Coronashift: working (and earning) through a pandemic

It's that time of year when I sit down to do my accounts - the UK tax year ends at the start of April so I usually get round to totting everything up to submit my tax return around now. Before I get down to the serious book-keeping though, I just spent a couple of hours making myself some graphs to see how work's panned out over the past year.

Most years, I make a graph for myself to see how my different sources of income break down. It's partly just out of curiosity, but it's also useful for tracking where the main focus of my work has been and assessing whether it's the kind of balance I'm after. This year, of course, has been a bit different with the coronavirus pandemic breaking out just before the start of the 2020-21 tax year.

So, below are the graphs for April 2019-2020 - to give a pre-pandemic comparison - and then for April 2020-2021:

The main points to come out seem to be:

Grants: I had a long patch of 4-5 months last summer with almost no work at all as publishers cancelled or paused projects. I was luckily able to claim government grants for the self-employed. So these made up nearly a quarter of the year's overall income.

Talks & training: Around 10% of my income in an average year is generally made up of talks and training in some form; at conferences, events, workshops, etc. This year, for obvious reasons, that dropped off a cliff and made up less than 1% of my income (for a single paid webinar). 

Royalties: These were down both as a percentage of my income and in real terms. With everything going on, some teaching cancelled and the rest shifting online, people haven't been buying new ELT books. Publishers' reps haven't been able to get out to chat to teachers and schools, bookshops have been closed, some publishers have even struggled at points to get books printed or moved around the world. So, royalties for writers have dropped and because they're paid in arrears, I suspect they'll continue to go down before they start to recover.

Writing vs. consulting: In terms of the kind of projects I worked on, it looks like there was quite a big shift from lots of consulting to more writing. 'Consulting' is a bit of a 'miscellaneous' category for work I do for publishers which isn't really materials writing. It might involve reviewing, giving input on syllabus or word lists or the like. One project that slightly skewed the 2019-20 figures was my work on the Oxford 3000 word list and the position paper I wrote for OUP. I've lumped it all in as consulting, even though the final bit involved writing the paper for publication, just because it was all part of one project. Over the past year or so, the extra writing has come from four main writing projects - creating writing workshops for the Oxford Discover Futures students books (levels 5 and 6), plus two forthcoming projects which I'll post more about when they're published.

The first couple of months of 2021-2022 tax year have been very quiet so far with only a few odd bits and pieces of work; a couple of online talks, some blog posts and quite a bit of (unpaid) work in my role with the Hornby Trust.  Fingers crossed though there's a new project in the pipeline which might see a whole new category added to next year's chart and hopefully, a bounce back in the talks and training category whether that's online or maybe even in-person.

Manic May

Phew! I've just come out of what felt like a very busy, head-down patch of work. Since I got back from a break mid-April, it's been full-on through to a couple of deadlines at the end of last week … and it's really taken its toll.

As many of you will know, I suffer from a chronic pain condition that tends to flare up when I put in too many hours at my desk. I try really hard to keep a steady, manageable flow of work, but that's always a challenge. In this instance, a number of factors conspired against me:

• The two main projects I was working on expanded significantly from their original briefs, involving a lot more hours' work to complete, but without the deadlines really moving.
• A few unexpected queries came in from projects I thought I'd finished. Although they weren't big things, they did take time emailing to and fro, going back to look through documents, tracking down information and generally getting my head back into a different project.
• Several things also came up about potential future work, all of which is good, but again, is a distraction and requires shifting yourself into a different headspace to consider whether each one is of interest, whether it will fit into your schedule, then flurries of emails, phone conversations and in one case, travelling to a face-to-face meeting.

All of which made for a sense of there being not enough hours in a day and days in a week … and inevitably led to a pain flare-up. That then had its own knock-on effect as I struggled to work through more pain, which made me slower and less productive, so everything took even longer. On bad pain days, there are only so many hours I can manage at my desk, so I tended to work shorter days and with work piling up, that meant I ended up working through five weekends in a row just to keep up. And while fewer hours per day spread across 7 days instead of 5 meant I ultimately managed to keep all those plates spinning and hit my deadlines, the lack of any respite took its toll too.

Thankfully, this week has been much calmer. There's no rest for the wicked though with two new projects starting straight away, albeit at a less hectic pace – so far! – plus decisions to make about what I take on over the next few months. I'm feeling utterly drained and my inclination right now is to say no to everything and just rest, but I need the work and some of it does look interesting.

All of which got me reflecting on my working hours again and took me back to a blog post I wrote  last summer about My Working Life in Stats. As it's almost a year on, I thought I'd do a quick update with this year's stats.

