Agree. The article had good points with the part about pitching especially helpful. I do get too that the focus of this piece is more on how to get into these publications. I do wish though that the author spoke a bit more on how he survived as a freelance writer.
If you're a good enough writer with good ideas and you keep pitching persistently, you'll get traction soon enough. It's whether or not you're able to survive the unstable early goings that's the issue.
From my experience, if you're jumping into freelance writing without any savings (and starting from scratch with no connections with editors, no previous published pieces, etc.), it's hard to survive. Pitches take time (some editors might take months to reply). Writing/research takes time (you're essentially unpaid until your piece gets published). Even harder is the invoicing. You have to hound some publications to pay you (some take 45+ days to pay after your piece gets published). You really have to plan your pipeline well. When I tried doing it full-time for a bit, I planned ahead in terms of income (i.e. income from this month came from all the work I did in November). The moment you slow down or you stop pitching though, you know it's going to affect you in two months time.
Getting through the gates is tough but the hardest part is trying to find sustainable work that can pay your bills month to month. If you can develop relationships with editors (who consistently greenlight your pieces or give you regular assignments), that helps a lot. But, if you're starting out without any of that, the constant grind to find something regularly is stressful.
I still do it because I love it but I don't do it full-time anymore because I need to pay my bills.
Have you taken a look at his main site? He's selling a course on growth marketing.
I'm pretty sure being a freelancer journalist is not his main gig. Rather, this article was supposed to demonstrate one of the ways he was able to 'growth hack' his way into publications.
Nope, I didn't see the rest of his site until after I commented. Make sense under that lens, getting published in those places do help a lot reputation-wise.
I second that. A dev I spoke to basically said that the indie dev scene before (distribution-wise) was really tough because the only way to distribute games on a mass scale was through big box stores (with actual physical copies). A lot of these stores rarely, if ever, dealt with smaller studios (let alone one-man shops) so you would have to make deals with publishers (like EA) just to get your games on those shelves. Those publishers then took a large cut of all the revenue.
If your game was somehow a success, you had to keep making bigger games with a bigger team just so you can make that game 'relevant' to the big box stores. It's a never-ending cycle of needing to keep growing, expanding, and eventually that financial pressure swallows up indie studios. Nowadays, you have digital distribution channels like Steam or itch.io which make it significantly 'easier' to reach customers. Plus, there's less pressure to grow unless you want to. Like erik said though, there's definitely more competition nowadays.
I will say this though as someone who writes about games, a unique hook (ie in mechanics, story, tech, or maybe all of them) goes a long way in getting press to write about you. I suppose that's the way it is with other fields though.
As a writer, I love discovering and covering new indie games. I want to write about you but if you scroll through a lot of these games, it feels like stuff we've seen again and again. The one game that changes the formula even for a little or presents it in a novel way (ie Undertale or Her Story), you get people really interested and talking about it.
I'm going through something similar and you never want to go on a full on fight because, like you said, it's hard "knowing that you or the other person may not come out as friends anymore".
It's a hard lesson but I'm slowly realizing that it's better to know the limits of how real and true your friendships are rather than realizing it was all based off unstable foundations.
Wonder who'll come out on top. From my understanding, the APEX one has an Amazon-like 'verified traveler' system where only those who traveled on those flights will get to rate them (though it might be limited to partner airlines, not sure about the specific details).
(Full disclosure: Used to worked for an agency that did work w/ APEX)
I definitely agree though. You can't just take what works in film and expect it to work in a VR film. It'll be interesting to see how filmmakers experiment with the medium as more and more start pushing what it can do.
I have a friend who partnered with another guy and they bought the Nokia OZO recently. I'm really excited to see what they do and hopefully will get to figure out someway I can participate and be useful. I'm very intrigued by video for VR. Though I am kinda sold on light field tech eventually being the solution.
That link is cool. I'll read it in depth. Thanks! I am excited by the possible shakeup in film theory caused by VR. I believe some really cool artistic innovations are going to come coupled with the technological ones.
Does anyone have a good simple and free alternative to Invoiceable? I loved the simplicity of that tool (where you can track who your clients are, make reports, the income chart, etc.). I've yet to find a similar kind of alternative (everything else seems bloated and missing features like client tracking/adding notes or customized reports by client, year, etc.).
A friend made a platformer for an incubator called "Runnin' Around With No Shirt On" where it's basically about a (shirtless) guy running around in hell (and dodging all the basic platform obstacles like spikes, moving platforms, etc.). The goal of the game was to defeat Satan in order to get his shirt back.
It was the most ridiculous thing I've ever played but I couldn't go one second without laughing at how ridiculous and how much fun it was to play.
I love "serious" kinds of play and games with these awesome narratives but sometimes you just want something funny and fun to play!
The University of Waterloo is a good example of getting an official degree all while doing courses online. Their transcripts do not differentiate between online courses and regular courses so if you get a BA in English or Philosophy for example (degrees fully offered online - http://cel.uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate.html), nobody will know you took it entirely online.
Love that flexibility when I was there. The cost per credit was the same whether I took the course online or on campus.
Did three semesters online before switching to the regular campus (my program wasn't fully online). The education was top-notch too with responsive profs and (for the most part) a good pace even though you're doing a lot of self-studying. My final exams were either held at colleges near my area or proctored at public libraries (the latter though I had to arrange on my own and the school just mailed the exams directly to the library).
Definitely. I think that's one of the reasons they have such flexible online course offerings (gives their co-op students a lot of flexibility).
At the end of my second year, I transferred to McGill and I was a bit disappointed at the state of their online course offerings (barely had any, apart from some electives, that could count for my degree). Also felt the school had a misguided bias against online courses (if you take one externally, there's a limit of 2 courses that you can apply to your degree - http://www.mcgill.ca/oasis/away/online-courses). When I was trying to get transfer credits, any mention of the course being taken online got my advisor telling me that my course would probably be denied. It was a good thing Waterloo didn't differentiate in my transcript between the two or else a lot of my credits might have not transferred over.
This was such a stark contrast to Waterloo where I really felt they considered their online courses to be just as comparable to their on-campus ones. I suppose though it's the whole culture of the instition. It helps too that Waterloo has a whole department dedicated to just the creation, design, development and testing of online-based courses - where they have designers/devs/subject/qa spcialists working closely with professors to design the courses (both for credit courses and professional development/continuing education courses). I don't believe my school has such a department to rely on.
Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was hard?
Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the lookout for folks with different perspectives.
If you're a good enough writer with good ideas and you keep pitching persistently, you'll get traction soon enough. It's whether or not you're able to survive the unstable early goings that's the issue.
From my experience, if you're jumping into freelance writing without any savings (and starting from scratch with no connections with editors, no previous published pieces, etc.), it's hard to survive. Pitches take time (some editors might take months to reply). Writing/research takes time (you're essentially unpaid until your piece gets published). Even harder is the invoicing. You have to hound some publications to pay you (some take 45+ days to pay after your piece gets published). You really have to plan your pipeline well. When I tried doing it full-time for a bit, I planned ahead in terms of income (i.e. income from this month came from all the work I did in November). The moment you slow down or you stop pitching though, you know it's going to affect you in two months time.
Getting through the gates is tough but the hardest part is trying to find sustainable work that can pay your bills month to month. If you can develop relationships with editors (who consistently greenlight your pieces or give you regular assignments), that helps a lot. But, if you're starting out without any of that, the constant grind to find something regularly is stressful.
I still do it because I love it but I don't do it full-time anymore because I need to pay my bills.