Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Great Experiment

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“This post marks the beginning of an experiment.”

That’s how I started the Freelancer’s Survival Guide, back in April of 2009.  The experiment was mine; I had no idea how well writing a book chapter by chapter on my website would work—or if it would work at all.

As I mentioned a few times, my friend Michael J. Totten has made a good living from his blog.  But Michael travels to the Middle East and reports from there, doing the kind of journalism most media outlets can’t afford to do any longer.  His readers appreciate what he’s doing and fund his travels, so that they can get the news they crave from a part of the world still undercovered in the United States.

When I spoke to Michael about writing my Guide, I knew I wouldn’t attract the readership he has;  I wasn’t providing the timely and necessary service that he is.  He convinced me to add the donate button.  I thought it wouldn’t be used.  I was wrong.

I was wrong about many things.  I figured the blog itself and the weekly deadline would keep me honest.  I would finally finish the book that I had planned to write for years. Then I would market it, and some publisher would buy it, put it in the stores at a relatively small level, and that would be that.

What a difference fifteen months makes.

Here’s what I was right about:

I finished the book I had planned to write for years.  The deadline did keep me honest, although at times it felt like a high-wire act performed in public without a net.

That’s it.  I was right about nothing else.

I haven’t yet crunched all the numbers.  In addition to finishing the Freelancer’s Guide just last week, I am finishing a major novel.  I have a revision due on another novel.  I also had to write an essay that required a great deal of research for a textbook, and finish my bimonthly column.  Not to mention a bunch of work I must do for the publisher who is putting my entire backlist online.  And I almost forgot the three e-mail interviews (time-consuming), and some research for the novel after the two I’m finishing.

Which is all a long way of saying that I had no time for number crunching of the serious variety.  I’m organizing the Guide—I got one section in order in the middle of the weekend.  Two other sections are online now, so you can order them separately if you have need of those topics (see below).  I’m still on track to get the Guide out to everyone who donated before I leave for Germany in the middle of September.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, I should barely make that self-imposed deadline.

When I do that, I will have finished the number-crunching, so that I know who donated more than once, and via different e-mail accounts, and so on.

Right now, my numbers are a bit vague.

Here’s what I do know:  People from more than 25 countries read the Guide every week.  Most of the readers came from the United States, followed by Canada and England.  Quite a few came from France and Japan, with Australia coming in sixth.  After that, it depended on the month as to which countries brought me the most readers.

The Guide was, by far, the most read item on my website.  People didn’t stop at one post, either. They caught up on past posts.  (Guess I’d better update the last of the table of contents.)  Once they discovered the Guide, many people began at the beginning and read post after post.

I got a tremendous number of private letters, more than I can count, commenting on everything from personal responses to my posts to locating a few mathematical errors (thanks!).  I learned that posts about money made everyone shut up except me.  (I love to talk money.)  I learned that posts about emotions inspired the most personal letters, often recounting personal stories which I, in turn, found inspiring.

My big fear as I started up the blog was opening it to comments.  I’ve written columns electronically for more than a decade now, and my experience with comments has—up until the Guide—been primarily negative.  Several people on the net seemed out to prove just how stupid I was or how I couldn’t know what I was talking about.  Even more attacked me personally.

I didn’t want that to happen on my blog.  I asked several people how they managed comments on their blogs.  Most people had never had the problems I had with negative comments on their own blogs.  A few writers had, and they suggested that I moderate the comments, simply preventing the negative comments from getting through.

I sighed and agreed, not wanting to admit that I wasn’t worried about other people reading hateful things about me.  I didn’t want to go to my internet computer every morning and get told what a horrible person I was.  In short, I was more worried about my reaction to the negative post than I was about other peoples’ reactions.  But I manned up, and took the risk.

And never once got a nasty comment.  Not one.  No hate mail, none of those vile comments I had gotten as recently as two years ago on my columns for online publications.  Thank you for that.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the civility that you’ve all shown on my site.

The discussions were lively as well, livelier than I expected, although they never reached the depth and breadth of comment that my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, gets on his Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing blog.  I think that has more to do with content than anything. Dean is destroying myths.  I’ve been providing information.  Information is a lot less controversial than using facts to skewer assumptions.

Finally, the donate button.  I had hoped that I would get a few hundred dollars so that I didn’t feel like I was wasting valuable  writing time, time that I would have normally been paid for.  If I had gotten no donations, I figured I could use the first three chapters of the Guide, add a proposal and attempt to sell the thing to New York, getting money nine months in or so.

Well, a couple things thwarted that plan. First, I write out of order. Aways have, always will.  I would have had to wait until six or eight weeks in before I had the right kind of material to show to a publisher. By that point, I had enough donations to pay a small advance.

Most advances from modern publishing come this way: half on signing of the contract and half on acceptance.  The small advance you folks paid me came in long before I would have gotten any money from New York.  The money trickled in during the entire time I wrote the Guide instead of in lump sums, which was nice as well.  By the time I finished, I had a full advance for a non-bestselling nonfiction book.  That’s about six months earlier than I would have received any money had a major publisher purchased the book four months into my writing process.

No major publisher has purchased the book because I haven’t mailed it to any of them.  Midway through writing, I realized the book would be larger than most publishers could comfortably handle.  I also decided that I would rather publish it myself, not just in e-book format, but in a print edition as well.

I wanted all of the information in the book, not just the topics some publisher felt should be in there.  The topics would be chosen by them, not because the others were unimportant, but because we would have to cut something to bring down the cost of production.

I also wanted the freedom to update the volume whenever I felt like it.  Working electronically and via a print-on-demand service, I could update the book each week if I wanted to.  That flexibility is important, because there are big changes coming, not just in publishing, but in many areas.  Already the piece I wrote on insurance is somewhat out of date.  That bit will change annually until 2014, when (theoretically), all of the provisions of the new U.S. health care law will kick in.

Then there’s the fact that I’m constantly learning.  I’ll probably be dissatisfied with the advice I gave in some section as I learn more about the topic or the information I have gets updated.  I wanted the flexibility to alter that as well.

Finally, I realized during one of my posts marked “Part five” that some of the sections were long enough to be minibooks on a particular topic.  I could try to convince some publisher to do the minibook or I could do it myself.  I’ve already started that process, with the two below.

The minibooks are for people like me, people who don’t want 140,000 words of some how-to book when they only really need 30,000 words on one of the topics covered in the table of contents.  The longer book will have every topic; the shorter ones will only have the topics that lend themselves to more than one post.

What has changed the most since April of 2009, however, is me.  I am much more comfortable working online.  I’m happy with doing my own electronic editions.  I’m exciting about bringing back my rusty publishing skills to get the book out in print editions.  I’ve also embraced my inner nonfiction writer.  I didn’t quite abandon her when I gave up my nonfiction career to focus on fiction.  I continued to dabble.  But I missed the opportunity to stretch my nonfiction wings more than I wanted to admit.

I declare the experiment officially over. Not only that, I declare it a success.  Although, to me, success seems like an awfully small word for the changes doing the Freelancer’s Guide has brought to me.

It’s developed a community.  It’s put me in touch with old friends and helped me make some new ones.  It forced me to formalize my own thoughts and opinions about various topics.  It showed me the freedom of online publishing.  It also brought in readers who would never have come to my site otherwise, people who don’t read fiction, people outside my insular genre fiction universe.

Thank you all for participating.  It’s meant a lot to me.

As I came to the end of the weekly portion of the Guide, I had mixed feelings.  I wanted to be done, like I always do on any book that I write.  I wanted to have my Wednesdays back.  I disliked the deadline, but I loved it as well.  The Guide made me more productive.  I found that on the days when my health problems make it hard for me to write fiction, I could generally work on the Guide.  I hadn’t missed my deadline, so if I was going to be out of town or teaching, I figured out a way to rearrange my schedule so that I could get the Guide done.  (I even got up four hours early one morning to finish, which is more serious than you realize, considering how allergic I am to mornings.)

