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Category: Careers

Home Category: Careers (Page 3)

How I’m preparing to take maternity leave as a freelancer

May 6, 20191 commentLauren Orsini

I’m over halfway done with being pregnant, and it’s starting to feel extremely real. At Anime Boston, I didn’t have to tell people I was pregnant for them to guess (though of course, nobody said anything until I said it out loud, because you should never assume). If you ask me to put your hand on my belly, you might feel her kick. She kicks a lot! I feel like a Gundam occupied by a small, angsty pilot. I hope this means she’ll be a protagonist.

Even before I started showing, I started planning out What Happens Next. I have a lot of experience with newborns for somebody who still decided to have a kid anyway. I’m not going into this blind; I know that I’m going to be out of commission for weeks. Survival mode, barely rested, “I put on a clean T-shirt and that’s my work for the day” kind of thing.

In most nations, this is a given and often built into a country-wide healthcare plan. Here, not so much. I covered this last summer when I ghost-wrote How to Survive Unpaid Maternity Leave in America for GoFundMe (you will just have to trust me as my name isn’t on this), and I actually cried frustrated tears while writing it. I interviewed several moms who have been screwed by their workplaces’ leave policies or lack thereof. I was acutely aware that my own plans to start a family would be intrinsically tied to this struggle. Additionally, the central message of this GoFundMe-funded piece still wasn’t a solution I wanted to pursue unless I had to: “Why not use our platform to beg your friends and family for money?”

I’m due in early September, so I’m planning to take that month and October off from work. As I get bigger (and more tired—nobody talks about this!), here are some of the ways I’m getting ready to take all that time off:

Figure out my finances

First off, I have to say that being on John’s insurance and living in a two-income household is a huge help. I hope I’ve never been misleading about how much more I’d have to pay in Virginia if I were responsible for my own freelancer health insurance instead. I’ll say that one of the more affordable options here is eHealth, which is around $300 a month.

John’s healthcare covers my doctor’s appointments (of which there are many), but it does not offer life insurance, which is recommended for pregnant people. I looked into a few policies, but since pregnancy is a “preexisting condition,” it is pricey! So I decided to just go without. John and I joke that he can just order a bargain-rate funeral if something happens to me.

Maternity is not only a preexisting condition but in some cases, also a short-term disability. In Maryland as well as in Washington, DC beginning next year, pregnant people can apply for a short-term disability program, and if they are approved, receive a stipend during their leave. Virginia doesn’t have anything like this, and with another income in my household, it’s difficult to tell if I would qualify for it even if I applied. But I made sure to check anyway. (The answer is no.)

One way I am keeping costs down is by buying a lot of items for the baby secondhand. I joined a Facebook group for parents to reuse and recycle items and have gotten a few items for free or around $10. Since babies are only babies for so long, they quickly outgrow their nursery furniture—and after just a year or two of wear.

Find a replacement

NOTE: I AM STILL LOOKING FOR ONE! If you look at my work and think, “Hey, I could do that,” and are available during Eastern Standard Time, please reach out. Update, July 30: I found one!

When I found out I was pregnant, I told John first, my family second… and my clients third. The good news about being self-employed is that I don’t have to ask for permission; I just let them know I have already decided I will be taking two months off. (The bad news is I have zero job security, and there’s no guarantee anyone will take me back after that time is up.) I usually work a revolving door of gigs in which some clients don’t contact me for a month and then need me a ton the following month, so this won’t be all that different from usual.

How will the world ever survive without me for two months? Just as well as always, I am sure. But one of the clients I work for most often is looking for somebody who can take over my tasks—blog post and press release writing, copyediting, WordPress website upkeep, and PowerPoint presentation generation—while I’m gone. The job is remote, but you’ll need to be available to work during EST business hours, around 9 to 5 EST. If my client is happy with the work, they might keep you around far longer than two months!  

Keep my expectations low

One of my favorite posts on maternity leave is Jen Dziura’s A Not-Very-Relatable Post About Taking Zero Maternity Leave and Doing All the Things and Everything Working Out Just Fine. Obviously, as somebody preparing to take leave, I don’t find it relatable but I do find it impressive! Kudos to Jen for being able to balance her business with literally giving birth. This post, more than any other, reminds me that having a baby is a totally different experience for everyone, and there’s no prescribed process.

