Top Ten Money Saving Ideas for Freelance Writers
June 25, 2008 by Jodee
Filed under Freelance Writing
by Contestant #2
A writer’s income can fluctuate greatly and finding ways to save money is essential for trying to maintain some balance between your income and expenses. You can reduce your expenses with these helpful tips compiled specifically with the writer in mind:
Forget the long distance feeling. If you frequently make long distance phone calls to your clients or editor, invest in a prepaid long distance phone card to reduce your long distance calling expenses. Be sure to check all the details on the back of the card for possible service charges or restrictions.
Stop the Spies. Save money on costly computer repairs by installing anti-virus and anti-spyware software on your computer. Reputable computer related websites such as www.pcworld.com have various anti-virus and anti-spyware software that you can download for free. Some programs are available for a limited time trial period and some can be used indefinitely.
Don’t dodge the draft. If you are printing your work to proofread and edit, change your printer preference setting to ‘draft’ mode to save on your ink usage. However, never print your final mailing manuscript in draft mode – editors prefer crisp, clean fonts.
Get acquainted with your local printing house. If you have a large project to print, save it on a CD and email it or hand deliver the disk to your local printing house. A 100 page manuscript will cost under $10 to have printed, whereas you would need two ink cartridges to print it from your computer at a substantially higher cost.
The tax man beckons. If you run a legitimate business and designate space in your home specifically for office use, you may be entitled to some tax deductions on your income tax return. Check with your government’s income tax department for all the particulars.
Reduce, Reuse, Refill. Whilst working on a large project that will require multiple pages of printing or editing, you can save money by purchasing a refillable ink cartridge kit and refilling your own cartridges instead of purchasing new ones.
Pass on the post-it notes. Little sticky post it notes are super convenient but can be expensive and sometimes get lost. Reduce your use of post it notes and keep a permanent record of your notes by investing in small spiral notebook. No more sticky notes sucked up by the vacuum cleaner!
Free webhosting – yours for the taking. There are plenty of free webhosting companies that you can use to create and host your author’s website. They are easy to use with pre-existing templates, guest books, blogs, and photo uploading capabilities. You can also upgrade your site with add on features for a nominal fee. A few sites to check out are: www.freewebs.com and www.bravenet.com.
Free yourself with free classified ads. The internet is host to various free advertising venues where you can promote your services at no cost. Popular sites such as www.kijiji.com and www.craigslist.org are home to hundreds of classifieds ads and receive thousands of hits each day. Both sites are simple to use and free of charge for basic ads.
Cheap promotion and publicity. Promoting oneself need not break the bank – become a celebrity in your own community, home town, or city. Offer your services at events held by your local school, library, or arts council. Consider reading at an elementary school, guest speaking at a high school career day, or judging the library’s writing contest.
Remember what your grandmother used to say; take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves!
Great tips! There are so many ways to look professional without spending a lot of money to do it.
While I’m very frugal (wife and kids call me cheap), overdoing it can be costly in terms of time and lost opportunities.
Free classified ads might land some work, but targeted marketing works better. How long does it take (and how messy is it) to refill an ink cartridge? Also, laser printers cost more upfront, but if you’re printing a lot, they’re cheaper in the long run. So no ink catridge.
Kodak’s printers are said to provide more cost-effective printing.
Do like the suggestion of using a print shop over doing it yourself.
While I agree on anti-spyware, you still need to buy a reputable application. Some anti-spyware — many of the free ones — actually put spyware on your computer. Also, anti-spyware and virus protection are two different apps from some technology vendors.
Awesome tips! I used to work for corporation after corporation before becoming freelance, and it’s easy to get used to a regular paycheck. Adjusting and budgeting for a feast or famine lifestyle is such a hard thing to do at first.
May I also suggest hosting your website at http://www.1and1.com – they’re extremely inexpensive, simple to use, and offer really great tools for building your website and monitoring marketing statistics!
Phil, usually you take refillable ink cartridges to a store who does it for you. That’s not very messy at all.
I tried one of the refill-at-home kits for my cartridges and it was a horrid mess. Never doing that again. LOL
adam,
I agree. But the post seemed to promote do it at home.
