Notes from a Hired Pen: My $115,732.50 freelance year

Readers!

 

 

It’s that time of year! In 2025, I made $115,732.50.

Here are past breakdowns: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019.

Let’s get into 2025:

• Association Publications: 33%
• Colleges and Universities: 24%
• Business to Business Publications: 11%
• Research Institutes/Hospitals: 12%
• Consumer Publications: 6%
• Custom Content: 12%
• Freelance Instruction: 2%

To the chart!

The biggest change from 2024 to 2025 is that custom content and consumer publication work made up greater percentages of my income, with a drop in B2B publications and colleges and universities.

All the custom content work came from clients I found via marketing: one from a letter of introduction (LOI) and one from a newsletter reader (hi hi you know who you are!) I don’t take every custom content job that comes my way, but I’m glad I gave both of these a shot as they worked out well, and became repeat clients.

At the same time, one of my B2B publications had layoffs, and a beloved editor was moved to another title within the company. The new person has promised work that never came. It happens. I don’t take it personally. I have tried to replace that work with other B2B writing but no dice yet. And yes, colleges and universities also dropped, which isn’t surprising given everything going on. I get more into that below.

 

The Good

• I’m hanging in there. I started freelancing part time when I was 21 years old, then freelancing full time when I was 24. I turned 45 last year year, and I sometimes worry that I’m a step behind. I don’t have TikTok, and other than short clips of my dog, I don’t make videos, let alone report through them. The idea of creating my own podcast gives me hives, especially since now you’re expected to be on camera too. Blech. But I have been able to adapt my freelancing business in ways that means my work is still relevant, pays well, and fulfills my curiosity about the world, which is a big reason why I chose this career path. An example: last year, I added “writes about physics and quantum mechanics” to the list of things I can do, which landed me a few new clients and my first piece in Nature. That was a combination of my engineering clients asking me if I could do it, me investing in myself to learn more about a science I hadn’t studied since high school, and recognizing that these are topics that are going to continue to be relevant. Some of my cybersecurity sources have started talking about quantum computing as a security threat (because of what will happen when AI is fed to quantum-powered supercomputers), so I expect more work will lie ahead in that area. I also know that I don’t need to follow every trend, and I don’t just mean about denim. I am very glad I haven’t hopped aboard the AI train, as far too many journalists and journalism associations have, and instead staked my position in calling it the lying plagiarism machine. Good call, me. Pat myself on the back.
• I turned marketing up to 11, and it worked. Things were not looking good after Q1, and I thought, for the first time since 2018, I wasn’t going to break six figures for the year. So I ramped up my marketing efforts in terms of pitching, letters of introduction (LOI), following up on those LOIs and reconnecting with former clients. It worked. I generated $12,000 in 2025 by following up (maybe), and also netted 10 new clients last year year: one consumer publication, four academic institutions, three associations and two marketing firms. Work from those new clients resulted in about $25,000. These won’t all be long term partnerships — two were not a good fit at all — but the rest I hope to work with again, and have “we’ll have something for you in 2026!” pledges from three. I don’t know if those will pan out, but I hope so.
• No one client makes up more than 15% of my income. Some people freelance and have one or two clients. As a full timer, this would make me uncomfortable. I try to be diversified so that if someone goes bust, it’ll pinch but I’ll survive. Most of my association work came from two clients, which is a bit worrisome, but again, neither one made up a big piece of the whole picture. I mentioned above that one of my clients had layoffs and an editor shuffled that lead to me getting less work. It hurt of course, but it didn’t pull the whole operation down.
• I lived in another country for six weeks. What an adventure! I lived in Italy for six weeks last year, setting up in a sublet in a neighborhood of Turin, which is not a city Americans typically visit. Most locals, when they heard me stumble along in my Italian, assumed I was British. I had planned to stay longer, but after my mom and I got food poisoning in Milan at the tail end of her visit to the country, I decided it was time to go home. But oh until then. I’m not going to say it was perfect. I was horrifically homesick for the start of the trip, especially since I didn’t take my dog Bonnie (who didn’t seem to notice as she spent most of my time away boarding as a farm dog). Living in a place where your brain churns hard to read, speak and understand the language is exhausting. I wasn’t able to take off for the entire trip, so it was almost a relief to turn to my work and do interviews and write in English every afternoon after my U.S. clients woke up. Turin was also pretty empty in August, as happens in Italy, so would my experience would have been different if I was staying there any other time? But I picked a hard thing to do, got to explore a country that makes up a huge chunk of my heritage, and met my Italian relatives! The travels I have planned for this year aren’t as dramatic, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do something similar in the future — and next time, I will go through the pain in the butt process it would take to bring Bonnie with me.
• I fell in love with the local library, again. I got a library card the first month I moved to my current town, but I used it for digital media like audio books and streaming services. That changed this year. I’ve enjoyed owning books I read so I can line them up during the year to see my progress, but then I’d either sell or donate most of them at the end of the year. It didn’t make financial sense, especially as I cut back on expenses. Now I’m a regular at the library, where I check out books and physical DVDs, often finding movies I’d have to pay to stream or aren’t available to stream at all. It’s not just about me needing to be entertained, or letting my mind wander through the stacks looking for potential story ideas. Libraries are one of the last publicly-funded places we can go where we don’t have to spend money, and they are community hubs. My library has hosted a free women’s clothing swap, free holiday portrait sessions, a “haunted” house, and a spice club. The more we use our libraries, the more we justify their budgets to people who might think nobody goes to the library anymore. That is also a good thing. I used to love going into the library when I was a kid, and just looking at books until something caught my eye. Turns out I love it as an adult too.
• I worked less. I say this every year, but every year it turns out to be true. I love my work, but I work to pay for what I want to do with with my life. Yes, I’m lucky that I can support myself doing something I mostly enjoy in what is becoming more and more part-time every year, but I’ve also worked pretty damn hard over the last 20+ years to get to this point. I’m not going to waste it.

