I am an academic by training and by my regular employment, teaching anthropology and gender studies and publishing papers for the academic press. But despite what you may have heard, there's not a lot of money in academia, especially for an adjunct like me, so a couple of years ago I took the plunge into freelance writing. I had some marketing and editing experience from working with non-profits, museums, and a doomed dot-com start-up while I was in graduate school, and so I felt I was well-prepared for the writer's life.
It's been both more challenging and more rewarding than I'd expected, but I can definitely say that in the last few years, I've never stopped learning, and that's not something you can say about every vocation! Some of you might know me from my work at Stepcase Lifehack, which I am the manager of as well as the primary writer. I have also written for sites like Freelance Switch, Problogger, and Smashing Magazine.
Offline, I've written for several corporate clients, doing sales sheets, press releases, email copy, and similar sorts of work, mostly for tech companies. And I've ghostwritten a bunch of articles on everything from credit card processing to border security to renewable energy for trade publications. Though it can be terrifying to take on an assignment to produce a kind of material I've never written before, or to cover a topic I know nothing (or worse, almost nothing) about, there's a kind of pride in it, too -- and it's never not interesting.
Like so many other creative people, the thing I was least prepared for when I made that decision to leap into freelancing is the business end of it. Creating invoices, tracking payments, monitoring expenses, keeping tabs on existing clients, finding new clients, building a network of referrals and business contacts -- none of these things came naturally to me (and still don't). I mean, my whole sense of myself as a "creative intellectual" is largely formed in opposition to that kind of work!
But of course, as soon as I decided to write for money, I was no longer a "creative intellectual". I was a small business owner. An entrepreneur, even. And running a business is running a business, whether you sell words or widgets.
Fortunately, now is a great time for a "business-averse" person like myself to enter the business world. The proliferation of easy-to-use web-based tools -- many of them free or incredibly cheap -- has made it quite simple to get up-and-running with little investment of either time or money, and to look professional doing so.
That's how I came across Outright.com for the first time. I was looking for information about paying my quarterly taxes (one of those things that the non-self-employed rarely even know exists) and was feeling a little overwhelmed. The system stinks -- you have to guess your income over the next quarter and pre-pay taxes on what you think you'll earn! And if you're wrong, you can wait a year and get your overpayment back in the form of a refund -- or pay a big penalty for underpaying. Blech!
Then I found out about Outright.com, which promises not to eliminate those concerns but at least to minimize them significantly. And it's free? Sign me up! But what really impressed me was the way Outright drew in date from other services, like Freshbooks and Shoeboxed. Impressed me so much that I wrote up a description of how to use Outright.com with Freshbooks and Shoeboxed for Freelance Switch. And started shifting my bookkeeping, invoicing, and contacts from LessAccounting to Freshbooks. It's not that I'm unhappy with LessAccounting -- it does a great job. But the ability to combine data from several sources and automate processes like computing quarterly tax payments means one less business-y thing I have to worry about -- which in turn means I can focus on writing, which is something that I actually enjoy.
I'm excited to be joining this community to share my experiences as a freelancer and self-employed professional -- and to learn from yours. I expect to write a lot about the tools and tricks I've discovered to make my freelancing life work, but I'm always open to suggestions too. If there's something you think worth discussing, email us and let me know. And by all means, leave a comment or pop into the forum and introduce yourself, too -- we're all friends here!
Dustin M. Wax will be joining the team at Outright.com to write about issues related to the freelance life, writing, technology, "and whatever else crosses my mind..."
He is managing editor of Stepcase Lifehack and also contributes to Freelance Switch, Smashing Magazine, and Problogger. You can follow Dustin @dwax
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