How do freelance writers make money phd

She shares a great thought at the end about valuing your own work. I did short to long-term projects editing journal articles, analyzing qualitative data and preparing literature reviews for academic and corporate clients. Join the mailing list to receive our 7-part video series, «How to Increase Your Income as a Graduate Student,» including side hustles and passive income. The beauty of Upwork is that you can apply to jobs when you are available to work, and you can choose projects of different time frames. Most of the academic writing jobs that I received were short-term ohw a phdd weeks at a time. I was careful not to take on too much work when had deadlines for my graduate work.

Planning ahead

Freelance writing can be a hard way to make a living. On the one hand, the Internet has opened an insatiable appetite for content. On the other hand, most of that insatiable appetite is serviced by content mills that pay peanuts or even just the shells of peanuts. But a few freelance writers are able to charge a premium for their services and have clients beating a path to their door. Writers get paid more when they have additional expertise. Most highly paid freelance writers came to be freelance writers via some other occupation or three. In their former lives, they were management consultants, lawyers, doctors, or marketing executives. They know their audience, and they know what creates credibility and trust in their spheres. But what if you majored in English and have no desire to go back to school and get a medical degree or an MBA just so you get paid better as a writer? You can still become a go-to expert for a particular industry by studying it deeply and writing about it. But what she did do is dedicate the time and effort to learn as much as she could about the various players in that sector, how pet owners think about their buying decisions, what pain points the industry is solving, and so on.

So really though — how do you do become a full-time freelance writer?

Once she combined her knowledge of the pet industry with her ability to write persuasively, she quickly rose to the top. Clients find HER — not the other way around. Researching an industry is work, but there are plenty of free resources to get you started, some of which Stanford Graduate Business School compiled here. Writers get paid more when they know how to write persuasively. A client is more likely to pay big bucks for a writing assignment when that piece of writing has to produce a certain outcome.

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It also could be that those publications are run as a full time,growing businesses and in contrast some of the others are just side projects for a group of enthusiastic people. But some of the other small or niche sites and publications would pay extremely well. As you can see below, those who have an ongoing relationship with an editor, or were assigned an article by an editor, earned the highest pay. You also need an efficient filing system so that you can easily locate anything you need, again to free up your time to write. Toggle navigation.

Paid to write: the first year

Pretty much everyone in the tech industry has done this at least once with varying degrees of success. It is almost a rite of passage to work in tech and is a great way get noticed by innovative companies. Many may have hated it immediately, but for some it became their full-time profession.

And we are not talking about trying to be an Instagram celebrity or building the next Flappy Bird. In this case, it is all about freelance writing. Right now we are in a freelancing boom that many experts believe will continue. Although there are no concrete numbers on how many are actually freelance writers, the estimates are pretty high. A simple search on either UpWorkScriptd or Fiverr brings up hundreds of thousands of freelance writers.

But c an you survive as a full-time freelance writer in ? Select up to 10 cities to compare. Check out the total required written words per month for those cities.

Publication Levels to Write For. Select the publication level buttons below to get a more accurate breakdown of your required word count. Writing Level Distribution. This pie chart will show how your time must be broken down between the different levels. In addition to earning some extra cash, freelance writing is a perfect place to learn more about your industry. Honestly, it is where I got my start in tech.

I always knew I wanted to work in tech, and with my writing experience it was a perfect match. Simply by writing about new startups for the first year after graduation, I was put in contact with thousands of startups and founders.

It also gave me the chance to expand my skills and portfolio in subjects that I was passionate. One of the things that stuck with me was how wildly the pay varied between publications. Some of the most well known publications would pay in exposure, hoping to find new and eager writers like. But some of the other small or niche sites and publications would pay extremely.

Back when I was a new writer and even now, it makes no sense to me! That is why for some time I have been wanting to investigate this phenomenon. But because publications do not post their pay scales publicly, I was at a loss. According to their site:. And after finding this goldmine of data that outlined some interesting trends, I knew we had to dig deeper. So I did and got lost in it like the Forbidden Forest. To make this article a little easier to follow, I have decided to break it into two parts: the first part will strictly report on our findings after looking at the Who Pays Writers data; the second part will be all about the implications of those findings and bring in some outside data on writers across the country.

But both will be used to answer the ultimate question: Can you survive as a full-time freelance writer in ? As stated above, Who Pays Writers WPW is a fantastic resource full of crowdsourced pay rates and other important metrics. At last count, there were over publications included in their database with even more entries about working with. The typical WPW entry can be seen below:.

If you are interested, all of our data can be seen. The entries from previous years were excluded because most of them were not how do freelance writers make money phd. Since this entire study started with the desire to see how freelance writers are paid, we should probably start. I broke this down into two distinct categories to make sure the analysis was thorough.

They both show almost the same thing, but it makes it easier to visualize later on. Firs,t we looked at strictly the Pay Per Word of each article but we also calculated at the Total Pay of each article. But the paths to that pay are completely different. That may sound like a lot or like nothing depending on how seasoned you are as a freelancer.