Be very careful about refilled ink. I did that with my Brother multi-function printer and right after my four-month-old printer died. The repair man they sent out saw the refilled ink cartridge and said I’d voided my warranty and therefore if I wanted my printer repaired it was on my dime.
And another issue I’ve run into – I stopped using my long distance (out of state) service, instead using my cell phone for out of state calls. My phone company called me up one day and said because I was not making out-of-state calls, they would be charging me a $5 a month non-use surcharge. Verizon is the only phone company in this area, so instead I asked them if it was possible to remove long-distance completely, the surcharge for that was $2 a month, so we opted to do that.
Yeah, I’ve always just taken my ink cartridges to Walgreens to refill–no muss no fuss, and way way cheaper than buying a new cartridges (better for the environment, too.)
And I have to wonder, what on earth are you printing that 100 pages uses *two* ink cartridges?? With my last printer (a cheapie Lexmark) I could squeeze out two draft copies of my ~350 page novel on one ink cartridge.
These are really helpful! I have some comments:
Get unlimited long distance with VoIP. Skype is the cheapest if you want to keep your landline. T-mobile has a new deal for $10 monthly VoIP service if you have a T-mobile cell phone. We’ve had Vonage for almost 4 years now and have been very pleased with it instead of a landline. There are lots of options.
“Local print shop” could mean kinkos, the UPS store or even an independent copy place. Many have high-quality full-color photocopiers/printers that print in good quality and will let you email them your files. Watch for when they have special prices on copies.
I don’t have experience with refilling printer cartridges, but I wrote about it and what I found out is, they’re not all created equal. Pick a few sites and read their FAQ sections, you’ll learn a lot about how they do things, you might find you chose a cheap option the last time and there are better ones available.
I just recently found this site. I hope it’s okay for me to jump into the comments
This was an awesome article. I love anything from a “saving money” angle. However, I have to respectfully disagree with the free hosting tip for two reasons:
1) If you are putting the site up to act as your resume, or to represent you in any way then the last thing you want is for the company you go through to host their own ads on your site. Not only do you have no control over the type of ads shown, you never get even a penny of revenue for them either.
2) Hosting services are not that expensive. GoDaddy.com has reasonable hosting for around $6 a month – as long as you do not have a high traffic site.
When people are hiring you virtually, then you want to put up the best appearance you can, and your website may be the first thing they look at. To me, that’s more than worth the monthly investment of actually paying for a domain name and hosting.
Just my 2 cents. Overall I really enjoyed this article. You can tell you put a lot of thought into it, and I like many of the suggestions. Especially the quote at the end – it is very true.
~Connie
I find that having a small, personal laser printer (like the HP laserjet 1200) is much more cost effective than an inkjet printer. Even when I was in school and printing lots of papers, it took a long time to use up a cartridge.
I second the laser printer, especially if you mainly print out text, not images. Some inkjet printer companies will invalidate your warranty if you refill your cartridges. Laser printers are much, much faster than inkjet, too.
My local print shop charges a fee for transferring a file from a CD to their computers before printing it out, so watch out for that as well.
And VOIP instead of a calling card is an excellent suggestion.
Thanks for all the feedback on my article, please remember these are only suggestions to help you keep your well earned money in your pocket and not all tips will be applicable to all writers.
I have used both the do-it-yourself refillable ink cartridge kits and purchased the reuseable cartridges and concluded that the quality of the print and ease of refillable ink cartridge depends on the printer and the ink cartridge itself.
As for the free webhosting, a free website (with minimal advertising) is a starting point for all writers lacking adequate funds thus making it a viable, cost free alternative. It is better to have a website (no matter how small or inexpensive) than to have nothing at all online to advertise oneself.
For long distance calling – go for Skype and it has the advantage of allowing you to record your phone calls when you do interviews.
I really think I might die without my post it notes. But I do like the idea of taking a large manuscript to a printer.
Thanks for the article.
Thank you for the suggestions. A good article.
