When junior artists, animators and programmers are getting into the industry, they often make the mistake of only considering one potential career path: applying to a large studio where they can work as a team of tens, hundereds or even thousands of fellow creatives on each project. However, what they often fail to recognize is that this is just one of many paths to success, and while it may work for a lot of people, for others, freelancing may be a better route.
Pros and cons#
On the surface, freelancing can seem like a great deal; you get to choose your own hours, select your clients and reap all of the profits. However, it can also come with some unique downsides.
Some of the advantages include:
- Flexible schedule - You are your own boss, so you get to choose when, how and where you work. Need to make last minute plans? There’s no need to make a formal request to your boss, you can just change your calendar and that’s it!
- Work from anywhere - Currently there’s a big debate amongst those in the creative sector surrounding working from home, and the current push by companies for employees to return to the office after the great work from home revolution that occured due to Covid. When you’re freelancing however, it doesn’t matter! Work at home, rent an office, do all of your work exclusively on public transport; as long as you can still do your work, it’s all up to you!
- Choose which work you want to do - When you’re freelancing, you are your own boss, which means that if you don’t want to work on a specific project, with a difficult client or on too tight a deadline, you have the full autonomy to simply say no.
However, it also comes with some disadvantages that you may not consider:
- You have to do your own tax - One thing some people may not realise when they’re working for other people is that the salary that goes into their bank account is not actually the salary that your employee is paying. Part of that income is sent to the government in the form of income tax (at a rate of 20% - 45% depending on your income level). When you’re your own boss, this isn’t done automatically any more, and it’s up to you to either register as self employed, or set up as a limited company, realising the relative advantages of each approach. Also you might go to prison if you do it wrong.
- You pay for your time off - When you’re an employee, there are certain luxuries that don’t come with being self employed. Paid time off is one of those luxuries, so when you’re a freelancer, any time that you’re not working, you’re not making money, which can suddenly make that 2 week rave trip to Ibiza seem less financially viable. This has the potential to significantly impact your mental health, and self imposed crunch can be a real problem that is often not talked about.
- High risk, high reward - What is often not talked about when people list the pros of freelancing (as shown above) is that many of the benefits only start to materialise after you’ve already found success, and built a client base. Before reaching that point, it’s much harder to, for example, be selective with what jobs you take. If the choice is between taking an unrealistic deadline, or running out of money, realistically for most people there’s only one option. This leads to a large amount of pressure at the beginning, as the cost of failure is so large.
The importance of marketing#
While it might be nice to imagine that if you just produce good work, clients will find you, this is, more often than not, naive. If this were the case, companies wouldn’t invest trillions of pount collectively on advertising, when they could be spending that money on making their product better. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that you’re the best at what you do if nobody knows that you exist.
I have personal experience with this; When I released my Blender addon Alpha Trees on the Blender Market, there was an initial spike of a few sales from people who saw it on the “new releases” section, before dropping down again to only one every few days.
Initially I was disappointed by this, as I knew that it was high quality, but after a while I realised that since I had put very few resources into marketing prior to release there was really no way for new people to find the product. As a result I decided to spend the next few months working specifically on marketing. I made posts on websites such as BlenderArtists, Reddit and Twitter, made a tutorial for the addon on Youtube (that now has over 12k views), and reached out to Youtubers and potential affilites to see if they would be interested in promoting the addon.
This resulted in a large uptick in sales, going from one sale every few sales, to multiple sales each day. Now, 3 years later, the addon has over 2500 sales and is still going strong, something that I attribute to the combination of having a strong product, and also a strong marketing strategy.
And so, in order to practice what I preach, you can have a look at Alpha Trees here:
