Freelancers find creative ways to save, grow during bad times

It’s one thing to read a laundry list of actions that freelance writers could take to keep their writing business afloat during the current weak economy, which has hit the publishing industry especially hard.

It’s another thing to read what people are actually doing. Here’s first-person advice from a handful of freelancers who answered a question I posed on LinkedIn asking what they’d recommend doing to beat the bad economy.

Utah freelance writer and editor Melissa Mayntz suggests using free resources whenever and wherever you can find them, including checking out the library for newspapers, magazines and book. She also advises conducting interviews by phone or email to avoid travel time and the cost of gas, and sending queries via email to save paper – something many if not all freelancers probably already do. Some of Mayntz’s suggestions are downright frugal: “Go outside the home to work,” she says. “Use the free Internet access, heat and other facilities at a library, college lounge or other space where you can work.”

If you love books and don’t want to stop buying them, Joy Matkowski, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, copyeditor and proofreader, suggests selling old books online and making enough profit “to order all the books you crave.”

David Gargaro, a self-employed consulting editor in Toronto suggests reviewing your cell phone plan. “Discuss it with the customer service people to find a better plan based on your actual needs,” Gargaro says. “By switching to a new plan, I now save $20 per month, and I get the same service.”

Bill Bucy is using research and reporting skills learned from years spent as a reporter and editor to supplement his income working for a private investigation firm. On the pro side, you can do it from anywhere. On the con side, it’s often drudgery and “demands greater precision than required for 95 percent of honest journalism,” he says. “That’s because our clients (law firms) must rely on what we send them 100 percent and their clients (large corporations) have tens- or hundreds – of millions on the line.” On the other hand, it can be fun. “A multimillionaire was ducking me so I looked up his family members and started calling them, politely, but persistently,” Bucy says. “Eventually, he called me because his mother wanted me off her back.”

Linda Formichelli is dealing with the economy by spending more on her business, not less. Formichelli, a Boston freelance writer and book author who blogs at The Renegade Writer, recently started paying a service to transcribe her phone interviews. “I paid $350 last month, but I also used the saved time to write a query that brought in more than $2,000,” Formichelli says. And she hasn’t foregone her daily mocha at Borders. “Not to say I waste money, but I consider frivolities like transcribing services and coffee to be essential to helping me work better and make more money,” she says. To add to her income, Formichelli recently started a phone mentoring service for writers.

You can read a complete transcript of the Q&A here.

What are some of the more creative things you’re doing to maintain or build your writing business in the face of the weak economy?