On Career Progress as a Freelancer
I’ve been freelancing for long enough now that I’ve had several other writer friends come to me asking for advice on how to do it. I think sometimes they’re looking for a step-by-step, and I’m afraid I always leave them disappointed because the truth is, there really isn’t one. Every freelancer’s path is going to be different, which is simultaneously one of the best and the worst things about being self-employed in general.
It’s like the difference between playing a side-scroller or an open-world RPG. A side-scroller has a logical, clear progression from level to level—you don’t need to wonder what order to do things in, or where you should go next. In an open-world RPG, you can spend hours just wandering around before you accomplish a single game objective, or accidentally wander into map areas with enemies you’re not strong enough to fight yet and have to backtrack to a more familiar space until you’re ready to face them. It’s up to you to decide when you’re ready to fight the next boss, or which activities and areas you’re most interested in spending time on. It’s no coincidence that open-world RPGs usually have a significantly longer average playtime than side-scrollers, too. If you want to do speed runs, you’re probably playing the latter type—and, I would argue, if your goal is to make quick advancement into a 6-figure salary, traditional employment is where you should focus. You absolutely can reach that income level as a freelance writer, but it’ll take some time to build.
I write about career-oriented topics for one of my freelance clients, so I spend more time than I ever thought I would looking up advice for how to secure promotions, land a better job, and otherwise grow a career for those who are traditionally employed. None of this advice really applies for me, though—or for most people who are self-employed, I would imagine. Those tips are for people who devote all of their work schedule to a single employer at a time, who increase their salary and advance their careers by leveraging their workplace accomplishments to negotiate raises, promotions, or new roles.
There can be some of that as a freelancer, and I have gotten “raises” from clients by increasing my rates. Even this conversation is a bit different, though. Freelancers control their own rates, so if you want to earn more you don’t really ask for a raise so much as you tell the client your new pricing structure. Of course, the client doesn’t have any obligation to keep working with you, so a rate increase always needs to be handled carefully to make sure you don’t price out clients that you want to keep.
Making things more complicated is the fact that freelancers often have multiple different clients at once, who may each have their own rates. This is particularly true of freelancers who write articles under their own byline. If you’ve build a reputation and strong name recognition, you can sometimes negotiate higher rates even from well-known markets, but in most cases these outlets will have a set fee structure for writers and that’s just what you earn for writing for them, period.
The final twist in the whole story is that “progress” doesn’t always equate to “higher pay”. Some steps can advance your career while making a lateral shift in terms of earnings or even taking a pay cut. I’ve been making one of these last kind of moves recently myself. From around 2020-2023, my goal for my freelancing career was stability. I had recently bought a house, and my partners both worked in food service at the time, meaning things were very up in the air for them employment-wise because of the pandemic. Having a consistent income was a very good thing for me during those years, so I established a couple of ongoing clients that would provide that. This meant sacrificing some scheduling flexibility, and one client in particular tended to treat me more like an employee, expecting me to respond within certain hours and do work on very tight turnarounds—not an ideal situation for my lifestyle. The work that client had me do was also not ideal, things like YouTube video scripts and list-style SEO blog posts that aren’t my preferred things to write.
So, in January of 2024, I parted ways with that particular client, opening up space in my schedule to take on different kinds of work. I knew that, by doing so, I would likely earn less in 2024 than I did in 2023, but that’s something I can afford now: both of my partners are in stable jobs again, I have enough in savings to cover any big-ticket repairs the house needs—and, maybe most importantly, I’m confident that I could land another “boring but pays well” client if I need to, maybe even one that pays even better, or offers more enjoyable work, than the client I fired a few months ago.
All of these complicating factors are likely why you don’t see as many people offering advice on how to make career progress as a freelancer. It’s just like creative writing itself—what works for one person might or might not work for you; there are multiple paths that can lead you to the same objective, none of which are inherently better than the rest.
The best advice I can offer to someone who wants to progress as a freelancer is to start by identifying your goals. These are likely to change over time. When I first started, my goal was simple: to live by words alone. I wanted to make enough to live on without needing another job and I took just about any and every offer that came my way in that pursuit.
Once I reached the point I was steadily maintaining a full-time workload, I started to focus on increasing my per-hour earnings. I took some fairly low-paying clients when I was still building my reputation and work portfolio. At the beginning, I’d accept work that paid as little as .01/word for writing, or $10/hour for editing. I stopped accepting work from these low-paying sources as I added better paying clients to my roster. By the end of 2023, the lowest rate I’d accept for new work was .08/word for writing, $27/hour for proofreading, or $30/hour for deeper editing. Granted, higher pay usually also means more complex work that requires a bit more time and attention, but even so that’s translated to a nice hourly raise.
A higher hourly rate gives you more freedom. It means you can earn more doing the same amount of work—or earn the same doing less work, if you want to free up space in your schedule for other projects. That was the path I took at the start of 2024. One of my long-term goals has always been to be an author and make money from writing my own fiction and articles, under my own name. Now that I have a book out, I felt ready to start pivoting more into that “author” space, and away from the copywriting and ghostwriting that have been my primary sources of income to this point.
So I dropped that long-term client I mentioned and reallocated the time I would have spent on their tasks. Some of it went to new, more flexible ghostwriting and editing clients. I also saved a portion of that time each week to start pitching article ideas to freelance markets, and have been devoting more time to attending conferences and book fests, doing public readings, joining the planning committee for local literary events, and otherwise working to build a readership and network as an author. I see these events less as active money makers and more as long-term investments in a future where I can eventually drop for-client writing entirely.
The point I’m at currently in my career feels like a confluence. Up to now, I’ve seen my creative writing and my freelance writing as separate. Fiction is what I do because I want to; freelancing is what I do because I have to. Now, I’m reaching the point that it feels feasible to combine these into one. The types of articles I’m pitching to freelance markets are things I’m actually interested in, the same kinds of topics I already write about for free every week on my blog: writing, publishing, travel, monsters and mythology, pop culture, language, and my other random weird interests. I’m targeting markets and topics that aren’t just about a quick payday but are also building my “brand authority” (as my marketing clients would say) as an expert voice in these areas.
At the same time, I’m continuing to write short stories and send them out, primarily targeting markets that have a broad readership or pay pro rates. I also have a short story collection and novel I’m shopping around to publishers, as well as a new novel I’m cleaning up to hopefully start submitting by year’s end. Again, these are things I’ve been working on the whole time, things I’ll continue to do regardless of whether I ever see a payday from them—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of income eventually. The ultimate goal has always been to center creative work as my career and have the freedom to only take on freelance assignments that I either enjoy or that will actively further this goal.
It’s a bit nerve-wracking to be at this kind of an inflection point because I feel like I’m venturing into completely new territory. I’ve made my living with writing for nearly ten years, sure, but an article pitch is a different beast than a client proposal, and this kind of freelancing is completely different on the back-end financial side, too. I suppose that’s also something that traditional employees experience as they make career progress, though—taking on that first management role, for instance, often means learning a completely new set of skills that your career to that point may or may not have prepared you for. But, then, I’ve always been more of an open-world gamer, and so I suppose it’s only logical that I would choose the freelancer life. I like having options, and that’s something freelancers pretty much always have. Taking control of your career progress comes down to knowing your goals and which opportunities are likely to get you closer to them.
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