Back in 2009, I wrote a post about living the frugal life as a freelancer (for technical reasons, this post is no longer available). Nearly three years later, I’m still quite frugal but with some new observations, so I thought this topic was worth revisiting. [Read more…] about Freelance frugality, revisited
Upcoming session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator
The next session of my online course, Getting Started as a Freelance Translator, starts on February 13. You can read the complete description or register for the course here. All of the course sessions for the past six months have filled up before the start date, so please register early if you’d like to join us! [Read more…] about Upcoming session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator
Adventures in co-working
After almost a decade of working from home and (mostly) loving it, at some point in 2012 something really changed for me. Fairly suddenly, I started feeling more trapped than liberated in my home office, and feeling like it was hard to carve out uninterrupted work time amid the myriad of household chores that needed to get done every day. In addition, my life situation is very different now than it was when I started my freelance business in 2002: my husband works outside the house, my daughter is closer to middle school than to infancy, and many of my freelancing mom friends in the neighborhood now work full time or pursue other interests like school and sports that keep them tied up during the day. So I decided to investigate the possibility of moving my office outside our house.
The quest started with a few visits to established co-working offices in Boulder, of which there are several. Stumbling block: many of them save on office rent by locating themselves in windowless basements, which is an absolute deal breaker for me (I didn’t move to a city with 300 sunny days a year to work in a basement!). In addition, there’s nothing to make you realize that you’re not 22 any more like visiting an office that’s mostly populated by tech startups. I think I’m reasonably young at heart for a 41 year old, but some of the established co-working offices reminded me of my college apartment on a bad Monday morning, complete with empty vodka bottles in the kitchen sink (actual example from one office!).
So then, I approached the all-women freelancers’ group that I’m in, to see if we could potentially put together a group of people and rent our own office together. This seemed like a great idea (cool people, we could configure the space however we wanted and one of the potential offices is about a 3 minute walk from my house). But we learned that commercial leases are tricky: most landlords want at least an 18-month lease with the first 3 months paid in advance, the office would be completely unfurnished, and the extra expenses such as liability insurance, Internet and even tea and coffee would add up. In addition, we would have to either form a corporation to sign the lease, or one person would be responsible for the entire rent amount.
Another option (if you live in Colorado) was PivotDesk, a local service that matches small companies and freelancers with office space. I would definitely give PivotDesk another try if I’m looking for office space in the future, but this time around I couldn’t find just the right match between what I wanted and what was on offer. However, in the course of tooling around downtown Boulder looking at offices, a couple of freelance friends and I found a “hidden” co-working office in a truly stunning historic building. Populated by real grownups with real established businesses, this office is a haven for freelancers who want to get stuff done in a beautiful setting without too many distractions (“…like a really, really nice library…” was the description of a friend who went to see the office with me).
I’ve been in the new office for about a week and so far I really, really, really love it. It’s about a 20 minute bike ride from my house, which gets me outside and gives me some mental space to transition from home to work and vice versa. In addition, let me tell you some things that a co-working office has: people to talk to, things to look at other than the walls of your house, different spaces to hang out in when you get sick of sitting at your desk. And let me tell you some things that a co-working office does not have: your dirty dishes, your washing machine and your cat hair-covered rugs. But all joking aside, I find that even these 5 days have really changed the way I think about work and home. I can walk in the door of my house in the afternoon and think “What do I want to do for the rest of the day?” I can avoid letting work expand to fill the available time, and instead confine work to the time I’m at the office. Instead of checking e-mail for the first time at 6:45 AM and for the last time at 11:15 PM and feeling like I basically worked for 16 hours with some extended breaks, I feel like I actually have work time and home time. Maybe this has more to do with my habits than with anything more substantive, but I do feel like this has been a fantastic change. Mostly, I want to encourage other freelancers to explore the co-working option if you want to, rather than feeling like you should be more grateful for the opportunity to work from home. If it’s not working for you, change it!
