A Personal Coronavirus Diary: The Other Stuff
Today I wrap up a series I expected to conclude last week. The interruption is a perfect metaphor for today’s post. Many hours in a freelance writer’s life are not occupied by the activities that directly contribute to finished pieces, and a level of chaos emerges from all the other odd work that rattles around, inevitably demanding attention at inconvenient, unexpected moments. Let’s spend a moment unpacking them.
Unwritten Revenue
Most writers do other things to raise the profile of their platform (which helps sell writing projects) or generate revenue. I’ve looked back through my records the last few years, and here is a probably-incomplete list of jobs for which I’ve been paid:
teaching: three places including the PSU gig I’ve mentioned
speaking
consulting with breweries: this has focused on helping breweries with their messaging, though in one case led to a book
podcasting
Critiquing/reviewing: publishers and in one case a company asked me to assess books/projects
Performing the audio for the Widmer Way audiobook. (Which, frustratingly, was never released.)
Beyond paid work, writers have a host of responsibilities if they want to be engaged members of their profession. Much as when brewers show me a brewery, I don’t get paid for this stuff, but it’s important to be supportive of the activities in our world:
Offering advice and help to writers. This is often in the form of background on how to write a book. It may mean reviewing a proposal or reading a manuscript pre-publication, or reviewing a book to blurb it. (If so, then there’s the blurb-writing as well.)
I would love to help mentor newer writers though have had only infrequent opportunities. Give me a holler!
Answering questions from readers/visitors/etc. This takes a fair amount of time and I could imagine it’s a serious problem for famous writers.
Giving interviews to media. I depend on quotes to elevate my stories, and so I offer them when asked.
Engaging the community by judging beer, giving unpaid speeches, hosting tastings, participating in events, etc.
I could complain here that being a writer means having a constantly-full inbox, one that only grows when I neglect it. And while that’s true, I recognize that it’s a very good thing. It means people are engaged with my work. When the inbox stops filling up, I’ll have a real problem.
Lines in the Water
With the exception of blogging and the column I write for Craft Beer and Brewing, all of the work I do, from books to the items mentioned above, require me to go out and rustle up the work (or in the case of podcasting, show sponsors). There are very few sure bets out there, so this means that for every idea that blossoms into work, there are several that die or which I abandon. I think of it like having a bunch of fishing lines in the water, waiting to see what bites. I would love to hear from other writers how they would assess the ratio of their time devoted to landing work to the time put into the work itself. I’d estimate 25% of my time goes to trying to land new work—though, of that time, only about half of it ever becomes work.
The challenge for the writer is balancing competing interests: pursuing higher-percentage work versus passion projects, all the while thinking of the arc of a career, which direction you want it to head in, and what will benefit your long as well as short-term interests. Take speaking. Despite being fairly introverted, it’s something I love doing. Finding paid speaking gigs isn’t that easy, though, and a writer should do certain things with their career to make themselves more attractive as a speaker. How much should I invest in doing those things and then pitching gigs on the hope that speaking will become a decent income stream? That’s not a rhetorical question—please, tell me! (It is a good example of the calculations one makes.)
The Newsletter Gambit
Just to add some appetizing flesh to these bones, let me offer an example—one that’s currently percolating at the back of my mind. Over the course of a year, I consider several of these possibilities, and they often amount to nothing. My guess is that this one will as well, but we’ll see.
The idea is an old one that has found new life: the email newsletter. If you’re not aware of this trend in media, that’s not a surprise. It’s relatively recent, and for old folks like me, it’s a confusing return to a web 1.0, like internet message boards and chat rooms. The leader in the movement is Substack, which offers a free suite of services to anyone with an email address: an email newsletter, podcast, blog, and—well, I’m not entirely sure how it all knits together.
It arrives at a time when news orgs are especially weak and writers, thanks to social media, have their own following. Staff writing positions for newspapers and magazines are rare, and even writers who land them don’t get paid a lot. So many are now taking their work straight to their followers via these new-school newsletters, which cache the content on a blog. They’re free for both the host and subscribers, but writers can add a paid subscriber feature—which of course only a tiny minority of the regular subscribers choose. (It’s spendy, too—a minimum $50 annual or $5 monthly fee.)
So, should I switch to this model? The timing is pretty good. I’m between sponsors on the blog. (As an update, it looks like Guinness may yet re-up for another year, though, so yay!) Given the hit breweries are taking from the virus—or worried about taking—they’re less likely to become sponsors anytime soon. So it would be a perfect time to switch the model. (Moments of crisis are moments of change.) But how many subscribers could I get? How much effort would it take to build the subscriber pool? And then, when I ask if people would support by paying, how many would be willing to fork over that (real) money? Unemployment is 10% and the economy may be teetering. Fifty bucks a year to support a beer newsletter is a big ask.
It’s an intriguing possibility, but the variables that will define success are not easy to assess. In this case, there’s a relatively low bar to entry—signing up (which I did, just in case) took all of two minutes. I could begin tweeting out links to subscribe now. But it’s high risk: I have an established, 14-year-old blog that has a pretty decent audience. Even if I kept it, I weaken the experience by either limiting what both audiences see (writing some exclusive content for each) or I just repeat the content on both and then what’s really the point?
All of this floats around my head in the context of the pandemic. How much sense does it make to pursue DIY projects like self-published books and newsletters? Is writing about beer even viable in the long term? If it is, what formats are self-sustaining?
I’ll wrap things up here. It has been therapeutic to talk through these matters, and I hope you’ve found it interesting. And, as an oversharing blogger, you can count on me to keep you updated.