From Academic to Freelance Writing

Lessons from the “Publish or Perish” world, running the hamster wheel of grants, impact factors, and citation indices

A major family move meant that I was not working full-time for the first time in my adult life. I used to work in academia, where “publish or perish” was the unspoken rule in the corridors of universities, just as it is, to some degree, for freelance writers. Unpacking boxes of old letters, I found pay-slips from two decades back, when I was a freelance writer before I ever knew what grants, impact factors and citation indices meant. I decided, yeah, let’s wade back into the world of freelance writing, even though I now had no contacts in media, hadn’t written anything that didn’t need a citation manager in more than ten years, and had now the talent of everyone on the internet to compete with.

Freelance writing and academic writing: what they have in common

I am still early in my journey, and now that I have made it to my first paid article since the move, I realize that freelance writing and academic writing do have a lot in common:

1. Getting used to rejection. This has been written about, loads, and I still feel this warm fuzzy feeling of kinship whenever another writer — no matter how famous, or no matter how “new” they claim to be — talk about rejection. In academia, I once attended a grant-writing workshop when the speaker asked us to raise our hands and ask how many of us had an acceptance rate of >50%, then <25%, then <10%. As hands went up / down, he told us (and this was an academic at the pinnacle of his career), his batting average was <10%. His point was, if we don’t try, we won’t get better, and we won’t get the big grants. I went home that night and checked my success rate, whoa, it was low, I was in good company! Then, I also realized — not knowing my failure rate, was that a good thing (I picked myself up each time and didn’t look back) or bad (I had no awareness of failure)?
2. The short-lived thrill of acceptance and hoping this is the “start of a new chapter in my career”. Having an academic paper published in a “top-tier” journal, I found, did not guarantee that my next few did. If anything, I began to have a near-superstitious philosophy, that if I had one big success in a “top” journal, my next paper should target a “decent niche” one. Right, I know this sounds terrible, coming from a scientist, but hey, the reality of it, was that “big” papers often take a lot out of you, and hammering out a neat, straightforward “next” paper to a “decent” journal that would reply quickly, without all the gods of science rubbishing my work, was something that the normal human psyche needs to keep the momentum going. The same thing happened with freelance writing. I got one pitch accepted into a major publication and the next few… fell flat!
3. Shopping the “market” for the right target for a piece. In academia, we usually have a “target” first-choice journal, a second choice, possibly a third choice, and then a “safety net” journal. I have learned the hard way, that there is an opportunity cost in having too many journals before the “safety net”, and for not having a Plan B (X) when a “safety net”, well, lets you through too. It means all that time spending resubmitting the article taken away from the precious time you could be working on a new piece. Of course, in freelance writing, the amount of time needed to rejig a cover letter, change the tone (personal vs formal; light-hearted vs serious-thinker; ironic vs outraged), or target a specific readership (including geographic changes, e.g. redo the spellcheck for audiences on either side of the “pond”), can be less than the effort in academic writing to reformat references, restyle completely in the new journal format, but it is time nonetheless.
4. Adapting “what we have now” for “what is in vogue”. This is tricky, both in academia and in writing. Ideally, we write an original idea, find the outcome, and pitch it to the journal, both in academia and in the freelance world. The reality is, there is tons of great material that just does not fit into one piece after doing copious research, and is good for another “piece”. Sometimes, though, the effort needed to produce a second piece that is not a mere shadow of its first incarnation, is again, wasted opportunity cost.
5. Editors who bother to reply quickly and politely, deserve my undying loyalty. We know they are swamped with pitches. The ones which bother to reply quickly are in the minority. We would think that there is an inverse relationship between the readership/circulation of a publication (equivalent to academic journal impact factor, in my analogy) and how much time they can afford to clear their inbox. I realize that an active publication requires active editors, in academia as in the writing world. Many have an “auto-reply” saying that if you don’t hear from us within Xyz days, then please feel free to submit somewhere else. Well, at least, we know that our email didn’t get stuck in cyber-black-holes.
6. The submission process should not be an obstacle in itself. I once submitted an interesting paper, with conclusions that went against prevailing thinking, to the then-top journal in that field. I was one citation over the journal limit, and it was very hard to explain our unusual findings without cutting any references. Without it even reaching review (i.e. to reach the stage where a fellow independent researcher in my field would say “aha, this deserves to be published”), the editorial team insisted I remove one citation. I ended up publishing in a competitor journal even though my draft was a few words over the limit (I had mentioned that in my cover letter and they moved on with the review). A few years on, the competitor journal has now overtaken the then-top journal in terms of impact factor. I am not saying that rules should not be rules, but if our goal is to further knowledge, then there should be some degree of flexibility occasionally allowed.
7. Luck and timing sometimes matter way more than any objective (or subjective) definition of being “good”. In science, trends can come and go. If you write a paper that is counter to what the rest of the world is saying, good luck if you are the first one saying it, although, once it comes out, it can stand the test of time and become your “most-cited” work. Conversely, a “we can do it too” replication experiment is no longer useful if, well, everyone has already done it. In writing, a topic can become “old news” before you get a chance to write about it. One of my successful mainstream media pitches resulted from me seeing a piece of news at dinnertime, analyzing it in my head while washing dishes, and hammering out the article in my bathrobe in the half-hour before the kids’ bedtime.

How they are different: Research “waste” Vs Writing into a Void

There are some ways, though, that academic writing is quite different from freelance writing. In academia, if our lab felt that our study was important, and we should get it “out there” regardless of which journal, we still did. Even letters to editors get indexed and read. With search engines available specific to certain areas of expertise, we don’t worry about research being “wasted”. I have had more than one request from journal editors to review papers, where my “expertise” to review a paper was clearly from a paper I had written that had “only” been in a “niche” journal.

In freelance writing, you might well write something that speaks to you and find it speaks to nobody else. It has disappeared into the world wide web of thoughts, a blip.

In academia, I used to console colleagues after rejection or failed experiments. If we publish a failed experiment (“negative results”), at least someone else reading of our failure will know that we tried and failed, before trying again, in a different tack, or with a tweak to the experimental set-up. The knowledge is not “lost”.

In an ideal world, our goals as scientists should be to improve lives. We don’t know how to measure that directly though, so our bosses assess these via “secondary” metrics: 1. how much grant money we bring in; 2. how many journal papers we publish, especially in “high-impact” journals; and 3. how many times other scientists cite our work. We just need to be able to sleep tight after a tiring day of failure, knowing that, even if we did not meet these 3 goals, that somewhere, we improved lives somehow.

When I look back at my freelance pieces since my journey began, I see that a piece that won some “short-list” prize in a major competition a long time ago, got clicked on by only a handful of readers. Conversely, agony-aunt advice that I’ve typed out so I can forward easily to people who ask me in future, still get readers, way after they are published.

I guess the main reason I continue writing, can be explained by why I still dabble in trying to make people laugh when I write. Did my humor piece make someone feel better about themselves, even if nobody read it again the next day?

If so, then, just as in academic writing, I should feel good about writing, even if I brought no money in, and if nobody else seems to be reading that article anymore.