The closer I got to finishing the Guide, the more I realized I didn’t want to give up my weekly nonfiction work.  I like the interaction.  I like exercising different writing muscles.  I even like the deadline, although I complain about it.

A number of you wondered what you would read on Thursdays now that the Guide is done.  I had been wondering that for a while. And in that jigsaw puzzle way my brain works, it doled out the answer when it was good and ready—last Thursday, after I had put up the last Guide column.

Starting next week, I’m going to write a weekly business blog.  It won’t be as focused as the Guide, although there might be a stretch of weeks on the same topic.  The reason I decided on business is this: it allows me to talk about a variety of things, from the latest publishing news to importance of this week’s manufacturing numbers, things that don’t fall into a narrow topic defined by a book.

Part of the blog will be an interactive feature called Ask the Freelancer.  If you have a question about freelancing, ask me, give me permission to use your letter, and I’ll respond on the site.  If you don’t want your name added, use a signoff like you might find in an advice column: Wondering in Wichita or something like that.  I’ll make sure to use it.

The Ask The Freelancer part will occur as often as I have letters.  If I don’t, I won’t use that feature.

I’ll also use the business blog to post the updated Freelancer’s Guide articles, the ones that have changed since the original post.

I have a variety of other ideas as well, but those are the ones I can put into words right now.  The one thing I don’t have is a good name for the blog.  I’d like it to be plain like “The Business Blog” but I’m certain—without even doing a Google search—that there are hundreds of those.  So if you have any ideas, feel free to send them along.

Installment one of the Unnamed Business Blog is next Thursday.  We’ll continue with our discussions.

Again, thanks for the help with my great experiment.  I know a number of you have said that the Freelancer’s Guide made a difference in your lives.  It certainly has made a difference in mine—and it couldn’t have happened without y’all.

As promised, here are the two sections of the Guide already in ebook format.  I’ll let you know each time we publish more sections of the Guide. The books will be available in all e-formats, however it takes a while to get to some of the sites.  If you can’t find what you’re looking for on your favorite site, go to Smashwords and download there.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

June was the longest short month in existence. Each day felt like it was two days long.  I have no idea why.

We traveled in June.  Dean taught. I did a lot of work. And I read.  And read. And read.  So it was a good month.

In fact, it was a spectacular month, considering how much of what I read I enjoyed.  This is a long list and I got a bit picky.  If I had a few reservations about a book, I didn’t recommend it.  An abundance of riches for once.

So far, however, July is starting slow…

Anyway, enjoy!

June, 2010

Balogh, Mary, A Secret Affair, Delacorte, 2010.  This is the book I was waiting for in the Huxtable series.  It featured the most interesting of the Huxtables, Con, who couldn’t inherit because he was born two days early.  He was a mysterious character in the previous books about the various Huxtables, and always the most fascinating whenever he was on stage.  The novel itself didn’t disappoint, although I worried it might at the beginning.  By the time we got to the middle, I was unable to put it down, and 75 pages from the end, I was in tears.  An excellent novel.  Now I want another.

Bowden, Mark, “The Professor of War,” Vanity Fair, May, 2010.  I’m always two months behind in my magazine reading, so as I read this profile of General David Petraeus, he was testifying before Congress (and fainted—which was a surprise).  The testimony made the article more interesting.

No matter how you feel about the various wars we’re fighting, you might want to look at this profile of the man running them.  He’s impressive (as you might imagine) and has a vision for what he’s doing, based on a view of history that is quite different from the view held by the so-called Greatest Generation.  That view alone made the profile worth my time.  I got a better understanding of the man and what he’s trying to do.  And the article itself challenged a few of my assumptions, something I adore.  I like being forced to revisit my own opinions.

Read this, if only to understand a person with a lot of influence in the world at the moment.

Brinkley, Alan, “The Time of The Lives,” Vanity Fair, May, 2010.  An utterly fascinating article about the start of Time Magazine back in the 1920s.  This is an excerpt from the book, which I’m going to have to order now.  You’ll see why below.  I love the history of publishing, and this is another wonderful example.  I didn’t realize the influence Time had on the language, let alone on publishing.  Take a peek, and see if you want the book like I do.

Chabon, Michael, “Imaginary Homelands,” Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  “Imaginary Homelands” is about writing, reader reaction, and the reactions of experts.  It’s also about the genesis of Chabon’s award-winning, bestselling novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  If you like essays about a writer’s process, this essay is for you.

Chabon, Michael, Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  After reading last month’s Recommended Reading List, you knew the Chabon book of essays had to be on my list.  For the individual essays that I liked, see last month’s list, as well as the others that I liked in June.  This slight collection is well written and fascinating.

Chabon, Michael, “Secret Skin,” Maps and Legends: Reading And Writing Along The Borderlands, Harper Perennial edition, 2009.  A version of “Secret Skin” first appeared in The New Yorker.  I liked the essay when I read it then and I like the slightly revised version now.  The trade paper edition of this book includes the essay as an extra, and it’s a worthy extra.  The essay is about important things like Superman’s cape and superheroes and how necessary they are.  Pick up the book for this essay alone—but make sure you get the right edition.

Child, Lee, 61 Hours, Delacorte, 2010.  I devoured this book in an instant.  Okay—a night or two—but still.  It’s a Jack Reacher novel, set in the dead of winter in the Dakotas.  I felt the cold, and the hopelessness, and the sheer emptiness of the space.  I got angry at Child for doing something he needed to do, and I admired his skill at ending the book properly (something some other authors, trying the same thing, weren’t able to do this year).

I don’t dare say any more without ruining the book for you.  Suffice to say this is a spectacular Jack Reacher novel, and one you should buy immediately.

Dubé, Marcelle, On Her Trail, Carina Press, June 2010.  When I’ve said in previous months that I’ve read some wonderful unpublished fiction, and editors should get off their butts and buy it, I am often talking about Marcelle Dubé.  I’ve been lucky enough to read Marcelle’s work for years now.  Most of you haven’t had the opportunity.  Now you do.

Carina Press has just published her first novel. For those of you who don’t know about Carina, it’s an e-book only line started by Harlequin.  They’re taking some risks in this line, and one of the risks they’re taking is to buy exceptional books that aren’t easily marketed.

Marcelle’s novel, On Her Trail, is one of those.  I would call the story romantic suspense, but it also has ghosts.  It’s almost a gothic, but not quite.  What it is, however, is wonderful.  It takes place in Canada, and has the richness of place I’ve come to expect from Marcelle’s work, as well as excellent characters.  I couldn’t put the book (or the Kindle, actually) down.

You don’t need an e-reader to buy this book. Go to the Carina Press site and download a copy you can read on your computer.  Carina keeps its prices low, so you can check out a number of writers you’ve never heard of for very little money.  Marcelle’s book is selling for less than $4.  I finished the  novel in less than a day.  Now I can’t wait to read the next.

Garrett, Randall, “A Case of Identity,” Lord Darcy, compiled and edited by Eric Flint, Baen Books, 2004.  I’m rereading alternate history for an article I’m writing for a textbook.  I have adored Garrett’s Lord Darcy series since I first encountered the stories in 1983.  Eric Flint compiled all of them in this volume, doing us a great service.

For those of you who don’t know, Lord Darcy lives in a 20^th century alternate history world in which Richard the Lionhearted did not die in 1199 and founded the mightiest empire in history.  That empire uses magic the way we use science.  The Darcy stories are mysteries.  Darcy is a not-so-standard detective, using observation and magical deduction, to solve murders.

I thought I’d read all of the stories, but I hadn’t.  I’m going through them slowly as rewards for other work I have to do.  I read “A Case of Identity” first, back in 1983, and I loved it then.  I like it even more now.  It’s a great starting point for new Lord Darcy readers.  Enjoy.