I have no idea what my life will be like as a parent. I haven’t figured out childcare or even decided on a name yet. I am bringing a baby into a terrifying world where unvaccinated morons could make her sick, where kindergarteners carry bulletproof backpacks, where students are demonized as political radicals and saddled with tons of debt. So to keep my sanity I’m just trying to take things a few days at a time. This plan is fairly minimalist for that reason.

One of my most helpful resources has been hearing from freelancer friends about their experiences taking extended leave—and not always family leave, either. I’ve known small business owners who blocked off their client calendars in order to devote a month to writing a book or for international travel. The plus side of freelancing is this freedom to choose how you will budget your income and spend your non-work hours. Everybody does it differently, which is a big reason why I wanted to share my plan: because friends’ stories have shown it is possible to leave for months and come back! I plan to be transparent about what those two months away from work are like, but I’m keeping my expectations so low that I am not even going to promise a blog post during that time. My “work” on leave will be keeping a baby and myself alive.

This is the longest Otaku Journalist post I’ve written this year, but I still have so many thoughts about this topic, and far more questions than answers. If you’ve ever taken an extended leave as a freelancer for any reason, I’d love to hear about it.

Lead photo via Markus Spiske from Pexels

How I unexpectedly found myself doing PR

July 9, 20181 commentLauren Orsini

Usually, my name can be found in the byline of an article. But last week, it was in reporters’ inboxes, too.

That’s because I was in charge of sending the J-Novel Club Anime Expo public relations (PR) announcements. I’ve been working with Sam, the J-Novel Club founder, since before he launched the site. I even designed it! I never planned to do PR there, but the role fits surprisingly well. I use my own name and my own press contacts that I’ve built over the years. As a journalist myself, I feel confident writing emails that I think other journalists will find helpful. 

In the past few years, I’ve realized I really enjoy this kind of writing. I got my first taste of PR while writing my own press releases to announce each of my books. I’ve managed publicity for other clients and I’ve also helped friends working on cool projects workshop their own press strategies. The highlight to date was when a young communications student at my alma mater and I had a phone conversation about writing PR that’s earnest and doesn’t suck.

When I was getting my Masters in Journalism, there was this idea that press and PR were polar opposites. One of my classes met in a communications building classroom right after the PR track had met there. We’d laugh at the professors’ obsequious strategies on the board about winning reporters over. At the time, I guessed PR and the press had a combative relationship. PR reps would push me to write glorified ads, I thought, and I would have to push back.

But while I’ve gotten my fair share of terrible press releases on boring or irrelevant topics, public relations point-people have helped me immensely. They send topics right to my inbox so I don’t have to search so hard for stories. They set up interviews with hard-to-reach people. They trust me with news ahead of time so I can publish timely exclusives. They offer to send me free stuff, which I usually refuse unless they send me something I am going to review because as nice as PR contacts are, they are not my friends and nothing they send me is really free.

You’d assume there are more strings attached here, but I somehow maintain good relations with PR contacts even when I write negative stories. I incorrectly called my Amazon Anime Strike piece a bridge-burner, because I used my connections and privilege as a reporter in order to write a negative piece about how much the service disappointed me. But after I sent them a link to the article, the PR contact said they looked forward to working with me again.

Just last week, a PR contact thanked me for my critical article about Cosplay Token. So if there is a string attached, it’s this: if I write anything, they win, because they get attention.

Honestly, I wish somebody had told me this earlier in my career: there’s nothing “brave” about writing negative stories that benefit my readers because no ethical company is going to cut my access because of a legitimate, if negative, story. That would just make them look bad.

The thing that does restrict my coverage? Well, doing PR. I wrote exactly one article about J-Novel Club before I started doing regular PR for them, and even that has a caveat about my ties to the company. I wouldn’t have written an article like that today, because I indirectly benefit.

Still, I would be comfortable with say, being a whistleblower if I learned about bad practices there (fortunately, I have not). I feel the same way about basically anywhere I work. Even though I’ve been writing at Anime News Network for four years, I’ve spoken publicly about being disappointed with CEO Chris Macdonald’s decision to join the Otaku Coin board (and following that up with how glad I was when he backed out of that).

You see, none of the places I work really need me. I am not an employee of anyone. A fellow freelancer recently shared a story on Facebook about these tenuous connections: after a year of turning in well-received work, she got pneumonia and was two days late on a deadline. The company paid her promptly as usual, and never contacted her again. It was perfectly legal. Anyone I work for could just as easily sever ties with me.

