How to get paid for jobs you would (and sometimes do) do for free with author Estelle Erasmu

 

Episode Description: Do you love your job so much you would do it for free? Writing coach Estelle Erasmus, author of “Writing That Gets You Noticed” shares how she transitioned from passion to profit as a writer, and how we can get paid for what we love as well. 

Video Highlight: Estelle Erasmus talks about knowing your worth, even when family and friends ask for a favor.

Estelle  Erasmus’s Bio: Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, writing coach, and longtime ASJA member and an adjunct instructor at New York University and for Writer’s Digest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Independent, WIRED, Huffington Post Personal, AARP the Magazine, Vox, Insider, Next Avenue, GH, Marie Claire and more. Estelle’s articles for the New York Times and Washington Post have gone globally viral (with more than 500 comments on her NYT piece). She has appeared on “Good Morning America”, “Fox News with Ernie Anastos” and has had her articles mentioned on “The View”. She is host of the Freelance Writing Direct Podcast, found on iTunes and Spotify.

 
 

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Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell: The other day I was watching our local news and there was a story that came on about using confetti- yes confetti- to de-stress. And I have to admit it was pretty appealing. By the way it's called the confetti project if you want to look it up. But guess what is the top thing that we stress about. Ok well given that you are listening to this you know the answer. It is money. According to the American Psychological Association, money continues to be the top source of stress for Americans. That’s where Financial Wellness Strategies comes in. We provide educational resources for companies employees to balance financial wealth with mental health. Financial literacy is important but we need to go beyond academics and learn how it all actually fits into our real lives- and what we want to accomplish with our hard earned money. Learn more about how you and your company can invest in peace of mind at FinancialWellnessStrategies.com

 

Welcome everyone to the Wellness for Financial Grownups podcast. I’m your host Certified Financial Planner Bobbi Rebell. Author of Launching Financial Grownups. Live Your Richest Life by Helping Your (Almost) Adult Kids become Everyday Money Smart and the founder of Financial Wellness Strategies. 

This week we are talking about getting paid for work you would do for free. All that talk about following your passion is great but sometimes we are so excited to be doing what we love- that we find ourselves in a precarious position of being underpaid or not paid at all because well- we would do it for free. 

Confession: after doing a couple of unpaid internships I landed my first job out of college at CNBC. I was paid- the standard amount a production assistant was paid. But I remember confiding in a jaded more experienced co-worker- an associate producer senior to me- that I was so excited to be in the CNBC newsroom and part of all the action that I would have done the “job” for free! 

This week’s quote- you can probably guess- is from the movie Jerry McGuire and it is “Show me the money” because honestly- work- including getting to play professional sports- is work.

This week’s guest author and award-winning journalist Estelle Erasmus learned to get paid even though she did write her blog for free. She is now getting paid-and teaching us how to get paid and much more in her new book: Writing That Gets Noticed: Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, Get Published. Her work has appeared in countless top publications including the New York Times and the Washington post- where the stories went viral globally. Estelle also hosts the Freelance Writing Direct Podcast. 

Here is Estelle Erasmus. 

 

 

Estelle Erasmus, my friend, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

 

Estelle:

Thank you so much for having me, Bobbie. It's great to be here.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

I'm excited to congratulate you after, really the whole time we've known each other, you've been working on this book, Writing That Gets Noticed, and it is now a reality. I asked you on here because you have at points in your career worked as a writer and I am saying it was work because it was work. and not been paid. Specifically, after you came back from having your daughter, you had a project that became very special to you, but also was, I don't know, was it a hobby? Was it unpaid work? You tell me.

 

Estelle:

Yeah, I mean, what happened was I had always made money through publishing and through freelance writing. And then when I had my daughter in midlife, I became part of a community through Listen to Your Mother, which was a show that you go on and on stage and you talk, you say your essays about parenting and motherhood. And I found community. And what I found was they were all doing this thing I'd never heard of before called blogging. And I wanted in because again, it was that sense of community. And I asked them who pays you? And they said, well, we don't really get paid, but sometimes we are able to get money from companies that if we post about something that they've done. And I thought, okay, there's an opportunity here potentially. So when I set up my blog or my website, I set it up as a wordpress.org setup. because that allowed you at some point to put ads on and to be able to make money. And I consciously made that choice. So even though I wasn't gonna make the money initially from blogging until I was more known and I knew that, I wanted, I was looking for the community and I was looking for opportunities for the future.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

So you weren't being paid directly for your work, but you always had the idea that you hoped to monetize it in the future.

 

Estelle:

I did, I really did because I saw that people were doing that and I didn't there were there was a lot I had to learn Bobbie and I always advocate that people if they want to do something go through step by step break it down into steps. I had so many steps to do I had to learn how to do a website how to create my own website and hire web designer. I did it myself. I had to learn how to write. very personal, somewhat vulnerable stories. I'd always been a journalist. I'd always written in a very journalistic, impartial way. So this was very new for me.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

So how did you make that pivot to being paid there and also expanding because you then moved on to many other things that you that you were paid for then?