Granger, David, “Don’t Kill A Tough Guy,” Esquire, May 2010.  David Granger clearly read Lee Child’s 61 Hours (see above) in galleys, so he didn’t see the offensive ad at the end of the book.  Because of that, he has written a thought-provoking analysis of the Jack Reacher books.  I don’t necessarily agree with Granger’s conclusions, but he sure made me think.

Hessler, Peter, “Go West,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  Peter Hessler and his wife Leslie Chang, both Americans, spent most of their adult lives living out of the country.  Both writers, they finally decided to come home after years in China.  They moved to Colorado.

Those are the broad outlines of this essay, but the actual essay itself is so much more than that.  It’s about culture clash—written from the point of view of an insider-outsider.  The differences in life here and life in China are profound, and Hessler perfectly conveys both worlds.

If I were editing this year’s Best American Essays, I’d make sure to include this one.

Jack, Ian, “Five Boys: The Story of a Picture,” Intelligent Life, Spring, 2010.  Intelligent Life is a British magazine that I wouldn’t know about if it weren’t for an interview with The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown on NPR.  I then searched for the website, More Intelligent Life. Talk about a multi-media roundabout way of finding an article.

Fortunately, the search was worth it.  The article is about five boys in a classic British photograph, still used as an example of the class divide.  Jack explores the  history of the photograph, and then goes into the lives of the boys to see if the assumptions about the photo are accurate.  The photo is seventy years old, and most of the boys are now dead, their lives closed books.  A fascinating example of expectations and the misunderstandings that can come for a moment in time—or from appearances.  Take your pick. But look up the article.

Junod, Tom, “Hillary. Happy.” Esquire, May, 2010. I try not to write about politics on my blog, but when the topic is Hillary Clinton, it’s tough not to mention them.  So here you go:  I’ve admired Hillary since she came on the national stage.  The admiration comes not from her politics, but from her life.  This woman has raised a child, maintained a difficult marriage, and pursued her own career.  She survives setbacks better than anyone I’ve seen on the national stage.   She’s an amazing woman, no matter what her politics.

And this article explores all of that.  It also looks at Hillary now, the Secretary of State, the former Senator, and the woman still married to Bill Clinton.  Read this whether you like Hillary or not.  I can guarantee it will expand your view of this remarkable woman.

Larsson, Steig, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Knopf, 2010.  The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is the third in Steig Larsson’s “Girl” trilogy.  If you haven’t read the first two, hike to a bookstore and pick up the first, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, immediately.

I read this 563 page novel in three days.  It would have taken less time, but I didn’t have a full day to devote to the  novel itself. Still, I read it almost as soon as I got it.  And I was up late every single night devouring this book.  I probably would have stayed up all night the second night, except that Dean pulled the book from my  hands and demanded that I get some sleep.  (He was probably right, but jeez.)

Very different from the other two books and yet quite similar.  I read breathlessly, hoping for the best, fearing for the worst.  In addition to the rip-roaring plot and terrific characterization, the novel also had some fascinating insights into Sweden’s legal and governmental systems.  A lot of things that happen there couldn’t happen here because our system is more formal.

I loved all three books and recommend them highly.

Lepore, Jill, “Untimely,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  Because the mainstream media believes that only five books are published every month, they tend to discuss the same work.  (Genres are beneath them, and so are “pop” histories, among other things.)  So I found myself reading about Alan Brinkley’s book The Publisher in two different publications in two days.  I’d already decided to order the book based on the Vanity Fair excerpt (see above).  Then I got to the “review” of it, in The New Yorker, which was more a navel-gazing example of the relationship between The New Yorker and Time.

For all the self-absorption, the article’s focus on the relationship between New Yorker founder Harold Ross and Time founder Henry Luce is fascinating.  I doubt the book focuses as much on that relationship as The New Yorker (apparently it’s still fighting eighty-year-old battles), so that makes the article even more interesting.  Real people are behind these iconic publications—real people who are as petty and visionary as the real people who toil in the genres the magazines ignore.  If you’re an sf fan, you’ll recognize Ross as a type we’ve seen in sf nonfiction publishing.  Worth reading.

Lewis, Michael, “The Mansion: A Subprime Parable,” The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver, Mariner 2009.  Michael Lewis, who lives in California, moved his family to New Orleans while he wrote his “latest project.”  He rented the largest mansion in New Orlean’s tony Garden District.  This essay discusses the problems he did not foresee with the rental—like the maintenance costs and the effects the mansion had on his children’s sense of self.  He uses this to explore the housing insanity that gripped America in the first decade of the 21st century, all the while recognizing that he really didn’t need such a huge home for such a short period of time.  Excellent analysis of what keeping up with those evil Joneses feels like, and an excellent self-examination as well.

Moore, Ward, “Bring the Jubilee,” The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, Del Rey Books, 2001. As I mentioned above, I’m writing an article on alternate history for an sf textbook, and I’m using it as an excuse to catch up on all the alternate history I’ve missed.  I’m having a blast.

“Bring the Jubilee” is one of those classics of the form that I’d heard about over the years, but never had a chance to read.  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1952, the novella holds up beautifully.  In fact, it holds up so well that if I were still editing F&SF and Ward Moore were alive and he submitted the story, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.  It is, in my mind, the perfect F&SF story.

But that’s neither here nor there.  What is important is how it works as a piece of fiction.  Set in a world where the Union lost the Battle of Gettysburg, the story occurs in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s—as well as other times.  It believably incorporates time travel as well.  Moore’s history is impeccable, not just his speculations about the Civil War, but his extrapolation.  I can’t praise this story enough.  Find a copy.  You’ll be so happy you did.

Resnick, Mike, “The Incarceration of Captain Nebula,” Asimov’s, October/November 2010.  At least once a year, Mike Resnick taunts me.  He sends me a story that he has finished and informs me that if I were still editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would send that story to me.  As an editor, I have never rejected a Mike Resnick story, and so far, I haven’t seen one that I would reject.  Some are good, but many are just plain brilliant.

This one falls in the brilliant category.  In fact, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get nominated for a Hugo.  The story is short.  It’s space opera—or is it?—and it’s just plain marvelous.  If I say any more, I’ll spoil it for you.

I got to see it before the issue comes out.  The issue should be on the stands as you read this list, so go pick it up.

Sullivan, Brendan, “The Grandmother of Pop,” Esquire, May, 2010. Sullivan knew Lady Gaga when she was Stefani Germanotta, a go-go dancer and song writer who worked in the bar where he was the DJ.  This essay isn’t so much a shocker about Lady Gaga as it is a study of the way lives change when one member of a friendship becomes famous.  Anyone who works in the arts should think about some of the issues he raises here.

Wilkinson, Alec, “The Ice Balloon,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2010.  I plowed through this article as if it were a novel.  The article is more of an essay about S.A. Andrée’s failed hot air balloon journey over the North Pole.  The picture accompanying the article caught my eye: taken by one of the team, it shows the balloon crashed on an ice field.

The article begins with the 1930 discovery of a body on White Island.  The body held a diary of the expedition, all the way to its tragic end.  At this point, no one had known what became of Andrée’s 1897 expedition, and suddenly they had a record of it.

What a record. Dramatic, sad, and courageous.  Fascinating stuff—and yes, there were movies made of it and books written about it.  But now the assumptions in those publications are being challenged, and that is fascinating as well.

The essay was well-paced and compelling.  If you like stories of exploration on far-flung places, this will appeal to you.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Freelancing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Several years ago, my career hit a serious downtown, the kind most careers never recover from.  I made a series of bad business decisions, including hiring two terrible employees who did everything they could to gut my business.  I compounded the initial mistakes by making more mistakes.  On top of that, my health collapsed.  I was ill twenty days out of every month, incapacitated for at least ten of those days.  In the middle of all of that, I hit my mid-life crisis.  Don’t let anyone tell you a mid-life crisis only hits men.  It hits women too.

