SYP's Freelance Glance
For some years I have written a column for the Society of Young Publisher's magazine, sharing my experiences and pearls of wisdom on being a freelance , and book writer.
In this column, I look at the admin side of setting yourself up as a publishing freelancer.
Setting up your publishing freelance business
So, I’d decided to work for myself as a publishing freelance. How exciting! What a wonderful excuse for a large glass of wine to toast myself and my blossoming career. But, oh dear, it wasn’t long before that nasty killer of joy – reality – began to filter through. Now what? How did working for myself actually work? How did I declare myself self-employed? What was I expected to do financially?
I had a lot to learn, but I made one crucial decision from the outset: I would run my freelancing as a business. It was clear to me that I was never going to pay the bills by wafting along, scraping by on the odd job here and there. If I was going to do this (and it was going to work for me) I would have to get businesslike.
I started out reading every book I could get my hands on about starting a home-based business, paying particular attention to marketing strategies, the legality and the financial implications. I soon learnt I would be what is called a ‘sole trader’, and had the right to trade under a business name. This inspired a week of appearing somewhat dotty as I played with different names, muttering ‘Word Up?’ around the supermarket, ‘Word Perfect?’ on the bus.
I finally settled on ‘Perfectly Write’, in part because I had discovered the domain name was still for sale. The next step was to create a corporate identity – a logo, letterhead, business card and website. Somewhat artistically challenged but unable to pay for a graphic designer, I muddled along in Microsoft Publisher and after many, many hours and several semi-hysterical phone calls to a friend in the know, I got there. Perfectly Write was on paper and online – albeit with a fairly rudimentary temporary website which was liable to crash the average computer.
Next, I decided it would be prudent to get some business start-up advice, and, thanks to that blessed provider of random information, Google, I trundled off to meet an adviser who specialised in the creative industries. After a couple of meetings with him – and one with his colleague, a business financial adviser – I had a pretty clear picture of where I was headed, all set out in that linchpin of the new business: a business plan.
Now it was time for the bit I had been avoiding: setting up an accounts procedure and getting to grips with that lovely organisation, the Inland Revenue. Never having been a maths whiz I had, to put it delicately, a slight apprehensiveness about handling financial matters (to put it less delicately, a full-blown terror of all things mathematical). First I had to declare myself self-employed, a surprisingly easy task done over the phone. Then my business plan and I took a trip to the bank, to set up a business account. The Rev. frowns upon using your personal account for business purposes, which is rather frustrating, especially as business accounts, unlike personal ones, are not free. My grumpiness over this was tempered slightly by the novelty of receiving my first cheque book with ‘Perfectly Write’ written on it.
Next I needed to learn the ins and outs of keeping basic accounts. Back to the books, which helped me set up a few simple spreadsheets and invoice templates, plus learn the basic rules of invoicing. With visions of audits and fines swimming before my eyes, I set up a system to record every penny coming into the business, and every penny out, which involves collecting, logging and filing every single receipt. I also had to learn which costs I was allowed to claim against tax, and which I wasn’t, e.g., I could claim a proportion of my electricity bill, but not a new suit (darn).
And now it was time to spend a delightful morning at an Inland Revenue training session, learning how to fill in my annual tax return. In a class of new businesspeople who seemed as lost and dubious as me, our instructor took us through a practice tax return. After several hours I finally cracked it. For all of five minutes I understood completely how taxation works; I was a tax oracle. Sadly, no sooner had I sailed out of the office and back onto Ealing High Street than I lost it again. Ah well, I daresay I’ll muddle it out when the time comes, and they do say you can re-sit the course again, and again, and again, oh joy.
So, I was a publishing freelance with a business, legally registered, a website, a brand identity and a financial framework; I was officially ‘set up’. In the space of a few months I had learnt heaps, but I’d only just begun. The hardest job was still to come: now I needed clients.
New book: How to Succeed as a Freelancer in Publishing
I'm currently co-authoring a book with Emma Murray called How to Succeed as a Freelancer in Publishing, which will be published autumn 2010 by How To Books. The book offers advice on how to build a freelancing business in your chosen publishing field – from proofreader to copy editor, ghostwriter to author, typesetter to graphic designer. So watch this space for plenty more top advice on making it in publishing.