Hands down, the question I am asked most often is, “How much do you charge per hour?” The second runner-up is, “How do you decide how much to charge per hour?” The answers to both of these questions aren’t nearly as straightforward as you might think; for one thing, projects differ, and while I keep a certain ballpark figure in my head, sometimes I charge by the hour, and sometimes I charge per piece or even per entire project. It varies depending on the situation. For another thing, how I set my rate works for me but may not work for someone else. It’s a pretty individual thing, and so when I’m asked these questions I tend to try generalize and then I worry that folks think I’m being evasive (when really I’m just trying to explain what I see as all the factors in deciding).

[Sidebar: For whatever it's worth, I do always try to point folks at a good resource in terms of finding an appropriate range of fees. For my fellow writers, maybe look at this table of editorial rates to get a general idea.]

This brings us to the question Karen asked a couple of weeks ago, and I promise, this is all related. She said:

I am relatively new to freelance, although I’ve been reading this blog (via wantnot) for several years. I don’t remember seeing you talk about how you handle the administrivia. I feel like I spend a frustratingly vast amount of work time doing things that can’t be billed for — invoices, finding a better way to do xyz, relevant webinars, that kind of thing. (Perhaps you don’t work hourly but instead flat rate per project — I know there are a million and six ways to do freelance, but at the moment I’m almost entirely billing by time.)

This is relevant to rate-setting and the thing that I think trips up most newbie freelancers.
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Last week I asked what questions you’d like to see addressed here—preferably germaine to freelancing, but I’m not all that picky—and you came through with some really good ones. Sheryl was the first comment and asked the question everyone wants the answer to:

I’m curious how you look for work. I’m sure most of it comes by word-of-mouth recommendations, but when you’re soliciting, how do you decide who you want to work for, and how do you approach a prospective employer. Do you frequent freelance sites,or do you wander around the internet looking for bad writing and then swoop in to save the day?!

This is the quintessential how do you freelance? question, and as a bonus, I now want to wander the Internet looking for terrible writing. Heh.

There are three primary ways to find paying freelance gigs, of course, and I’ll try to explain how/why I do what I do. Your results may vary, and I only speak for myself, of course. (Was that enough disclaimers? I hope so.) That said, here’s the rundown:
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Every now and then my day-to-day life as a freelancer settles down somewhat and I can’t think of any interesting way to spin what I’ve been doing that week. (“I got up in the morning, got my guys off to school and work, sat down at my computer, and worked for the rest of the day. And then the next day I did it again. And then again.” Not terribly informative or illuminating to read, right?) It’s a pretty good way to live—I’ll take boring in the grand scheme of things over a crisis anytime—but it doesn’t make for really excellent blogging.

I suspect y’all prefer it when I do things like underestimate my taxes or double-book myself on projects. Being stupid is funny! Yayyyyyy!

Okay, kidding aside, given that I’ve been writing here for a looooong time, I often reject a possible topic because I feel like “I already covered that” when, in fact, readers come and go, and things change, and everything has a season, turn, turn, turn…. Wait. That last bit is a song. Ignore that.

Anyway. It’s time to find out what burning questions you have.
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I’ve mentioned it here a few times, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a lot of detail about the fact that we are now—technically, anyway—in our second year of homeschooling my 13-year-old son. His first year out of public school, we enrolled him in a 5-day-a-week program, and so my responsibility in terms of that homeschooling was limited to showing up for field trips and filling out our state-mandated homeschooling paperwork each month. Hooray for programs where you can be a homeschooler without having to do it yourself! I had been quite apprehensive about the switch (even though it was absolutely the best thing for him), and was happy to find a program that worked for us.

As we wound down that first year, we looked back and took stock of the changes. The good news was that stepping away from public school had absolutely been the right choice. The not-exactly-career-enhancing news was that our beloved “Hippie School” program—while absolutely the right social environment—was perhaps not completely what my son needed, academically. Feeling grateful for the flexibility of freelancing and working from home, I got over the last of my reservations and we decided to drop his out-of-the-home enrollment to three days/week. I am now actually homeschooling two out of five of my work days each week.

I stacked the deck in my favor, though. I’m smart like that.
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If you work from a home office, chances are you’re already well-acquainted with the phenomenon where everyone else in the world who isn’t a freelancer assumes you just don’t have a job. (Do I sound bitter? Maaaaaaaybe just a little.) Show up for one middle-of-the-day event and suddenly everyone assumes that “flexible schedule” means “I would be happy to put down the bonbons and appear at your beck and call as often as you’d like.”

I’d love to say this happens more often if you’re a parent—small people in our care seem to come with various obligations at school and elsewhere—but I’ve heard plenty of similar stories from my child-free colleagues as well. Sometimes people expect that if you set your own hours, you must always be available. Funny, it doesn’t exactly work that way.

