You can work all the hours you want and no more. And industry standard rates are a dollar a word.

Right?

Uh, wrong. For most of us, anyway.

Herewith, a few things you might want to know before you even contemplate chucking in the day job, should you have one (and, if you’re thinking about that, you might want to see my post So How Can I Earn Enough Money to Travel the World?).

Everybody Pays Late

I get very cross when I read advice to freelancers about income that fails to mention this. Yes, yes, yes, we need to get the work. We GET that! We don’t get paid until we have done the work! We get that, too. But, often, we do not get paid until a VERY long time after we do the work.

Standard invoice terms (outside the rarefied world of blogging – on which see this), are 30 days from submission of copy, accompanied by an invoice. That means, in practice, that the earliest someone will even THINK about paying you is 30 days after it hits the accounts department, or, more accurately, the Friday after 30 days after it hits the accounts department.

That is also the earliest date on which it is acceptable to tentatively enquire if you can have your money now, if that’s not too much trouble, please, pretty please.

This process can require submitting anything from your bank details to a blood sample to a hair from the head of Yoda to the accounts department, which may, if you’re working with a big company, have been outsourced to anywhere from Bulgaria to the Philippines.

You can often get later terms than this, such as “90 days after publication”. Yeah, that’s right. You do the work, you submit the work, they sit on it for a while, publish it in a few months, and then pay you 90 days after that. In theory.

Some big organisations also require a Purchase Order (PO) to be raised, a process which can require submitting anything from your bank details to a blood sample to a hair from the head of Yoda to the accounts department, which may, if you’re working with a VERY big company, have been outsourced to anywhere from Bulgaria to the Philippines.

If you’re used to a salary dropping into your bank account on the last Friday of every month, this is a very, VERY rude shock. And, no, I’m still not used to it.

When You Need the Money, Everyone Pays REALLY Late

Sod’s Law guarantees that the month where you REALLY, REALLY need the money – perhaps you have no money for food, or perhaps you really, really want that super-duper facial – is the month when EVERYONE pays you late.

You’ll know you’re a proper freelancer when you can practise the Freelance Panic Shuffle.

This runs roughly as follows. “What will I do if X doesn’t pay me today?” to “What will I do if X, Y and Z don’t pay me this week?” to “What will I do if X, Y, Z, A, B and C don’t pay me this month?”

The answer? Victory Gin!

Particularly egregious errors will be shared on Facebook and Twitter for their friends and passing grammar Nazis to snigger at.

Being a Professional Writer Is not about Being a Good Writer, Particularly

You can be the best prose stylist on the planet and if you can’t angle a story, pitch a story and sell that story, you are not going to make any money.

Being nice helps, too. Which means, in particular, not being princessy about editing. They cut your best sentence? Really, please, please, please don’t fight with them about it. Unless you’re part of a media dynasty.

I’ve never been good at friendly emails, but I hear that’s pretty key too.

Which Doesn’t Mean You Can Be a Bad One

You will not get far as a writer without the basics of grammar unless you’re, ya know, the future Queen’s sister, or, perhaps, Beyonce.

There are exceptions to this rule. I once received an email from an editor at a women’s mag requesting that interviewees for a feature be “Caucashun only”. I’m not sure exactly what it says about me that I was more shocked by the spelling than the racism, but I don’t think it’s anything good.

Grammar matters if you’re a writer. It’s like steering matters to being a driver. There are many other elements to writing well, but grammar is the bit that stops you hitting things.

Still, at most publications the person who reads what you submit will most likely have a background in proofreading and so will be adopting the brace position with every howler you drop.

Well, no. They’ll cringe at the first error you make, and then throw it out of the door. Particularly egregious errors will be shared on Facebook and Twitter to entertain their friends and fellow grammar Nazis, along with, if it’s really horrifically bad, a screenshot with the offending elements highlighted in green.

Grammar matters if you’re a writer. It’s like steering matters to being a driver. There are many other elements to writing well, but grammar is the bit that stops you hitting things.

And, Further, You Need to Know Stuff

“I don’t have the figures on this” might work on a blog. It’s not going to get past your average paying client. It is really helpful to have expertise in an area, which means genuine, been-there, non-Google, non-Wiki expertise.

Note to travel bloggers: this does not mean reading a guidebook and inaccurately summarising plagiarising it. Nor does it mean paying someone you found on Fiverr.com to do this for you.

And, yes, this does happen.

Freelance Writing is Not, Actually, just Writing about the Fun Stuff You Did

Yeah, I’m afraid, for all but the elite, writing tends to involve research.

