Freelance Employment? Let’s start out this section with a frank statement: I don’t believe that the terms freelance and employment are really compatible. After all, as a freelancer I (and hopefully you as well) am not under any sort of ongoing obligation with my clients, apart from fulfilling the contracts.

I don’t depend on them for eight hours a day of work, and the other side of the coin is that they don’t have to worry about me and my pay as soon as our agreed to work is concluded. That said, Freelance Employment seemed to be the popular search term, so we will just stick with the oxymoron for now.

Freelance Writing Rates

So what is it that you can expect to find in this ill named section? Well, I will be putting up various articles about the “nuts and bolts” writing jobs freelance. It’s the place where I talk about setting your freelance writing rates, using some real numbers that I found worked as I was growing my business. I have stressed it before on this site but I think it’s worth saying again; freelance writing resources are notoriously vague when it comes to real numbers in terms of pay.

There aren’t any secrets here – I will disclose exactly the rates I started with and what I make now. Maybe you will be able to charge higher prices, and that is great, because I am all about raising the bar and making sure people understand what our work is worth!

Contracts and Copyrights

Some other important aspects of the freelance writing business that we are going over in this section are issues having to do with contracts and copyrights, probably two of the most intimidating words for a person seeking freelance writing employment; and no more so than on the Internet.

Whenever you have a freelance job writing for the Internet, you are probably going to base a lot of your research on what you find on other sites. They key is in understanding that almost everything has already been said, and the key is to say it in a different way. We will look into that a little bit deeper in the article on writing jobs freelance; understanding some of the legalities such as copyright.

And that, of course, leaves us with contracts. Whenever you find a freelance employment, it is more than likely that you will have a contract, whether it is an official contract such as the templates used by magazines and newspapers or the more informal contracts that are the typical backbone of online bidding sites.

You need to know what to include in those contracts, what certain terms mean, and most importantly what to do if something should go wrong.

Approach to Success

Finally, we are going to put a touch of the cold hard reality of freelance employment into this section. In another section we looked at what it takes to make a living as a freelance writer, and in this section we will talk about the approach you need to take if you want to be successful in your freelance writing business.

They say as soon as you have to do something it stops being fun; this isn’t true all the time when it comes to your freelance writing career, but you will definitely find that there are some days when it feels much more like a regular job than something you love to do. If you really plan on writing for a living, you will have to leave some of your pretensions at the door.