April Freelancing Roundup

I missed the end of last month completely, for which I apologise: it was a busy time, both online and off.

April saw a significant change in freelance earnings for me, as you’ll see if you pop over to the Earnings Blog – as always, I’m trying to keep things transparent and clear so other newbie freelancers can see what kind of money is possible or normal (whichever of those applies to me). This is partly because I focussed much more on actual work, rather than on blogging and hoping people would click AdSense ads.

Why was I blogging less? Because of some troubles over the Wordophilia domain name that gave me the push I needed to set up ScrawlBug – on my own domain. It took a while to get everything set up and funds from some work into PayPal to register the name – all of which gave me enough pause to do some writing-on-demand.

There’s no ads here on ScrawlBug, you’ll notice: that’s intentional. I had begun to dislike the obsessive tracking of revenues and perpetual worrying about traffic and so on – instead, I thought I would concentrate on writing, blogging for fun and meeting some more folks who might have interesting things to say.

That’s all going very well, with Shack, Nixy, Anne and Simone all keeping me interested and amused. There was a freaky moment when Helen Grant started following me on Twitter, which made me feel special, but I soon realised that was her Fame Brain personality. Oh, well. It’ll do for me!

On the writing front, I’ve picked up a second ongoing paid blogging job (again through GAF) and also worked on three one-off projects. All three buyers satisfied, nice feedback, reputation building slowly. I’m currently waiting to hear if a women’s magazine has picked up three articles I wrote – if so, that would be an absolutely monster success for me (though not much cash). Especially if it turns out to be a print mag. There’s just something cooler about being in print on real paper.

On the scary writing front, I also published the first chapter of my time travel novel over on Scribophile. It can only be viewed by members, but it received several incredibly helpful critiques and a lot of positive feedback. Phew! I shall reiterate here just how great the community at that site is: incredible quality editing and commentary at no cost except making the same efforts yourself. Very socialist.

All in all, April was a good month. It’s the first time I’ve had noticeable income from freelancing, which is a big step in the right direction.It’s taken almost six months to reach that point – a lot of which was floundering through lack of knowledge of where to look for work.

I need to get more organised (don’t we all) and more daring with the projects I take on, but a lot of my reticence is still due to having a bad back that prevents me from sitting for very long.

Onwards, into May. To quote Yaz, “The only way is up, baby!”