Your questions and TWC’s answers

SEASON 8, EPISODE 10

Today, we’re releasing the last episode of the last season of the show. After running three businesses for the bulk of a year, Wudan will turn her attention to focusing on her editorial business and new fact-checking agency, Factual. The podcast, the resources and everything else that The Writers' Co-op has created in the last five years will still live online and the Slack community will remain active. TWC was always intended to be an audiobook handbook for freelancers and will remain as such.

This final episode is a Q&A episode that answers some lingering questions from listeners. Wudan dives into: tangible steps to take to break into different streams of writing, how she landed her first client, creating a budget that accounts for the ups and downs of freelancing, staying ahead of deadlines and how she plans out her week.

Thank you all for listening and supporting the show!

Full Transcript Below:

Wudan Yan- Hello everyone. Welcome back to The Writers' Co-op. I am your host and executive producer, Wudan Yan. Before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to come at you with some notes about the show in general. As many of you listeners probably know, I have been running three businesses for the bulk of this year. One is my editorial business. Two, The Writers' Co-op. And by the time you're listening to this episode live, my third business, Factual, a fact-checking agency, will be live. So you may be wondering, how is Wudan doing this? How is this even sustainable? Is this sustainable? How is Wudan not already dead? The truth is, it's taken a toll on me. It's taken a huge deal of planning, prioritization, reprioritization, restructuring and reinvestment of my energy to figure out how to sustain all three businesses in a reasonable way without getting burnt out, resentful or becoming flat-out broke. Over this past year, I frequently reminded myself, this is why most people just have one job, like people who are conventionally full time employed, right? So it's very challenging to be equally committed to all three businesses when that is what I chose for myself. It's not sustainable to run three businesses. I just want to put that out there. Since I've always been transparent with my listeners, it bears repeating: I am not rich, and I do not have the privilege of generational wealth, so I can just leave one business and jumpstart another. My income from my editorial business has been funding all the financial resources that I've needed in order to start my agency. All of this is a long way to say The Writers' Co-op is coming to a natural end. This is going to be the last episode of the last season of the show. If inspiration somehow strikes me, in the future, I will release a new episode or webinar or workshop here or there under The Writers' Co-op umbrella, based on whether or not I have the capacity and if folks have the interest. But there won't be a new season in the coming year. I'll be focusing on my own editorial business and running my fact-checking agency instead. The paid Slack community for The Writers' Co-op will still live on, and I'll be adjusting my prices accordingly so you can still access the moderated group. I don't believe in taking people's community away. However, sustaining a community that actually benefits people and is psychologically safe requires moderation. The podcast, the resources and everything else that The Writers' Co-op, me, that I have created in the last five years will live online. That was my original intention all along in creating this company, for it to be an audio handbook and learning academy for freelancers everywhere on how to build sustainable and resilient businesses. If anything requires updating in the future, because knowledge or handling or protocols of something has changed, I will create updates in the show notes and via newsletters. Still, I wanted to get some time this episode to answer any lingering questions that have come up throughout the season. So here we go.

