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Episode 371: Jen A. Miller
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Jen A. Miller (@ByJenAMiller) is a freelance writer and author of Freelance Writing for Laid-Off Journalists (and Those Who Want to Quit).
Substack: rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Technical Apologies
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and efforts Brendan here I've been working through some technical difficulties with this file I've had to pull down the published one and I have to republish I had to do it again and now I'm doing it all over I'm sorry if this disrupted your listening experience and everything so just
00:00:20
Speaker
Thank you very much for your patience. Thanks for bearing with me. Really working at it. And I hope that the fact that you're hearing this right now means that the new file is up and it's working. So this is just me saying I'm sorry for the inconvenience. And here we go. A little shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there.
00:00:39
Speaker
This is not a paid plug. They are not an official sponsor of the podcast, but I am a brand ambassador and I just want to celebrate this amazing product. So if you go to athleticbrewing.com or use the referral link that are in the show notes to this podcast, use the promo code BRANDONO20 at checkout, you can get a nice little discount on your first order. Give it a shot. If you can turn in clean copy on time, you're going to be 95% ahead of the rest of everybody else.
Guest Introduction: Jen A. Miller
00:01:11
Speaker
Oh hey, CNF for the CNF Pod, that creative nonfiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Yay. Jen A. Miller. She's back. Freelance writer to the stars. Just kidding. But she's a wildly successful freelance writer, journalist, road tripper, dog lover, author, New Jersey native, Jeep owner.
00:01:36
Speaker
She's back to talk about her new ebook, freelance writing for laid off journalists and those who want to quit. For the cost of a classy six pack, Jen gives you the tools to leverage your skills into what could potentially be a lucrative writing career. Spoiler alert.
00:01:57
Speaker
It's not gonna happen in writing solely for consumer magazines, so give up that dream. Jen is at Jen A. Miller on Twitter and Instagram. Her newsletter is Notes from a Hired Pen, and her website is, you guessed it, JenAMiller.com, okay?
00:02:12
Speaker
Show's audience is tanking, not sure why. I guess I'm just not that likeable anymore. Make sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit RageAgainstTheAlgorithm.substack.com. First of the month, no spam.
00:02:30
Speaker
Still can't beat it. If you dig this show, consider sharing it with your network so we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who I think need the juice. You can also leave a kinder view on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNFer might say, shit, I'll give that a shot.
00:02:51
Speaker
There's also patreon.com slash CNF pond. You can always drop a couple bucks in the
Ebook for Laid-off Journalists
00:02:56
Speaker
head. If you glean some value from this show, feel some inspiration, feel like you're a little less alone, a little less angry. The show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Would you like office hours? We can talk book marketing, email marketing, reporting, research, writing platform, blah, blah, blah. We could try that. The CNF and patrons deserve it, man.
00:03:20
Speaker
So I guess that's it. I'm not gonna belabor this intro any longer. Let's just hear what Jen A. Miller has to say about turbocharging your writing career, okay?
00:03:45
Speaker
This one specifically is aimed at journalists or laid-off journalists and it's a 7,000 words longer than your other ones so you know what was the inspiration for this one and why did it well it appears to be something of a heavier lift than maybe some of your other ones too.
00:04:04
Speaker
So I've been writing a freelance newsletter, Notes from a Hired Pen for a long time, and I hear from people who need, who are asking for help.
Freelancing Tips and Networking Strategies
00:04:12
Speaker
And for a while I would do individual consulting and I realized that I didn't really like that. That wasn't my thing. So I just switched to doing these eBooks and I started hearing from journalists. I've always heard from journalists or people who want to leave journalism or who lost a,
00:04:28
Speaker
a full-time journalism job, I get tagged in tweets about layoffs and things like that. And I realized that in speaking to these folks over, you know, years, because I mean, there's been masses of layoffs of journalists since I graduated from college in 2002. So none of this is new. I realized that there were things, skills that folks who pretty much worked full-time at newspapers or magazines or news websites
00:04:53
Speaker
They have a lot of skills that translate easily to freelancing that don't involve pitching. I understand the importance of pitching, and I know there's a lot of information about pitching, but it's such a time suck. And almost every journalist I know who has worked in a full-time role has massive amounts of contacts all over the place, and I wanted to encourage them to start there.