The top heaviness of the data can be seen clearly: Because the data was a little top heavy we decided to break it down a little. This way we will not be making inaccurate conclusions later on. A more accurate of breakdown of Pay Per Word can be seen. To triple-check our data we even analyzed the Pay Per Word data in an extremely elementary way: simply counting the number of articles that fell in our carefully selected ranges.

Just like many other professions, to really make a great living you have to be at the top. That belief is even more prevalent and obvious in freelance writing. But honestly, most will not make enough for it to be a longtime legitimate career choice. But we will get deeper into that in the second part of this article.

Now on to the Pay Per Article data, which paints a similar picture of a struggling freelance writer. It may look very similar to the Pay Per Word graph, but the point at which payments drop below the average happens a bit sooner.

This shows that there is some income inequality even at the top! The top half of writers made a bit over three times more per article than the bottom half. To further show that most of the freelance money stays with the top writers, we broke it down even. This is yet another finding that shows a majority of the freelance writing money is made by the.

When the total pay for both groups was added up it was a lot closer than you would think. If that does not discourage you from becoming a full time freelance writer, I am not sure what.

From what we found directly above, writing longer articles should help make money writing online. But in some cases, that is not entirely true. We found that the average length was a reasonable words. If you are having trouble visualizing that, it is about the length of this article up until this section.

From there we tried to determine the perfect article length to maximize payment. But instead of finding that more words led to higher pay, we saw something interesting: those who wrote the longest articles, or more than 7k words, actually earned less per article than some of the.

We were blown away to find that writing 4. This definitely went against what most people would expect, especially those used to working hourly. As you can see in the graph above, the optimal range to maximize payment was between 5k and 7k words per article. Even writing between 2. If you are looking to maximize pay, we would recommend writing anywhere between 2. It is important to remember these findings should only be used as a guide.

We have seen that many new and experienced writers still do not know how to price their word. This will hopefully curb some of that ambiguity and confusion. In addition to payment and word count, the most interesting things we saw included on Who Pays Writers was amount of effort expended.

Effort was broken down into three distinct categories: Little, Medium and Heavy. Like all the other variables this was self reported by the writers and this gave us some concern. In the beginning we worried that the other variables may have caused a misrepresentation of the results.

And someone who wrote a 1k word article that was intensely researched could also report Heavy effort. In the eyes of the publications, the 5k article took more time and therefore should be paid. But those fears we quelled by comparing both the increase in pay and the increase in word count for each effort level. We believe the small increase between Little and Medium effort was caused by people selecting Medium out of habit.

As you can see in the pie chart above, more than half of the sample selected a Medium level of effort. Both of those measures shows in their own way that the more effort expended, the higher your pay should be. It also shows that it takes not only skill to be a great freelancer, but also good old-fashioned effort. That could be in researching and running down leads, or just putting a great deal of effort into the supporting images or graphics. All of these components matter and come together to form an interesting, shareable and actionable article.

Finally, as a thought experiment, we decided to arbitrarily assign hours expended to the different levels of effort. They were estimated and assigned as 10, 15 and 20 hours for each level, respectively. And you could work for almost 10 more hours on a Heavy effort level article before it became more lucrative to give Little and Medium effort.

Plus an article with Little effort would have to drop down to only 6 hours spent on an article to be worth it in the long run over a Heavy article. Again, this is just a thought experiment, but it could be useful when planning out an article or project! Picking the right publication to pitch your next idea to is tough. You want to make sure you will be fairly treated and actually paid for your work!

Based on personal experiences, that is not guaranteed at every publication. Oh, and we made sure to include those who paid the worst, so you can avoid them from the beginning.

Unless it is not about the money for you! In fact, the top paying per word publications were consistently publications that have a print and online presence. In fact, all of the top 20 pay per word publications, and nearly all the top 50 pay per word publications have a physical and online presence. My theory is that the most of the best paying publications were established before internet journalism took off, so they have the money to pay contributors.

They have the network or connections to make sure they get the best freelance writers.

Make money as a freelance writer — How to set your pricing

Introduction: How Much Do Writers Make

About a year ago, my blog went viral after I shared my story about leaving academia. Since leaving academia, I have been steadily building up a client base for editing and writing. It started with friends and friends of friends’ dissertations, and gradually grew from. Do I still live month-to-month? Am I worried about lining up new writing jobs as my current projects draw to a close? Oh, absolutely. But in a weird way, academia prepared me for.

The honest truth about making a living as a freelancer

Grad school makes the uncertainty of freelance life a cake-walk. Graduate school made me particularly adept at working from home and living, fairly successfully, with uncertainty. Did I mention I’m a 3 minute walk to a grocery store? So ya know, take this for what you. I was determined to figure out what the fuck to do next, and I knew I would only figure it out by talking to people. I started spending time with app developers, seeing how they were building their company from the ground up. I immersed myself in business and marketing lingo. Learned how things were. Weirdly enough at least to methe majority of my freelance gigs have been a direct result of my blog, and, frankly, Twitter.