on freelancing

In admist the holiday travel, the botched New Years plans, the lost luggage, and the parental pampering, I've been looking into becoming a freelancer.

Which is more difficult than one would think.
I know of a number of people who do freelance work, be it editing or writing, and as someone who is realistic enough to know that making a living with a Creative Writing degree only happens to the very lucky, I decided to follow in their footsteps. First came lots of Google-ing. Followed, by more Google-ing. There are a plethora of websites dedicated to freelancing, some as handily labelled as www.online-writing-jobs.com and freelancer.co.uk. However, for all the websites available, finding a website you feel you can trust seems nigh impossible.

As with all things on the internet, and all things that involve money, you have to be very conscious of whether or not the website you're looking at is actually a scam. Reading website and company reviews is helpful in this area. It's also helpful in determining whether or not the website you sign up to has your best interests at heart. A site like Suite101 looks good on the surface, however, some of my research has told me that it "favor[s] the company and deprive[s] writers of revenue". It is not there to help you as a writer or editor to establish yourself within the industry in such a way that you recieve proper compensation for the amount of work you put in. After all, writing and editing is an exhausting, time-consuming process, and no one wants to be short changed for the hard work they produced.

But as with all things, nothing is perfect, and some sites haven't been reviewed and as such I've been wary of signing up with them. Many sites, like freelancer.co.uk, also contain a system which does not appeal to me: the biding system. After signing up, writers and editors wait for jobs to be posted and then they bid on them, directing employers to their profiles in the hopes that they are chosen to do the job. It strikes me that waiting for opportunities to bid is a full-time job in and of itself, and I do not have the patience for it. Say whatever you want, but sitting there pressing the Refresh button all day is not exactly what I want to do with my time.

Thus, I have decided that the internet, for all that it is the best thing since sliced bread and the internal combustion engine, is not the way I want to go. I'm going old school.

I'm going to talk to people.

Wish me luck.

(Image borrowed from here.)