 

The Bad

• I made less money. I made 6.7% less in 2025 than I did in 2024. This isn’t quite a rounding error, but if a few payments had come in last week instead of this week, I’d have been within that range. It’s not the worst news, especially considering I was projecting a 20% drop after Q1 and a 10% drop in November, but it took that marketing work to nearly pull even. Most of this loss is due to higher education cuts. Many of my university clients have either had their freelance budgets entirely cut, or they’re doing projects in house (which means the same thing). I also refuse to write for some former clients who have kowtowed to the current presidential administration. Still, it pinches to see that number, especially with everything costing more in the U.S. (the absurd effects of inflation really hit me when I was in Italy, where I thought the check for my first meal out was a misprint because it was so low in comparison, and that’s not even getting into how much more I’m be paying for worse coverage when it comes to health reinsurance this year). Making about $8,000 less is not ideal, even if I am still well able to make ends meet. It’s more than I made in 2023 and 2021 and overall it seems I’ve settled into an income range since I wrote this book (more on that in my upcoming freelancer-versary post, where I will be sharing a graph of my earnings over time), but it’s a bit of a bummer.
• COVID. I got COVID for the first time (that I know of) in January of last year. The initial infection wasn’t too bad, but COVID is a vascular disease, and it took six months for my resting heart rate to return to normal. In February, I had some bad-looking cells taking out of my back. I’m grateful that my dermatologist caught them, but I had stitches — and — agony for weeks. I can’t separate these experiences from my work. It’s hard to concentrate when your body is screaming in pain or your heart is not functioning normally. And of course I couldn’t run, and while you may say “so what” it’s a huge part of my life and losing the physical and mental benefits of that was a blow. It also hammered home how dangerous it is that people are just pretending COVID didn’t happen, isn’t still happening, and that these mass infections won’t have serious consequences the longer it goes on. I worked so hard covering the outbreak of the pandemic, and for that all to be at best pushed aside, at worse ridiculed, is a puncture in my soul. And the destruction of public health…well. No one asks me anymore why I chose not to have children.
• I worry about 2026. I don’t see the economy getting any better, and I don’t think those higher education budgets aren’t going to magically be restored. Work wise, I am still looking OK so far, and am planning a spring trip (probably to the UK and France). But I don’t know if anyone knows what’s ahead for us, and I worry about how it could affect, well, everybody, and yes that includes my bottom line. Maybe that seems selfish, but this is my career and my life. I have to worry about it because no one else will.

