going into journalism and wish I was one of those lucky people who long ago made peace with the fact they didn’t love their job? Yes.
My freelance career had a turbulent start after I was made redundant from the newspaper I worked at. I was already looking for an exit route from this publication but redundancy is never nice. Even the word is horrible. Just say I was laid off! So although I had longed to go freelance for a good while and had always been intrigued by, even jealous of, my friends who were freelance, it wasn’t my decision in the end.
So here comes a pro: I have done the best work of my career so far as a freelance journalist. Before, I very rarely did work I was proud of. There are a couple of exceptions for sure and I’ve been swept up in the adrenaline of a scoop, lost in the sheer enjoyment of interviewing someone or the excitement of travelling on a story, but it was very rare for me to feel like I was writing something that was actually worthwhile. This year, through being freelance, I have been able to write some things I thought were worthwhile which really is a wonderful feeling.
Having said all that, I’ve also learnt you can’t build a freelance career and keep the wolf from the door writing exclusively articles that make you beam with pride. At least I can’t. And yes, this year I’ve written articles because I needed some money. And that’s fine when it’s a straightforward news story or a feature but I’ve also written a couple of personal pieces because I needed the money and I’ve learnt that leaves you feeling unpleasant - a bit grubby and exposed and vulnerable. It’s not a good feeling.
Let’s come to the biggest issue of them all, money.
So I’ve learnt I won’t starve as a freelance journalist - which is obviously good news. But also, I won’t - at least yet - make the money I believe I need to live the kind of lifestyle I want. And the jury’s out on whether, in time, that money will come. When I’m despairing, I try to remember that I’ve only been doing this for six months and it will, I’m guessing(?), get better in time. One friend told me that all freelancers said the first year was horrendous which gave me great comfort.
I’ve also learnt that, man alive, is the flow of income wildly unpredictable as a freelancer. One month this year I earned a solid, juicy, totally sustainable £5,020. The next month I brought in a paltry, not-enough-to-pay-my-mortgage £539. And your income feels different as a freelancer. Before, when my monthly salary hit my account, it was nice, yes. But I didn’t feel particularly grateful for it or really as though I had earned it. It was more like a pat on the head. Now I have a completely different relationship to the money that comes into my account. I feel like I fucking earned it. I feel satisfied and victorious and… scrappy. Scrappy is a good feeling. It’s like I’m hustling, scratching around in the dirt, making shit happen to get those pounds coming in and, a lot of the time, I’ve actually preferred that to being an employee.
But then, of course, there are the times when it’s not fun. When you can’t think up another idea but you’ve also got to pay the council tax. When you don’t hear back on that pitch and you really need the money to clear your credit card. When you are lying in bed worrying about how you’re going to manage that delicate balance of incomings and outgoings. When a friend excitedly tells you they have a fun plan and all you can think is: my God, how much is that going to cost me? It’s a horrible spot to be in and I’ve been in it a few times the last six months. It’s then that I start scrolling through LinkedIn and think to myself - well, maybe it IS time to become a content editor for a truck manufacturer.
Ok, ok, but what about the freedom? What about being your own boss, and escaping the strip lighting that every office seems to have to have by law and that awful realisation that you spend more time with your colleagues than your loved ones?
I think I’ve forgotten the daily grind of offices and bosses and colleagues because when I wrote the above, my immediate reaction was a shrug. Yeah, I guess it’s a pro? I’ve become too used to starting my work whenever I want and calling it a day whenever I feel like. I definitely enjoy going to a yoga class without any passive aggressive colleagues making comments about the length of my lunch break. Urgh, you know what, it is great. Even writing the words ‘lunch break’ makes me grateful that I don’t work full time in an office. I don’t want to have lunch breaks. I want to have lunches, baby.
But - with yet another swing of the pendulum - I do miss people. I don’t think I’ve ever felt lonelier than I have over the last six months. I suspect WFH alone is not good for my head. Especially when I don’t have enough work and I ruminate away, building things up in my mind, getting very upset over things that I would just brush off if I had to put on a brave face around colleagues.
