As a writer and publisher working primarily online for the past 12 years, I have watched the future of ‘free’ approaching for a long time. There is some recovery from it now, with payment walls on a number of publications online, but for the most part, the industry of writing in general is changing tremendously.
Organizations like the recording industry association and the newspaper chains have worked hard to maintain old models for revenue and content and look where it has gotten them – they have become either litigation monsters fighting a tsunami one consumer at a time, or they’re dinosaurs ignorant of the coming meteorite, ingesting all of the new technologies but not adapting to the new environment.
As an independent, self-employed business owner, I know the challenges of meeting the monthly bills through my own efforts. I toiled at web design as my main money-making enterprise for a number of years, but found workly for an hourly rate hugely deceptive, since about 35-40% of my time was administrative and unbillable. My luxurious $65/hr actually worked out to about $20 an hour when all was said and done… and that’s without taxes, benefits, health care and everything else that comes with a ‘real’ job.
I worked in community newspapers for another dozen years before starting my own business, so knew firsthand the sisyphean work involved in generating a publication each and every week, with supplements and special features thrown in for good measure. Both the writers and production artists worked for paltry pay; as a production manager I had a grand salary of $19,000 a year when other peers were earning in the 30′s with a similar educational background. Writers earned even less, counting in all the travel to meetings and events and the constant hacking away at their personal time. After about 10 years I’d had enough and knew traditional writing/publishing was not for me.
20 years later, I thank my lucky stars I adopted new technology and the Internet as early as I did. I was even a slow starter here on the Sunshine Coast, number 176 to get an account from our trailblazing Internet Service Provider, Sunshine.Net, long since defunct and gone.
The lure of self-publishing was heady and exciting. I found the lack of restrictions, the instantaneous nature of web publishing, and the creative freedom to provide sustenance for the long period spent building the portal and magazine side of my business, when funds were non-existent. Everything I did was free, on the publishing/writing side. I just felt there was something to this Internet thing, and if I stuck to it long enough I could make something I would own and control that would provide a decent income, some personal freedom, and a deep satisfaction that comes from answering to no one but oneself.
I now run a portal and magazine in it’s 13th year online. I believe it was the first site of its kind on the Internet at the time – an interactive place to learn about the Sunshine Coast through images, music, slideshows, writing, and advertising through a searchable database. Keep in mind this was 1997.
I make a reasonable income from my work, which is also my greatest pleasure… helping people learn about why the Sunshine Coast of BC is so special they’d want to spend their hard-earned and much-anticipated vacation dreams on, or even move here for a quality of life fast disappearing in the western world. I visit every day with amazing people running fascinating businesses, play at being a tourist and have it covered by my company, and be paid for my writing, blogging, networking, and visual creative skills. I own the environment I work in… and that came from turning upside down the old models of ‘how writers get paid’ and looking at new ways to connect with a vastly larger audience and find a monetary model that rewarded this new way of publishing information.
I sell T-shirts in my store online, resell others’ books through an Amazon affiliation, get paid writing gigs for web site content, online articles, and old-fashioned print publications.
Adapting to new realities can be painful, and frightening for those with long-established systems of making a living as a freelancer, but just lifting your head to look around at the changing landscape may give you the impetus to take a new route to a new definition of success. I urge you to try it – as we writers know, it’s a big world out there.