 

The Medium

• I cut my expenses way way way back. In January 2025, I spiked my Amazon Prime account, which forced me to change how I shop. Not being able to buy yourself a little treat and have it show up at your door that day made me ask why I was ordering myself little treats. Taking that one step had a cascading effect, and despite my worries about the economy and my work outlook, I was able to go live in Italy for those six weeks last year. Being there further had me re-thinking my spending too. I did that whole trip with one duffel bag of clothes, and I managed. Yes, I could have picked up new items, or ordered stuff online to my sublet, but I’d have to do all that in Italian, and also why? I’d just have to carry it home. The only things I bought there were food, toiletries, books, souvenirs, a pair of sunglasses and two bottles of nail polish (hey you can’t get Sephora polish in the U.S.) Instead I spent on train travel, hotels and museums, and even that wasn’t a lot. Of course, I haven’t been perfect. Did I really need a Power Hiker hat or another Donald Duck mug? Not really. But senseless spending for the dopamine hit is just about over. It’s like when I stopped binge drinking. I feel better not engaging in that activity anymore. And no matter how loud ding dongs cry about how we’re not upgrading our phones often enough and why the economy is in the tank (LOL no), I’m not turning back. I have refused to upgrade my iPad out of spite. Why would I go back to my former way of spending, especially when everything costs more because we’re lead by morons? Hard pass. I debated whether or not to put this in “The Good” or “The Bad” because spending less on nonsense is good, but the reasons behind why I was pushed into making this change was bad. So here we are.
• The novel is still of there. I did work on the novel last year — quite a bit! I realized I needed to change a few things about the structure of it. But it’s been on pause. Part of that is what you’re going to read in the next bullet point, but part of it is that I got some other stuff going on that is none of your business. Also, who wants to bang your head against a fiction project when you can take a train up to a giant church or go shopping for a new leather wallet in Florence after which you can stop at the movie theater/bookstore and look at historically significant couture dresses? Poor me, I know. I’ve been working on a few long essays that I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell, so it’s not like I stopped writing working on potentially unprofitable projects. We’ll see what happens this year.
• I made peace with perimenopause. Sorta. I started this process in 2020, maybe sooner, when real medical doctors looked at my brain going berserk + sudden weight gain and said “nope not perimenopause, have you thought that perhaps this is your fault?” One suggested that I go to a diet clinic that sells scammy supplements, and another told me to stop ordering takeout (which I don’t do) and workout more (how much more can I possibly workout?!) Last year, I connected with an OBGYN who gets it. Her acknowledging that this time in my life sucks for reasons I can’t control has helped a lot (I’m not here asking for advice, what I’m doing to cope is between me and her). Part of the acceptance process has been to not push through the swings in exhaustion that come with all this, and not pressure myself to be who I was in my 20s — in how I look, how I feel, and how aggressive I am in my professional life. It’s part of why I worked less. Because if the combination of patriarchy and late stage capitalism means not investing in women’s health, especially the natural process leading to me no longer being able to contribute to the domestic supply of infants, I’m going to take a goddamn nap.

And that’s it! I don’t know if people still find this annual post useful, so this might be the last year. I’ve proven my point that you can make a decent living as a freelance writer, but I don’t know if I write this for myself or others, and while doing this kind of lookback helps me, maybe it’s something I don’t need to share anymore. I’ve been putting less about myself in general on social media and in my writing (and I would never ever make my running training public #neverstrava) so it’s something to evaluate in 2026.

