Advice From a Pro
This Trade Tip is excerpted from an interview by John E. Phillips, Nighthawk Publications, http://nighthawkpublications.com.
Advice From a Pro
This Trade Tip is excerpted from an interview by John E. Phillips, Nighthawk Publications, http://nighthawkpublications.com.
Editor’s Note by John Phillips: Nick Sisley of Apollo, Pennsylvania, has been a mentor of mine for more than 30 years. He is one of the nation’s premier gun writers and one of the most prolific writers and successful writers that I ever have known.
Question: Nick, one of the biggest problems for most freelance writers is cash flow. The bills always seem to come in before the checks do. How do you manage cash flow so that you don’t go broke before you become a writer?
Sisley: This problem is easy to solve. A writer knows before he sits down to write whether that article is assigned or on speculation, and how much he’ll get paid for producing that article. So let’s say to meet all your bills and have a little bit of spending money, you need to write $1,000 a month (more than likely you will need more than $1,000 a month but this figure is easy to use). You sit down and write a story, and you know you are going to make $25 for that story. Now you know you need to write $975 worth of articles by the end of the month to get the $1,000 to pay your bills. So you write another story, and you know you’ll get $300 for that one. So, you continue to write all month long until you have written $1,000 worth of stories and sent them in to publishers.
Question: When does that $1,000 paycheck come in because you write an article and send it in. You may not get paid for that article for 3 months or a year, right? How do you keep an even cash flow?
Sisley: You just continue to write $1,000 worth of articles a month, and within 6 months or a year, you will start receiving that $1,000 a month every month on a regular basis. If you don’t decide how much you want to make each month, and you don’t generate that amount of articles every month, then the writing profession becomes a roller-coaster ride of hills and valleys financially. But if you consistently produce the amount of money you want to receive each month, within a year you can be on a fairly-even cash flow. Now your income will never be as dependable as someone who gets paid the same amount every 2 weeks. But it will be much more dependable than if you don’t set financial goals for yourself every month.
Question: Nick, what do you say to the writers who say, “I just want to write for the big magazines that pay $1,000 to $5,000 for an article?”
Sisley: I tell them they will never survive as a writer.
Question: Why, Nick?
Sisley: Because there is too much competition for those big markets, and a person has to learn too much, before they consistently can earn a living from those big markets. To have a steady income, a full-time freelance writer has to write for a wide variety of pay scales in small, medium and large markets. There may be only one writer out of 1000 writers who can earn a full-time living writing only for big markets. But more than likely, that writer has been spent many years writing for small markets and learning his craft before he or she consistently hits the big markets. One of the aspects of writing that most young writers never see is that to be a great writer you have to consistently learn more about writing all of your life. You don’t become a writer and then stop learning how to write. Great writers learn more and more about their craft every year they live. Most great writers I know never feel like they’ve learned all they can to be good writers.