f a l l o u t — Notes on Freelancing

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Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

Notes on Freelancing

So a question I get a lot and something that we’ve done lightning talks on in the past is “how do you do work-for-hire?”, especially in the game industry. I am not an expert in this field in any way, but contract work has been a cornerstone of our game studio for ten years, and there are a few principles or rules or guidelines or whatever that we developed that have helped us work with clients in a way that mostly helped us grow instead of holding us back. Maybe these things will be helpful for other people also.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and some of these things are going to be more principles or philosophies than like practical burn-down lists.

Also, I’d strongly suggest checking out blogs like Muddy Colors or google searching visual arts communities and blogs for other freelancing advice. Illustrators frequently have a tremendous amount of experience with this stuff and their advice and ideas often sync up with my experience on the more tech side of things.

Say Yes

This is something that I’ve noticed more when trying to hire people more than when I was seeking out work, but non-white-males tend, in the generalized case, to emphasize reasons to not apply for gigs. What we’ve seen a lot is “oh I would have applied for this but I don’t know how to do this one small part.” Say yes - if you have 50% of the skills for a gig, get up in there! Be honest about your experience and your desire to learn new things. Crappy clients might balk at this, but we’re about to talk about them anyways.

Say No

It’s important to develop what we used to call “weasel radar”. During your first few contract gigs, which will likely be a mixed bag in terms of collaborators and output, take as many mental notes as you can about warning signs for the ones that didn’t pan out, and promising signs for the ones that did pan out. I will expand on this in a minute, but the hardest part of contracting isn’t getting paid, it’s finding people that will let you do good work. And getting to do good work is the thing that will save you in the long run, mentally and financially.

Schedule Slack

When you first start freelancing, you probably won’t have any work. That’s fine - you can put extra time into finding new jobs and making self-guided material for your portfolio. But as you start to get busy, you might find yourself telling a client “yup, I can definitely do 40 hours a week on this project for the next 8 weeks,” since you don’t have anything scheduled. This is a thing I did a lot. This caused me two huge problems: I didn’t have enough time left over to chase down my next gig, and I didn’t have enough time left over to slot in last-minute emergency gigs (which often would pay better because of the short timelines). As my schedule ramped up over the years, I took pains to only take long term schedules at 20 hours a week, so I had time to job-hunt and help out with panic gigs in the meantime.

Err On The Side of Busy

Depending on where you are in your career, this may mean less or more, but I often felt most comfortable when our schedule was pretty full after all, especially when the clients were good. Our work was satisfying, our portfolio was growing, and our bills were getting paid. It can be a fine line. Scheduling slack often really meant leaving room for ourselves to keep the work steady and to keep the quality high and to be able to help people with emergency jobs, rather than simply working less hours. I am not going to go out on a limb here and say that freelancing 50 hours a week was healthier than freelancing 30 hours a week, but in controlled bursts or to accommodate certain projects, I think some of those sacrifices paid off a lot in terms of generating a better website and portfolio (and paying off the occasional tax bill).

Get Paid

Be picky about contracts, be honest about your rates, be sensitive to the status and needs of your clients, and be an absolutely relentless a-hole about invoicing. Your clients wouldn’t be hiring you if they didn’t value your output, so you should value it too. Not all clients are the same though - a small studio working a passion project might not be able to pay the 5x/10x multiplier of a coastal advertising agency.

Not All Pay Is Money

I hesitate to even say this in this particular way, especially in an environment where scammers and fraudsters looking for free work in exchange for “exposure” are literally everywhere, but in my experience there have been times and projects where substandard rates were acceptable and even advantageous in the big picture. Maybe it meant working on something you truly loved, and it was just good for your heart to do that. Maybe it meant getting to collaborate with someone who has a bad budget on this project, but usually has good budgets, and is just an amazing person period. Relationships, if they’re not everything, are pretty dang close to everything. The occasional tactical sacrifice on the financial front can pay off in the long run if you’re careful.

Repeat Gigs

In my pre-Canabalt days, most of my work came from doing a good job for good clients, and getting rehired for their next project, or having them tell friends that I was reliable and good enough. This was my bread-and-butter for years. No big scores, just steady work that built up my portfolio and was satisfying to do.

Beef That Folio

This was probably the most important single rule or guideline that we developed over our decade of contract work. The principle is this: every good gig that you get to do, every nice piece that you add to your portfolio, has the potential to generate several more gigs over the following years. Because of this, the option to do good work for someone, the ability to build something that you can show off and be proud of, has exponentially more value than something that won’t generate more work but pay well in the short term. Filling your schedule and selecting your gigs will probably need to be a mix of these things, especially at first, and especially with underdeveloped “weasel radar,” but each time you are able to concretely improve your portfolio, you are increasing your chances of cooler future work with better clients. Each good gig you get now might be 3 or 5 or 10 good gigs down the line. Weight these opportunities appropriately; this is the single most important thing you can do as a long term freelancer, in my opinion.

The Long Term

God this stuff can take a long time. I did contract work for 18 months on the side before I quit my day job. My wife Bekah kept her full-time, health-care-providing position for a further 30 months while I built up my portfolio and rolodex. It would be very fair to say that it took me somewhere between three and four years to level up enough and meet enough people to be able to do this sustainably. There are folks who can and have done it faster, but especially if you are fresh out of school and trying to work in a competitive field like video games, where you’re often up against people with more experience than you, and more connections than you, you have to be patient and put in the time.

Adjacent Industries

A very, very small fraction of my contract work over the last decade was done in what you might call the mainstream game industry. My biggest, most reliable clients were usually in marketing and advertising. I did some neat work in education and scientific research spaces. I did some good collabs with independent studios. We did a very brief stint doing previz for EA. Video games are a multidisciplinary medium and that usually means that there are other industries that value your output as much or more than the big game studios, and the work is so similar and so satisfying that you might not mind.

That’s everything that I can think of for now, hope that helps <3