Logistical notes: The co-working office that I’m in costs US $350 per month for my own permanent desk, wired and wireless Internet access, access to multiple conference rooms and unlimited coffee and tea (priorities!). And the office managers do the dishes! The desks also have locking storage cabinets so that I can leave my laptop there if I want to. So far I’ve been toting my laptop back and forth, but I’m considering leaving it there at least some of the time, since all of my files are synced online.
Wrapping up 2012
It’s snowing here in Colorado and the last day of school is Friday, meaning that it’s time to put some wrapping paper on 2012 and call it a year! I always find it helpful to look over my accomplishments and failures for the current year and set some goals for the next year. So here goes!
Accomplishments
2012 will have been my second most profitable year of freelancing, in terms of gross income. My highest income was in 2009, when I did a huge amount of legal translation on the heels of the global financial crisis. I would also say that this year was probably my most satisfying year of freelancing, in that I am focusing more narrowly on my main specializations (international development and corporate communications) and working with more direct clients. I still love my longstanding agency clients, but in general I find direct client work to be more profitable and more satisfying, because I’m working directly with the person who wrote the French document, the person who will use the English document, or both.
My income from writing and teaching went way up this year. Book royalties amounted to about $6,000–certainly not enough to live on, but it enabled me to take a month off to bike across Switzerland and Italy. The past four sessions of my online course for beginning freelancers have been completely full, and I find that these additional revenue streams keep my work day interesting and allow me to protect against any downturns in my translation work volume.
I attended some excellent translation conferences this year, including the SFT financial translation conference in Paris and the ATA conference in San Diego. Both of these presented excellent opportunities to learn and network! And eat great pastries and drink fancy cocktails under palm trees! Oh, and I was elected to the ATA Board of Directors; that was very exciting as well!
My next book, a compilation of posts from this blog, should be for sale in about a month. I’m excited about it, and I’m already at work on book #3 (or #4, depending on whether you count two editions as two books or one!). It’s a freelance business guide that’s not industry-specific, tentatively titled “The Fearless Freelancer.”
Failures. Shortfalls. Basically, stuff I wanted to do this year and didn’t
The blog book took much longer than I had hoped. No major technical difficulties, just my high load of paying work (not a bad thing!) and my procrastination because of the lack of a real deadline (a bad thing!).
I didn’t do much networking at client events this year. I really believe in this type of outreach, but I have to travel by plane to get to any conferences or seminars where my potential clients would be. However, I’m determined to do this in 2013! More on that in the next section!
After years of saying that I want to pursue interpreting, I persist in doing absolutely nothing about it. I say I’m going to practice for 15 minutes every day, then I do that for one day and “don’t have time” for another three months. At this point, I’m re-evaluating what exactly about interpreting appeals to me and doesn’t appeal to me, and taking it from there. More on that in the next section too.
Looking ahead to 2013
I have a good feeling about 2013. First, I’m going to rent a desk in a local co-working office for January and February and see how it goes. After 10 years of working from home, I’m starting to feel like I need a) some boundary between home and work b) some more social interaction during the day and c) a reason to get out of my workout clothes before 2 PM, so I’m going to make the leap to a beautiful building in downtown Boulder which has both individual and group offices. I’ll report back on the results!
I’m planning to attend some client-side events for the international development sector. One of them is already on my calendar although it’s in June, because with the trip planning, I need to think about it well in advance.
I have a few projects for ATA that I’m very excited about. One of them, a new roundtable discussion column for the ATA Chronicle, will start appearing in the February issue. And soon it will be time to start submitting proposals for next year’s ATA conference in San Antonio, so lots of irons are in the fire on the association front!
In terms of my “I love it, I hate it” relationship with interpreting, I’ve decided to explore the option of doing English voice-overs. I’m thinking that maybe I just need some language-related work that doesn’t involve the high pressure and drama of interpreting, but that gives me a little break from reading and typing. So I’ve signed up for an introduction to voice-over class that my local adult education program is offering.
Feel free to add your own thoughts, hopes and fears in the comments! And with that, I’m going to wrap some presents, deliver one final translation and then go skiing; see you in 2013!