The first question is: Recent episodes about diversifying your freelance business were super helpful, but I still get stuck on what tangible steps to take to break into different streams of writing. If I only really have journalism experience, how do I go about selling myself and making contact with content folks, or vice versa? Okay, so moving into a new income stream requires a bit of direction, I will say that. You don't really want to spray and pray. That ain't gonna work and will likely make you feel incredibly frenetic and emotionally dysregulated. I'd say the first step is identifying what kind of journalism-adjacent work interests you. You might know offhand already what specific services you want to break into. If not, I would look into the work that other freelancers are doing and literally take note. Like, write it down in a journal or in a Notes app that backs up to a Cloud of what you might want to do. Is it ghost writing? Is it institutional writing, content marketing, copywriting, social media management, speech writing? Like, what is it? The second step would be to identify the type of client that you want. This might be based on the cadence of work. For instance, a client, assigns you people to interview every quarter or every month. It could be an industry that you want to serve, or if you want to prioritize and you're currently valuing making money, who out there can probably pay you the most. If you're looking to do institutional writing, you can target established research institutes. You can also look at universities with many, many, many different research schools. You can look at foundations. But really what I'm asking you here is, can you be as specific as possible as who your ideal client would be? The third step is to figure out who to reach out to. So depending on your target client, you are looking for, like, the lead content strategist, the senior communications manager, the managing editor of a particular institution. LinkedIn is a great resource. You can search for specific companies or institutions, look at their employees who are on LinkedIn to see who's in the role that you are looking for. After, I identify a name. I personally like to use hunter.io to find the email addresses of folks. There are a few other platforms that people have mentioned, and if you're listening and you want to weigh in on this, like, please repost this episode with what resource you like on LinkedIn or a social media platform of your choice. So hunter.io is great, and even on a free account, you get something like 20 free searches a month, and all you have to do is know the first and last name of the individual you're trying to reach, and the domain of the organization and Hunter searches the entire internet and email conventions at that organization to give you the best hit. Once you've got somebody's email, you'll want to send that letter of interest, or LOI. Sometimes people get super stuck on this part. What do you say when you're trying to break into something new? Well, TWC, guest from this season, Ashley Cisneros, Mejia really recommends focusing on the skills you bring to the job. Don't focus on what the deliverable is called, necessarily. So if you produced in a journalistic magazine, a feature that profiles a certain individual and the difference that they're making in a specific field, you have skills as a narrative storyteller, an interviewer, and someone who can write profiles. Focus on that, and show your work. Lots and lots of people who have content marketing or institutional writing needs want writers with good interviewing and general good storytelling skills, not writers who know how to craft SEO content or put together a listicle, necessarily. So play up the skills that are really unique to this journalistic work that you've cultivated. You could say: I've brought my interviewing and skills as a narrative writer to produce stories about X, Y, Z, and of course, fill that in. A while back, I applied for a researcher position for a podcast. Now, I've never actually had someone assign me the role of researcher, per se, but in my job application, I focused a lot on my skills. And here's exactly what I wrote. I said: "My research skills are well-honed through fact-checking for nearly the last decade. I was trained as a magazine fact-checker, and over the last two years, have taken my keen eye for detail over to limited series narrative podcasts." Then I listed a few shows I worked on, and then I said, "In this kind of work, I've had to chase down and manage contentious characters, handle sensitive sources and more." And guess what? Focusing on like, the actual nitty gritty of what I did and the skills that I had landed me an interview and later an acceptance. So I would also say, it's always a good idea to have a trusted colleague look over that LOI that email, and after you send it, don't forget to follow up. A lot of magic happens in the follow-up.

Okay, next question. What was the breaking point of your success to break into freelance writing? What do you think helped you get your first client? This question, to me is kind of interesting, because I actually think it's asking two separate things, which is, how did I land my first client? And then how I think I got my "break." So, I'll address the second part first, because it's a little easier for me to talk about that. I personally don't ever think I've had my break, because I've always wanted to do very different things. At the jump, at the very, very, very start of my career, I wanted to do science journalism, and then a year and a half in, I moved abroad and wanted to produce international reporting. And, you know, like a few years ago, I wanted to work on more podcasts. And every new industry I've dipped my toe in required me to stay curious and work smartly and to really land where I wanted to. I don't have a lineage that lends well to nepotism. I don't consider myself any more well-connected to anyone else, especially not when I was first just starting out. I will say this, though: The things that I did at the start of my career was to meet lots and lots of people in my industry. It's natural for me to want to develop more than surface-level relationships with people. So that's basically what I did. I asked for help. I asked friends who knew someone in their life who was a science writer to connect me with them. I remember catching up with a friend from college, telling her how much I wanted to get out of my grad program and that I wanted to move into science writing. And she was like, did you know I did an internship at, like, a popular science magazine? And then proceeded to connect me with someone she worked with there, who also freelanced, and that person ended up being one of my earlier mentors. I basically told everyone the type of work that I wanted to do. And again, like at the start, that was mostly science journalism, fact-checking and general science writing. Some, if not a lot, of, my earliest work came from other freelancers who I met in professional groups or other settings, but became friends who were about to move on to a staff job. They were kind of like, here, I'm leaving freelancing, so take all the work that I used to do and can no longer take on. Or they were like, do you know so and so they're always looking for pitches, or like, they're always looking to assign stories out for this one section of the magazine. I just kept talking to people and being again, like, really vocal about what I wanted to do and telling them what I wanted to get hired for. So I think, like that, just telling people and being specific about what you want really does pay off. I can't express this enough, your relationships are the best source of lead generation. This season, I interviewed Caity Cronkhite, who started a technical writing agency two years into freelancing because she had too much work. And you should go back and listen to this episode. It's amazing. Caity's such a great source of inspiration and energy, but she had so much work because she literally went around asking people she knew if they needed any help with projects, and when she brought all that work into her agency, she was able to earn millions of dollars a year in profit. So telling people what you want works, but you also need to be specific.

