Named by Writer’s Digest as one of the best websites for writers, The Writers’ Co-op is a podcast, learning academy, and online community for freelancers everywhere.

Each episode addresses concerns like finding clients, time management, diversifying income streams, balancing multiple assignments at one time, creating a budget, the ins and outs of taxes, negotiating higher pay, marketing your business, building authority and trust with clients, securing mentorship, work-life balance, and more. A more stable business model allows freelance writers to do better work (and live more satisfying lives!), so the take-aways from each episode are meant to give aspiring and current freelancers tools they can use immediately.​

The Writer’s Co-op also includes an inclusive and safe online community of empowered freelancers. Join us on Patreon and get access to newsletters, our members-only Slack, discounts, and more.

Meet our team

Executive producer and host Wudan Yan is an independent journalist and podcast producer based in Seattle.

She’s a Chinese-American narrative journalist working in print and audio. Her written work appears in The Atlantic, The California Sunday Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Harper’s, High Country News, Longreads, MIT Technology Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, among other outlets.

Over the years, her reporting has been supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to investigate Southeast Asia's palm oil industry (2016); UC Berkeley’s 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship (2016) and the Pulitzer Center (2020) to report on food supply chains; the Institute of Journalism and Natural Resources (2019) and Society of Environmental Journalists (2020) to look at the legacy of nuclear weapons development on Native American communities in the American Southwest. She received Hostile Environment & First Aid Training in 2018.

Wudan also fact-checks for magazines and podcast production networks, helps academics become better communicators, and coaches fellow freelancers on building successful freelance careers. She frequently speaks to college classes and at conferences about the craft of writing and business of being an independent journalist. Prior to journalism, she was pursuing her doctoral degree in cancer biology.