Freelancing? People still do that?

[LloydBrown]

Hi, Larry.

The reasons stated before are good:  lack of capital requirement, minimal time requirement, and you know what you're getting paid up front (usually). 

Here's another:  you can pick and choose your favorites.  Want to write D20 this week and Fading Suns next?  Feel free.  Like to do CCGs every once in a while?  There's a mag or two that pays well for that.  Got a GURPS itch to scratch?  Scratch away. 

And another:  if you specialize in a particular type of book or product, you can write just that.  Are you an adventure-writer?  Sell one of those to each market.  Do you prefer source material?  If you stick with one game, you are capable of out-producing its ability to support material of that type.  What game really needs half a million words of adventure material each year? 

The big one, I think, is skills sets.  Writers are legion.  Writers, rules designers, editors, graphic designers, and business administratorrs--all in one package--are considerably rarer.  I can do 3 1/2 of those jobs, which leaves me splitting any income I receive from self-publishing with somebody else, whether it's through a partnership arrangement or paying a wage.  What loot I get as a freelancer is all mine.  Well, my wife's anyway.

I will say on the "whether or not they pay me issue" that I've never been burned by a publisher.  It's all in the company you keep.   

[Larry L.]

Hi Lloyd! Thanks for responding!

So I've gathered that there are indeed reasons why a writer would choose freelancing over self-publishing. I'll stop imagining publishers as some sort of bourgeois oppressors exploiting freelancers through control of the print and distribution system, then.*

Insightful comments, everyone.


*This is where I would include the smiley indicating a tongue-in-cheek statement, except smileys are not real Forge-y. (Kudos to Clinton for turning them off in the new software, in fact.)