Freelancing: A How-to Success Story

IWW member Nick O'Connor gave permission to transfer his post on the WRITING discussion list to the IWW blog. It is a fine example of how ingenuity and perseverance can combine with writing skills to provide a steady income.

I've been a full-time paid writer for the last year and a half. I write insurance study manuals for a vocational school that's putting manuals online for all of the states; this is my bread-and-butter job. Pays $25 an hour and I have as much work as I can handle, hopefully for another year or two. In addition, I've contributed a dozen articles to an insurance magazine during that same time period -- 650 words at $400 an article.

I got the manual writing job by posting my writing resume on craigslist. The school's owner called me, I interviewed and turned out to be a perfect fit: I had years of legal secretarial experience and the job is essentially taking state laws and turning them into English. She had first hired a lawyer to do the job, but he overcharged and had trouble with the English aspect.

Before that, I had written one or two case studies for the insurance magazine, as described above. How I got that job: I had been unemployed for most of a year and my wife and I were telling everyone we met that I was a writer looking for some kind of work. At a kids' party, my wife met the wife of the insurance magazine editor, who had just fired a writer. She told him, I followed up with an e-mail, he gave me a chance and liked my work. The magazine job appeared on the resume that the vocational school owner saw. I have no doubt this was key to her calling me.

Before that piece of good luck, I had gotten a couple of small jobs through my craigslist resume. One, polishing a janitorial inspection manual, paid about $500 total at $25 an hour. It went onto the resume as soon as I was hired and I'm sure helped the insurance magazine editor make his decision.

Before that: When I first lost my job -- as a secretary, which I hated -- and let a hundred people know I was looking for work, the significant other of an old friend, someone I was not in good touch with, called me. She was looking for writers to contribute to a travel guidebook. The pay was nominal -- $10 for a 75 to 100 word blurb that took about two hours to write well. I wrote about 30 of those, essentially at my leisure while looking desperately for a job. This was the start of my craigslist resume.

However, before that: I've been writing for about 30 years with some seriousness, always trying to improve. I had a few small things published but was never very confident about selling my work. When I put together my craiglist resume I noted my past paid or published writing and added it.

My craigslist resume is pretty lean. There's enough substance to show I'm a serious writer, and no hype. In AP style, more or less. I end it with a quote from my hero, Henry Miller: "Until we accept that life is founded in mystery, we will have learned nothing."