During those dark days, I kept threatening to give up the writing.  Now, you have to understand what this means.  Giving up writing—for me—is like giving up breathing.  I sometimes say that I, the daughter of two alcoholics, am an addict too, only I’m addicted to writing.  If I don’t write, I go through withdrawals.  This, by the way, is not a joke.  If I am in a particularly bad mood, my husband will tell me to go write something.  If I take his advice (and I don’t always), I feel much better.

So for me to say that I was going to give up writing—and more importantly, to mean it—meant that something was seriously, seriously wrong.  I felt like I was at the bottom of a very deep pit, and I couldn’t figure out a way to climb out, so I simply decided to give up.

Or I would have, if I had an answer to the very reasonable question my brilliant husband would ask me whenever I brought up quitting.

What else would you do?

I had a list that I worked my way down.  At this time, our local radio station needed a news director.  I was overqualified for the position, so before I applied, I investigated.

The job paid one-third of what I earned during those bad years if and only if you added in the costs of the benefit package—a measly health insurance policy not as good as the one I had as a freelancer, and two weeks paid vacation.  To earn one-third of what I was doing, I would have to commit 40 hours per week (and occasional weekends, if there was a news story) to the radio station.  I would have set hours.

I would work for someone else.

In fact, every job on my list—from waiting tables (yes, waiting tables looked good to me then) to going back to editing—required me to work for someone else.  On their schedule.  With no hope for an increase in pay, except at the once a year or once every two year performance review, and then the increase would be rather small (by my freelancing standards).

The only job I came up with that even marginally approached my freelance lifestyle (but not my freelance income) was teaching at a university.  In order to do that, I would have to go back to school, get a masters degree, and get a Ph.D.  Not so bad. Sometimes I miss living in a college town.

But to get my degree(s) would cost money. I would have had to uproot my husband (and my cats), move to a part of the country with infinitely worse weather than the Oregon Coast, and – oh, yeah—be on someone else’s schedule.

Worse than that, when I graduated, tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars later, I’d be at the bottom of someone else’s totem pole, at the bottom of the pay bracket which was at that point (again) one-third of what I was earning in the bad years, and oh, yeah, I’d be working for someone else.  Deeper in debt, no promise of job security (not as a first-year professor), and no real way to earn my way out of it all quickly.

I could have opened another small business (which required a capital outlay—and oh, yeah—it would have to be something else I loved. Since I’ve only had one job I loved for longer than one year (writing), I doubted the new business route worked for me).  My husband even offered me the option  of loafing for two or three years while he supported me.  (Bless him.)  I know that was a serious offer, but I also know he understands me very well.  He knows that after two days of vacation or two days of “doing what I want”—basically two days  of not writing—I’m absolutely miserable.  He made the offer, but he knew the chances of me actually succeeding at lying on the couch, eating bon-bons and reading all day were between slim and none.  I get cranky when I have a week’s worth of research reading and no time to write.  Imagine how I’d feel if I had years to do that.

Okay, some of this is my personal pathology.  I’m really not wired to do anything else.  But beneath that was an honest, desperate search for solutions by a woman who had hit bottom.  I really saw no way to revive my career.  I had given up.  But I didn’t want to do anything else—or nothing else.

I didn’t have blinding revelation.  I didn’t have a life-changing insight.  I realized slowly and over time that I was doing what I loved, that things had gotten bleak, and I had to rebuild.  I found a doctor who helped me live with the health problems, taking my bad days down from 20 per month to seven or so, and taking my worst days down to a maximum of four per month.  (This sounds so easy.  It took two years of experimentation and work.)

I fired the last bad employee, dug in and figured out what damage he had done, and started to repair it.  Then I slowly rebuilt my career, examining every single part of it, figuring out what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t, and figuring out where I wanted to go in the future, and designing a path to get there.

Slowly—and I do mean slowly—I climbed out of that horrible deep dark pit.  What kept me on that climb was not the goal, or even the ability to work hard.  It was a daily reminder—sometimes by listening to the new news director on the local radio station, sometimes by watching the waiters at the local restaurant, sometimes by simply reviewing the options of other jobs (or plain old slacking) and realizing (again) how unsuited I am to all of those.

Unsuited really isn’t the right word.  If I had to, I could have done any one of those things.  The real key was, deep down, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to give up my freelance lifestyle.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again freelancer for thirty years.  Every time I got a real job, I came screaming back to the freelance life. The longest fulltime job I ever held lasted three months.  Even the news directorship, which I had for years, was intermittent.  I was always acting news director, stepping aside when a new, permanent news director came on board.  (Of course, they lasted only a few months, so I’d get the position again.)

What do I like about freelancing?  Just about everything.  The pros, the cons, the ups, the downs, everything that I’ve mentioned in this guide, I’ve not only experienced, but I prefer to working a day job.  I’ve tried very hard in this guide to keep a measured tone about day jobs because I intellectually understand their necessity.  I know why people have them, why people believe that a day job gives them security, and why they would want such a thing.  And if I had had children in my twenties, I would have followed a different life path. I would have gotten a day job, and hated every minute of it, and done it for the security, for my dependents.

But I have no dependents.  Dean is a co-equal partner with me in our various businesses (yes, we have more than two), and he likes the risks as much as I do.  As I’ve said before, we really don’t see them as risks.  We don’t take risks.  We make educated choices based on all of the knowledge available to us.  That we chose to do so without the “safety” and “security” of a large corporation behind us shows our questioning natures from an early age, not any great wisdom or stupidity.  As I said in the day job sections of this guide, I have never believed, even when I was in my teens, that any job was secure.  I’d seen too many people lose theirs, too many people fired for no apparent reason.

And when I was seven, I watched my dad lose his tenured college position in part because he had the courage to speak his mind. (A long story, one someone [not me] wrote a book about, but suffice to say that you can’t have tenure at a college that ceases to exist, and you can’t easily get a job at another college when you’re known as a whistleblower.)

These things—tragedies, really—helped me become a freelancer. I didn’t have to jump over as many mental hurdles as some of my freelancing colleagues when they started.

But risk taker or not, traditionally security minded or not, all freelancers face the same problems and have the same benefits.  I’m sure every single freelancer you talk to will have a different list of benefits for doing the work, but here are mine:

1. I work for myself. I set my hours.  I decide what I’m going to do every day.  Through the work I chose to do, I set my income levels.  Sometimes I turn down boring high-paying projects.  Sometimes I take a high-paying crappy project because I need the money.  I make the decision.  I don’t get assigned that project by someone else.

2. I do what I love. Yeah, yeah.  If you read the entire Guide, you know there are parts of freelancing that I loathe. But I do those things—well, not exactly happily, but not unhappily either.  Because I’m doing them in service of the work I love.  Without those things, I could not do what I do.  They make the rest of what I do worthwhile.

3. I never complain about going to the office. I’m happy to go to work, even if I’m not enjoying the process.  I found it fascinating that when I first opened the Guide to questions, the first questions I got were about taking time off.  I had to ask other professionals how they take vacations because I don’t take one.

Many freelancers don’t.  Why?

Simple.  The work we do now was the thing we did for fun in our free time.  Why take time off from something you love?  (Yes, yes, I know. Rest and all that.  I do rest.  But I don’t see why I need a vacation from something I would do on vacation if I had a day job.  That makes no sense to me at all.)

The idea of time off—and time off as part of a job description—comes from having jobs that you don’t like, jobs you only do for the money. And if that’s the only reason you’re freelancing, friend, then go out and get a day job.  Freelancing’s too hard to do if you don’t love the work.

4. I get to design my own workspace.  I almost wrote that I get to work at home, but I’ve had businesses where I didn’t work at home. Even then, I designed a Kris-style work environment, one suited just to me.