But there’s a kind of freedom in that, too. I don’t have one master. No one outlet has so big a vise on my wallet that I can’t up and leave. If one of them does something so poisonous that I don’t want to be associated with them anymore, it’s not a major financial hardship for me.

Lives and careers are messy. Even if I never did PR, this would be the case. My articles are full of editor’s notes: “I donated to this Patreon,” or “I met this founder at a con.” I have a lot of allegiances, sure, but my sense of right and wrong is stronger. Ultimately, my most powerful relationship is to my readers, without whom I wouldn’t have anything. As long as I feel like I’m doing right by them, I can sleep well at night.

Standing still in 2018

June 18, 2018Lauren Orsini

First off, I wanted to let you know I’m giving a talk at the Japan America Society this Friday. You can still sign up for it here. I’ve been a member and language student there for four years, so when they asked me if I would volunteer to give this talk, it was a no-brainer.

This talk is coming two weeks after I gave an earlier version of it as an AnimeNEXT panel. It was one of four panels I gave at AnimeNEXT with John. Five if you count our participation on the AnimeCons TV panel, in which we talked about supporting the next generation of anime fans, something I have a lot of opinions on. 

With these speaking events combined, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of resting on my laurels lately. I’ve been giving talks about things I have done in the past, without really having anything in the works at present.

Somebody asked me what happened to Anime Origin Stories. I stopped putting these up regularly right after a friend of mine passed away, and never got back to them. I haven’t posted any since November 1, and I still have 100+ stories waiting to be followed up on.

Also in November, I wrote a novel, which I’ve been meaning to edit. But I’ve only sat down with it once since then. That hardly counts as “in the works.”

I wanted to investigate more serious stories about fandom. Now that actually is something I’ve got in the works but no thanks to my own efforts—I found a place interested in assisting me with the resources I need to do this, so uh, stay tuned on that.

I’ve been letting Tom Aznable do the lion’s share of work for Gunpla 101.

Then there’s that blog series I said I was starting in March and stopped after one post. Nobody’s asked about it, but it still grates at me that I haven’t added anything new to it.

What have I been doing? I’ve had a lot of client work lately that’s not fandom related (unless you count writing about niche topics for niche audiences fandom, which I sometimes do). I’ve been doing my work for clients as thoughtfully as I know how and then logging off for the day. I’ve been going on a lot of walks. It’s a little like summer vacation.

We’re halfway through 2018, so I thought I’d give you a status update by writing this. Maybe it’s comforting to see that other people don’t have anything figured out, either? It’s weird not to be working toward a goal right now. It feels like standing still. This isn’t burnout. This is just a blank space in my career, in which I’m not sure yet where I want to refocus my daily work.

Habits are hard to form. It takes 30 days, experts say, for a repeated task to become a habit. And yet, they are so easy to break. Take Otaku Links, my Friday column for years. For the first few weeks, I didn’t post them, I felt like I was forgetting something. It felt weird, but not for long. Now weeks go by without me remembering that column ever existed. I know that in order to break out of this uncertainty, I just need to decide on a goal and start chipping away at it a little each day. But which goal?

The logical way to conclude this post would be to tell you how I’m going to break the cycle. But right now, I’m not sure what comes next for me. As I keep writing here every Monday, I’m going to continue to evaluate what matters most to me each week, and see if it forms a theme.

It’s all a long way of saying, watch this space! I’ll talk to you next week.

How I prepared my freelance business for international travel

April 9, 2018Lauren Orsini

Going to Japan is a once-in-a-lifetime vacation that I’ve decided to take twice. I have a lot of feelings about how indulgent that may seem, which I wrote about last year after I bought the tickets. It’s a Billfold article, so it explains exactly how I was able to afford this, too.

But when you’re self-employed, it’s not only a matter of having the money to spend on a two-week international trip, but the time as well. Obviously, I don’t get vacation leave, much less paid vacation time, the way somebody with a regular job would. So how is it realistic for somebody like me to even go on a trip? Here’s everything I do to prepare.

Figure out what I can deliver

Sorry to disappoint, but I will obviously be working at least a bit during my trip, as I do on all of my vacations and weekends since becoming a freelancer. The trick is figuring out how much I will be able to work while still putting aside the majority of my time to enjoy Japan.

