50 Years of Being a Full-time Freelance Writer
Andrew Crofts
I have been earning a full-time living as a freelance writer for fifty years. There have been ups and there have been downs. The “ups” have included the month where two of my books received advances of £300K each, and the month where I had four books in the Sunday Times bestseller list simultaneously. There was also the book which eventually sold something north of five million copies, and the client who wanted to meet on his private island in Bermuda. There have been books ghostwritten for heads of state and bonded labourers, refugees, genocide survivors and child brides, pop stars, soap stars, reality tv winners, hairdressers, and Basil Brush.
These “ups” are the jewels of memory that sparkle amidst the decades of typing, submitting and waiting for industry gatekeepers to get back to me, and all the manuscripts which were rejected by every agent I could find, let alone every publisher. Then there were the editors who “loved” the books but wanted them totally rewritten, and the books that were published but sold not a single copy – a sort of slow death by rejection. There were the publicists who cheerfully gave up trying to get media coverage after a week, editors who changed employers half way through the editing process, or fell pregnant, or died. There were the legal departments who covered pristine manuscripts with their scribbled worries, and there were the reams and reams of unintelligible royalty statements that have been landing on the doorstep every few months, telling me I still owed the publishers thousands of pounds.
The end result of these first fifty years? I have published over a hundred books and managed to support a family and raise four children. If I’d possessed a crystal ball fifty years ago, would I have embarked on the same life journey? Absolutely.
When my journey started, in 1970, my manuscripts were bashed out on a pre-war, upright typewriter, and dispatched by post, with self-addressed envelopes, direct to publishers, (after lengthy searches for the right addresses). After months of heady dreaming, the now tattered envelopes would arrive back, accompanied by dream-crushing rejection notes. I doubt that process had changed much over the previous hundred years. But I was seventeen and optimistic. I had written my first novel, (when I was meant to be paying more attention to my exams), and I was moving to the bright lights of “swinging” London, to share a flat in Earls Court with a dozen or so people, all of us quite certain we would be rich and famous very soon indeed.
It would take five years of hard typing and draconian budgeting, trying out every avenue of freelancing, before I was selling anything I had written, and ten years before I had managed to carve a small niche as a travel writer. In between hammering out more submissions to publishers, I was then able to visit exotic places I would otherwise not have got to, meeting exotic people I would otherwise never have had access to, providing more for me to write about in my fiction.
By 1990, twenty years after setting out, I was actually making it in through the doors of agents and publishers in my search for people who would fund publication of my work, since I could not afford to fund it myself. One of the books I wrote was “Sold”, the story of Zana Muhsen, which would, over the following few years, sell in many countries, one year becoming France’s bestselling non-fiction title.
By the time the Millenium ended, my income was steady and technology was starting to streamline the lives of all writers. Word-processing was doing away with the need for endless drafts and messy struggles with carbon paper and Tippex, and the gradual adoption of email was turning self-addressed envelopes, and frustrating queues at the post office, into unmourned memories.
Amazon was opening up new ways for writers to reach wider audiences. The gatekeepers within the agencies and publishers remained trapped inside the culture of waiting - it does, after all, still take a lot of time to read a manuscript – but writers could now circumnavigate these waiting rooms from hell, and even cut down on the levels of rejection they had to face.
So today the main challenge is proliferation. Because it has become easier to produce manuscripts, there are far more of them out there, competing for everyone’s time, and AI is destined to magnify that problem a millionfold.
But writers also now have the services of creative agencies and bespoke publishers to call upon. Coming to Whitefox, for instance, feels, to this world-weary traveler, like being ushered left as I walk onto a long-haul flight, after decompressing in a comfortable airport lounge, insulated from the anxiety-inducing queues and jostling crowds.
Writers no longer have to sign away their copyright, which means that they can keep any money generated by their work, not just a tiny percentage of it. We can maintain ultimate creative and financial control, while at the same time receiving advice from all the same experts who work for the traditional publishing houses. Above all, however, just as when you turn left on a plane, or visit a private consultant with an ailment that is worrying you, you encounter people who will take the time to be as supportive and helpful as possible.
As with the airlines and the doctors, of course, there is an upfront cost for these services, and there is always a risk that you will not earn enough to cover those costs. But as anyone who has ever stretched out flat on a bed during a long-haul flight knows, it is sometimes worth investing if it avoids having to spend twelve hours crowded into the back of a plane with your knees under your chin, sleeplessly waiting for the ordeal to end, while being ignored by the overworked cabin crew.