00:05:16
Speaker
Start with people who know you, who know your work, who have projects that aren't gonna be advertised everywhere, not gonna be posted on Twitter. Just start with saying, I'm looking for freelance work, who do you know who could use me? And I thought it would be a newsletter post and it ended up becoming a whole ebook. Does that make sense? I think that if you have a beat, for example, even if your beat is you work for the local newspaper and you cover school board events or things happening in this town,
00:05:45
Speaker
You don't necessarily have to go out and find work. It comes to you. You know, when I was writing the running newsletter for the New York Times, I never really had to pitch what I was going to write about it. I have to write something about running this week. When you are freelancing, especially new, you have to think more about what you can write, what people will hire you for. I mean, I did this whole ebook and never even touched on journalists who use their investigative skills to write scripts for podcasts.
00:06:13
Speaker
I think that journalists can be, and that's my fault. I never knew that, but once talking to people when I actually did a little survey for this ebook, I found out about it. Their focus may be too narrow and not thinking about all the different places that will hire a writer. They will hire somebody who can turn in clean copy on time. If you can turn in clean copy on time, you're gonna be 95% ahead of the rest of everybody else. So just walking people through, okay,
00:06:42
Speaker
You covered municipal waste. Could you write about studies that are coming out about municipal waste? Could you write an alumni profile of somebody working in municipal waste? Could you write for a business publication that caters to folks who handle municipal waste? It's just sort of that starting with this, I know about this, here's all the things I could write. I think that you just kind of got to nudge people sometimes.
00:07:08
Speaker
I think one of the more valuable, and call it an anecdote, call it what you will, is when you talk about alumni magazines in particular and you're like, okay, well, this school, fill in the blank, has an alumni magazine. Great. But they also have
00:07:24
Speaker
Dozen different schools under there and you're like they all have alumni magazines or some some content Engine and you're like when you start seeing that that every college might have upwards of two dozen outlets and then Subsequently two dozen different editors then and they probably all talk and it's all of a sudden you start to the flywheel starts to move and you're like Oh Wow, there's so much work out there. I didn't realize this I
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah. And I learned all that because out of when I was in graduate school, I worked for a medical school, an Ivy league medical school. And I got an inside view of, Oh my gosh, gosh, we hire freelancers to do all these kinds of things. And we're just the medical school. What about the law school? There's a whole staff over there. What about the engineering school? And it just, all of these things, especially for an Ivy league school that has lots of like archeology department and things like that. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the archeology department has its own
00:08:20
Speaker
printed alumni newsletter, but they might, alumni magazine, sorry, but they might have an email they send out once a quarter that possibly a freelancer writes. It almost gets overwhelming if you keep thinking about it that way. This started, I've spoken to a lot of college classes and I used to do this on a whiteboard where I would ask the students to tell me
00:08:42
Speaker
Well, who at your college could hire a freelance writer? And we would just keep going on and on and on until they got bored with it because there were so many things we could list. Just sort of trying to get people to think outside of, I can only pitch story ideas to these publications that I could find on a Barnes and Noble magazine rack. And that's all that there's out there for me. And that's just not the case.
00:09:04
Speaker
So if someone is looking to make that pivot, what might be some, or they got laid off and are subsequently forced to, what are maybe just some quick things just to get some early momentum, start feeling good about it?
Announcing Freelancing and LinkedIn Refresh
00:09:21
Speaker
You got to let people know, and not in a, here's a 25 tweet thread about why my former employer sucks. Keep that to the group text. Just using whatever platforms you use, I know not everybody's on Twitter, not everybody's on LinkedIn, to let people know, hey,
00:09:38
Speaker
I'm freelancing now. You could even say if there's been big layoffs, people are used to it by now. Hey, I'm one of the unlucky ones who've been laid off until I figure out what's next. I'm going to freelance for a while. If you know anybody who needs a good writer, let me know. That takes no time at all. I mean, it takes a little bit of time. You want to make sure that it's grammatically correct and clear. You might want to run it by somebody and just post it.