Okay, next up, we have a question about money. We haven't talked about money in a while, so I wanted to bring a question about it to the forefront. The question is simple: How do you create a budget that accounts for the ups and downs of freelancing? Yeah, the ups and downs of freelancing are truly super real and wild, even if you've been in this for a long time. As an example, this past year, I had a month where I only invoiced for $3,500. That was my lowest. And at most, almost 16k. So whatever you're feeling, whatever volatility you're experiencing, you're definitely not alone. What I found keeps most freelancers sane when it comes to having a budget that accounts for the ups and downs of freelancing are two things when it comes to managing your money. So first, if you're thinking about how much money you need to make every month, I would highly suggest moving that thinking into how much money do I need to make every quarter or three months? This has helped me shift my focus tremendously off having a bad month and getting down on myself and zoom out and see a bigger picture. So I generally aim for about $9,000 of invoices a month. But let's be honest, a one-off 3,500 month, which, again, happened earlier this year, won't set me off that much if I'm able to get past my average in other months. So I would say, set a goal that helps you see the forest through the trees. The second thing that I found to be instrumental is to have a business checkings account separate from your personal checkings account, so you can give yourself a paycheck every single month. This is something I've been doing for, I don't even know, five, six years now. I basically make sure a certain amount of money moves from my business account into my personal checkings account every month. For me, it's always the same amount, so I can think about my earnings as a salary, save what I have in my business checkings account, which also treats interest for taxes, and so on and so forth. I usually like to say to envision your business checkings account as a piggy bank, right? And you're essentially taking from that pile. So if you're earning more than you need in a month, you wouldn't pay yourself all of that, but you transfer into your personal checkings account a fixed amount, so you're able to cover your needs. If you have earned less than anticipated in a month, well, you'll probably still have some left over from your business checking account from other months to kind of be a reserve, if you will, to pay yourself and cover your needs.

