Building a roadmap for your freelance career

By Virginia Hughes

A freelance writer wears many hats. There’s the writer hat, of course, but also accountant, marketer, strategist, and even social media consultant. As a freelancer, in other words, you’re both a lowly worker and CEO, accountable to no one but yourself.

“The first rule of freelance careers is that no one gives a s--t about your career except you,” said Christie Aschwanden, a leader of Saturday morning’s session on freelancing. Aschwanden has been a freelancer for 16 years, writing primarily for journalistic outlets. In contrast, co-panelist Anne Sasso has developed a booming business of mostly corporate clients. The duo outlined a path of concrete steps for any kind of writer to build a thriving, professional business.

The first step, Aschwanden and Sasso said, is to identify the experiences that make you happiest in your day-to-day work — what they called “tasty buckets.” A tasty bucket might be making money, for example, or interviewing cutting-edge scientists, or being appreciated by editors. You may have lots of different buckets, of all different sizes, and they may change as your career progresses. Not every job has to fill all of the buckets, Aschwanden said. The point is to pick and choose projects and clients so that all of your tasty buckets are full.

Once you’ve identified the tasty buckets, the next step is to make specific goals. They could be ambitious goals — such as writing a book or screenplay — or more modest, such as learning a new type of software. Goals should be under your control: Instead of aiming to win an award, it’s better to aim to write a story worthy of an award. Whatever the goal, it needs a deadline, whether next month or five years from now. “Otherwise goals become big, amorphous things,” Sasso said. You can prioritize your goals based on how much they fill your tasty buckets.

To actually meet those goals, break them down into the smallest possible action steps, the panelists said. If you have a goal of writing for local publications, for example, the first step might be making a list of those publications, followed by finding the email addresses of the editors there, and then writing introductory emails to those people. Then it’s easy to slot each action step into your schedule. “Be super, super specific,” Aschwanden said, “30 minutes on Tuesday at 11 o’clock.”

The final step in running your freelance business — just like in the corporate world — is regularly assessing your progress. The panelists create quarterly and annual reports for themselves, listing, for example: major milestones; income by type of writing and client; expenses; and clients retained, gained, and lost. (The Science Writers’ Handbook offers an annual report template, they noted.)

All of this strategic thinking is important to your CEO mind. But once you’ve made these decisions, it’s often just as important to be able to shut it off. “The CEO mind creates the to-do list for tomorrow,” Aschwanden said. Then when tomorrow comes, listen to your boss. Think to yourself: “The CEO mind told me to do this, so the worker mind is going to follow through.”