Is a freelance writer an entrepreneur?

Recently I reviewed a book on Livre du Jour called The Entrepreneur Equation.  As a freelance writer, I often like to read books on business and entrepreneurship, but I found this one a little disappointing.  Early on in the book, she says that one-person businesses are just job-businesses, and aren't really worth pursuing, because you spend all that time (marketing, administration, etc.) to build a business that doesn't have any value and cannot be sold, since it revolves around you.  She says you'd be better off just getting a regular job doing what you want to do.

The point of the book is to help you decide whether you really should start your own business, and for the most part I like the message.  For instance, she points out the fallacies that are behind most people's motivations to start their own business (and why they don't work out): they want to earn their living doing what they love (running a business involves spending a lot of time on marketing and other tasks), they want more free time (you usually have to work even more in order to build a successful business), and they want to be their own boss (as a business owner, your customers or clients are your bosses, and can be far more demanding than any "real" boss you've ever had).  I agree with all this stuff.  Going into business for yourself is hard work, and takes a certain kind of person to succeed at it.

However, I just don't agree with what she says about one-person businesses.  First of all, she is overlooking the fact that there may not be a job available as an alternative.  For instance, I don't believe there are a lot of companies hiring novel writers.  As another example, I knew an artist who used to work at a tile company, painting tiles, but that wasn't really a long-term career choice for her, so she went solo.  There wasn't really any other option if she wanted to pursue a career as an artist, except going into business for herself.  Even for copywriters and content writers like myself, there are very few jobs, yet there is plenty of opportunity to pursue a career if you work as a freelancer or a contractor.

So then we move on to the claim that it's not worth spending the time on marketing etc. if you're not creating a business with value to it, which you can sell further on down the road.  First of all, it should be pretty obvious, but still bears mentioning that most freelancers have no intention of selling their business — they are creating a career for themselves, not for someone else.  Yet it has been done, as you might know if you've been around for several years.  Remember Carson and Content Done Better?

More importantly, though, how do you define value?  Monetary value?  Well then yes, she may have a point (although, as I already mentioned, selling a one-person freelance business has been done before).  But for most of us, I would say that the value we get out of freelancing is being able to earn our living doing something for which there aren't many career options in the traditional job market.  I definitely see that as being valuable.  You're carving out a career for yourself where there aren't many options.  Sure, maybe you have to work hard at it to succeed, but isn't that better than not being able to do it at all?

I don't like to criticize the book, because it does have some really great points about who should or shouldn't be running a business.  But I also think that saying there is no point in one-person businesses is a little short-sighted.  What do you think?

More pricing wisdom from The Office

I love how often The Office finds humor in real-life lessons.  I've blogged about it before: the classic whoever/whomever debate, and Michael Scott's lessons in the importance of pricing.

We're on season 7 now.  A few nights ago we watched "The Search," where Michael Scott is lost in the city without his wallet.  He gets hungry and tries to con a hot dog stand owner into giving him a free hot dog.  First he offers his watch as collateral, saying that he'll come back later and pay the guy in order to get his watch back.  The stand's owner basically says that he can't do anything with a watch, and that he needs money.

Of course, this makes me think of website owners who try to get freelancers to write content for their site for free, often promising "exposure" or that they'll pay them when the site starts making money.  Regarding "exposure," what has value for the client may not have value for the vendor, so how does it benefit you to get exposure on a site no one has ever heard of?

In other words, what do you need with a men's watch?

And, seriously, who comes back later to pay?  Michael claims his watch is worth $45, but maybe it's a $10 watch and he doesn't care if he goes back to settle the bill.  Promises of future payment are the same as being paid nothing at all.

When that doesn't work, Michael tries another tact.  He asks, "What do you do with the hot dogs you don't sell at the end of the day?" and of course, the vendor says, "I throw them away."  Michael suggests that he "throw one away now, in my mouth."

Ah, another approach used by websites trying to get free content: "You're new/blogging/a stay at home mom, so you'll be writing for free either way.  Instead of spending that time writing for free for yourself, why don't you write for free for me?"

What a winner of an argument.  Unbelievably, some "clients" seem to think the logic here is sound.  Sorry, but if I'm writing for free, why would I want to do it for any other reason than my own pleasure?  Besides, if I write for myself, I keep the rights to the work and could possibly benefit from it later on.

Of course, the vendor still refuses, so Michael says, "You've lost my business!" and storms off.  It's funny on the show, because obviously his "business" was of no value to the hot dog vendor, yet website owners make that kind of threat all the time: "If you don't write for us for free now, we won't pay you when the website becomes profitable," or, "you'll lose out on this GREAT opportunity to showcase your work."

Lesson learned: Beware of wallet-less Michael Scotts trying to con you out of free hot dogs.

My birthday week

Tuesday of last week was my birthday.  Since my workload has been a bit on the slow side lately, I decided to take advantage of it and celebrate my birthday all week.  I still worked — in fact, I even worked on my birthday — but not as much, and I made sure that I did something for me every single day.  I went to the barn every day that week, read a lot, took hot baths, and just in general pampered myself.  With the exception of a fall from my horse on Friday, it was a great week.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten into the habit of not doing much to recognize my birthdays.  Sometimes I'll try to take the day off, but that can be hard to manage.  I found the week-long method much easier — I didn't feel guilty about working on my birthday that way, because I knew that I would go to the barn later, or read a book in the middle of the afternoon, or something else like that.  I think I may have to make this a yearly tradition!

