Ouch. The loss of any writing client can be a disappointing time. This is particularly true if you have been writing for them for quite a while and you’ve got used to that stream of income flooding your way.
Are you keeping your fingers crossed you keep all your regular clients - or are you looking for new ones all the time to ensure a regular income?
I had just such an experience today. I have a regular market – offline as it happens, the only one I have on a regular basis that isn’t internet based – that regularly takes four of my articles a month for their magazine. But this morning I received an email that revealed they will only require one article a month for the immediate future.
Since the articles are also well paid, this will be a chunk of money to lose. Not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but enough to notice, if you see what I mean. Obviously it’s disappointing, but it got me thinking about the nature of freelance writing and how well prepared you are for such things to happen.
After all it is the very nature of freelance work of any kind. You do get regular clients, but they won’t go on forever. You might work for them fairly steadily for years on end, but even then you should never come to rely on them.
So how do you turn this into a positive experience?
Well firstly it will free up a little time to focus on more things. Firstly I have decided to devote some of that time to finding more clients. And secondly – and perhaps most importantly – I have devoted some of the time to writing for myself. You may have read before that writing for your own needs is the best thing to aim for in the end. You can write eBooks that you sell over and over again; you can create your own websites that you monetize in all kinds of different ways, and you can do lots more besides.
I have a plan for an eBook that I can now devote some more time to. And I also want to start creating PLR – private label rights – packages to sell directly to clients from a dedicated website.
All of this takes time though, and the danger when writing for lots of clients all the time is that you never get time for yourself. So this is the lesson in losing a client, or a certain body of work. By all means take a moment to mourn that loss, but then think about how you can use that news to gee you up and start making inroads into achieving even more in your writing career.
In this sense, losing a writing job or a client could be one of the best things that ever happens to you as a freelance writer. At the moment I am devoting time to the Ezine Articles Challenge too, so this is just one example of how you can spend that extra bit of time in a productive way.
Related posts:
- How positive are you about your writing skills?
- The benefit of having regular weekly and monthly writing jobs
- Do you work for plenty of different clients?
Tags: clients, freelance, freelancer, income, writing life
You have exactly the right mindset about losing a client or job. It’s almost always the gateway to another opportunity. It sounds as though you have some very interesting projects on the burner. Enjoy!
Janice Campbell
National Association of Independent Writers and Editors
Yes, it can be difficult to focus on the gateway part but if you do you would be surprised what can turn up. Many thanks for your comment Janice!
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