As for resolution, I don’t really make them because I think you can try a new habit any time of the year, but I would like to finish a counted cross stitch that I started in 2016 (!), which would mean less reading at night and more sewing while watching movies. I am also kicking around ideas for a new eBook. The three I have keep selling (they made up a good portion of the “freelance instruction” bucket last year). But it might be time for a new one. Got a suggestion? Question? Mail bag query? Drop a comment on this post, or contact me here.

 

What I’m Reading

• An Elderly Woman is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten, translated by Marlaine Delargy, read by Suzanne Toren. This is about an 88-year-old Swedish woman who is a menace, and not in a “poke you with a walker” type way. She’s way worse! I won’t give away how. The book does mention the Swedish tradition of children watching Donald Duck cartoons on Christmas Eve. A menace after my own heart.
• When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. What if the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Yes, like the song. That’s what Scalzi asks in this novel, where each chapter is one day of one lunar cycle. I enjoy how he takes what might seem like an off the wall idea and runs with it in a mostly fun way (I say mostly because this ends up being about disinformation too). At one point, he describes a room as like “being on the inside of an iPad.” Perfection.
• Off the Grid by C.J. Box. Our intrepid Wyoming game warden is back again! This time he’s doing one last job for the outgoing Wyoming governor, which happens to overlap with another off the books job being done by his pal Nate. Of course it’s not logical that all of these things keep happening to one guy, but then again, you wouldn’t get a book series if he just stuck to his regular game warden duties.

 

What I’m Watching

• The Accountant 2. Did we really need a sequel to a movie about assassin brothers, nine years after the original? I would argue yes after watching said sequel. It’s a bit formulaic, but do you really want to think with an action movie like this? I hope they make 12 of them, with at least one crossing over into The Beekeeper universe.
• The Wedding Banquet. Two queer couples end up doing a sort of partner swap — in name only — so that one can stay in the U.S. and not out himself to his family by pretending to be a heterosexual couple. It’s a bit of a convoluted story but one that shows how families rejecting gay kids and teens can be devastating and have long lasting effects. On a happier note: Lily Gladstone might be one of the most beautiful people on the planet.
• Guys and Dolls. I have seen versions of this many times, including my brother in our high school production and the West End version in 2023 (which was a FANTASTIC in the round where you could buy “standing” tickets and be part of the show which of course I did). But watching the movie again was a reminder that it’s still just incredible, even with Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson not being able to sing. You would not be the only one to think this was Frank Sinatra’s song in the movie considering he made it one of his career standards, and yeah he was pretty pissed to be playing Nathan Detroit instead. ANYWAY, my friends and I play a game where we cast a movie version now (which many people have said they want to do but can’t get it off the ground). Anyway. Here’s where it stands after this viewing.
• Death in Paradise (season 12). Ah yes, it was back to Murder Island for the holidays! Well, for me. It’s an easy watch in that I can be doing something else when it’s one and not really lose track of the story. Since I already watched season 13, it’ll probably be the last time I’m here for a while unless I go back to earlier seasons, or season 14 becomes available through the library soon. Fingers crossed!
• Saving Private Ryan. I’d never seen this movie before and it’s probably not ground breaking to say it’s intense. I had to walk out of my living room twice during the Normandy Landing section. It’s a stunning movie and yes it should have won Best Picture that year. It also made me once again so angry that so many people died, or like my grandfather carried the burdens of that war through whole lives, only for people now to open the door to fascism? Really?! He’d take his big Italian hands and slap some of these people if he were still alive today, including some of his own descendants who are throwing that sacrifice away. Anyway. If I do go to France, I plan to visit Normandy and am glad I saw this, despite how graphic it is.

 

Nail Polish of the Week

Ring in the Blue Year by OPI. I didn’t pick this for the name, but still, it’s apt. It’s a vibrant royal blue, and a favorite.

 

Until next time!

Jen A. Miller (she/her)

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