Last month, Jennifer Lawler wrote an excellent guest post on developing multiple streams of income. In the post, Jennifer discussed why it’s important to diversify; for one thing, you’ll have other income generators to turn to if one dries up.
I always sing the praises of diversifying on this blog and to my e-course students. And boy, do I follow my own advice. Here are some of the products and services I offer, both paid and free (which help me promote my paid services). I include links where appropriate so you can see how much goes into each one:
Like I said, diversifying is a good thing, and that’s what I’m doing. But after a certain point, it gets to be too much. There are 12 items on my list, and each of them has its own to-do list with dozens of tasks. For example, for the Renegade Writer e-courses, I have to tell instructors how to build a successful course, put their course info on the website, edit their course lessons, design and password-protect their web pages, and market the courses. For the phone mentoring, I need to market the service, handle payments, send clients forms to fill out, study and think about the information they send me — and then conduct the phone call. And for the Renegade Writer blog, my tasks include brainstorming and writing posts, finding and uploading photos, and moderating and answering comments.
Some of the items on my work list require hardly any work. For example, I probably receive one update request per month for the Review Copy Helper, and the copywriting site has been pretty much dormant for a year. But they take up psychic energy: I should market the copywriting, I should be more proactive in updating the Review Copy Helper.
However, it’s great to have so many forms of income, I love what I do, and even with all this I work only two days per week. In terms of my career, magazine writing makes up a large portion of my income, and the rest of my offerings are lots of little things that each bring in a small to moderate amount of money. If I were to suddenly lose all of my magazine writing income, the rest of my services wouldn’t pick up all the slack, but they would probably keep us from starving.
But it’s gotten to the point where I feel scattered. I have ADD — and I mean that literally — and while it helps me bounce from one task to another quickly, it also makes it hard for
This is a guest post by Jennifer Lawler. Jennifer is the author of more than 30 books, inlcuding Dojo Wisdom for Writers, and has written for magazines ranging from Family Circle to Cooking Light. She teaches a copyediting class at the University of California, San Diego and was formerly a freelance editor for ATA World magazine. We’re excited that Jennifer is teaching the e-course Freelance Editing 101 for The Renegade Writer. Her next session starts on July 12—that’s this coming Monday, so sign up now!
Multiple streams of income. You’ve probably heard that as a freelancer you should have them—but how? And why?
Simply put, having multiple streams of income means you earn money from various sources. A staff reporter has one source of income, her employer; a freelance writer may have ten or more, depending on how many clients she’s juggling at any given time.
Beyond that, though, and what I think is most important for freelancers, is the concept of having a variety of types of income. This makes intuitive sense to most people. If you have one spigot, and it gets turned off, you’re going to go thirsty. If you have ten, and one gets turned off, well, you still have nine to draw water from.
That’s the key to surviving the often-turbulent waters of freelancing. For many years, writers who wrote exclusively for consumer magazines did very well for themselves—and then the economy tanked, and print media was devastated, and those writers were left scrambling to regroup when assignments stopped coming. Going from 80 to 0 in a couple of months is like slamming into a brick wall. It takes a while to shake it off. Writers who weren’t so heavily invested in writing for consumer magazines had an easier time of navigating the new waters.
The problem—which I’m sure you can immediately see—is that you can get too scattered chasing all kinds of opportunities and end up with nothing much to show for your efforts. Everyone has a limited amount of resources (time, attention, energy, knowledge). If I’m trying to break into magazine writing, should I also be trying to break into book publishing and corporate writing at the same time?
Probably not. Although I now have many sources of income—book advances, book royalties, magazine writing, teaching, editing, coaching—I certainly didn’t start that way. I didn’t pursue all of the possibilities at the same time.
I started with books, mostly because I’d always wanted to write them. I focused on martial arts related topics (a subject matter I knew pretty well). Then I started to write for magazines: first, I wrote for magazines that published martial arts content, then I wrote articles with a martial arts slant for general consumer magazines. Then an opportunity arose for me to edit a martial arts magazine, so I branched into that. In the meantime, because I had become familiar with book publishing, and I had some editing skills and deep intimacy with the Chicago Manual of Style (from grad school days), I started doing copyediting and developmental editing for book publishers. Then came chances to teach writing and editing skills at various universities (as well as online courses I develop myself).
What’s effective about this approach is that I got pretty good at one skill (say, writing books). Then I branched out and got pretty good at another skill (say, writing magazine articles). Then I spent time mastering yet another skill (editing magazines). Each time, I was getting paid for mastering the skill,
Last month, Jennifer Lawler wrote an excellent guest post on developing multiple streams of income. In the post, Jennifer discussed why it’s important to diversify; for one thing, you’ll have other income generators to turn to if one dries up.