There are actually two separate issues just about every freelancer I know has to grapple with at some point, regarding scheduling:
1) The expectation that you are always available,
and
2) How much structure you require in your day to get stuff done.
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It’s the key downfall of more than a few freelancing creative-types that they’re good at “creative” but not so great with the “business” side of, you know, running a business. I have always—perhaps smugly so—prided myself on never falling prey to that sort of “whatever, man, it’ll work out” sort of business management. This maybe makes me “smarter” than some of my fellow writer-types, but let’s be honest—mostly it makes me just more anal-retentive. It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s that I’m constitutionally incapable of that mystical “letting the universe show me the way” thing that so many of my cohorts seem to embrace.

My tongue is firmly planted in my cheek here, by the way. While I’m glad that I always pay my taxes on time and such, of course there are moments when I believe everyone else is more creative, more meaningful, more everythingniftykeen than I am.

So when I shared that I thought it was time to make another vision board, it was because I’d become keenly aware of everything being off-balance for me, business-wise. I wanted a bit of inspiration while figuring out which sorts of practical measures to put in place and get myself back on track. As an overly-cerebral type, I find this sort of exercise good for me—it gets me out of my own head, for a bit.
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Well. Here we are, almost at the end of 2012, and I think we can all agree that it’s been… uhhhh… kind of A Year. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the worst part. Between the deaths and the illnesses, the various miscellaneous crises and the broken bones, I think it’s safe to say that 2012 is pretty much my least favorite year of… well, ever. (Beating out the year my first marriage imploded, even. It was a bad year, folks.)

Part of me wants to curl up and mourn the massive hit my business took this year, and part of me wants to pat myself on the back for still having a business, given everything that’s happened this year. But then I think I hardly deserve that pat, either, because the nature of many of this year’s crises meant that letting the business go under wasn’t ever an option (financially, anyway).

Now that we’re at the end of the year, I’m ready to look forward and try to figure out what comes next. Only this year, it feels so very different from years past.
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When I first started freelancing—eight years ago, now—I had a state-of-the-art Sony Vaio laptop that weighed about seven pounds. (It’s okay, you can laugh. I don’t mind. It is pretty hilarious to think about, now.) I did most of my work on that laptop, in the beginning, and most often while sitting in my bed, late at night, after my kids had gone down for the night.

As time went on and it became clear that I was actually going to make a go of this freelancing thing, I moved to a desk in the corner of the family room. The kids could play and I could keep an eye on them and continue to work. Sort of. And once they were both in school I could work at the desk in blessed silence.

When I moved to Georgia five and a half years ago, I was excited to finally have a proper office. Oh, sure, my from-a-kit desk didn’t fare too well on the move—the hutch bowed in the center and was never quite right again—and I was sharing the space with my new husband, but still. An office! Like a grown-up! This was the start of a new chapter for me, both personally and professionally, and I felt rather heady with the possibilities.

And then, of course, life set back in.
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My strength is writing, not math; this is why I have an accountant. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the key to running my own business was going to be figuring out who I needed to help me. So, back to my accountant: he is very patient with me. Some aspects of bookkeeping and payroll taxes and such I’ve picked up easily, and other things involve him trying really hard not to laugh at me as I sit in his office, asking for the umpteenth time which form it is he needs me to fill out on the state treasury site. (I am a fun client to have, I bet. Ha.)

Anyway, one of the things I didn’t have that much trouble digesting as I came into this world of business taxes is that certain expenditures are deductible, and that’s a good thing. I keep meticulous records, now, after my first few years being a little less, shall we say, stringent. (”I bought some stuff for my office. That’s deductible, right? … receipts? I… hmmm.”) It’s all good now.

And this is a very long prelude to admitting that I got a shiny new iPhone 5 this week. Not because I always want or have to have the latest-and-greatest (I was upgrading from an iPhone 4, not a 4S, because when those came around I kind of shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’m good”), but because periodically it makes good business sense. This year has been dismal, financially, and so it turned out that this month was a great time to spend some money. No, really.
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It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I mean, I assume it is for someone. Most people I know actually get pretty stressed out about the holidays—contrary to the “peace, love, and good cheer” hype—but when you work in a field that makes December one of your busiest months, it can sometimes feel like everyone else is getting ready for a party while you’re chained to your desk. (Pity party, table of one, please.)

December is always a hard month for me, work-wise. I work longer hours than usual, at just the time when I would rather be with my family. This particular December, I am really struggling. Due to multiple work hiatuses this year, this is really my kick-it-into-gear last chance to get some solid income in before the year’s end. We’re not traveling this year, which is both a relief (because the only thing worse than working through the holidays is working through the holidays while traveling) and a disappointment. My daughter is coming home for her first visit since moving in with her father, and that is wonderful, but I don’t want to feel like I have to work-work-work while she’s here.

Basically I am out of sorts in every possible way. But I’m going to take a page from my son’s playbook to try to get myself back into the right frame of mind.
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