2018-2019 in Stats

It's been a very tricky year for work. Just after I wrote my post last year, I took a couple of months off work almost completely to try and get my health back on track (see Not Working). It did help, in the short term at least. Then, when I got back to working in the late summer, I had a frustrating patch of jobs being delayed and cancelled. This had an especially big impact because I was being cautious about not overdoing it, so I'd only planned in one project at a time and when that dropped off, it left me with nothing to fill in.

As you can see from the graph, things picked up towards the end of the year (the numbers along the bottom are week numbers, so 41 is into October, 01 start of Jan), but work was very bitty with lots of short jobs which led to sudden peaks in busy weeks. January to April was quiet-ish, again with several shorter jobs, then the recent flurry through late April and May.

Financially, the year 2018-19 (that's the tax year April to April) was dreadful with my overall income dropping to about £21K which was just £17K after expenses. In part, that's down to the couple of months I didn't work at all for health reasons, in part it's down to the working time lost through delayed and cancelled projects, and also the bitty nature of short projects (which I wrote about here). I also worked through the autumn and winter on a royalties-only writing project which accounted for around 27% of my hours for the whole year. That paid nothing in the short term (although I have included the hours in my working hours graph), so that's effectively more than a quarter of my year working 'unpaid', but it will, hopefully, pay back in future years (fingers crossed!).

Looking ahead

I'm hoping the year ahead will be an improvement. From a financial perspective, my recent flurry of work through April/May wasn't counted in the income figures above and with solid work through June and into July, I should already be on track for a better start to the new financial year. And with a few potentially interesting projects in discussion, it's looking like the issue over the coming months won't be lack of work but trying to fit it into my schedule in a way that's manageable. In the short term though, I've just booked a week off before things get too busy again to wind down somewhere warm, do very little and hopefully ease off some of those pains!

Getting going: the economics of short jobs

Getting started on any new project, it takes time to get up and running. Recently, I've worked on a number of short jobs where the start-up time ate into the hours I could allocate to the whole job (based on the fee) to the point where the whole thing turned out to be hardly worth it financially. It's made me reconsider whether short writing jobs are always viable from a financial perspective.

At the start of a new writing project, there are lots of things to get your head around and no matter how experienced you are, that takes time. I've been writing ELT materials for 20 years now, so I generally know what to expect and can more-or-less 'hit the ground running', but even so, I still have to read through the brief and accompanying documents (of which there might be anything up to a dozen) to check:

- which market the materials are aimed at 

- the level (not just A2, B1 etc. but how it's actually pitched)

- the overall format of the book/components (even if I'm only writing a small part)

- the general style and approach

- any restrictions on topics, artwork or permissions for authentic texts
- any relevant exam guidelines or exercise types

- the format I need to use - templates, file naming conventions, combined/separate answer keys, etc.
- any requirements for artwork briefs or audio scripts

- the extent

- the styleguide (if there is one)

- all the other random bits I can't think of right now!

Then there's all the admin - emailing to and fro about dates and schedules and contracts and who to send stuff to, and downloading all the briefing docs.

On short jobs, you're typically writing a small part to fit in with other material (review units or tests or worksheets), so then when you start actually writing, not only are you flicking back and forth to check all the stuff above, you're also referring to the already-written material to check which language points you're covering, what's already been done, the approach the other writers have taken and topics they've covered. So the first unit (or spread or page) can take much longer than you'd normally expect for the actual amount of text you end up with on the page.

On longer projects, you can generally absorb that start-up time within the overall fee and hope to speed up and make up the time later. You might even find that time's been allowed in the schedule (and budget) to send in a first unit for feedback, and to go back and forth a bit to get the style and format established. On short jobs though, it seems there's little or no allowance for any of this. The commissioning editor looks at the number of pages/spreads/units and calculates a fee by simply multiplying how long they think each one will take to write. When those fees are already pretty low, absorbing that start-up time and still making more than a minimal hourly rate can prove tricky. Especially if you miss something in the brief in your rush to get started - or something wasn't actually mentioned or made clear - and so you send in your whole batch of work only to get it back with loads of requests for revisions. Now your hourly rate's ticking down even further.

Don't get me wrong, it's convenient to do short jobs now and again. Sometimes, they just fill a gap in your schedule and it can also be nice to do something simple where you don't get sucked into a big long complicated project. And sometimes they work out fine - occasionally, they can even take less time than you expect - hooray! In my experience though, that's getting increasingly rare. With publishers producing multiple levels and components of courses simultaneously and dividing up the writing between a whole slew of different writers, they also seem to just divide up the time and budget without taking into account that each of those writers has to factor in some start-up time.

That's not to say I'm going to stop taking on shorter jobs - like I said, they can make a nice change - but I'll certainly be considering that start-up time as a more prominent factor when I'm assessing fees and considering whether to take work on in future.

