Some Honest Talk About Freelancing

Have you ever had the experience, maybe while looking through clothes in your cupboard or shuffling through drawers in your kitchen, when you stumble upon something and say to yourself, “Wow, I’d forgotten about this”? That’s how I feel about LinkedIn.

The ever-popular social media app (yes, it’s social media) is a regular part of many people’s lives. If you work for a company that’s big enough to have an HR department, or at least an HR manager, there’s a good chance LinkedIn has played some role in your career.

But for many creatives, especially those who work for themselves, or in small companies, LinkedIn is an odd beast. It’s a bit like watching a reality TV show where one of the contestants is a friend of a friend.

So it’s always a surprise when I get a message from LinkedIn. A few months back there was a promising communication from a senior Asia editor at one of those big fat glossy fashion magazines. Apparently I’d been recommended to them and they liked my photography and writing. Their brief was “undiscovered Japan”.

I said sure, give me more details, and let’s talk. They then requested I submit five or six original and unpublished feature-length stories, complete with photos, for them to “consider”!

So, I do all this work, maybe two or three months’ worth, and they might pay me? Or might they just pass my work on to their in-house team, and send a much cheaper writer and photographer to go reproduce it, using my efforts as a free template and guide?

I’d like to say this was unusual, but it isn’t. The freelance world was always tough but it has increasingly become brutal. Part of me wants to cry despair and say that, given the anxieties I’ve had recently, I’m not up to competing in this game. But, it’s not just me.

There’s been a string of articles in recent years calling out the state of the creative freelance market today, like The ‘gig economy’ has broken a fundamental link in capitalism that was good for workers, All work and no pay: creative industries freelancers are exploited, and Freelancing made my depression worse – here’s how I learnt to cope.

This experience has been behind some of the other recent things I’ve written, like Stop Being A Photographer And Make Better Photos, How Can We Define Fine Art Photography, and On Having No Side Projects.

I’m not saying that freelancing as a model is dead. But unless you can work at high volume, on short notice and with massive adaptability, it’s increasingly untenable.

This is why, from now on, my focus is on selling the work I make, as finished pieces of art.

In one sense this is redefining what my work looks like, but more importantly, it’s redefining the ecology that allows that work to exist.

In the coming few months you’ll see new products from me, a new online store, and new ways to support the work. The blog won’t change. It will be ad-free and honest, like always. But I’ll be able to talk more openly about everything I do. I’m looking forward to this and I hope you will enjoy it too.