5. I am a creator.  I can’t tell you how important that is.  The economy survives based on how many creators it has.  Those of us who develop our own product and our own businesses don’t just create that product. We also create jobs. In addition to the people I hire, like the house cleaner and gardener I mentioned in the employees section of the guide, there are also the people I keep employed, people whose businesses I frequent with the money I bring into my local community.  From the grocery store to restaurants, from the local bookstore to the clothing stores, the money I spend here doesn’t come from here.  It comes from all over the world, and it helps to fuel the economy in my small town.

6. I am responsible for my own career.  In other words, if I succeed, I succeed because of what I do.  If I fail, I fail because of what I do.  I mentioned the two bad employees in my first paragraph above, and if you read only that paragraph, you might think I blame them for the downturn in my business.  I could, I suppose.  A lot of people would.

But I’m the one who hired them, I’m the one who trusted them to do their jobs with minimal oversight, and I’m the one who didn’t fire them soon enough.  In other words, they caused a lot of damage that would never have happened if I had acted promptly.  Their mistakes are my fault.

7. I control my finances.  I might never make as much money as some writers.  I might not make as much as I would have made working for that friend who offered me a job in Hollywood all those years ago.  But I am not in this for the money, although money is a factor.  I can earn more if I work harder.  I have put myself in the position, as a lawyer friend once told me, to hit not one, not two, but multiple home runs financially.  I might never do so.  But I have the chance, a chance I wouldn’t have had if I had taken a day job.

That chance means less than you think it would, especially if you’re still putting in your 40 hours for a paycheck.  Because you are working for the money, so you’d expect me to as well. But I’m not.  I’m working for the enjoyment.  And study after study after study shows that people who work for themselves are happier than people who work for someone else.

Other studies show that people who are happier live longer than those who are unhappy.  I’d much rather be like Frederik Pohl who, in his nineties, is writing a blog and publishing a book a  year than I would be like a friend of mine who has retired in his sixties, doesn’t know what to do with his days, and is now worried (because of the changes in the economy) that his pension will run out.

Retirement falls into that vacation mindset to me. I retired from editing at the age of 37, and I was happy to do so. Relieved, actually.  I never ever want to do that again.

But retire from writing? Who are you kidding? When I die, I want to die like Jack Williamson did.  He was in his mid-nineties and had just finished a novel.  Or like Robert B. Parker, who died at his desk, while working on the current book.

8. A continual intellectual challenge.  I’m always learning something and doing something new.  Not just related to writing, but also related to business.  I follow court cases that apply to my field, financial regulations that deal with publishing, the changes in publishing methods now happening all over the world.  I constantly work to improve my craft.  I’m always reading something weird and interesting connected to my job (see my Recommended Reading List).  I travel to places I would never have seen otherwise, from places as beautiful as Paris to places as unexpectedly interesting as Salt Lake City.  Each trip is an adventure and each adventure comes from my work.  But I still work.  The last time I was in Paris, I slept very little, not just because of the book tour interviews and signings, but because I stayed up late every night, writing down what I did, and making notes for future stories, doing research, and learning as much as I could about a new city and a new country.  I think these things are fun and challenging.  And lucky me, they’re part of my job.

9. The harder I work, the luckier I am.  That’s the real secret to freelancing.  We seem to have lost the value of hard work.  People want to take things easy, and if you’re one of them, don’t freelance.  But if you like to be busy, then freelance.  You’ll always have too much to do.

But the real secret to freelancing?

Enjoyment.  It’s all about the fun.  When I teach writers, I give them a writing assignment and then tell them to go play. They often look at me like I’m nuts.  But seriously, that’s what I do.  I’m playing every day.  I make things up for a living.  I do something I would do even if no one ever paid me for it.

I’m having fun.

Life is hard enough without slogging through your daily existence.  We all get sick. We all lose family and friends. We all have setbacks and failures and unexpected (nasty) surprises.  Why add on the burden of a hated job if you can at all avoid it?  The biggest benefit to freelancing—for me, anyway—is the fact that it makes life enjoyable.

I even recognized that in the depths of my despair a few years ago.  The worst day at my freelance job is better than the best day at any day job I’ve ever had.

That’s what has kept me freelancing for thirty years.

And, if I’m lucky, will keep me freelancing for at least thirty more.

And there it is. The last installment of the Freelancer’s Guide.  <Whew>  140,000 words of material.  I’ll be spending the next three weeks trimming it down, getting rid of the repetition, and making it presentable.  Then I’ll send out e-copies to everyone who has donated.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll do a short post on the experiment that is the Guide: Did it work the way I expected? Do I consider it a success? I’ll crunch a few numbers, figure out the tangible and intangible benefits, and let those of you who’ve come along for the ride know how it all went.

Thanks ever so much for being a part of this. As I said, it’s been fun.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “The Benefits of Freelancing” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Hindsight

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I don’t know if we get wiser as we get older, but we certainly gain a lot more experience.  The experience comes in handy, if we chose to use it.  And sometimes that experience is just there, a part of our personal history and nothing more.

I had a discussion with someone this recently about hindsight.  We both discussed our fathers, both of whom discouraged us from our first marriages.  The person I was talking to is going through a divorce right now.  I went through mine 24 years ago.

We both agreed, in the course of our conversation, that our fathers had been right. We also agreed that if we had looked at those relationships now—from the outside (with someone not us) and with the benefit of another couple decades of living—we would see the upcoming problems as well.

Relationships follow patterns, and people often get attracted, particularly early on, to someone who might give us an opportunity to heal problems that currently exist in our own lives.  Watching other people’s relationships have given me insights into my own.  But that all comes from experience (and an annoying tendency toward nosiness).

The conversation with my friend wasn’t a bitter one though.  In fact, we both laughed about our poor fathers’ inability to stop us, and we both expressed some empathy for our fathers in that situation.  Because as clearly as our fathers could see the situation, their experience didn’t extend to preventing it.

Then, of course, both of us contemplated what might have happened had we listened to our fathers. If I hadn’t married the first time, I would probably never have met my current husband.  If I hadn’t met Dean, I certainly wouldn’t be typing this now.

As I’ve said before, I don’t regret that first marriage, despite the pain and anguish it caused me and my ex.  Not only do I (we, I hope) have some good memories, but that relationship was a critical one in forming both of us.  Fascinatingly to me is this:  Had my ex and I stayed together, his children would never have been born.  Had we done things “right,” he would have lost the family he has now, and probably not had a different one in its place.  I never wanted children, which we discussed at the beginning.  My ex, at nineteen, figured (without telling me) I’d change my mind.

I never did.

Most of us use hindsight the way I did here, to explore the various possibilities of our lives, the paths not taken.  I actually looked at that very topic in a story I just published in Analog, called “Red Letter Day.” The idea being if you could write a letter to your younger self, helping that person either change something in their life or not, what would you write? Would you write at all? (Still haven’t entirely answered that one for me.)

But we can use hindsight for more than what-if exploration.  We can use hindsight as we build our businesses.  In fact, I believe hindsight is an essential tool of business building.

In my post on failure, I wrote, “Failure is something we need to practice.  Handled well, failure leads to success.  In fact, I know of no long-term successful business person who lacks a failure in her background.”  Later in that post, I wrote that I believe that failures handled well are more properly termed setbacks.  Of course, I wrote three posts on the topic of setbacks as well.

What changes a failure to a setback? Attitude.  I know a number of people, several of them men, who have not remarried after their divorces.  Most of those men never even dated again.  They were so rocked by the failure of their marriages that they simply could not conceive of another relationship at all.  They weren’t willing to try again.

Sometimes this attitude is healthy.  It comes from suffering physical pain.  It’s hardwired in.  When we get hurt badly, we don’t want to repeat the behavior that caused us that pain.  This makes sense when it comes to touching a hot stovetop with your bare hand—you’re not going to do that again if you can at all help it—but makes a lot less sense when applied to everything in life.