My working life in stats

Recently, I’ve been following a series of blog posts by ALCS, My Writing Living, and the Society of Authors, My Writing Income (both following on from the ALCS survey of authors’ earnings). It prompted me to think about my own income and after creating my first pie chart, I kind of got carried away with the stats …

Working hours

Before I start talking about income, I need to get clear how much I work. As some of you will know, I originally went freelance back in 2000 to try and manage my health. I suffer from a combination of RSI mixed up with a more general chronic pain condition which means that I need to limit the number of hours I spend at my desk. My condition fluctuates, but generally, I aim for between 15 and 20 billed-for hours a week; so actual time writing. Then on top of that, I’ll generally do something like another 5-10 hours of admin, keeping up with social media, prepping for and attending conferences and events, and various other bits and pieces that make up my working life.

Keeping to that 15-20-hour limit is almost impossible though within publishing schedules where work often comes in concentrated bursts. Below is a chart of my billed-for hours from mid-2017 up until mid-2018 – the red line showing that 20-hour max mark.

The ‘zero-hours’ weeks are for a variety of reasons: there’s one proper week’s holiday, there’s some time off over Christmas, there’s a week’s ‘reading retreat’, there are 2 weeks at a Forensic Linguistics summer school, a week at IATEFL, a week at a corpus linguistics conference and some time teacher training. Then there are a couple of patches of ‘downtime’ at the end of projects, where I was at my desk just catching up on myself.

Income

In the 2017-18 tax year, I had a total income of £29,715. Minus expenses that comes down to £23,596 … and then, of course, you have to take off tax and National Insurance. The sources of that income break down as below.

All of my writing was for a fee rather than a royalty. That isn’t a big shift for me, over 18 years of writing, I’ve only worked on 3 royalty projects – most of my work has always been fee-based. In 2017-18, that comprised of:

•  A small patch of lexicography work
• A substantial writing project writing vocabulary practice activities for a book for the Italian market (as part of a team)
• Learner corpus research and writing of common error pages for two books for the Spanish market
• A set of online grammar practice activities to go with a coursebook series

Then I did a few odd bits of consulting (reports and reviews for publishers mainly) and some teacher training.

The trend:

For some time, I’ve felt as if my income hasn’t really increased since I started out freelancing some 18 years ago. So, I climbed up into the loft to dig out all my old accounts and came up with the following graph. I’ve shown my income after expenses but before tax because that seems to best equate to an employee’s salary. For simplicity, I’ve just shown the year-ending (so 2002 is the figure for the 2001-2002 tax year). The figures for the average UK income come from the ONS website (Office for National Statistics).

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of fluctuation. Some of that is down to personal circumstances – so around 2004-05, I had a lot of changes in my personal circumstances and I took quite a bit of time out travelling and training, then in 2016-17, I did a part-time MA which more-or-less cut my working hours in half. Around 2012-2013, I worked on a year-long royalties project with only a small advance – although I’m not quite sure why the slump carried on into 2014 … perhaps I was just recovering!

Most interestingly, the blue dotted line shows the trend averaged over time … which as you can see, shows that I was right, my income has stayed more-or-less that same for the past 17 years at around £19K. Pretty depressing, huh?

Okay, so the big dip in 2017 is probably skewing the recent figures a bit, but there’s something else going on too. If I look at my total income before expenses, the picture looks slightly different … and slightly more positive in terms of the trend.

So what’s going on? If I compare 2002 and 2018:

	Total income	After expenses	Expenses
2001-02	25,860	24,492	1,368
2017-18	29,715	23,596	6,119

Why have my expenses gone up so dramatically? Well, obviously that’s in part just down to inflation (esp. in terms of the IT kit you’re expected to have). But there are other things at play too.

Finding work: 

Back in 2002, I was largely working on lexicography projects. A big dictionary project would keep me busy with regular hours for months and months. And once you were known, you’d just move from one big project to the next in a fairly steady, reasonably well-paid stream of work. As dictionary work dried up and I moved into more general ELT writing, I had to work harder to find work and going to conferences and events to network and raise my profile became more important.  That’s become especially true in recent years as I’ve tried to move my career on. I probably could have ticked along getting the same kind of work, but to get into new and more interesting areas has required a more proactive approach to putting myself out there … and that costs money.

Conference costs: 

In the old days, most of the conferences I went to were ones I was speaking at on behalf of a publisher, so most of my costs were covered. In recent years, publisher sponsorship for speaking, for me at least, has been dwindling. As publishers tighten their belts, it seems they’re only paying for authors of their new, high-profile courses to speak. And as someone who tends to work in more niche areas – vocab, EAP – despite pushing, I keep being told there’s no budget available. That means I’m increasingly self-funding. Last year, I spent around £2000 on going to conferences and other events.

Which raises the question, should I cut down on my conference habit?! Is all that investment paying off? Well, probably not in financially, but it’s what keeps me interested and engaged, so maybe it’s worth it?