I’ve never worked on a guidebook. But whether you’re bar reviewing or covering hotels, you’re talking about trudging from place to place, hitting a tonne of spots in a day, and eliminating, testing or noting and reviewing. It’s leg work. Quite fun leg work, if it’s bars. But leg work, all the same.

Ditto book reviewing. For every book review you place, there’s a tonne of books you’ve read just because that’s your job.

Those “What I Did on My Lovely Holiday” pieces you see in the newspapers? Most of them are press trips, or paid-for holidays offered to the papers in exchange for coverage, increasingly given to staff, including secretaries, who’ll do the writeup for zero cost, because, fuck it, they just went to Mustique with the family gratis for a fortnight, something they’d never otherwise have afforded.

This is, incidentally, precisely the type of cost equation that makes the following piece of advice highly relevant….

Frankly, ladies, that time spent honing your prose is, for most of us, better spent on grooming.

It Helps to be Part of a Double-Income Household

If you’re trying to support children as a freelance writer, it is advisable to have one person in the household with a steady, reliable income, whether that’s to paper over any skint patches or to fund absolutely bloody everything so that you can pursue a decorative career that makes you endlessly fascinating at dinner parties while also remaining flawlessly groomed.

This is especially important if you want to write books, a sector where most are lucky to earn as much as 10 cents a word.

Alternatively… You can be lead earner. That means you need someone around to look after the kids while you gallivant off selling well-structured, well-pitched pieces and bringing in the dough.

Frankly, ladies, that time spent honing your prose is, for most of us, better spent on grooming.

Pitching is Critical

The good writers, by which I mean the workaday ones who make a tonne of money without being famous, can parse and snip down every single trip they take into a tonne of individual jobs – and sell them.

It’s about honing angles, knowing your market, turning your five-day trip to Paris into ten or so unique and saleable pieces that aren’t replicating what’s in the guidebooks.

That, gentle reader, is the hard part. As with most freelance endeavours, when it comes to freelance writing, it’s not doing the work but getting the work that’s the difficult bit. (And even when you’re travelling, work is still work.)

Fighting over whether we can use “helps reduce fine lines” instead of “can help reduce the visible appearance of fine lines” on some piece of 98%-water-100%-voodoo facial bollocks.

Most Words You Will Ever Read Have a Paid Writer Behind Them

I have done a shit-tonne of crap writing jobs in my time, and let me tell you this: even the blurb on your loo roll has been written by someone, and, if it’s a big brand, been approved by layer upon layer of marketing honcho, battled vigorously with the legal department, and probably debated at the kind of meetings that make you want to stab your own eyes out with a plastic fork.

I’ve been to some of those meetings. And whenever I feel low, I look back at them.

Because I still could be reaching for the grey folder we kept of beauty lies that the legal department let slip through and fighting over whether we can use “helps reduce fine lines” instead of “can help reduce the visible appearance of fine lines” on some piece of 98%-water-100%-voodoo facial bollocks.

For Most of Us There’s More Money in Corporates, Always

Wanna make money as a writer? Get a few high-profile or expert journalism gigs, then shill to corporates in your sector.

£400 a day is an entry level day rate here, which is more than what the majority of pure journalists will earn, and each time you get a new client, you can shove another few quid on your day rate until someone baulks.

Corporate copywriting, like technical writing, can be soul-destroying, but it’s also possible to find an enjoyable steady rhythm in it. (Pam Mandel does technical writing for money and travel for a bit extra.)

I’m not old enough to remember the days when you needed to shoot a photo for publication with everything carefully planned out so that you could physically drop metal letters into the spaces between the individual products that you’d shot.

The Freelance Writing Landscape is Ever-Changing

I started writing before the internet was on most people’s horizons. Which is to say, the first office I worked in didn’t have email, although I’m not old enough to remember the days when you needed to shoot a photo for publication with everything carefully planned out so that you could physically drop metal letters into the spaces between the individual products that you’d shot.

I don’t think the kind of dispiriting, $5 a piece jobs you get on elance or on fiverr.com existed when I started. For the ne plus ultra of these (so far), I give you Leif Pettersen.

What’s new? Content. Print media may be shrinking, but web content is growing and there are plenty of organisations out there ready to pay well for good content, AKA good writing. Social media – yes, looking after Facebook can be a full-time job. It is also possible to make money self-publishing ebooks, without necessarily making yourself the apex of a pyramid scheme.

Regular Gigs are Critical

Unless you’re in the top 0.001% of writers, who can flog a piece for $5000-$8000 every so often and then fuck off, or have an absolutely bloody loaded partner – a good divorce settlement will do too – regular monthly gigs are critical.

That could be people who’ll take a piece off you every month, a weekly column, a daily content gig – but you really want enough regular gigs to cover the baseline expenses, which frees you up to go after higher-paying stuff in the interstices for gravy.