For me, what makes sense is spending about an hour a day at my computer checking email, putting out fires, and publishing my daily travelogue for Forbes. I’ll do my weekly streaming anime review (right now that’s just Record of Grancrest War), deal with minor technical difficulties any of my clients have, and call it a day’s work.

I’ve decided that 5 or 6 AM would be ideal, since that’s when I wrote my daily travel post for Forbes during my 2016 trip. I actually just re-read the whole thing, and while there are some odd word choices in places (I blame the jet lag), it was a rewarding experience and not only monetarily. I can’t wait to process my trip through writing again, and I hope you’ll check it out.

Manage my clients’ expectations

Once I’ve decided what I can do, it’s time to tell my clients how that will affect them. This is my least favorite part of the process because I hate to let people down and tend to put this off. Of course, failing to communicate my plans will let people down a lot more!

So about two weeks ago, I started letting my clients know that I’d be out of the country for a bit so they could get that on their calendars. Then, this past weekend, I sent each client a personal email about what they can expect from me during my trip. I let them know I’d be checking my email around 4 or 5 PM their time each day (yes, that’s how the time difference works out!) and which recurring tasks, if any, I would continue to complete for them while I’m gone.

For everyone else, like recurring clients I don’t work with on a regular basis, I set up a Gmail vacation responder that notes the dates I’ll be gone plus the time I plan to check my email each day. Gmail lets me limit this to people in my contact list, which I do for safety reasons.

Let systems work while I don’t

It goes without saying that I won’t be able to make my regular income while working one hour a day. But my daily earnings won’t be zero. I fully plan to make money even while I’m not working, and I owe it all to the passive income streams I’ve established over the years.

I’ve written extensively about how I use sites like Gunpla 101 and Anime Origin Stories to earn money through affiliate links paired with useful written content. I also sell books and my workbook even when I’m not doing anything to promote them. I’m not going to have a particularly profitable April, but these sites ensure I can still pay bills when I get home.

When I went to Japan for the first time in 2016 I wrote that it felt like I’d spent 20 years preparing. This time hasn’t been much different. Since I booked the tickets a year ago, I’ve always had this trip in the back of my mind. It takes me a lot of planning and organizing to set up travel as a freelancer, but it’s worth it so I can enjoy myself when I’m gone. By communicating clearly and setting up expectations for clients and myself, I know I won’t return to chaos.

Finally, I need to communicate to you, reader, that I’m not going to be updating Otaku Journalist while I’m gone. I will, however, be posting a daily travelogue on my Forbes blog. I can’t wait to tell you all about my trip starting late this week.

Top photo: Shinjuku Gyoen, as seen at the top of this blog post

How to do your taxes as a freelancer

March 19, 2018Lauren Orsini

The only constant in my career is that my taxes suck.

Nobody likes taxes, but at least when you have a traditional job, they aren’t painful. You don’t notice losing the money that goes toward your taxes because you never had it in the first place.

When you are a freelancer though, you have to take a portion of the money you earn out of your bank account and give it to the government in taxes. It’s a more viscerally unpleasant experience because even though you know logically that everyone has to pay taxes, your brief possession of that money makes it feel like something is being pried directly out of your hands.

Obviously, my tax advice will be most accurate to freelancers in the United States. But based on my cursory research, estimated quarterly taxes are a Thing for freelancers globally. In the US, Self employed people are at the highest risk of getting audited, since we’re most likely to make mistakes with our taxes. This is going to be less about which forms to fill out than it is about the year-long process of making sure your records are in place to avoid tax time mistakes.

Since my lawyer best friend will probably read this, let me take this time to say that I am not a lawyer and if you have serious legal concerns about taxes, consult a lawyer, not me.

Recording your business income

In a perfect world, here is how it is supposed to go:

In January, you will receive a 1099-MISC form from every person who paid you at least $600 over the course of the year. They will be completely accurate (perfect world, remember?) and you will then input those forms into your tax software, file and submit.

This never happens. Not every employer sends tax forms. For example, if somebody pays me $600 to build a website, they’re probably not going to send me a 1099-MISC. They don’t see themselves as my employer; they see themselves as my client!

Even when I do receive 1099-MISC forms, the onus is on me to make sure they are accurate. If they don’t match up with my bank statements (because of a missed payment, a lost check in the mail, or a zillion other reasons), I have to request an updated one.

