Target 2024

It has been a little over three months since I started The Science Freelancer.

Earlier in August, four years since I started writing for a living, I found myself out of substantial work. I panicked and spent the next two weeks looking for new projects and clients, just so that I could pay my bills.

Luckily, a project that had been in the works for months came through. But beyond that I had nothing!

We all know that writers need multiple clients to write for, but building this network is difficult. Finding new clients is time-consuming work and impossible when you are working on a project. The day you finish the project, you have a work drought.

There are many gig newsletters, but none focus specifically on science. They may have 1 or 2 opportunities for science writers in each edition, but that’s not the quantum of work out there.

I started this newsletter to help science writers quickly find out what is available without wasting hours scrolling social media platforms every day. With every growing subscriber on the list, the work I put in is saving hundreds of working hours for writers around the world.

But I make no money in the process. In fact, I am spending money to send out this newsletter. My target for 2024 is to change this.

I am taking a leaf out of Lex Roman’s Journalist Pay Themselves Newsletter and have decided to do this in public.

I will continue working on this newsletter until the end of this year, but I have set a revenue target of $555 by 31 December.

Why 555?

Here’s the simple calculation.

I spend about 25 hours every month on sending out editions and growing this newsletter.

Paying myself only $20 an hour for this work, a typical virtual assistant’s wage makes it $500.

The extra $55 is for the tools I use to source the gigs and send out the newsletter.

What will I do?

A few writers have suggested that they will share a 10% finders fee when they land a project thanks to the newsletter. Others have committed to paying each month, while many have said they will click on the ads.

In each newsletter, I will share the revenue generated through Ads or coffees bought by subscribers in the week and how close I have reached the $555 mark.

If we reach this number by Dec 31st, I would have still worked for free for the whole of November.

If we reach this figure earlier, I will spend some extra hours collecting useful resources to share through interviews with writers, editors, etc.

Come January 1, 2025, I will decide the fate of this newsletter.

At the time of writing this, we have crossed 500 subscribers. So, we need each subscriber to contribute just $1 to get to this number.

What can you do?

There are two ways you can help

• Buy me a coffee ($3, payable in your local currency)

• Share this newsletter so that we are a larger group and per-person contribution is reduced even further

Thanks for reading it till the end and your support.

Ameya