Great list of tips. I’d like to add that if you reclaim printed paper, you can use this for drafts and informal printing. I don’t know how laserjet printers take to reclaimed (i.e. already printed on one side) paper but my old Brother printer as well as my newer HP all-in-one rarely if ever have problems. I get all the reclaimed paper I can carry from my newspaper’s office. (I write regularly for this paper, and the office is nearby.) The editor is more than happy to get rid of old faxes and so forth and I’m more than happy to get free paper! I think most businesses with a fax machine have surplus paper that you could have for the asking.
Also, I highly recommend using a spiral notebook for notes. I used to be the Post-It Queen, and wasted a lot of time searching for that one darned note that contained the info I needed – and, invariably, that was the one the cat ate. I happened to hit a back-to-school sale at Wal-Mart and found 70-page, college ruled spiral notebooks for 10 cents each, and haven’t looked back! I’ve noticed that for the past few years, Wal-Mart (and Target, I think) have had super-cheap back-to-school sales where you can load up on certain things at a substantial savings.
I also use an ink refill kit, which has saved me a lot of money on ink. There have been a couple spills, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy. I spent $14 on a refill kit, which has refilled my cartridges at least 6 times and I still have plenty of ink as well as good print quality. New cartridges for my printer are $30. You do the math.
I have to agree that free web hosts are often not the best choice. You can get a free blog at Blogger, that is an exception.
Or instead of a notebook, use Gmail or some other email application. No wasting paper, accessible from any connected device, and searchable.
I just recently bought a small “Zwipes” notebook from Mead. It has about 10 plastic pages that are reusable. PERFECT for ever-changing to do lists, because I can erase the things that are done. I can carry it with me, so it works much better than an electronic list. And I don’t have to scan through all of the scratched-out entries to find the one that I skipped. So far, it’s working great.
@ #2 – Not all of us are critiquing your choices, just adding what our own experiences have taught us.
You’re right, they won’t all work for everyone and many of them are good starting points.
I love back-to-school sales. I can score a year’s worth of office supplies for under 50 bucks.
As for free hosting, not all of the hosts display ads on the sites. Weebly.com is one of the ad-free hosts that comes to mind.
Another way to get a cheap/free website is to do a favor or two for some designers/web hosts. A good friend of mine who does design and has his own server gave me free space in exchange for writing work.
I have never heard of “draft” mode on a printer before! I am thoroughly intruigued. Can someone tell me how to do this?
@Melody- I use StickyNotes, post its’ for my computer! Love them. Here is a link if you’re interested, they’re free.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Information_Management/Notes_Management_Tools/StickyNote.html
@Andrea- Draft mode can be found by going into your printing options when you choose to print. On some printers is it called ‘draft’ on others you can choose ‘economical’. The printer prints documents very quickly, but with occasional smudging and the ink is lighter. It saves a lot of ink.
I have to disagree about the free hosting, to those who do not think it can be professional. Before I purchased my domain, I used Wordpress as a personal site. You do not need to worry about ads, plus you can post your resume, writing samples, a personal introduction page, and never spend a dime doing so. Wordpress useage will show potential blogging clients you have experience with that platform.
As for worrying about a professional email address, Gmail has become the standard even for companies. Gmail has so many functions that your standard domain email will not include. Many of the domains also have a spam filter that will email someone back and force them to verify they are a real person. This is not something I want a potential client to have to do, jumping hoops to hire me.
Phone services all across the US now offer a standard flat rate for unlimited long distance. If you use long distance often, (i have family all over the US), this will save you a lot of money!
And the ink? Ugh. I won’t refill my own again, it looked horrible on me and leaked all in the printer, even though we followed directions to the ‘t’. Other than the ink and phone card advice, I really enjoyed this article. We freelancers are rich or poor, depending on the day/week/month! Great job!
My kids get a shot at all my scrap paper/drafts before they go in the recycling bin. They color, cut, tape, and fold. This keeps them away from my sticky notes and spirals.
I keep a box in my paper organizer below where the “new” paper goes, that has paper only used on one side. I use this to print drafts or when I need a scrap piece of paper for something.
I’ve also started trying to keep more and more lists and notes on the computer, so I can find them again.
A paradox of the current media moment is that, while journalism jobs are disappearing, j-school enrollment is up? ,