The solution to this is simple but tedious: you need to track every single payment you earn. There is no alternative. You are solely responsible for keeping track of what you have been paid.

I use Quickbooks Self Employed but I could also use Freshbooks. I could even use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Or, a pen-and-paper list if I’m a real masochist. The structure does not matter—keeping a close eye on every single payment you’ve received does.

All you need on the spreadsheet is the employer name, the amount of money you got paid, and the date you received it. For your April 14 taxes, you’ll want to add those up to a total for each employer, too. And if you got a 1099-MISC, it better add up to the same number as the sheet.

If you fall behind on this, you’ll have to do all of it at tax time.

Recording your business expenses

This next thing is a little easier and more fun. It’s another spreadsheet for recording everything you spent money on in order to conduct your freelance business.

Freelancing isn’t free. Did you buy a computer for writing articles? Write it off as a business expense! Take a client out to lunch? In the US, you can save the receipt and write off 50% of the total. Do you use one of the aforementioned softwares for tracking income? Write it off!

Here’s a complete list of self-employed business expenses that you can deduct from your taxes. The problem is if you don’t remember to record these expenses, or you don’t have any records of buying them. In that case, you don’t get to write them off.

Once again, the software you use does not matter. What does matter is the item or service you bought (anything from a scanner to contract labor*), what category it falls into (equipment, software, labor, advertising, etc.), and how much it cost. It’s also good to save the receipt in case you get audited so you can show the Tax Person proof of purchase.

If you do remember though, add up the total. Then, subtract that number from the total business income you earned that year (this is your gross income). The resulting number is your revenue, the amount of earnings you have to pay taxes on in any given year.

If you itemize your business expenses in this way, you will need to pay money for your tax software or else go to an accountant. (Silver lining: these are both expenses you can write off!) For my April 14 taxes, I import my records from Quickbooks into TurboTax Self Employed. Otherwise, I would have to manually enter each expense write-off line by tedious line.

*If you paid a contractor $600 or more, you need to send them a 1099-MISC!

Calculating your quarterly estimates

Since I make more than $400 a year as a freelancer, I pay what the IRS calls Self Employment Tax four times a year. These are Social Security and Medicare taxes just like everyone else pays, but since I’m self-employed I have to do it myself.

Even though I need to pay taxes four times a year, April 14 is the beginning of a new year and end of an old, fiscally speaking. So that’s when I calculate my quarterly estimated taxes. For federal, I can use IRS Form 1040-ES to calculate this. Virginia has its own calculator for my state taxes (and I guarantee your state has this, too).

In April, June, September, and January, I pay taxes to the state of Virginia and the federal government. Each time, I pay 25% of the total I determined on April 14 using state and federal forms, but if I had a really good (or really bad) quarter, I could redo the estimate based on my new higher (or lower) total income prediction for the year. If I predicted I was going to earn $60,000 for 2018 in April but it’s December 2018 and I’ve only earned $40,000, I would pay a much, much lower amount for my final January estimated tax payment.

What to do on Tax Day

For John and I, Tax Day usually comes in March simply because my taxes are so much more complicated than average. We want to give ourselves room to deal with them.

Honestly, my 2017 taxes were the best yet. I automatically imported the data (business income and expenses) from Quickbooks to TurboTax. After that, I just had to confirm that the income I reported matched the 1099-MISC forms I received, add any additional income for which I didn’t receive a 1099-MISC, and input the date and amount of each quarterly tax payment.

(Oh, and then we had to put in John’s W2, because we file jointly as a married couple. But it’s clear that John’s job is more of a footnote to the tax nightmare than the main attraction!)

It only takes a few days after that for TurboTax to notify me that my tax return has been approved. And then it’s time to start all over again! I calculate my estimated taxes for federal and state, and then because I live in a county with special rules for doing business as a self-employed person, I pay an additional yearly tax there, too. You will have to check at the county website (or at the local courthouse) in order to learn if you have to do this as well.

In conclusion: Taxes suck

I used to think it was cool that my tax money goes toward schools and parks and public services, but as my local library languishes and my idiot representatives spend my taxes on a $1 million bus stop (no joke), the appeal has worn off for me. That said, everybody has to pay taxes so you might as well lay the groundwork so you can pay them accurately.

This blog post ended up being a short novel, but the book chapter I’ll base on it will be even longer. If you have a question about freelance taxes, leave it in the comments, please.

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