How to be a freelancer without starving

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Author and columnist Penelope Trunk has a post up on her Brazen Careerist blog titled How to be a freelancer without starving. Trunk is a very successful syndicated columnist. Her career column appears in over 200 publications and her first book will hit the shelves next month. A sampling of her three-point advice:

2. Accept self-promotion as a way of life.
No one likes to do self-promotion, but the people who really, really want to work for themselves force themselves to be good at it. There is no one to get work for you except you. And it takes a lot of time to get the word out about what you do and why you do it well.

There are a ton of freelancers who can do a competent job at any given job. The freelancer who gets the work is the one who is best at marketing herself. So don’t talk about the injustice of the world and how you are too much of an artist to promote yourself. Instead, set aside 40% of your day for self-marketing. I used to think that as I got to be a better writer I would do less self-promoting. But in fact, it never happens, as far as I can tell. It’s forty percent forever.

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