 

Estelle:

So I saw that people were being influencers. And this was very early on with social media. It was before Instagram, it was before TikTok, both of which I'm on. But it was before all of that. It was basically Twitter and Facebook. And they had these big groups and everybody was sharing everybody's social media and following each other. And they were sharing opportunities, so-and-so company. is looking for a few people to attend an event and tweet. And then events I understood about when I was a magazine editor, I would be invited to events all the time. And perhaps I would write about them in my magazine or perhaps a columnist would write about them or sometimes I even had a column. And so that I understood. And so the translation into making money from it wasn't that difficult for me. Then I realized there were, you had to categorize it. So maybe they wanted 10 tweets over a three week period. Okay, I can do that. Back then, I think tweets were 140 words. And so it was a process of learning and growing to another phase. And I always had in the back of my mind, yeah, I wanna get back to publishing, traditional publishing. But while I was thinking that traditional publishing was becoming so untraditional, it wasn't print anymore that was king, it was digital, which is really, I had honed my teeth on small publications and learning how to run everything, which was a great precursor for understanding the editors of digital today.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

And it is tricky because a lot of writers now have a very tough time earning a living. You've written a book, writing that gets noticed. Well, it's also within that writing that gets you paid. And you do have quite a bit of information about once you do have someone that's interested in publishing your work, how to get paid and also how to get paid the best deal, both in money and other things. Can you talk a little bit about that? In other words, once you get that interest.

 

Estelle:

Sure, once you get that interest, once you get that assignment, I'm very clear in a whole chapter about what happens once you get the assignment. You have to make sure if you don't get a contract that you get something in writing, or even verbal that you could then send an email back and I give the actual verbiage on how you can do that. I'm glad we spoke. This is our agreement. This is how many words. This is when I'll get it to you. These are the rights. Even if they don't send you a contract. And then I break down the types of contracts because our work is valuable. And we don't wanna just get, unless we want to, right? Sometimes there are throwaway stories, you can give the rights away, it doesn't matter. You've done something, you're not never gonna repurpose or use it again. But there are times when you're gonna use something again, maybe in a memoir, maybe in an anthology, maybe in some longer form and you want to retain. those rights. And so there's little trick. I would always go to an editor and I'd say, I see this contract that's taking all rights. Do you have another contract that will allow me rights if I want to do a memoir or an anthology? And I can't even remember any one publisher that said no to me, but you have to ask just like anything in life. It's all about the ask.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

Right. And this advice goes for so many different businesses, whether it's coaching or even being like a home organizer or different things. You want to have a contract. You want to know what your – it has to be very clear what exactly is expected. For example, how would you protect yourself from someone taking your ideas? And again, this goes to anything. It can go to if someone is just constantly asking you for advice. I mean, doctors get this all the time. Tell me what do you think about this when you're at a dinner party or whatever it may be. How do you – convert those people who are just asking you for help, you know, your friend that asked you to tweak her essay, versus really getting paid. Especially when it's people that may be your friends, maybe they think you're friends, but they're really just acquaintances, and they're effectively, even innocently, asking you to work for free.

 

Estelle:

I think we have to have an understanding that our time is valuable. We have limited time during the day. Everybody has the same 24 hours. And if we want to maximize it and get value for our work, we have to value our own work. So I think Marie Forlone, I don't know if I'm saying her name correctly, but she says something which is great when somebody says, can I, you know, can I grab a coffee with you and bend your ear? you know, or like pick your brain. She says, I barely have time to see my best friend, my daughter or my mother. You know, she says something like that. And I have used that before. With that said, I am very generous with my time to my students, to the people that I mentor who usually have taken a class with me at NYU or Writer's Digest or done one-on-one coaching with me. And that is... an equal investment. I'm invested in them because I'm invested in getting their work to the point where they're gonna get their writing noticed and they do very successfully. And I feel like that's a good use of my time. Just somebody randomly saying, can I pick your brain? Well, you know, this brain has had decades worth of preparation and... I'm just not gonna give it away like that. I do give it away in many ways through my podcast, Freelance Writing Direct, where I always ask my guests for actionable writing tips or craft tips and I shared them myself. I give it away on my sub stack a lot of times when I share editor on call interviews that I've done with New York Times editor or Washington Post editor that I use for NYU. In my book, I give so many tips and tricks away. So I feel like you share the knowledge, but very specific questions like, can you look at my essay and analyze it? That's work. That is something I would be hired to do. And that is how I would approach that.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

How do you prevent people then from taking your ideas? Do you ever have ideas where if you submit a story or a consultant maybe has to pitch themselves to get a job and then they turn you down and then you see your idea being used? Is there a way to protect yourself?

