My month as a Solo Writer (with my real revenue & profit numbers)
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Hey everyone, May 2024 was a great month as a Solo Writer. I worked with 7 clients and earned $23,000 in revenue (I'll get to expenses in a bit). Here's how my client mix broke down: Client 1 - $7k Client 2 - $5k Client 3 - $4k Client 4 - $2k Client 5 - $2.5k Client 6 - $1.5k Client 7 - $1k Only two of these clients were new this month. The average age of these client relationships is about 6 months. What will I change for next month? Consolidation. As I've mentioned before, the high-paying clients aren't that much more work than the lowest-paying ones. Usually the main part of the work is collecting background info on the client and switching into the correct context to write for them. So the $7k client definitely wasn't 7x more work than the $1k client; probably only 3x as much work. In other words, I need to figure out how to have 3 clients paying $7k a month rather than trying to add more $1k clients. Expenses Here's how my expenses broke down for the month: Contract Labor: $1,970 Payment Processing: $155.60 Software: $245 Total Expenses: $2,370.60 Total pre-tax profit*: $20,629.40.*Before paying myself Contract labor consisted of 3 contract writers I hired to help out with a few parts of my projects. One earned about $1,400, while the other two each earned about $250 Goals for June:
Thanks for reading! Let me know what questions you have, happy to answer anything. |
Solo Writers
What does a day in the life of a Solo Writer look like? For me, the day mostly revolves around managing my roster of clients and making sure I'm on top of the deliverables for each one. Here's how that roster breaks down: 6 total clients 2 clients with daily deliverables 4 clients with weekly deliverables The 2 clients with daily deliverables are X accounts I run that need daily memes & shitposts. It's hard to draft those ahead of time, because the shitposts usually need to related to the...
The more I've done client work, the more I've noticed that one thing stops my creativity and hurts my business: Having to spend time as a project manager. This is a huge challenge for Solo Writers who offer ghostwriting services. Clients want someone who's creative and good at writing, but there's a lot more work that goes into a client engagement. In a lot of my client engagements, at least 50% of the work is managing the client's expectations and managing the project. That's a lot of work...
Here are the numbers for my Solo Writing Agency in January: $20,573 in revenue $1,506 in expenses (Largest expenses: $500 for a contract writer, $451 payment processing fees, and $150 for software) 9 total clients. Largest is $3k, smallest is $1,200. Most of them are ~$2k per month. Biggest challenges: Most clients are on a custom package, so the deliverables and process for each client is a bit different. Goals for February: Take on new clients at higher price points ($3k minimum), test out...