If we avoided everything that hurt us, emotionally and physically, over the years, we’d eventually stop doing anything.  I’ve turned my ankle crossing a room without tripping on anything; does that mean I shouldn’t walk again?

Back in the failure post, I used the analogy of the child learning to walk. Toddlers don’t give up.  They want to move on their own too much to stop, even though they fall constantly and often hurt themselves.

But that’s a simple analogy.  I don’t think (don’t remember, honestly, and don’t really know) whether or not toddlers analyze what made them fall.  I suspect toddlers just get right back up and try again without any real thought except some version of I’m going to conquer this thing; everyone else I know has.

That bullheadedness serves us well in many areas of life. Sometimes you need to get right back on the horse, the bike, whatever cliché you prefer.

And sometimes you need to analyze what went wrong.  You need to use hindsight.

Because I have a driving desire not to ever make the same mistake twice, I get really angry at myself when I do make a single mistake over and over again.  I don’t quit whatever it is I’m doing—I’m closer to that bullheaded toddler than I let on in public—but I do rethink it, and sometimes I take a vacation from it.

Case in point: Business.  Business, unlike writing, is something I learned as an adult.  I’m a very organic writer.  I read, gather information, and eventually apply it.  I can teach what I’ve learned—somewhat.  But as I recently explained to a group of professional writers who had all come to study with me, if you delve too deeply into my ability to express my knowledge about writing, you’ll learn that my ability to describe what I know is pretty shallow. At some point, I just shake my head and say, “Look, just do it.  If you can’t do it then, we’ll see what else we can figure out.”  Not because I’m frustrated with the student, but because my own learning process in that area is so subconscious that I can’t even articulate how I know what I know.  And sometimes expressing what I know is equally hard.

On the other hand, I learned business in the school of hard knocks.  And when I say hard knocks, I mean the kind that make little cartoon birdies and stars revolve around your head for years.  I can point out each wound and scar, each dent to my thick skull, and every single slight that every happened, my fault or not.

Why am I not bitter?  Sometimes I am.  I occasionally indulge in the pity party or the nasty analysis of someone who has hurt me years ago.  But mostly, I learned relatively young that looking backwards and wallowing in regret does me no good whatsoever.

Life moves forward whether we want it to or not.  Our choice is whether or not to move with it or to give situations the permission to batter us around.

Hindsight is the tool that allows us to move forward.  It is also the tool that allows us to go near a stove again.  We assess what went wrong, and then we see if it’s even possible to move forward again without repeating the same mistake.

Once you put your hand on a hot stovetop, you realize that you have to approach that stove with caution.  A toddler might stay away from the stove entirely, since a toddler can’t see the top, and judges the entire thing harmful and can’t yet understand a stove’s benefits.

But an adult realizes that there are many ways to approach that stovetop, most of which will not hurt, if you’re careful.  One thing most of us do, however, is keep our bare hands away from any part of the stove that’s on.  Most of us never put our hands on that top without looking at it first.

Simple caution, based on experience.  It allows us to have a useful, if dangerous, item in our home.

But let’s move hindsight away from the realm of the physical into the realm of the mental.  Pain can be emotional.  The emotion comes from severe stress and trauma.

I’ve owned many businesses, and I’ve failed at a lot of them.  I’ve approached each one with the idea that I won’t make those same mistakes again.  Often, I decided not to go into the same kind of business again.

When Dean decided to open a collectibles store as a hobby, I wanted nothing to do with it.  I had worked retail from the age of twenty forward, and my ex and I owned a frame shop and art gallery that was a retail shop.

I hated most of the aspects of owning a store.  I hated the hours.  I hated the stuff.  I hated the cash outlay required to get inventory, to rent (or buy) a building, and most of all, I hated waiting for customers to come in.

But Dean had owned several shops, and had loved them.  I was not about to stop him from doing something he loved.  So I helped him plan, using the mistakes my ex and I had made in the past, combining those mistakes with the ones Dean made in his early stores.

That planning, and all of that hindsight, allowed us to build a successful business.  I didn’t ever stand behind the cash register, but I was part owner.  Dean and I made the major decisions together.

Our experience paid off.  Dean’s expertise in collectibles made the store a destination stop within its first year.  The inventory came from Dean’s collections, and his judicious purchases of other people’s collections.

Because Dean knows himself quite well, he also realized that the joy in any project for him is building that project.  (That’s why he became an architect.)  He literally built this business from scratch, making a deal with an owner of a strip mall that we would pay to fix up a dilapidated space inside that mall in exchange for three years of rent.

The nice thing about that rent deal and the previously owned inventory is that together, they gave us the opportunity to walk away from the business if it didn’t work.  We had three years of free rent, so we had three years to see if the business could sustain itself.  We had more than a year’s worth of inventory, so we had relatively few start-up costs.

The business became so successful so quickly (which we did not expect) that Dean realized he was going to have to put more time into it than he had planned. That realization too came from experience.  He had done this before, and he knew how to grow a business.  He did not want to become a collectibles mogul. This was supposed to be his hobby, not his life.

Once he made that realization, he sold the business—for a profit—six months after Oregon, already ahead of the curve, had sunk into this deep recession.  The new owner, who had worked at the business from the start, maintained it, and it continues to grow even now, doing extremely well in this tough economic climate.

Every single plan we made about that new business came from hindsight.  We knew, first of all, that Dean needs to build things.  He always has something going on besides his writing.  Before he wrote, he had two or three new things happening as well.  He must create on a variety of levels, and it’s impossible to hold him back—although he’s great at analysis, and able to figure quickly if a new project is the right project for him.

That ability to figure out if a new project is right also comes from experience.  In our lifetime together, he’s started projects only to abandon them within the week as it became clear that he wasn’t suited for them. Time has taught us to evaluate first, sink money in later.

Experience taught us to do the financial plan up front.  We’d both started businesses by the seat of our pants, with just a vague idea that it would work out.  Once or twice it did, but mostly it failed.

We also learned that we needed to spend as little on start-up as possible because we were taking no outside investors.  We needed to be able to walk away from this business.  Because of our years of experience we knew that the economy was headed downward (long before the “smart guys” in Washington had it figured out), and we had to make the business as recession-proof as possible.  We’d both started businesses in a recession, and we lost Pulphouse Publishing in part because of our response to the recession of 1992.  So we knew how dangerous the overall economic climate could be to a business.

We planned for that.

We also knew the price we needed if we decided to sell the business, and we knew it up front.  Mostly, we expected to shut it down if it didn’t work. The fact that we found a buyer with little effort had more to do with Dean’s planning abilities than with me, but he doesn’t like building things only to take them apart.  So he worked hard to keep potential buyers interested, even while he started the business up.

All of this planning was extremely different from the planning we had done in our early businesses.  Those, as I said, were done without enough planning at all.  In fact, as I mentioned in the business plan post [link], I didn’t understand why places like the Small Business Administration wanted a business plan.  How could we know how the business would operate when we hadn’t operated a business?

I recently watched a business go through the same by-the-seat-of-their-pants start-up, and I haven’t even talked to or met the owners.  I recognize the signs from experience alone.

Down the hill from our house, a lovely Italian restaurant went out of business but not because of financial mismanagement.  The place was wildly successful.  Instead, it closed because of what I think of as a weird Oregon Coast phenomenon.  The owners got sick of tourists.

We went to this restaurant a lot, and in hindsight, the signs of the closure were obvious.  It started when the owner decided that locals could make reservations, but tourists could not. Then it migrated to little signs on the table, telling people to control their children and not to use their cell phones.  Then the hours got strange—staying open on Monday and Tuesday (traditionally days on the Oregon Coast when business are closed because there are no tourists) and closing on Sunday.  In their last year, the owners closed for the summer (the high season) and reopened in the winter (when the town is empty).  The reopening didn’t last.  In fact, the restaurant closed for good during, of all things, spring break.  The owners loved to cook. They loved to cook for people they liked. They hated dealing with rudeness, demands, and all the other things that come with owning a restaurant.

