How has your world as a freelance writer or author changed this year? Are you noticing differences in your income, your number of clients, your number of assignments, how quickly you are being paid, the number of books you are selling, etc? Is the recession finally starting to touch you where it hurts—your livelihood, your choice of lifestyle?
The trickle-down effect is certainly beginning to trickle down, isn’t it? The magazines you write for are folding, folks aren’t buying books, the authors you edit for are not hiring editors (some have gone back to work and aren’t writing, others are giving their books a lick and a promise and are bypassing a professional editing).
So today, I would like to know the answers to two questions:
1: How is your freelance writing business, book sales or plans for a pending book being affected by the recession?
2: What are you doing about it?
Two simple questions. Respond to them either via the “comments” function of this site or email me at PLFry620@yahoo.com. Everyone who responds receives their choice of ebooks:
How to Write a Successful Book Proposal in 8 Days or Less
The Author’s Repair Kit
Catscapades, Tales of Ordinary or Extraordinary Cats
The Successful Writer’s Handbook
The responder with the best idea for the rest of us gets a FREE copy of my book in print: The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book.
This offer is good through May 1, 2009.
Do people write for money? I thought this was social work. Guess I need to rethink.
At present, the recession effects me more emotionally than financially because when you make little or nothing, it’s hard to go below that. And when your accountant tells you that they pass your annual letters at tax time around the office for entertainment, you know your have a problem. I just wish he would stop asking me if I am sure this is not a hobby.
Note to Patricia: Just messin’ with ya, as you know I never take too much seriuosly, and I also think you’re great! I would like to make money, but then my heart would problem succumb to the shock.
Self-pity got the best of me yesterday. The tears falling onto my keyboard were turning into nano flecks of salt. “Enough of this,” I said and marched into my bedroom, pulled back the drapes and opened the french doors wide. The gentle breeze and sunlight filtered in through the vines that cover the patio. This, alone, made me feel like a queen and for good reason which I will soon explain. After snuggling into bed with my mother’s Log Cabin quilt made from recognizable scrapes of my school dresses, her aprons and my brothers shirts, I picked up the book I’ve been longing to read, Sailer on Horseback by Irving Stone.
Truly, excitement and adventure were at the core of Jack London’s existence but not once did he forget the spiritual passion he had for writing. Most of his short life was lived during great depressions. He never had the luxury of time in which to write. His parents and siblings would starve if he did not work and hard manual labor was all the boy could find to do. He considered himself lucky to get it. Nothing that I have experienced to date come close to the hardships and rejections this exceptional man experienced in just a few weeks. It seems his life was made up of rejections. He always wrote under duress, fatigue, and hunder.
Therefore, I feel like a queen. I have only to ponder, to write or not to write, such luxury surrounds me.
Should this recession turn into a full blown depression then we, as writers, may feel the pain. Not only of rejection, which in itself is painful, but we may begin to feel the pain of hunger.
Alter throwing my self-indulgent attitude out the door, I decided today, this very minute, was the very best of times to publish a book or to foster a new idea and see it to fruition. The men and women of America want to work and I intend to give them something to work on.
My book project requires hours of light manual minimum wage labor. The time is right. I need a publisher. The time is right. My project requires graphical engineering. The time is right. I need tin boxes manufactured to my specs. The time is right. I need to travel. The time is right. I need to learn all that the author, editor, mentor, and publisher, Patricia Fry, has to teach. The time is right.