 

Estelle:

Ideas are kind of in the zeitgeist. And I've seen this a lot because I've been on both sides of the publishing wall, Bobbie. I've been a magazine editor-in-chief where somebody will send an idea and literally a week later, somebody will send the same idea. So ideas and trends, people can do things. And I talk a lot about it in my book, how you can find trends, how you can follow trends and work with them. But I feel like you have to make sure you have to do your due diligence like anything in life. When you buy a home without researching it, without going at night to see who's in the neighborhood, without looking around to see the changes in the last few years, you do the same thing when you're looking at a publication that you wanna write for. And there is a whisper network. There are some publications that aren't trustworthy. I'm not, you know, I don't work with. publications like that and usually they end up closing pretty quickly or after time. But if you go for credible newspapers or publishers that have been around for a while, you're usually in good stead.

 

 

Bobbi Rebell:

A lot of us wanna be working in something that we're passionate about, and we would do it for free, but we know we can't. What is your best advice to get paid for something that you know, and to some degree they know, you would do for free or for very little money, so you don't have that leverage?

 

Estelle:

I have two pieces of advice about that. One is whenever somebody suggests something to you, and they say, you know, you can do this, or we're paying $50, or we're not paying anything, you could say, you know, I've been in the industry, blah, or you know, that I've written for all these publications, and you know that this is my subject area. and that I have the latest, is there any wiggle room? You can say that if they're offering you nothing, you can say that if they're offering you a thousand dollars, you can say no matter what it is, you always ask it. I've asked that question and I have gained 70%. I mean, you would think that maybe they double something, they've gone up 70%. So it's been insane that just asking that little question. so if you're not gonna get paid for something and you really want to get paid for it, you have to look at what kind of history the publication has. Do they ever pay their writers for anything? Or is it a nonprofit, which usually they won't. They'll say something like, oh, we're a nonprofit, we don't pay, but we will put it on social media five times a day, we'll share all your links. And I would just go for things that are gonna help you because honestly, sharing social media links really counts. I've had times when I've shared social media, I've been able to share more than one link. Usually they said we can give one link and I'll say, well, can I give three? And they will and you immediately can see like an uplift in your social media because people are reading it depending on the reach of the publication and they're following you. A lot of follows give you more opportunity because every time you have a class that you're teaching, every time you're doing something, you can share it with your followers and that gives you more opportunity. So I feel like you have to look at it as a big, a long game. Publishing is a long game. And if I had said when I first started blogging, I'm not gonna do this, I'm not making any money, I would never have become a blogger, I would never have become an influencer, I would never have learned social media way earlier than most writers and had, by the time writers got to Twitter, I had 15,000 followers. So it really changed the game for me. That made me valuable to publishers. even early on before I had viral hits in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And it showed that I was a grower and somebody who could pivot and learn and move forward with my career in a very strong and positive way.

Bobbi Rebell:

Estelle this has been wonderful Where can people catch up with you and get access to all of your upcoming events and your podcast?

 

Estelle:

Perfect. Thanks so much, Bobby. This has been such a pleasure talking to you. My podcast is Freelance Writing Direct. It can be found on iTunes, Spotify, and now YouTube. And recent guests, I won't say that. Guests include Cheryl Strayed, Anne Hood, and editors from top assigning publications that will pay you money. I am on, my website is estellserasmus.com and I can be found on Twitter. Instagram and TikTok at Estelle S Erasmus. And now I have a sub stack called writing that gets noticed. And I have information on that on my website.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

Great, thank you so much.

 

Estelle:

Thank you, Bobby. Pleasure.

 

Bobbi Rebell:

We all want to live our best financial grownup lives and one way to do that is to know that the people we care about are also in a good place when it comes to their money. That might mean our kids, our grandkids and yes- even our friends. But how. Its’ awkward. You see them struggling- pretending to know more than they do- or making bad money decisions but don’t know what to say- and even if you say something supportive- then what? That’s why I wrote Launching Financial Grownups. In Launching Financial Grownups I share the tools and strategies so you know what to say to take the pressure off and give those you love the confidence they need. It's about giving those we care about the right amount of help, at the right time- so they can not only learn what they need to know about being financial grownups- but also be confident they can do it- and that you will be there to cheer them on. Pick up a copy of Launching Financial Grownups - I promise you will be so happy you did. 

Wellness for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media. Editing and production by Steve Stewart, guest coordination, social media support, and show notes by Alliee Borbon. Artwork by Chelsea Perez. You can find the podcast show notes, which include links to resources mentioned in the show, as well as show transcripts by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. 

To get even more out of this podcast, make sure you are also on our newsletter list to get more free content to live your best financial lives. There is a link in the show notes but you can also sign up at bobbirebell.com or at financialwellnessstrategies.com. And be a friend- share the podcast with your friends by taking a screenshot and sharing it on social media. Make sure to tag me on instagram at bobbirebell1. And while your there- follow me- and if you DM me that you listen to the podcast I will follow you back. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me. You can also support our merch shop, grownupgear.com by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself as well. And finally my grownup friends, don’t forget to invest in peace of mind. Thanks everyone. 

 
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