What do you do to celebrate your birthday?

Happy Day-After-Tax Day!

We did our tax returns at the last minute this year, thanks to my poor recordkeeping habits last year.  When I mailed them yesterday morning, I had such a feeling of relief and freedom.  No more worrying about it anymore!  I know procrastinating isn't a good habit, but I do love the almost euphoric feeling when you finally get something done that you've been putting off for a while.

It was also nice that we owed less than we thought we might.  Not to mention, doing our taxes was the kick in the pants I needed to finally clean my desk.  It was starting to look like a disaster area — my laptop was an island amid stacks of papers.  Yikes!  I feel so much less frazzled now that I have a clean desk... or maybe that's just the post-Tax Day euphoria again!

What about you?  Did you do your taxes early this year, or at the last minute?  Was the end result good news, or bad news?

Professionalism for writers: What NOT to do online

Those of you who are plugged in to the self-publishing world may have already heard about this, but in case you haven't:

A self-published author recently threw a public tantrum in the comments on a book review blog, because she didn't like what the blogger had to say about her book.  He gave it two stars, because although he liked the story, the many grammatical errors throughout the text made it difficult to follow without getting distracted.  He gives a few examples in the comments, and wow, he wasn't kidding.  When you have to ponder a sentence for 30 seconds or a minute before you can figure out what the author meant, you are no longer enjoying the book.

Anyway, the author basically pitched a fit in the comments, insisting that he read the wrong copy of her book, and demanding that he remove the review from his blog.  From there it continued to go downhill, until she was telling other commenters to "F--- off" for criticizing her behavior.

Apparently the entire thing went viral.  It was being linked to on Twitter and Facebook, and in forums such as the Barnes & Noble forums (which is where I heard about it).  The sad thing is that her sales probably did go up a little as a result (bad press is better than no press), but I think for the most part she has alienated more potential readers than she has attracted.

This demonstrates the need for writers to behave professionally at all times, especially authors, and especially on the Internet.  What you type online can come back to haunt you, in your writing career or even in another career.  (A friend of mine found this out a couple of years ago when his employer took offense to some coarsely tongue-in-cheek reviews he had published online.  He now writes anything potentially offensive under a pen name.)

I think this is probably by far the most extreme example of writers behaving unprofessionally online, but have you noticed other authors or freelancers behaving questionably online?

A centuries-old issue

Not long ago, Kathy Kehrli blogged about writing rules that it's okay to break.  Although most of us writers are sticklers when we see spelling and grammatical errors in everyday life, it seemed like most of us agreed that the rules listed in the article were okay to break.

NPR did a story yesterday, on a book called The Use and Abuse of Literature, that reminded me of Kathy's post.  The author of the book says that disagreements over the "proper" use of the English language have been around for centuries.  So to have efforts to ban books that weren't deemed appropriate — heck, even Shakespeare was challenged, once upon a time.

The author makes the point that if we are still bickering over language usage, still dealing with challenges to books, it's actually a good sign, because it means that people are reading.

It may look as though reading is declining in importance. After all, yesterday's readers are today's video game players or text message obsessives. But the fact that these controversies still crop up — for example, over a new version of Mark Twain's Huck Finn being released with every instance of the n-word changed to "slave" — is, Garber believes, proof of literature's power. Books are labeled as dangerous "precisely because [they] can enrich the mind, challenge, disturb, and change one's thinking," she writes. So let the naysayers bemoan the shifting tides. Literature has been through much, much worse.

Obviously, there are things that aren't such good signs, such as the apparent lack of editors lately and the dwindling importance of teaching handwriting in schools.  But if we can still have a healthy debate with someone over whether the singular "they" is correct, or if there are still parents rioting over whether Huckleberry Finn is appropriate for their 14-year-olds, I'd have to agree with Marjorie Garber.  The point isn't who wins these little battles, it's that they are still being fought in the first place.

The art of writing

It's slightly off-topic, but I was dismayed to see this article in my local paper the other day:

Colorado schools are beginning to write off cursive handwriting

Really?  Really?  Just because we are living in "an increasingly paperless world" means that kids don't have to learn to write legibly?  I mean, have we stopped teaching math because we have calculators?

Maybe it's old fashioned of me, but I think that handwriting is a skill that children ought to be learning, no matter how paperless our world gets.  They will have to be able to write something that someone else can read at some point, such as a note to a lover or child, or, heck, a shopping list.  And let's face it, even with schools teaching cursive, there are still plenty of educated people whose handwriting I can't even begin to make sense of.

Like I said, it's a little off-topic, but maybe not much.  I've always been fascinated with my own handwriting, and it went through several transformations before I arrived at a script that I like and use regularly.  I still prefer to write on the computer, because I can type so much faster than I can write, but I'm proud of having nice handwriting.

What about you?  Do you think this is a skill that we should continue to teach, despite our digital age?  Do you think you benefited from learning cursive when you were in school?