They had owned their building, and it sat empty for two years, waiting for a buyer or for someone to rent it.

This spring, someone rented it.

Because the restaurant is so close to us, we watched the newcomers build it.  A small sign went up immediately, announcing the future home of the new restaurant.  The front door sat open during the business day, as the new owner painted and did a slight remodel. The official sign went up in late May and with it, an announcement on the changeable sign below, that the restaurant would open on June 25.

Well, I could see the interior of that place, and it was clear to me that they would have to push to hit their June 25 deadline.  On June 20, the furniture got delivered.  On June 24, the sign changed to a July 2 opening.  Fourth of July is the biggest weekend in our little tourist town, so it became clear that these new restaurateurs wanted to take advantage of that.

But both Dean and I have worked in restaurant start-ups, and a menu, a good chef, and a well-designed interior do not a restaurant make. Every single successful restaurant that we’ve worked at—and that Dean has managed—has given itself a month to work out the kinks.  Mostly, the restaurant holds practice nights with the newly hired wait staff, without opening the restaurant at all.  One restaurant in Superior, Wisconsin, when I was a teenager invited the relatives of every single person on the staff to come into the restaurant and eat free for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.  That restaurant did so for two weeks.

By the time it opened, the staff knew the menu, knew the quirks of the kitchen, had made (and corrected) dozens of errors, learned where everything is kept, and learned how to pace themselves through a restaurant slammed with customers.

(Our local six-plex movie theater did the same thing, by the way, just to get the bugs out of their system.)

Dean worked varieties of the same practice session.  Every restaurant that does this opens to acclaim, if not for the food, at least for the service.

On July 1, the restaurant below announced a July 5 opening date.

On July 4, the opening date was gone.

On July 17, the place held a stealth opening.  They’d lost an entire month of revenue from their business plan (if indeed they had one), and they have so far gotten no word of mouth throughout the community.  The stealth opening allowed them to practice a little, but they probably lost customers who expected a more polished staff/restaurant.

I hope they’ll survive, but their cold opening probably made things harder than they needed to be. And the cold opening is a clear sign of inexperience.

So how do you make hindsight work for you?

1. Do a fearless inventory of what went wrong in your previous business(es).  Make a list and be honest.  If you’re not honest, there’s no point.  If you did something wrong, or several somethings wrong, admit them.  You need to understand where all of the mistakes are, not just some of them.

2. Evaluate whether the mistakes came from a) the economy; b) your response to the economy; c) your inexperience or d) your personality.  If the mistakes came from the economy, then you better make sure you know how to weather the same economic climate.  If they came from your response to the economy, then you better learn how to be more flexible in response to a crisis.

If the mistakes came from your inexperience, don’t get overconfident.  Just because you have experience now doesn’t mean you’re all wise.  Plan to make more errors.

If the mistakes came from your personality, you better find a way to negate that part of you that has the tendency to do things wrong for the type of business you’re opening.  I’m great at publishing and editing, but I’ll never edit again.  I’m good at it, but not suited to it.  No amount of “change” will make me and editing suit.  I might be able to do a small project or two, but I won’t make a career out of it—not without a personality transplant.  Been there, done that, spent enough to buy a factory’s worth of t-shirts.

If the mistakes came from your personality, you might need to hire someone to take that part of your personality out of play.  I could own a publishing company (in partnership with Dean) again, if I don’t edit.  But I would have to remain hands-off with the new editor.  I would have to trust that person—which is a tall order. As I said, I’m very good at editing, and I’d see mistakes right off.  I’d probably drive that person out of the business if I wasn’t careful.

Hiring a person to do the part of the job you’re not suited for has all the pitfalls of hiring an employee for other aspects of your life.  See the employee sections of the guide.

If your previous business failed due to your personality, then you might want to reconsider stepping back into that same kind of business at all.  Sometimes it’s better to say that you don’t suit than it is to keep pounding your head against the same brick wall.

3.  Use other people’s hindsight.  Ask them about the mistakes they made in the same type of business.  Do this even if you’ve owned a business before.  You’ll learn something, guaranteed.

However, make sure you listen to their advice.  At least three start-up publishers interviewed me and Dean about what went wrong at Pulphouse Publishing.  We were very honest with them, told them about various warning signs, and told them to call us if things got dicey.

All three of those start-ups failed, one spectacularly.  All three of them followed the exact same path that Pulphouse followed, and all three responded to the problems the same way we did—which is to say, the wrong way.

They were forewarned.  Of course, they took no notes during our meeting, never contacted us when things got dicey, and only one remembered our advice at all.  He later admitted to us that he was in the hospital (the failure caused a physical collapse that put him in the hospital for weeks) and he kept hearing our voices, telling him what exactly would go wrong if he didn’t take our advice.  He says we haunted him, and he apologized for not listening.

He didn’t owe us an apology.  He owed himself one.

5. Let hindsight help you in all aspects of your business.  Because I know how a failing business behaves, I often will not work with a business that is exhibiting the symptoms of a business on the edge.  Because we had a publishing house collapse, I particularly know the signs of that, so I won’t approach a company that even whispers of trouble.  The trouble is often obvious to those of us who have been through something similar years in advance.

In fact, when Dean and I talked with one of those start-ups all those years ago, the owner told us in the middle of the meal he was buying us that he “would never ever make such dumb mistakes.”  We immediately decided never to work with him—not because he insulted us, but because his ego was so large that he believed he was immune to our stupidity.

He compounded our stupidity, and his failure was so spectacular that people within publishing still discuss it as an example of what not to do when running a business.

6.  Remember the most important lesson of hindsight: You are fallible. Sorry, kiddo.  You’ll make mistakes just like the rest of us.  In fact, you’ll  make mistakes every single time you start a new business.  You’ll make mistakes after owning that business for ten years, fifteen, twenty.   Face it: You’ll make mistakes.

Now longtime readers will understand where I get my mantra.  The key is to avoid making the same mistake twice.  You’ll always make new mistakes.  Be creative about them.  Make new mistakes in the pursuit of the perfect, mistake-free business.  Then learn from those new mistakes.

That’s what hindsight is for.  Toss out the regrets and the “I wish I hads.”  Stop fantasizing about going back in time and fixing things.

Move forward with the right attitude—after you’ve fearlessly looked backwards, of course.

One more topic! Seriously, I’m down to one more topic!!!!!  Not that I’m thrilled about this or anything, but one more topic!!!!  I’ve already put two small sections of the Guide on Kindle and Smashwords.  I’ll have more up by next week.

If you want the whole Guide—and you want to set your own price, not pay mine—hit the donate button now.  I’ll be sending a free e-book of the finished Guide to everyone who donated about three weeks after I declare the Guide done on my website.  (That might be as soon as next week because there’s one more topic!)

So thanks again to all of you who have already donated, participated, and sent letters or comments.  See you next week!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “Hindsight” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Incorporation

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I spent most of this evening putting another Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book together. The first short book, When To Quit Your Day Job, is available now in an electronic edition.  It’ll be on all the sites eventually, but right now, you can get it on Smashwords (in any e-format).

What I’m doing as I put these short books together is setting up the sections for the final Freelancer’s Guide—all 150,000 words of it.  Those of you who have donated will get the big book (unless you e-mail me with requests for the shorter books as well), and that should come to you sometime this fall.

Things are coming together, which feels quite good.

Because I’m organizing, I’m also going over my topic list.  I’ve missed a few things as specific topics, but I’m discovering that they were covered in brief in other posts.  One of the missed topics is incorporation.

I’m in the middle of another novel, which makes me very spacey, and that means my desk is piled high with papers.  I’ve gone through them twice tonight, and can’t find the initial letter asking me about incorporation.  (Sorry!)  I know it’s here somewhere, but rather than wait to locate it, I’m just going to dig into the topic.

