Today's day

I imagine that a lot of readers of this blog wonder what I do with my typical workday. I imagine this, of course, because it's probably fiction.

But in case anyone is wondering, here we go:

Today I have a $75 story due on home energy audits. I'm still trying to nail down an interview. Yes, I waited too long to get started on this story.

I also have a $50 content assignment due. This assignment focuses on how important it is for small business owners to analyze their financial statements on a regular basis. Yes, that's not very interesting, but it's easy writing.

I have to write two stories for a blog that I'm working on through the Content Divas site. The stories are on payday loans and bankruptcy. I can write about anything I want, as long as they are on these two topics.

An independent comicbook company needs a press release written. I pump these out fairly quickly.

Finally, I hope to write and turn in five $15 Demand Studios stories.

That's a lot of work, but when the day is done, I'll be able to add more than $250 to my monthly total. That's not bad. This month I'm on track to meet my freelance goals.

Want to make a living as a freelance writer? Learn to juggle

I make enough money as a freelance writer to support my family, keep our house out of foreclosure and put food on our table. Some months are better than others, but for the 15 years I've been working as a freelancer, I've been able to keep us relatively sound financially.

My writing certainly has won any Pullitzers along the way. But I do enough of a good job to keep the work coming in, though it has gotten harder to do that this year.

What's the secret? It's all about building a writing career that's varied enough to survive the little downturns or hiccups that hit every industry.

Here's my formula: I specialize in real estate writing for trade magazines and newspapers. This includes my work as an editor for a real estate trade magazine in Chicago. Of course, this part of my business has taken a big hit lately thanks to the housing meltdown. A slew of the real estate-centered trade magazines that I've written for have either gone out of business or have slashed their freelance budgets.

Fortunately, I have also developed a busy content-writing career. I haven't been writing content stories for too long, but I generally make anywhere from $800 to $1,000 a month in content writing.

I also do some ghost writing for corporate blogs. That part of the business has suffered a bit, too, thanks to the economy. However, I still have a handful of reliable blogging clients.

I still write regularly for the Washington Post, too, and have picked up work this year for an Illinois publisher that creates books full of odd trivia. This means that I've been able to write about the history of Mighty Mouse, the most overwrought Harlequin romance book titles and the world's most dangerous professions. I also write regularly for a local newspaper chain.

Finally, I have nabbed some -- not a lot, but some -- paid writing for comic-book work. That's a blast.

Every day, I make sure to apply for new writing business. It's the only way you can survive as a freelance writer, especially in this lousy economy.

It's a lot of work, but it's better than sitting behind a desk all day.

Persistence pays off: Publisher coughs up missing money

It's a sad fact: It's harder to get paying jobs these days thanks to the dismal economy. There's pretty fierce competition from freelance writers for even some of the lousier writing jobs.

What's even worse, though, is that it's getting more difficult to force deadbeat publishers to cough up the money they actually owe freelancers.

This happened to me earlier this month, when a publisher seemed to disappear after I turned in a short writing assignment for him. I bugged him a few times by e-mail, didn't hear anything and decided to give up. It wasn't worth my time, I figured.

Then I changed my mind. The money wasn't a lot. But I did do the work. I deserved to get paid. So I started bugging the publisher again. This time, I heard back. And, amazingly enough, the payment showed up in my Paypal account.

Of course, I don't expect I'll get any more work from this guy. His message back to me was a bit on the ticked-off side. But so what? I don't want to write for people who I have to constantly pester to get paid.

On the down side, I have two other clients -- print publications that actually pay significantly more -- that are late on a total of $1,750. Again, that's not a ton of money, but it's enough when the assignments are so hard to come by. Come Monday, I'll be bugging these editors and publishers, too.

It's a bit of a shame, really. Freelance writers want to write. They don't want to run their own collection agencies.

A reality check: Content writing doesn't bring enough of them (checks,that is)

I got a big wake-up call yesterday. During much of this year, I've been losing print clients, some big, some small. Many of them simply went out of business thanks to declining ad sales. Others became online only publications. And still others eliminated their freelance-writing budgets entirely.

This has been nerve-wracking. But I've been holding things together. It helps that I also have a full-time, part-time magazine-editing job that pays my mortgage.