00:10:00
Speaker
And do it more than once, because not everybody is on social media at the same time. Who knows what's going on with algorithms. I would tell people to refresh their LinkedIn. I'm not a huge LinkedIn person. I know freelancers who get a lot of work that way. I'm more like, this is a billboard advertisement for me. You want to make sure it's accurate. You want to make sure it says you're open for work. And if you don't have a website yet, you could send them your LinkedIn profile. Totally fine and acceptable while you get all that figured out.
00:10:28
Speaker
And then start making a list of everybody who you've ever worked with who might be able to give you work. I allowed two of the people I interviewed to have pseudonyms, which I made up. One was Joe Spaghetti, which I hope there's a person named that. And when he got laid off from his full-time journalism job, he actually made a spreadsheet.
00:10:47
Speaker
pulled in everybody he had ever worked with and liked, and not just editors, not just other writers, PR people, agencies, all sorts of people. And he made a spreadsheet and he just started contacting them with a basic say, hey, I don't know if you heard, but I haven't been part of the layoffs at X. If you know anybody who needs a writer, let me know.
00:11:08
Speaker
And now he makes more money than I do. And he's doing quite well. You know people. Any journalist knows people. Tap your network and start using that as a base rather than send blind pitching people who might not even get back to
Ethics and Financial Management in Freelancing
00:11:22
Speaker
you.
00:11:22
Speaker
I think another thing, too, that might be not confusing, but certainly a point of importance is the nature of journalism ethics and freelancer ethics. So I'd love for you to speak about that and to make sure that there's a firewall between certain items. You write about it well, yeah. Yeah. So I freelance often for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I'm expected to follow their
00:11:50
Speaker
journalist ethics. No matter what, no matter what I'm doing, even if I used to write weekly for the Times, now I write for them a couple of times a year, I was supposed to follow it. So no press trips, no letting PR people buy me lunch. And also I would never write about somebody
00:12:08
Speaker
who I write for. So for example, if I'm writing a story about a medical condition for The New York Times, I would not use a researcher from Brown University because I write for their medical school alumni magazine, because that's a conflict of interest.
00:12:24
Speaker
And I've sort of placed stuff into zones. So when I was writing about running a lot, I would never, ever, ever write for a running brand. Just not even get anywhere close. So I write a lot about technology. I don't write for software vendors.
00:12:41
Speaker
There are some freelancers who've left writing about technology who only now write for software vendors because the money's really good, honestly, to be honest with you, but that's their decision. That's the way that they've decided to move their freelance life forward. There was one case where I thought there might be a conflict because I was writing about some medical device and some of the research on the medical device was written by somebody I wrote for three years ago.
00:13:04
Speaker
And all I did was say to my editor, hey, I used to write for them, do you want me to just find another source? And he said, that's fine, don't worry about it. And never an issue, never a question about that. And for people coming off of full time jobs or steady part time jobs, there is a certain security in having that biweekly check, no matter how big or how small it is, it is something steady.
00:13:28
Speaker
And then in the freelance world, you might have, you write that sometimes you're, in a month you might get $10,000 worth of stuff, and then just checks coming in, another month might be a thousand. So there are those natural ups and downs. For people not used to that, how would you coach them to endure those ups and downs? Well, I draw it from a book, the Freelancer Money Book, I think it's called. It's in my e-book, which you should buy, just every time I get a check.
00:13:55
Speaker
It gets split up automatically. It comes into my checking account, and then a certain percentage goes to taxes. A certain percentage goes to savings. A certain percentage goes to my fund account. A certain percentage goes to a savings account that I then, when it reaches a certain point, dump it into my retirement savings. I've been doing this for so long that it's just habit.
00:14:18
Speaker
There are some freelancers who do automatic withdrawals. I can't do it. I don't have any bills on autopay. My income is too wild and all over the place. But if you start doing this, every check, okay, check comes in, it gets divided into these buckets. There's less of a temptation.