I agonized over writing about incorporation and twice crossed it off my list.  I am not a lawyer, nor am I a tax expert.  I really didn’t want to tackle the topic.  But I talked with a few people about whether or not I should write about incorporation, and all of them seemed enthusiastic.

A few suggested I contact my “panel of experts” to discuss incorporation.  While I know dozens of attorneys, many of whom are tax attorneys or copyright attorneys or corporate attorneys, I don’t feel right asking them to comment for this article.

I know what they’ll all say.  It depends on the business.  It depends on the financial situation of the business.  It depends on the structure of the business.  It depends on whether or not you want investors, what your tax liability is, and what it might become.

It depends, it depends, it depends.

It also depends on which country you’re in. Since I’ve received donations for the Guide from Japan, England, the Netherlands, and Canada (to name only a few), I don’t want to spend a lot of time on a topic that I know only from an American perspective.

So I’m going to handle this very complicated topic in a very simple manner.

First, let’s discuss business structure.

Most freelancers are sole proprietors. They run their own business by themselves. They own it, they run it, and they manage it alone.  They file a Schedule C on the United States tax form.  They use a simple accounting system.  Often their business doesn’t even have a name, except their name.  People in the arts work this way, often.  So the tax document is filed under the owner’s name.  Business cards have the freelancer’s name on them, and maybe a description of what the freelancer does.

That’s it.  Simple and easy.  For most of you, this is a fine system.  No need to mess with it.

But let’s say you decided to name your business Green Frahg Productions.  You have become the owner and operator of Green Frahg Productions.  You want all bank accounts, receipts, bills, payments, everything financial to funnel through Green Frahg Productions.

There are many ways to do this.

To open a bank account in the United States under the name Green Frahg Productions, you’ll need a DBA document.  That’s a Doing Business As form which you can get from your bank.  You’ll need to file that form with the state.  Once you’ve filled out that form with all the pertinent information, you can then open your accounts under the name Green Frahg Productions.

It’s really that simple.  Each state has different regulations.  Your banker will tell you what the regulations are for your state.  I have a hunch it works this way in each country as well.

You’ll be on the DBA as the owner and operator, but Green Frahg becomes the public face of your business, not you.  The check for any purchased material will come to Green Frahg Productions. The only problem comes in signing the contract. Someone has to sign as a representative of Green Frahg, and that someone is you.

A DBA is the simplest way to assume a name other than yours for your business.  A corporation is an extremely complicated way, and if you want a corporate identity only for the name, then you don’t understand corporations.

Under U.S. law (and under the laws of many other countries), a corporation is a separate entity.  In other words, it exists, like a person exists.  In the U.S., we’re constantly arguing about what that means.  The major Supreme Court case this year, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that caused so much controversy is a case about (among other things) the definition of a corporation under the law.  These things change all the time, and there are books upon books upon books defining what a corporation is, what its tax liability is, and what regulations it must follow.

Not to mention that inside the United States, corporations can take various forms.  Some have limited liability.  Some are public—meaning that anyone can buy stock in it (through the correct channels).  Some are private.  There is subchapter this and structure that, and they all follow different rules.

One thing each corporation holds in common is this: If you decide to incorporate, your paperwork will increase exponentially.  You’ll have to have board meetings. You’ll need to document everything.  Your finances must be handled a certain way.  Your taxes must be handled a certain way.

If you fail to follow those rules, you are legally liable for all kinds of nastiness.  Taking on a corporation is a mighty task, one you shouldn’t do lightly, if at all.  It’s certainly not something you can decide on your own.  You’ll need to hire an attorney to help you incorporate.  Make sure that the attorney you hire is a business attorney who handles corporations routinely.

You’ll also need a certified public accountant to help you set up the books of your corporation.  Those books must be set up to a particular standard, and that standard has to be maintained.

If you have stockholders, then you’ll need to do reports, filings, disclosures and all kinds of things like that.  Corporations, in case you can’t tell, are a gigantic pain in the butt.

So…if corporations are a pain, why do people incorporate their businesses?

For a variety of reasons.  Many will incorporate to minimize their personal tax liability.  If your business starts making profits in the hundreds of thousands, then you might want to consider incorporating.  Your tax liability (in the States) might go down.  It might not.  I know people who have so badly mishandled their corporations that their tax liability went up.

If your business is a risky one, then you might want a corporation to stand between you and any legal liabilities.  If you’re afraid that you could get sued routinely for standard business practices, then you might want to incorporate.

It sounds like I’m talking about criminal businesses here, but I’m not.  I’m talking about a business, like a gym, where injury might be common, and lawsuits are expected.  People hurt themselves all the time on gym equipment, and it doesn’t matter how often you explain how to use the equipment correctly.  People will sue.

If you own the gym as a sole proprietor, then any legal damages could come out of your own personal wealth.  Your kid’s college savings might go instead to the dumb guy who decided he could bench-press an extra 50 lbs and broke bones doing so.  Yeah, you warned him, but you didn’t take the weights away from him.  And the jury found for the dumb guy.  Your kid suddenly isn’t going to college.

Unless your gym is incorporated and—here’s the rub—it’s the right kind of corporation, then you might be protected.  Some corporations aren’t protection against a lawsuit like that. Some are.  The ones that are will act in this way: the court will take the damages from the corporation’s finances and leave yours alone.

Again, it depends on what you need the corporation for.

So if you are thinking of incorporating, either to protect yourself from huge tax bills or to protect yourself from standard (and expected) lawsuits that are the cost of doing business, do these things:

1. Research, research, research.  Read up on corporations. Then find the right people to talk to.  Research the attorneys you might hire. Research the accounting firms.  Figure out what you really need before you ask for help.

2. Hire the correct attorney and listen to what she has to say.  Ask the right questions.  Tell her exactly what you want the corporation for.  Ask her about taxes, liabilities, benefits and drawbacks to the various corporations she proposes.  You might want to see a second and third attorney to get their opinions as well.  You don’t want to have the wrong type of corporation when all is said and done.

3. Hire the right accountant and listen to what he has to say.  He’s going to help you set up your finances.  He’s going to set up your accounts, and he’s going to tell you how the accounts work for your type of corporation.  Follow his instructions and setup to the letter.  If you don’t do this, you could be subject to extra taxes, fines, and all kinds of ugliness.

4. Keep a wall between you and that corporation. Don’t blur your finances.  Don’t blur your taxes.  Don’t tell people you are the business when you are not.  Think of the corporation as another person and don’t ever, ever steal that other person’s identity.

5. If you have shareholders, keep them informed.  The law requires this, of course, but so many small corporations don’t do it.  Do it.  That prevents shareholder lawsuits.

If all of this talk of tax  liability and rules and thick books and lawyers and accounting regulations and lawsuits scares you, good.  It should.  Because incorporating is a big decision and not one you should take lightly.

It’s a decision that most of you should not take at all.  Be happy with your DBA or your unnamed sole proprietorship.  Plug along at your small business, and keep it small.

Once you become a corporation, you’re playing with the big boys, and believe me, they play nasty.  Stay out of their game if you can at all avoid it.  If you decide to join them, then be prepared—and follow the rules.

You’ll be glad you did.

Writing about corporations give me heartburn.  It’s a topic I wouldn’t have covered without reader input. Thank you for the question, and thanks to all of you for the comments.  Those of you who have kept me going on this very long project with your donations deserve my special thanks as well.

If you donate now, you will get a copy of the full ebook this fall.  I’m winding down here (and getting sooo tired).  By my count, I only have two topics left.  Unless I missed something you really, really want to see.  If I did miss it, e-mail me this week.  Because I’m getting ready to do my sprint to the end. Those two topics might take me a few weeks to get through (they’re not small), but after that, I’m done.  Thanks, everyone, for the year-plus of support.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “Incorporation” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.