Then yesterday, my top freelance client gave me the news I'd been dreading: This trade magazine, too, was cutting back. I'll still get freelance assignments from them. But instead of two a month, I'll probably end up with one every other month. That's a huge, painful drop.

It's sent me back to the world of pitching again. Yesterday I had some success: A real estate agent is interested in having me ghostwrite his blog for him. A newspaper chain may have me write a weekly real estate column for them. And a book publisher might hire me out to write a chapter or two in one of its trivia books.

I felt better at the end of the day, though still nervous. There's no guarantee that any of the above three projects will come to fruition.

What I didn't do yesterday was any content writing for Suite 101, Examiner.com, Demand Studios or any of my niche blogs. When faced with the loss of some very real dollars, the content writing just didn't seem worth it. The payoff is too low.

It reminds me that while experimenting with content writing is OK, relying on it for any serious money is a mistake. When things get tight, it's time to go back to the basics of pitching stories to new publications and reconnecting with editors you've worked with in the past. It's the only way to recover when you've lost a well-paying regular client.

If you think freelancing is bad, try working for a newspaper

There are days when I hate being a freelance writer. They're the days when my phone doesn't ring, my e-mail messages go unanswered and the mailman delivers me the credit-card bill when I was really hoping for that check from a late-paying publisher.

But then, every time I even contemplate chucking the freelance life, I get a reminder of why working for myself is the best job I've ever had.

A former editor of mine -- my very first, actually, from back when I worked for $13,000 a year at my local community newspaper -- sent me a message. He knows that I sometimes write for the comic-book industry, and he wanted to know if the publisher I work with needed any writers. Turns out, my former editor was on an unpaid one-week furlough from the newspaper chain for which he works as an editorial page editor.

Yes, my former editor is nervous. With the state of the newspaper industry -- with solid papers like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Seattle Post Intelligencer failing -- he's worried that he'll soon be out of a job. He's already survived one round of staff firings this winter. He's not sure he'll escape a second round.

So, yes, freelancing can be a tough go. And, yes, there are times when you wonder where your next month's payments will come from. But no matter how bad it gets, at least you're in control. You can scour the Internet, hit the phones, pester former editors and do everything it takes to find work. You can try online writing options for the first time. You can create blogs, equip them with Adsense and hope they take off. You can submit stories to places like Triond or Suite 101 in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they'll generate at least some spending cash.

People who work full time at newspapers and magazines can do all this, too, of course. But if they don't already have that freelancer's risk-taking spirit, they might not diversify their writing lives until they're already out of work and desperate for a paycheck.

So next time your 18-month-old son wakes up 45 minutes early from his nap -- as mine is doing now -- remember, it could be worse: You could be getting a pink slip from your boss this morning.

It's time to apply like crazy

A year ago, I'd turn up my nose at much of the writing I'm doing today. Blogging for $12 a post? That would have been way beneath me.

But it's not one year ago. It's today. And today, there are very, very few writing jobs that are still beneath me.

A former editor of mine -- actually my first editor -- sent me an e-mail message yesterday asking me about comic-book writing. (I do some writing for independent comics. If you think the pay is bad for blogging or content writing, try writing a comic script for a comics company that isn't Marvel or DC.) Turns out, his newspaper chain just put him on a one-week unpaid furlough. It's an alternative, management said, to more layoffs.

So, yes, the writing and publishing industry is in the crapper these days, and a lot of freelance-writing careers are following them. I'm determined to not have this happen to me, if at all possible, so I'm supplementing my print-magazine clients -- who are dwindling every day, it seems -- with as much online writing as I can. This means that I'm applying for some jobs that I'd never, ever consider in previous years. Of course, so are a lot of other freelancers. That's why I apply for so many jobs, even some that may not perfectly match my skill sets. When there's so much competition, you have to throw a lot of cover letters out there and hope some stick. So far, I'd say I get about one or two potential hits a week. Not all of these turn into jobs, but some do.

There are two places every freelance writer should search regularly for online writing jobs: Deb Ng's Freelance Writing Jobs and Anne Wayman's About Freelance Writing. Anne and Deb do the hard work of scouring the Internet for job leads, shoveling through the junk on craigslist and other sites to provide us lazy freelance writers with the possible nuggets.