So in the new year, I’m redoubling my efforts to get a part time job - to bring me out of myself and back around people because that’s one of the things I really miss from my old job. I will give journalists this: they are almost always great fun. I miss the bouncing around of ideas, the giggles, the gossip. I miss knowing every day I would see people I cared about. (The job really was an odd one, awful in many ways and yet such fabulous, fun people who remain great friends today.)
As you can see, my reflections on my first six months as a freelancer really are all over the place. There feels like a very long list of pros and a very long list of cons and I’m just ricocheting between the two. I wish I could wrap it up in a bow for you (and for me), a nice summation, a take-away point but I can’t find it. I’ve loved being freelance and I’ve loathed it. I want to do it forever and I’m hopping into the next full time job that will have me. Is it going well? I have no clue. But have you ever heard the saying, ‘you are exactly where you’re meant to be’? It’s something they say in recovery a lot. I think those eight words are some of the most deeply comforting I’ve ever heard. And I’m really, really going to try to believe them.
Some recommendations…
Why do I know more about antidepressants than my GP?
Wrote about the frustration of getting prescribed antidepressants by a GP who doesn’t seem all that knowledgeable about them, in The Times yesterday. This subject is definitely a polarising one - I’ve had emails from people who went through something similar and an email from an angry GP which I (probably unwisely) replied to. If it’s a subject you’re interested in, here’s the link.
Saltburn
Oh my God, I am so glad I dragged my arse to the cinema on a cold blowy night to see this because it is SOMETHING. It’s Brideshead Revisited 2.0, directed by uber talented and uber posh Emerald Fennell who also did the fantastic Promising Young Woman.
It’s about a working class boy (complete with Northern accent) who goes to Oxford and becomes obsessed with the beautiful, aristocrat Felix then ends up spending an idyllic summer at Felix’s stately pile with his fucking mad family, lusting after their wealth, beauty, and of course class - which is oh so effortless and nonchalant and you’re either born into it or you ain’t, sweetie.
Listen, this film really is too much - a lot of it is just too much - but it’s also brilliant as well as terrible. Can you tell I was left with mixed feelings? One thing I do know is that I’m never ever ever going to be ok with soapy bathwater fagain. Oh, and I loved the closing scene where he’s dancing around starkers (I can’t tell you where because it’s a spoiler). Alexandra Jones wrote the best thing I’ve read on the film - and wove in a bit about her time as an intern at Tatler. But go see it! It really is SOMETHING.
The Chanel exhibition at the V&A
I went to this exhibition with my sister and my mum and it was lovely. Of course it was lovely - you just wander through room after room of Chanel ball gowns and tea dresses and flapper dresses and cocktail dresses and tweed suits and bottles of Chanel No 5 and pearls and, well, isn’t that a nice thing to do? I don’t know that I took away all that much - and I did note that the exhibition presented her downright Nazi activities in World War Two in a much more vague, ambiguous light than her Wikipedia entry does - but it did hammer home how ahead of her time ‘Coco’ was, how her designs and the textiles she chose were groundbreaking and how clued into marketing she was - 70 years ago, Coco knew she needed to have a perfume line, a makeup line and a skincare line to get the big bucks. As ever, the V&A gift shop does not disappoint. I love their Christmas baubles.
#TheStew
When I was in New York, my dear friend and flatmate Lorenzo and I fell in love with the cook Alison Roman. We called her our Quarantine Queen. She’s very big in America and this stew - a chickpea, turmeric, coconut healing concoction - was what put her in the big league. Simply everyone was making it (controversially some people think it’s more of a soup) and posting about it online with the hashtag #thestew. I’ve probably made it about seven times now, I think? And I love it. I love how it tastes, how good for you it feels, how warm and filling it is, how its bright yellow colour shines out like a beacon against long winter nights and sad thoughts.
I made it this week and, put simply, I think rustling up the stew and serving it to someone you care about is more healing than therapy.
That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom and for being here. I love writing Things We Don’t Talk About (But I Do) for you. If you hit the ‘heart’ button below it will help me get more visibility on Substack and if you have any thoughts, please tell me in the comments. Thanks as ever for reading xxx
Haha, I love your humor: "It’s then that I start scrolling through LinkedIn and think to myself - well, maybe it IS time to become a content editor for a truck manufacturer. "
Such a a beautiful read, beaming with warmth.