Now that I’ve dipped my toes into the waters of both freelancing and e-publishing, I think I’m qualified to give my barely informed opinion about the differences between the two. I’ve been freelancing for a content mill, writing SEO articles (keyword-stuffed pieces of text that will help bump a site up to the front page of a Google search) and miscellaneous pieces of text for anyone who wants to pay me five bucks. I’ve also released one ebook, which has been sitting around at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Writing the ebook was a hell of a lot more fun, but definitely more taxing. I spent a lot of time agonizing over each turn of phrase. When you’re freelancing, if you spend your time crafting deathless prose you’ll end up earning pennies per day. The effort I’ve been putting into writing for other people has been more about my time and energy, not my creative juices.
Here’s the deal: when I write for someone else, I get 1.4 cents a word. It’s not the best payout in the world, but it is a great incentive to keep going. Write a 500 word article, get seven bucks. Rinse and repeat until you have a dollar figure you’re comfortable with. The ebook, on the other hand, was around 6,000 words. By the standards of freelancing pay, that’s $80. To date, I’ve made maybe $15 off that book.
Of course, the ebook’s at something of a disadvantage because I haven’t put much time at all into promoting my work. I do plan to do that someday, but I’ll either have to spend money (to buy ads) or put in a lot of unpaid time (to promote myself on various social media). I’m holding off on that course of action until I have at least two or three other stories ready to go.
I’m going to keep writing ebooks, of course, because I adore fiction. What I’m banking on now is the possibility that churning out prose for other people will train me to be a better author, one who can sit down and put words on the page every day instead of staring out the window for hours.
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