Freelancer Blues Part 2

Yesterday, I talked about the necessary first steps into trying to make money while writing about games. Notice that I could have dressed that up into saying something absurd like "first step into a larger world," or whatever, but I didn't. Frankly, that's bullshit. This immediately brings us to our first myth-crushing point of the (again picture-less) day:

THE WORLD IS SMALL (AND IT'S GETTING SMALLER)

Ok, yes, the internet is as mysterious as it is vast, and you can absolutely make a name for yourself writing for tons of smaller sites or getting your podcasts bandied about on reddit, but if we're talking about cash money, the stuff that buys you food and keeps your heat on, the world is shrinking. Yes, there are places that pay, but think of them as the Majors: IGN, Kotaku, Joystiq, Polygon, GamesRadar, Gamespot, VG24/7, Game Informer (and I don't even know if they publish freelance work. I'm really thinking no), and maybe Kill Screen to a lesser extent. There are probably more places, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind. For the most part, they publish a steady stream of good, easily-read (that's important) work, and they get their share of hits per day.

But, as we also observed yesterday, things change all the time. You know what my dream gig was? Working for 1Up...in 2008. The fact that I didn't turned out to be in my favor after we've seen what's happened to that site and many, many others over the course of the last five years or so. Jeremy Parish has now worked for three separate parent companies (and now back to the first). Future Publishing owns an awful lot of print and web publications and they have restructured more times than I can remember right now. One of those pubs was Nintendo Power, which we all know went poof a few months ago. See where I'm going with this?

So there really aren't that many places out there that will shell out for your work. Be patient, and be diligent about checking back to see if anyone's willing to pick up your work. Another myth that I'm going to crush is that staff writing jobs at these places are about as common as plutonium deposits in your back yard. Don't expect to score one of these things very easily, if ever. On that note:

ABOUT THAT 'WORKING FOR FREE' THING

I kept a MySpace blog for two years (I think more) about used games and collectability before getting set up with a couple of free sites. From there, I probably had two, maybe three articles posted at these places and thought that I had my black belt in games writing, so it was time to drop these fools that have lent me a hand and move on. This was a mistake.

It was over a year (closer to two) with the free sites when I finally found a place that would pay for work after doing free stuff for three or four years at that point with the blogs. I was starting to get resentful and discouraged. One of the free sites kept making promises about payments (though I was getting the occasional free game), but never came through. My ego's trajectory started from gratitude that I was being published, to "I'm too good for this place," to "why the hell can't I find work," to "maybe I'm just not that good of a writer" (which is still very probable). I'd like to tell you to try to just stay happy that you're getting published, but I'm not an idiot. At least try not to burn any bridges or piss off other writers you work with. Eventually, everybody might know each other in some capacity or another, remember?

ACTUALLY GETTING WORK

I'm going to be totally honest with you and say that I find this to be the hardest part. Once I had what I felt was a pretty decent set of samples, it was time for me to try to pass some around. If you're curious, I placed in two or three reviews (one game I loved, one I hated, and one that I thought was mediocre) to show some range, a news roundup article that I was doing at the time (I picked one that included what was happening at Infinity Ward when West and Zampella left to show how I covered Big News), and one feature article. If I were to do this over, I would probably put in more features, because many, many sites are going away from the boilerplate news/previews/reviews format in favor of feature-based content. But I knew at the time that my reviews were strong, and that's what I was most comfortable doing, so that's what I wanted to show. Other people might tell you different if you ask them, especially these days, but it worked for me.

Then, I started babysitting the internet. Seriously. Since I'm in the Midwest and there aren't a lot of events or shows that happen around me, I didn't have a lot of opportunities to meet people for some face-to-face time, but I'll come back to this in a second. Once a month or so, I would go to every site that I could think of and looked at hiring pages. Occasionally, some had open call-outs for good freelance work. I would type a brief, neat (both of which are monumentally important) intro and links to my published work and hoped for the best. Some places gave me nibbles, others didn't get back to me. One of them finally replied to the email and gave me a shot with a short news clip about Split/Second screen shots. It was the most slaved-over 150 words I have ever written.

Here's something else I've tried to very mixed (meaning, sort of lousy) results: contacting people directly. A lot of sites have their writers easily message-able or with their email address plainly displayed on their articles. I would try to find whomever the executive or managing editors were and directly send them inquiries. This has never, ever worked for me. You might get a different result, especially if you have a lot of published work under your belt. My advice, though, is just stay far enough away. These folks get an awful lot of these (Stephen Totilo, ME over at Kotaku, did an online Q/A in the a few months ago. Guess what a huge chunk of those questions were about?). Better to just leave them alone

Actually meeting people has turned into a pretty good approach for me, but only after I've had some stuff published so I could say, "I'm the guy that wrote ______ for _______." Once I had one contact, they could introduce me to other contacts, too, and this was a pretty big help. But once the door is open, it doesn't mean that the whole party is coming in. You have to be smart and diligent about making contacts and meeting people, and you can't just expect that more work is going to come your way just because you've gotten one story written for x site.

Take this as friendly advice: remember to BE COOL to other writers. I cannot say this enough. At one point, a guy sent me a PM on a message board because he'd seen some work that I had done, and it was totally out of the blue. It didn't turn into a ton of work or money, but it was still very welcome and downright flattering. I sort of paid this forward to another writer that I've read on other sites when I knew an editor that I occasionally work with was looking for more freelancers. I don't know if this person's picking up any work out of it (yet), but it can't hurt to help other people to ultimately help yourself.

Want to know what else you should never do? I'm going to out myself in some way by telling you that I've never been to PAX or E3, but I have been to other industry events (and I have certainly written coverage for both sitting with a laptop in a coffee shop, but not playing Phantasy Star II). I had a chance to shake hands with a few people from larger websites that I really wanted to meet and toss business cards around with. Most of them aren't there for that, though, they're there to work. It's totally cool if you introduce yourself and if you're at some after party and you see a couple of these cats around, then yeah, a "hey, I'm John, and I write for _____" is fine. Doing it during the day when they want to talk to developers and see alpha builds of games is a serious no no. If the time comes for you to be in their shoes, you would want it the same way. Also, make sure the business cards that the place your writing for has your correct email address on them. I once walked into a place a couple of years ago with a box of cards that were shipped to my hotel that had all kinds of bad info on them. This full box of useless crap sat in my room for two days when they should have been given to certain people.

COAST TO COAST

Here's something a little stupid about me. In college, I used to do freelance storyboards for the film majors, and I even took a crack at doing some independent comics for a second. Everyone I spoke to on the subject told me the same thing: If you want work in storyboarding, you have to go where the money is, and that meant Las Angeles. I wasn't so in love with it, and for a bunch of reasons unnecessary to explain, I did not move to LA. The games writing industry, in its way, isn't really that far removed from that. Future, IGN, and GameSpot are all located in San Francisco, and a ton of stuff has their roots in New York City. In fact, every time recently that Kotaku, for example, has put up cattle calls for part-timers it's for NY-based writers. While this isn't always the case for other large publications (Game Informer is in Minneapolis of all places, which, actually, is a much cooler town than you think) and the internet makes it doable if you live almost anywhere to work, full-time office kinds of work are basically on one coast or the other.

That doesn't mean pack your bags, sell your car, and plan on having dreams as your only income. But we'll talk about that and other horror stories tomorrow.

Have any questions about any of this stuff? I promise to be as brutally honest as I can within reason, so ask away.