Expanding your book sales beyond your Facebook friends
Publishing has been on my mind a lot lately, as I gear up to get my next book out the door and start writing another one. Let’s say that you too have a book lurking inside your head, or better yet, a book lurking on your hard drive and waiting to see the light of day. These days, publishing the book is the easy part, if you do it yourself. Using the services of BookBaby, BookBrewer, Lulu and/or CreateSpace, I’ve seen authors go from idea to published book in under two months. But after that “Christmas morning” moment when you open the box or the PDF with the proof copy of your self-published book in it, you’re up against some tough odds. Various articles (such as this one and this one) note the similarity between the average number of copies that a self-published book sells (about 150) and the number of Facebook friends that the average person has (about 190). So, let’s look at some potential strategies for expanding your book sales beyond your Facebook friends. Many of these apply to self-published and traditionally-published authors!
You need a niche or a very targeted readership. My first book, How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, has sold about 5,000 copies. Hopefully it’s a good book, but it also fills a very targeted niche (people who want to become translators; translators who want to improve their businesses) and appeals to a very specific kind of person. And no niche is too small; one of Lulu’s current bestsellers is about the 1940 census in Mendocino, California. Just make sure that you can complete the sentence, “The kind of person who would buy my book is…”
You need a platform. This wisdom comes from my good friend and social media guru Beth Hayden. At first, I didn’t want to hear it. I just wanted to be a word artist and forget the marketing stuff. But 5,000 books later, Beth was right. You cannot just put your book up for sale and expect that people will find it and buy it. “A platform” can take many forms: maybe everyone in your industry knows you from your previous writing (like Chris Durban, author of The Prosperous Translator). Maybe you create a whole new website, blog and seminars that complement your book (like Judy and Dagmar Jenner did for The Entrepreneurial Linguist). Maybe you go on a book tour and do tons of interviews in all kinds of media (like Nataly Kelly did for Found in Translation). But you cannot just throw your book at the Internet and hope that it sticks.
Your book has to actually be good. This might seem obvious, but it isn’t. Stereotypes of self-published books exist for a reason: lots of them read like a stream of consciousness that the author banged out at 3 in the morning, saved as a PDF and printed. Many seem not to have even been spell-checked before printing. It takes time, money or both to create a professional-looking book.
You have to get good, unbiased reviews of your book. Your mom and your Facebook friends are guaranteed to love your book, and that’s how you’ll stall out at 150 sales, unless your mom buys them for all of her friends, and then maybe you’ll sell 200. I’m being a little harsh here, but part of what will sell your book is the opinion of people who matter, or people who rave about you in an unbiased way. There’s a big difference between your college roommate writing an Amazon review that says “This book is awesome and everyone should read it” and someone you don’t know writing “I was about to call an attorney to help incorporate my freelance business. This book showed me exactly the steps to follow, in a way that I could understand. Right there, I saved over $1,000.”
Once the book is out, you have to promote it. Send out review copies, do signings, blog blog blog, Tweet Tweet Tweet, package the book with an hour of your consulting time, ask your local bookstores to feature it, flog it to your college alumni magazines, and anything else you can think of. When you’ve exhausted your bank of ideas, read John Kremer’s 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books and steal some of his ideas. Think way outside the box, like this Brooklyn novelist who opened a “Novelade stand” and offered free cookies to anyone who bought her (published by Houghton Mifflin) novel.
You have to believe that you can do this. Here in Boulder, we’re all about “putting it out to the universe” and other techniques that may or may not work. But the older I get, the more I believe in the power of a mindset. The indie author wave (and by “indie” I mean both self-published and traditionally-published authors; basically anyone who isn’t Janet Evanovich or David Baldacci) isn’t just coming, it’s here. A couple of months ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reported that 27 of the top 100 Kindle books were self-published. Hugh Howey, author of the hugely successful self-published science fiction series Wool, reports that his Kindle Direct royalties often top six figures per month. My book certainly isn’t in that category, but the royalties (normally $400-$600 per month) have paid for some sweet vacations.
So, now that you feel inspired, get it done! 2013 could be your year to break beyond the publishing averages; if you have other tips for authors, please add them in the comments!