My Writing Business Review

At the start of the year one of the things I decided was that I would review my writing business regularly to help me with planning.  I had already looked at freelancing income in the past and made some decisions based on that; now I was looking ahead.

In order to do this I created a spreadsheet listing all of my main clients and how much money I expected to earn from them until the end of 2011 (click on the image to see what it looks like).  To help me I looked at what I’d earned in the past year and then averaged that out to give me a figure for the coming year.  I had do do some guessing, but I tried to keep this conservative.  I didn’t include advertising and affiliate income in my forecast as this is variable.

In my spreadsheet I did something a bit different (well, different for me, as I am not that comfy with spreadsheets) and added the columns going across as well as down. That gave me the amount each client was likely to bring in over the next 21 months. Where I wasn’t sure of something I tried to err on the side of caution. Even so it looks like I’m looking at about a 30% increase in revenue this year over last year.

What else did I learn?  I learned:

• what percentage of my income each client represented and would represent over the coming year.
• which clients were not really bringing in enough (more on that in a minute)
• where I could increase income if I needed to
• that even if I lost one major client I would still improve on last year’s revenue.

I also did another exercise which was to work out how many hours I spent on each of the major clients each month. Dividing the amount they pay by the number of hours gave me an hourly rate for each client. I could see at a glance which ones were the lowest payers.

So what will I do with that information? I will use it to tweak my writing business further. That means either withdrawing from contracts which do not represent an adequate rate of pay or negotiating a better rate.

I also discovered that I am now working more hours every week than I wanted to because of the new business that has recently come in.  That’s something else I will need to address to keep my life balanced.

Have you reviewed your writing business?

Tagged as: work-life balance, writing business, writing career, writing income

Article by Sharon Hurley Hall

Sharon Hurley Hall has been mentoring writers here at Get Paid To Write Online since 2005 to help them improve and build sustainable and successful writing careers. Check me out on sharonhh.com. Feel free to connect with me online on Google+.

Sharon has written 653 awesome articles for us at Get Paid to Write Online

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