How Panic Can Ruin Your Writing Career

Good planning is the bedrock of a successful freelance writing career. In contrast, running your career in panic mode will leave you overworked and stressed out — and probably earning less than you think.

The Panic Mode Scenario

When you run your writing career in panic mode, you start to worry every time you don’t see a steady flow of work. If you happen to be the main breadwinner, then this panic can escalate to paralysing levels. You’re so busy thinking about the absence of a bottom line that you end up doing something that will make your working life even harder.

Grab Any Job That Moves

Once you start to panic, then you feel compelled to take any job that comes along., even if the pay is low. After all, earning something is always better than earning nothing, isn’t it? I’ll come back to that question later. You only start to relax when you see a pleasingly full diary in front of you. Now all you have to do is do the work.

Overbooked And Underpaid

I’ll give you an example that happened to me a couple of years ago. Once, in this same situation, I took on a couple of jobs that I knew would bring in some funds. They were below my usual rate but they were bulk jobs, and I figured I needed the money.

My wake up call came when I put all the jobs into my diary, allocating a time slot for each of them. What I found was that I had booked up most of each working day with jobs that would only bring in half the money I needed. This was the direct result of panicking about an empty diary. Worse still, I had to spend so much time writing that I had less time for bidding and promoting. So, what could I have done instead?

An Alternative To Panic

Well, my strategy of taking a job below my usual rates was only half wrong. What I should have done is only take ONE of those jobs, not several. That would have given me:

• some basic income coming in so I wouldn’t need to panic

• time to bid on other, more lucrative jobs

• time to promote my writing services

In the long run, promoting myself and bidding on better paid writing jobs would have been a better move. So that’s my advice. The next time there’s a shortage of writing work, redouble your promotional efforts and put your bidding on steroids. You’ll soon ride out the slump and put your freelance writing career back on track.

Technorati Tags: freelance writing,writing career,get paid to write