Okay, our next question is about balancing journalistic work with potentially other higher paying work. Due to the media landscape, lots of freelance journalists are diversifying. Wudan has talked about doing journalism for high-caliber publications such as The New York Times, while doing brand or content work. How can freelance writers balance both ethically? Do old-school publications blacklist you for doing content work? How do you not crowd yourself out of writing about so many subjects? And how does Wudan do this in particular? Okay, I have been called out, so let me try and address this the best I can. For those listening who don't freelance in the media industry, journalists tend to need to be objective. So if you're a climate or environmental journalists, for instance, ideally, you're not also earning money by writing copy for, say, fossil fuel companies or even from environmental lobby organizations, so that your journalism isn't influenced by who you're taking money from. That all makes sense, because in an ideal world, readers will be consuming journalism by journalists who are truly objective. But you know, when we're freelancing, we know that journalism doesn't pay really healthily. And as a freelancer, money, sanity and income matter. So in my opinion, the best way to supplement journalistic work is to determine what you value. Here I am referencing something I talked about all the way back in the very first episode of The Writers Co-op, which are the values of our freelance business. If you genuinely value truth seeking in a specific coverage area and want to only produce journalistic work in that given arena, yeah, you're going to want to box that off and ideally make sure that any other freelance work or clients you take on don't conflict with that. All that makes the most sense ethically. That's how I would handle it. In my decade of freelancing, I've always been doing content marketing, in addition to my journalism. Where I've suspected a conflict of interest, some old-school clients, I found, don't even care. So a few years ago, a public health organization funded my travel to Kazakhstan to cover a conference. After that conference, I traveled on my own dime to another part of the country to do some reporting about the legacy of nuclear weapons testing. Even though I disclosed who funded my travel to Kazakhstan, to my editor, he did not care at all. He didn't care. He was like, I don't care how you got there. The organization who funded me didn't have influence over the nuclear weapons story that I was pitching and was not involved in any of the research that I would have been featuring in that piece. I think it's natural for journalists to kind of like doubt ourselves, get in our own heads about what constitutes a conflict of interest, and I'd really urge people to test these limiting beliefs. So here's a coaching question. If you kind of exercise this full disclosure that I just described with my story in Kazakhstan, how many times would an editor be like, "oh, yeah, no. Like, that's bad. Like, that's a no, you're not allowed to cover this story or this topic area." Again, over the last 10 years, I've written for biotech companies, outdoor gear companies, research institutions and many, many other types of clients. I don't take any of these work for hire story ideas and spin them out to journalistic pieces, and I don't need to, because those clients actually pay me and my business enough to thrive. And journalistically, you know, I consider myself a generalist, right? And so that's why I've had such a great range of content writing clients, but I'm a generalist who, at the end of the day, still needs to make money where there is money. Again, let's come back to values. My business values and prioritizes working with clients who believe that narrative writing is valuable and a worthwhile investment. They treat me with respect and pay me well and on time. Most of the time journalism clients don't check those boxes. So, I look elsewhere. And if I contract with clients who treat me well, then whatever they pay me needs to be worthwhile enough so that I don't feel resentful that I can't produce any journalism about that particular client. And for me, that's fine, because I still don't feel like I've crowded myself out of journalism altogether. Some of this has to do with another variation of abundance mindset. There's enough work out there that will not only help you sustain a freelance business financially, but also loads of work that will not create a conflict of interest. So I really just encourage you all to go out there and gather evidence for yourself that diversifying services, landing commercial or nonprofit or institutional clients is okay, in addition to the work that you do journalistically. The last thing I'll say is this: Dditors who you are likely pitching journalism to understand the state of the media industry, and extremely few have made a fuss about all the content writing work that I've done, which now amounts to quite a substantial body of work and is something I'm pretty public about. I've never run into an editor who didn't want to work with me on a piece of journalism because I broadly did content writing for other clients. Perhaps that's a limiting belief that's a holdover of an older generation of journalists, because I really haven't found this to be true at all. Editors working with freelancers know that we're doing what we need to to pay the bills.

