Here’s What I’ve Learnt From Being A Freelance Journalist

Basically lessons from my six months of being a content ashawo.

Photo from ‘What It’s Like Being A Gay Porn Star In Nigeria’ written by me for Dazed. Photography by Chuchu Ojekwe.

People who know me say I’m impulsive, I do things the moment they come into my head and somehow they often turn out well. People who know me well say I obsess over every decision i might have to make from the moment it becomes a possibility, I think about all the different potential outcomes and the moment I can make a decision I do it so fast it looks impulsive. I think one of the scenarios that perfectly illustrate this has to be the way I left my job last year.

I started at BellaNaija Style as a contributor — the editor at large at the time emailed me, complimenting my work and said she would like for me to contribute to the platform. I was excited, I agreed. I quickly pitched a Lagos Fashion Week story and got the opportunity to travel to Lagos and attend my first fashion week as part of the BN Style team, seated front row and had the time of my life. When I returned, the editor was further impressed and it took very little convicing for her to offer me a job (took HR a lot of convincing because talent is great but a 19 year old university student who lives in a different state from their base of operation required a bit of convicing). I worked at Bella Naija and BellaNaija Style for more than nine months — weekdays, weekends. It was a literal dream come through, I got the job I literally dreamed about without having to apply. However, on the 10th of October 2019, my editor texted me about a few stories and I told her I had to leave BN, and that I appreciated everything she had done for me, for rating me and my work but I had to leave. I said this and I switched off my phone. Thirty minutes before I sent that message, quitting hadn’t been on my to-do list. It hadn’t been on my to-do list that morning. I just saw her text and I realized I had to do it. To people who know me, that was hella impulsive. But people who know me well know that I had been thinking about leaving BN for about three months before I did.

The reason? Working as a writer, journalist, content creator in Nigeria is hard. I’ll be transparent, BN wasn’t a horibble experience. Compared to what i heard from my friends who worked elsewhere, I had it great. They always paid on time, they treated you with respect and the pay, by the Nigerian standard, wasn’t bad. But I did the math, I made more money from a single story i wrote for a UK/US publication than i did from working an entire month. At BN, i was working every day of the week — weekends included. There’s also a problem I noticed with a lot of publications in Nigeria and the kind of stories they tell, everyone wants to write and publish the same kind of stories. And these stories are things i’ve told already, written already and i was bored of. Going freelance was the logical way out. It took me three months to come to this conclusion and execute it in a way allowed me to leave BN and go on to tell the stories I wanted at a good pace while making at least four times what I did at BN.

It has somehow been six months since I randomly texted my editor that i was out of there, left my job and between then and now I have grown to be a better journalist and feature writer, written about things like gay porn stars for Dazed, written about African fashion for NYLON, written about old Nollywood for PAPER, won an award, made more money than i have ever in my life and somehow still got to take a whole month off working. Along the way I have learnt and unlearnt a lot, these are the ones I feel the need to share today.

Wavy The Creator photographed by Chuchu Ojekwe for a feature on the alté subculture written by me.

Plan, leave room for improvisation but plan.

Before I left BN, I made plans. A lot of plans. I had a lineup of jobs and projects I was working on — I was working on a story for VICE, I had an i-D commission, I was working on several stories for OkayAfrica etc — and I had my finances in a pretty good place for the rest of the year. Good enough that I could afford to go on holiday in December and not work for an entire month. Freelancing is chaotic as fuck. Plans — even though they don’t always work out how we expect them to — give us a semblance of order and control. With freelancing, you can easily make N600,000 in one month and N100,000 the next. There are months where you get commissions and projects back to back and there are months where no matter how great your ideas are or how hard you try, it just doesn’t seem to stick. That’s life. Planning is how you survive this. I have a spreadsheet where I input how much I make and the projects I’m working on, this helps me plan. I give myself a salary based on the average I make monthly, then spread out the excess across several months. That way, I can get my three months salary from one good month. If the next month isn’t so good, I fall back on the salary already allocated to that month. If it’s good, I push the excess forward to the next couple months ahead. Right now, I have about four months of average income down the pipeline.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean:

Say your average income is N300,000 monthly — you get your average income by calculating what you earn on the average per month.

If in January, you make N500,000, you pay yourself N300,000 — this is the money you spend that month and also the money that you save from. The N200,000 goes into the next month’s salary. And if the next month is good too and you earn let’s say N400,000, what you do is pay yourself N300,000 and now you have another month’s income of N300,000 at hand, this way you aren’t left crippled if you get a slow month.

I hope this makes sense.

People are Human, Treat Them So

Writing and journalism both involve people a lot. From people you’ll interview to editors you have to work with to your readers, it involves a lot of people to people communication. Understanding that these people no matter their positions or their desire or lack of desire to help you are human goes a long way in making or breaking your career. When pitching editors, I take in the fact that I am not pitching to an automated machine that’ll read and accept my pitch. I’m pitching to a human who has to open the email, be interested enough to read it, think it’s good for their publication then tell this to you, work with you and then publish this. It requires a lot from that person and you need to nail every step and it’s the little things that determine if you’ve nailed it or not. Eg I don’t pitch editors when it might be later than 5PM their time. They are either getting ready to leave or already tired from a busy day. I send emails from 10am to 5PM, from Tuesdays to Thursdays. Mondays are busy for everyone, they most likely get a lot of emails from inside their organization and might be less likely to even open yours, Fridays are for watching the clock and counting down to the end of the work day. When I pitch, I would like to not have to follow up so I send when they are most likely to see and respond to it. This is just one small example of how humanizing these people you have to work with can make or break your projects as a freelancer.

Diversify Your Income

I sound like Rise and Grind twitter and it is taking everything in me to not tell myself ‘Glory Osei, please’ but still, do it. Diversify your income. The good thing about freelancing is you get to explore a lot of themes in-depth and in ways that you probably wouldn’t if you were attached to a newsroom or publication. Building on that knowledge won’t only create another income stream and career but will also make you better at what you already do. For me, lately I have been working at consultancy which I must admit I more or less fell into because writing about culture and identity illustrates how much I know about culture shifts in Nigeria, subcultures etc and in the past few months, I have been working with some UK and US based companies as a freelance consultant. It’s a pretty good way to break into a new career as well as supplement your income — at the moment, almost half of what I earn most months comes from consultations.

Learn From People

I think a lot of people have this belief that the only way to learn from people is for them to consciously teach them. Might be true for others but personally, I’ve learnt more from watching people. I learnt how payments work in the freelance world from an instastory post where someone was complaining about payment, I learnt how to write a pitch from a twitter drama cycle. Asking for people for help is great and amazing but realistically speaking, people are protective about what they know and not many people are willing to start sharing their knowledge for everyone to benefit from unfortunately. People are also busy and don’t owe you anything. Learning from what people share and don’t share, observing their inactions and actions go, in my opinion, a farther way than asking them for help every step of the way.

Honorable mention — please use Google too, you’ll be surprised how much information is out there and that you need to ask someone you think is knowledgeable about things every step of the way.

Brand Yourself, Sell Yourself

I’ll keep this simple. — brand yourself in a way that if someone comes across your social media they know who you are, what you do, what you’ve done. This way they know if they want to follow you, they are intrigued and might check our your website/muck rack/contently page (by the way, please have the link to your digital portfolio in your bio. Branding yourself is obviously more than just this, it also involves streamlining the content you put out as a writer/creative on your social media and as work too.

This last one is the most important of all and is just a few words — Read a lot.