And that, for now, concludes the lesson.

Look out for my upcoming post on how to be a freelance writer. But, for the meantime, consider whether this is actually what you want.

Picture credit: jetheriot.

The post A Few Things You Might Want to Know about Being a Freelance Writer appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I hate the term “location independent”, but that’s one way of describing what we are, because I can work and earn from most places in the world as I travel with my son.

That’s provided, of course, our travels are going to plan and I’m not stuck somewhere with no internet or handling third world bureaucracy for a week.

I’m going to do a post on how I, personally, earn enough money to travel in a couple of weeks (this post is a good, bubble-bursting introduction to what can be a difficult and precarious living), but here I’ll explore how some people make the location independent thing work — even if they have families to keep.

The basic principle is: cut your expenses and work as little as you can for as good an hourly rate as you can get.

Rule 1: Travel Cheap

The first rule of world travel is, if you come from an expensive country (see this post for the other side of the coin), most countries are going to be cheaper than your own.

Our 20 day trek to Everest Base Camp, for example, including food, accommodation — everything — cost us roughly my share of the mortgage for a month in our old place in London. (See How Much Does the Everest Base Camp Trek Cost? for more.)

You can rent a three bedroom house with a guest cottage and a pool outside Ubud in Bali for a month for the price of a week’s rental of a two-bedroom flat in my old part of London, or a simple three-bedroom house in Dahab for a month for £150 (more here).

WWOOFing is an option for some, where you live on a farm in exchange for your labour. House-sitting gigs are another way to remove accommodation costs, and, if you’re part of the couchsurfing community, you can find families prepared to host you for free.

So you don’t need to earn a lot of money to travel. We live on a lot less than we did in London, and, because of vast global inequities that I do feel guilty about, we live much better than we did.

Rule 2: Travel Slowly

The second rule is to travel relatively slowly. This is the only way that longterm travel is sustainable for most – there’s only so long you can sleep two nights in one place, wake for a 5am bus ride, then sleep one night in a new place and move on again, before you start to go stir-crazy.

And it’s also cheaper. Longterm rentals are cheaper than short-term rentals, and having the leisure to get on the ground and look around, rather than being limited to what’s available online, means that you can find the good deals. You can travel overland, which I prefer to plane travel, and is both greener and cheaper.

In much of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, it’s possible for two people to live well AND travel on $1000 a month or less, while even in places like Spain and Greece you can find longterm rentals for 300 euros a month.

Travelling slowly is key, though. If you’re taking planes every week, and staying in posh hotels, your costs will skyrocket. By contrast, if you take a rental for a month or more, you can go diving every day on the change you’re getting from staying in a hotel.

Personally, I like to mix things up. Have a base somewhere for a month or two, exploring largely locally, then go on adventures for a few months, covering a lot of ground, then get a base again.

But… What about MONEY?

If you’re lucky enough to have married rich, won the lottery, retired on a pension, or own a house with no mortgage that you can rent out, or a house with a tiny mortgage that you can rent out, that’s your revenue stream sorted, so you need read no further.

If you’re not, then here’s a basic principle for you.

Rule 3: If You Can Telecommute, You Can Travel the World

Any job you can do online or via telecommuting, you can do while travelling the world.

But — and this is an important but — you can’t do a fulltime job while travelling, because travel in itself takes time.

If you commit to a fulltime job, you’ll spend your time stuck in one place, grappling with bad internet, running to stand still: and even if you’re on the world’s most perfect beach — especially if you’re on the world’s most perfect beach — you will be living quite the reverse of the dream.

Some portable jobs? Freelance writing. Graphic design. Web design. Computer programming. Day trading. Marketing. Online businesses from Etsy stores upwards, though shipping can take some juggling. Medical transcription. Virtual assistant-ing. Translating. Teaching via Skype. Photography. Legal research. Business research. Search Engine Optimisation. And, of course, voodoo stuff like life coaching, social media consultancy and travel blogging.

Many skilled jobs can increasingly transfer over to an online role – here’s an example of how a qualified nurse might be able to translate those skills and training into working remotely.

Let me say that one more time. Anything you can do online from home, you can do online from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. And, most likely, you’ll need to do less of it, though you may need to choose your time zone carefully.

Further, anything that can be done on well-paid short contracts can be done with gaps between those contracts spent travelling.

But what about if you’re not currently in one of those jobs?

Rule 4: Unless You’re an Expat Working for a Big Company, Travel Doesn’t Mean Big Bucks

Jobs that require a physical presence can be portable, though you’d be looking at stints of months in one place getting together money, followed by a stretch of travel, followed by a pause to replenish your finances. There are fairly few flexible jobs available overseas, and most don’t pay particularly well.

