You’ve got A-Mail! Before I get into this week’s newsletter, which is an income report, I have a programming note. This year will be my newsletter’s seventh anniversary (!) I started it back in 2017 because I’d just lost my journalism job and I was looking for a creative outlet while figuring out my unexpected sojourn into freelancing. My redundancy was, and remains, a badly wrapped gift. Getting laid off fundamentally changed my career, for better or worse. In many ways, it took losing a job to finally have the career I’d always dreamed of. Yet, one kinda major challenge has persisted: how to balance my journalism/writing/general artistry with making money. A struggle anyone with a creative career endures. This newsletter has been the public arena for that existential tug-of-war. A few years back, possibly the entry point you had to me and this newsletter, I exclusively shared tips on how to build a creative business. I taught people how to freelance. It was super rewarding and even at times lucrative, but it took me further away from writing – I became the freelancer who talked about freelancing but didn’t do much freelance writing. After a dramatic burning down of the newsletter followed by a quiet comeback, I tried to use it as a place to write stories and essays on topics that interested me. However, that meant putting up a paywall. I want to get paid for my work, but I also want people to read my writing without a financial barrier. (I also didn’t love tying my self-worth as a writer to how many paying subscribers I have, but let’s go there right now!) It was a constant battle between creative expression and financial sustainability. Recently, I had a simple but radical thought: what if I find a way to solve both problems? What if I keep my writing free — both literally and creatively AND I share the behind-the-scenes of how I make money as a writer? So that’s what I’m going to try to do. Here’s how it’s going to work:
If you’re already a paying subscriber, firstly, THANK YOU for being one of my OG supporters. The good news for you is you’re now just going to get more of the BTS and you don’t have to do anything! The promise for my paid posts is simple – I’ll share my figures and feelings about what it’s like to make money as a writer. In being transparent about how I try to make it work as a freelance writer, I hope you can learn something useful for your creative career, too. Thank you all for continuing to support me in all the ways you do, by reading me every week, supporting this newsletter financially and generally just be the best readers a writer could hope for. – Anna 💌 I lost a client! I’m fine!This month’s income report is a deep dive into the role commercial clients play in my writing biz. Future memos will include similar looks at other income streams like my journalism, newsletter/Substack, books, and public speaking. In this income report, I’ve shared how much money I made from commercial clients in 2023, broken down by clients and the work I did for them. I also explain what I’m doing about the fact that I recently unexpectedly lost a client, plus how my feelings about commercial work have changed over the years. As per, my usual disclaimer before I talk about money on the internet:
With that out the way, here’s how much money I made from commercial work in 2023... Subscribe to A-Mail to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of A-Mail to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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