Okay, last question. Well, these are two questions, but they more or less get to the same thing: workflow, management. The first question says: how to get ahead of your deadlines and stay ahead. I'm always finishing work the day it is due, and I want to break the stressful cycle. Second question: How do you plan your day or week? Almost all my work time, about 30 hours a week, is spent on client work and emails. There never seems to be enough time for other things I want to do, like marketing, professional development, and administrative stuff. I'd love to hear some day or week in the life examples. I am somehow a person who has never learned how to procrastinate a day in her life, and I really value working with clients who give me ample lead time. I learned about five years ago that I actually really do poorly on things that require a quick turn. So the first thing I do when I get new assignments is that I put them on my calendar. My two major services are writing and non-writing assignments, such as editing or copy editing. I know I have capacity for one writing and one non writing deadline every week, so that is kind of how I look at my calendar and say if I can take on another assignment due around this very specific time point or week. So that's my first coaching question for you all, which is, what do you have capacity to do every single week or every other week? Figure out that cadence. From that space, I can figure out the balance of work to take on. I can easily tell clients what I have and don't have capacity to do very quickly. And I mean, I have 25 working hours every single week, which both feels like a lot and not very many at all to me, and I do need to use all of them wisely and prioritize deadlines accordingly. My next question for you would be:What is your ideal cadence for work? I know if clients give me a one month turnaround for a written single source customer story or profile, that's like more than enough time that I need. I can interview whoever I need to that first or second week, have the third week to put together draft and finalize the copy of the last week leading up to the deadline. So that's an example of my workflow. But here I am asking what's preferable for you. If you know that answer and you're kind of like trying to figure out your workflow, write it down. And then on a weekly or daily basis, there are just so many ways to figure out your schedule. For instance, here are some questions that I like to ask when I'm helping coaching clients determine what their schedule can look like: Are there ideal times of the day for you to execute very specific tasks? Are there ideal times of the day for you to take on meetings, if they're applicable to your work. Are there ideal times of the day for you to work on those administrative tasks or marketing or professional development that you want more time for? Another way to think about this are the hours that you dedicate in a given week to these different arms of your business, right? For instance, the creative part:when you're actually writing, creating photos, if you're a photographer, designing stuff. The human part: meetings. The administrative part: making sure your books are in line. The marketing part: like, scheduling LinkedIn posts or just spending time on social media platforms. And then the professional development, right? Like, whether you are working with a coach or you are taking a class or so on and so forth. Once you've set those categories, try time blocking it in your calendar. And remember, like a lot, about figuring out a work schedule for yourself is really experimental, and it might take a while to figure out when you do certain work the best, but I do generally find time blocking to be the most effective in figuring out what you're going to do and when. And if a certain time block doesn't work for you, you have the flexibility to move it to a different time and try something new. I will say that it took me eight years to get to a schedule that I actually love, that is super sustainable and feels like really good for me. And since then, I've added running on more businesses, and so the balance of my time has shifted greatly the more business ventures I've started to own. At the top of every week, I will say, I do a thing where I just determine what my priorities are. Maybe it's polishing a draft for a big magazine feature. Maybe it's really drilling down on social media strategy for an event or a launch that I'm doing on The Writer's Co-op. Maybe it's finally getting some time to develop standard operating protocols or building a very specific thing out for my fact-checking agency. But I write it down, and I let that center me, and I let it guide me. I don't have more than three priorities, really, in a week. Otherwise, I can feel super overwhelmed. So maybe that's something worth trying as well. I also want to acknowledge here and say that as small business owners, we don't have to do everything immediately all the time. Not everything everywhere, all at once. We likely do need to get everything done eventually, but some of it may not be urgent. Some of it might be able to wait. We might be able to offload some of it and delegate, if we work with an assistant, for instance. So my schedule over the past year, I've basically focused my editorial business Monday to Wednesday, and on my fourth and last workday, I primarily focused on work dedicated to Factual and The Writers Co-op. I find about two hours a week to sift through my email and work on anything admin related. And on a day-to-day level, what I've worked out is that 8:30 to 10:30 in the morning, I am the most creative. That's where all my writing and other brainy creative work happens. From 11am to 3pm, I have meetings I do administration or anything more analytical, like fact-checking or copy editing. I've programmed my Calendly so that I don't have more than two meetings in a day. Any administrative tasks or anything marketing related, I actually just have, like, an ongoing Notes app in my iPhone, and I'm an Apple person. So when I have some downtime, I just work through that list as if it were a checklist. Nothing is really urgent, but just like stuff that needs to get done eventually. And if I don't have any creative tasks to do in a given day, which is also possible, I look at my priorities and work down that list. I know that schedule is going to shift as my life and businesses evolve over time, but, again, it's a good starting point. We all have to start somewhere, right? So create something roughly that you think you can follow and try sticking to it. If you've subscribed to The Writer's Co-op as a Patreon over the years, we have released Day in the Life newsletters, so search your archives. But this is such a fun question, and everyone is going to have a different answer. So I would also encourage asking your friends, your colleagues, folks in your online communities, about how they structure their time, so you have some inspiration for your own business.

Alright, that's it. We are at the end of the Q & A episode of the season and of this show. Once again, thank you so much for listening to The Writers' Co-op. I really appreciate everyone who's listened to the show, shared it with someone else, or blurbed about it online. I know it's helped many of you, and I hope y'all continue to share the show as an educational resource to folks who are looking to strike out on their own. I can't wait to hear how this show has impacted your freelancing journey. And with that, I will see you on the internet. You all probably know by now how to reach me. Thank you so much. This season is written, hosted an executive produced by me, Wudan Yan. The show's producer is Margaret Osborne, and our editor is Susan Valot.