Make Real Money Freelancing and Dump the 9–5

Secrets to having the freedom of writing for a living--how to submit, what to submit, and where

It doesn’t matter if you live in the center of downtown Manhattan or a back-to-the-land commune in the middle of Australia’s outback. You can still make a steady income with freelance writing—also known as contract writing. That means submitting your writing or pitches to editors and publishers. It isn’t easy, you must write well, have a strong instinct for choosing compelling topics, and know these secrets of success in the freelance business.

Top secret tip: Bookmark this series and refer to it often.

Perfect your craft

Competition can be daunting if your work doesn’t stand out. Investing a small amount of time and money to take a proofreading or editing course returns unbelievable dividends. Reviewing the basics of punctuation, grammar, and spelling sets your work ahead of the crowd. Believe me, editors are continuously amazed at the poor quality of work that crosses their desks.

Whenever possible, you might consider hiring professional help in areas where you struggle: maybe marketing, maybe editing, maybe social media.

I find things in my inbox that are written on about a third-grade level or clumsily AI-generated. Most, and I mean MOST, of what I receive is rife with typing errors, improper usage, poor sentence construction, and poorly executed content. They get about three seconds of my time.

Make your work the best content you have ever written every time you write. Plan, research, and understand your topic. Use an AI generator to suggest a strong outline. When you finish writing, set the book or article aside for a day and then reread it, preferably out loud.

Top secret tip: Use an app like Speechify, Talkback, or ElevenLabs. They read aloud, so you get a different perspective on your writing.

Reread it, word by word, not looking for content but rather looking for good sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. Spell check isn’t enough; you have to read your work — all the way through, no skimming. A spellchecker will find “bom” and tell you it should be “bomb.” But it won’t find “too” mistaken for “to,” and it won’t correct a miss-spaced “t he” because “he” is an actual word, see? Read. Read. READ your work.

Now, polish it, I cut out a minimum of 15% of the words in the first re-read. Wordiness doesn’t make good writing; it makes boring writing.

Assemble your submission

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For any manuscript submission

• show your name, contact info, and word count at the top left

• add a few blank lines and center the title

• set the body text flush left with one-inch margins

• number every page at top-right

• Put your last name in the top-right corner under the page number, along with a short version of your title. I’d use the short form “Real Money Freelance” for this article. If pages get separated, they can be easily reconnected.

• Wouldn’t it be tragic for a great piece to be rejected because pages went astray?

Before you submit material, you must read writer guidelines from the publication or publisher. Follow the exact instructions or risk immediate rejection before your work is read. You won’t get an email for those rejections. Your submission will just be clicked away into cyber trash.

Top secret tip: Never, EVER use glitzy page designs, emoticons, or color to make your submission stand out. You’ll be perceived as a rookie, and your work will be trash-canned.

If you have samples and clips of your highest-quality writing, there are companies that will pay you to put pen to paper or, more likely, fingers to keyboard. You can make a considerable living as a writer, even if you never break into a major publication. So read on and try a few of these possibilities.

Major and intermediate markets

Ok, it’s polished, packaged, and focused; where do you find the markets? Who do you communicate with? How do you contact that person? You can search online at job board sites. Some consistently offer connections with publications who will publish your writing on assignment. Besides the usual suspects like Upwork, other useful sites include:

• Journalism Jobs — mostly non-beginner jobs, vetted

• Writers Digest — jobs and calls for submissions at all levels

• Writers Write — similar to Writers Digest

• Freedom with Writing — If you want to make article submissions, this site is useful and pretty current. They publish calls for submission in different kinds of publications. Browse the site.

• Flexjobs — Formerly, this site kept out the content mills and fake jobs, but though there are still some opportunities here, there is more and more spam. This is a paid membership, reasonably priced. Give it a look with a free trial.

• Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc — traditional job boards; if you can navigate through the spam, you may find opportunities.

• Best Writing — a 2-year-old global project with a lot of resources. Job board, writer profiles, resources. Worth a look.

• Make a Living Writing — here’s a category list of magazines that work with freelancers. Do a search for this string — magazines that buy from freelancers. That should keep you busy.

We use these resources by visiting them frequently and making a list of article types that appeal to us or that we might already have written about. Follow the instructions precisely for responding to each particular ad.

It’s also profitable to follow various magazines or their editors on X or Facebook. Many of these pros post calls for submissions with exact instructions. You can jump on the call as soon as you see it.

Most professional writers, except the Stephen Kings or Danielle Steeles of the world, make it a practice to keep a stream of writing going out to publishers on a weekly basis. Set aside a day to send work out. Carefully choose a publication to target, familiarize yourself with that publication, and then send for guidelines or find them online. I keep a clip file full of writing ideas, quotes, or names of interesting people I come across as I read every day.

Make notes when you get a brilliant story idea. Maybe you’re watching the news and see a trending topic. Remember all those great ideas you’ve had, but they sort of slipped away because you were busy? Henceforth, put them down in a notebook, diary, or spreadsheet.

When you have a well-conceived idea or an excellently completed piece, send a pitch or the article to your target publication. Most pubs prefer pitches. Log what you have sent to whom. A task manager app is great for that. Don’t ever give up.

Submission tracking tools:

1. Duotrope is a paid submission tracking service that provides a comprehensive database of literary magazines, journals, and publishers. It allows writers to keep track of their submissions, analyze their success rates, and find new markets.

2. Submittable is a free submission management platform used by many literary magazines and publishers. It allows writers to easily submit their work to multiple publications and track the status of their submissions. Some mags require that writers use this — they will send you a link in response to a query letter.

3. The Submission Grinder is another freebie designed for science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. It allows users to search for markets, track submissions, and receive market updates.

4. Writer’s Database is a free online tracker with a robust database of literary magazines, publishers, and contests.

5. Trello, Asana, Monday, et al, are project management tools that can be adapted for submission tracking. Writers create boards or cards for each submission and track the submissions, rejections, and acceptances.

If you receive a rejection letter, carefully read any notes from the editor. I once missed a great opportunity with a well-known major children’s market because I got a rejection letter that said,

“We can’t use your submission because we recently published a very similar piece. Your voice is a good match for our style, please feel free to submit other material.”

Well, being a rookie, I filed it under “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” My mentor read the note, banged me sharply on the head, and said, “Hey — this is an opportunity!” Read carefully, and accept any encouragement you are given.

If you receive an acceptance letter — get very excited, dance a happy dance, and then FOLLOW THROUGH with the assignment. Many, many freelance writers shoot themselves in the foot by not completing the assignment they told the editor they could do. The project falls through. The editor is left with egg on their face for trusting the writer, and the writer never gets another assignment from that editor.

Consider this — the publishing world is a closely-knit community. Editors move from publishing house to publishing house — and a writer’s bad reputation may move with them.

If you have a portfolio of polished work ready to send out, go pick a story, find a market, and submit it. Don’t put it off — the sooner you submit, the sooner you get paid.