00:14:37
Speaker
to say, let's say I get a check for $6,000. I'm not going to go buy a new Louis Vuitton bag because those percentages, okay, I got to split this XYZ into all these different buckets. And it creates, you know, it puts money in buckets so that you're not struggling. So we pay quarterly estimated pay, uh, quarterly estimated taxes.
00:14:58
Speaker
I do. And as I say in the book, you need an accountant. I'm not struggling to find money for that because I went and spent it somewhere else. No, it's already off somewhere else and dedicated to paying my taxes. Same thing with emergency savings. My dog was quite sick last year and had $7,000 of vet bills. I wasn't so worried.
00:15:20
Speaker
income goes up and down, I wasn't so worried about it down because I had saved all this money for a rainy day, which that was. And at this point, it's just, you know, it's just my life. I don't know what I would do if I had a regular paycheck. I wouldn't be used to it. So when it's when it's quarterly tax time or estimated tax time, do you pay just like on everything you earn for that quarter or are you one of those people who pays like the same every quarter? The same, whatever my accountant tells me. And I will say I put 20 percent towards
00:15:49
Speaker
every check in my taxes fund.
00:15:52
Speaker
because that's how it works for me. I am single. I'm the only house, you know, I'm the only person who makes money in this household unless my dog gets an only pause account. If you are, have a partner, you're married and your partner has a W-2 and you file joint taxes, your picture is going to be totally different. Or if you have some freelance income and maybe you have a part-time job, again, it's going to be totally different, whatever your percentage is in which way I stress so much. You need an accountant. You need an accountant. You need an accountant.
00:16:21
Speaker
And they will help you figure this all out. My accountant tells me what to pay each quarter. And that is exactly what I pay. And I have been within, I think, uh, so if you overpay or underpay, you either have a refund, which I roll over into the next payment or I have to write a check. I have been within like a hundred dollars for the last three years, which is amazing. So my accountant does a really good job.
00:16:44
Speaker
When it comes to money, a lot of writers, a lot of people sell themselves short. What might you say to someone who struggles having that conversation, certainly negotiating back and forth with people who have budgets?
Valuing Freelance Work
00:17:00
Speaker
Well, you have to figure out what works for you. There are some people or groups who say, this is what you should be paid. I saw one the other day that was saying under 50 cents a word was acceptable and fair, and I wanted to scream.
00:17:14
Speaker
And I'm trying not to engage in Twitter fights. So I just sort of let it go. You should always be looking for advice from freelancers who are successful at this and have been doing this for a very long time, not somebody who has.
00:17:27
Speaker
dip their toe into freelancing and hated it and said, nobody can make any money doing this because they're not a success story. Even if they tried it because they had to and they didn't have any other choice and then they found a good job, again, they're not dedicated to this kind of lifestyle. I've always sought advice from freelancers who have been doing this for a long time and enjoy it and make a good living doing it. That being said, you have to figure out what rates work for you. Your financial situation might be different, let's say,
00:17:51
Speaker
You're married to Iron Man and he has Stark Industries and you don't need to earn a lot of money for your work, but you still want to be paired fairly. That's going to be different from someone like me who's paying on the bills in her house by herself. I encourage people who freelance to think about themselves as if they are a plumber. And I think I put this in the ebook. I know I've talked about this before. I just put it in a newsletter that came out today. Your work is valuable. It's valuable.
00:18:21
Speaker
you should be paid for your work. If a plumber wouldn't accept it, you don't accept it. For example, I had someone, I wrote a story for a set fee, set parameters, come back to me and say, I need you to write a playlist, a music playlist to go along with the story. And I said, what else? What's the additional fee? Oh, we're not going to pay you. You should just like do it to us as a favor. If someone comes to replace a sewer pipe in your house, do you really think he's going to go fix a leaky faucet for you for free? We're no different.
00:18:49
Speaker
This is labor. This is work. We deserve to be paid for it. You got to get out of this mindset that we should feel thankful that anybody comes to us and wants to pay us for our work. This should be a 50-50 street. Editors need content. We need to sell our content. We need to sell our skills to pay the bills.