If you’re a qualified, experienced teacher, teaching at international schools overseas can provide a living that’s good enough to keep a family well, and enable you to travel the region you’ve chosen during your holidays. (Most Brits and Americans will enjoy a better standard of living teaching overseas than they do at home, and the home base will typically be good enough to allow a high level of home exchange.)

TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)? Less so. These are great jobs for a single person, or a couple, but unless you’re a really strong career TEFL teacher with a stack of qualifications and experience prepared to make longterm commitments you’re not going to earn enough to even keep a family, let alone to travel with them.

Hospitality? If you’re an elite bartender working in high end bars, you’ll be able to make a good living overseas, though again you’ll be looking at longterm contracts. Bar gigs in traveller spots will typically keep a roof over a single person’s head, with some money left for beer, drugs and cigarettes, but very little more – this is also the case with working in hostels or guesthouses, or in promotions roles. There is no money in cooking or waiting.

Other options? Gigs like teaching yoga, or teaching scuba diving, are portable but tend not to pay well (scuba instruction, like many dream jobs, involves long hours for not much money: see this post for more). Offering hair cuts, tattoos, massage or crafts on the beach can keep a single person in beer, weed and fried rice but is unlikely to do more.

Incidentally, anyone who tells you you can make big bucks online easily is lying to you. (You can see how many travel bloggers spend their time here, and it isn’t travelling.)

Rule 5: If You’re Freelance, Diversify

It is absolutely critical if you’re freelancing anywhere, but especially when you’re travelling the world, to have multiple clients and, for many, multiple income streams as well.

You’re likely to be picking up most of your work online, rather than through face to face networking as you might at home.

So a writer might do some writing, some editing, some blogging and some English teaching. A marketer might do some social media consultancy, some marketing, some blogging and happen to be a yoga teacher on the side. Some graphic designers also do photography and/or branding work; translators might also teach languages, work correcting translation errors in advertising and menus, and even land up copywriting.

This blogger was at one point combining medical transcription, diving instruction and paid writing work.

Flexibility, initiative and regular gigs are key to making the location independent work thing, well, work.

What if I Don’t Have a Job?

Rule 6: Just TRAVEL!

Some of the toughest questions I get on Facebook, normally as messages, and on my About page, are from other single parents who would love to travel like we do but can’t currently see a way forward: often unemployed young mums feeling incredibly trapped and terrified that life is passing them by.

Because, here’s the thing, if you’re not part of the digital economy, where you can live somewhere cheap while earning Western wages online, it IS hard to earn enough to travel by working in many countries, because wages in non-digital jobs tend to be much, much lower than at home.

Working while travelling as a single parent is especially difficult because you need to also care for and educate your child, or children: you’re the sole earner, sole carer and you’re keeping at least two people on your income.

I tend to recommend two things to single parents who want to travel with their kids and aren’t currently working — in the UK childcare costs can be so prohibitive that single parents are often better off not working.

The first is, if you have a supportive family who can help with childcare, move in with them, lose your rental costs and childcare costs, then bust a gut doing some job – any job! – for a year until you have the money to travel for a few months or a year: £5000 should be enough to get you and your kids at least six months overseas, far longer if you really shoestring and stay for long periods in cheap places.

The second is to get a qualification and some marketable skills, be that teaching, nursing or coding (media and writing degrees turn out about as many pro writers as arts degrees turn out pro artists, AKA close to zero). You can then use these to work as you travel, and to work on your return, or wherever you end up.

Rule 7: Not Everyone Can Earn Money While They Travel

But here’s the rub. Brutal honesty? Not everyone can earn while they travel. Not everyone has those skills. And, you know what? That’s OK!

Some people can find a path that leads the way they think they will. Some people will find a very different path from the one they expected. Some will find this path is not for them.

But travel is a good thing in itself. It opens your mind, and your children’s minds, it transforms all of you, and it’s something that will stay with you for the rest of your lives.

So I would always, always recommend you take the leap and go, be it for a few months, a year, or as long as you can last before the money runs out – you might find, for example, that there are ways of making a living you hadn’t anticipated.

Because the quality time you get with your children while travelling, the experiences you have, the adventures you go on, will stay with you, all of you, for the rest of your lives.

So go. Even if it means moving in with mum – if she’ll have you. Just go. And, if you’ve got the money to go now, quit planning and go NOW.

Photo credits: Mindsay Mohan, Rob Pearce, Judit K, Hampton Roads Partnership and Victoria Graffiti.

The post So How Can I Earn Enough Money to Travel the World? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.