00:19:06
Speaker
You got to think, again, more of this is yourself on equal footing and not accept bullshit behavior from editors who treat you as if you should be grateful that they have come down from on high to bestow you an assignment that pays less than 50 cents a word.
Jen's Personal Journey to Independence
00:19:21
Speaker
And you've been doing this for a long time and as we've talked about before and as you've written before, you know, there was a moment too where you, you know, things were pretty much raised to the ground and then you had to rebuild it back up. So you've, you've endured a lot of those ups and downs and you're at a pretty good place now. And I want to just kind of close this thing out by just asking you just one of your, you know, what's kind of your proudest, you know, moment as an independent contractor, as this freelancer and being able to do this for so long?
00:19:49
Speaker
This is probably not what you're going to expect. I wrote the running newsletter for the New York times for a long time, over three years, I believe. And before that, I wrote a very similar column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I wrote about running all through the pandemic, which was a scary, weird time for a lot of reasons, but like trying to come up with an idea about run running, like what, this is, this is mass death. Who cares? Um, a lot of people cared, I should say. And I wrote a book about running.
00:20:19
Speaker
And I just had nothing else to say. And I was in a position financially and professionally that I could walk away from that.
00:20:29
Speaker
and be totally okay. I was professionally in a place where I didn't want to do this anymore. I could have done it for a really long time. Nobody had noticed that I had checked out and I wanted to leave before it became obvious that I had checked out. And I think being in a place professionally where I could say, you know what? I had a good run here. I'm not mad at anybody. I really enjoyed this work, but I think it's time for me to try something else and be able to step away
00:20:57
Speaker
from that role and continue on successfully is I think a testament to the business that I've built that it could survive, not just losing that position,
00:21:10
Speaker
but also that income and I was totally fine. And I rebuilt my business. I made that possible because I always knew I didn't want to get stuck doing something just for the money. I want to continue to be creatively challenged and write about things that I care about and I find interesting and fascinating. And that just wasn't doing it for me anymore. So now I do something else.
00:21:31
Speaker
Describe maybe the lightness that you felt by discarding something that you were writing for for a long time. I imagine that that made you feel lighter, in a sense. It did. It was a weekly column. It did not take up too much of my time. It paid okay. I think if I had stayed on, I would have asked for more money.
00:21:55
Speaker
But it's just not having to think about, oh my God, when am I going to write this week? And oh, I got to get it in before the deadline because the editor is doing all these other things. And it comes out on Saturday.
00:22:03
Speaker
And every time it comes out on Saturday, some other asshole starts screaming at me on Twitter and it's gone. It's gone. I mean, I still get screamed out on Twitter because, you know, whatever, but it just was this weekly thing that, that until I stepped away, I don't think I realized so much it was weighing on me. And then also, you know, you write for the New York times every week. A lot of people assume that you're full time. You're there full time. Totally. You know, I get that.
00:22:27
Speaker
But then when people have complaints about the paper, they associate you with it. And you start getting into like inner office intrigue and gossip. And I don't work anywhere full time because I don't want to deal with that. I don't need that overhead. So it's just like a huge space in my brain opened back up to the world. And you know, I still write for them. And I'm working on another running story right now for somebody else, even though I said I was done with it.
00:22:50
Speaker
Um, but I was able to take this idea for this column that I really, this, this feature I really like and this editor that I really like and say, you know what? I think, I think I'm willing to come back to write the story because I think it's important. Um, and that's refreshing and it's just one story. I don't have to deal with all this other stuff. Um, you know, cause I was in the right space for it.
Conclusion and Promotions
00:23:09
Speaker
Oh, hey, CNN efforts. Hey, thanks for listening. Seriously. And thanks to Jen for coming back for a short chat. I don't think anyone has the bandwidth anymore to talk for more than 10 minutes.
00:23:19
Speaker
Brendan of Merit.com, hey, is where you can get show notes and consider signing up for that Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter over on Substack. Give book recommendations, a short essay, writing inspiration, and a series of links that goes up to 11. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. I don't know what to say this week. I'm kind of burnt out and tired, so it's probably best that I don't say anything at all. So stay wild, seeing your efforts, and if you can do interviews, see ya.