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The Otaku Journalist is going on maternity leave

Just a heads up to say I am officially on maternity leave. That means I will be slow to respond to anything or anyone, here and in my email and probably even on social media. 

Today is my last day not being somebody’s mom, as my labor and delivery are scheduled for tomorrow evening (because apparently we can and do plan babies now). I’m both excited for it and not at all—labor is, by its very definition, hard work, but on the other hand, I can’t wait to meet the tiny person who frequently sticks her hand or foot out of me like a bizarre tumor. 

Maternity leave in America is, as I’ve stated many times, a joke. But I’m lucky to have somehow gotten just about all my work finished in advance. I’ve notified all my employers, and if you try to email me you, too, will get my auto-responder. Even though I technically could be working today, I’m mostly going to spend it cleaning my house because as the old saying about newborn care goes: “Eat when the baby eats, sleep when the baby sleeps, and clean when the baby cleans.” It’s been a long, strange nine months and I’m glad to have had the time and space in my life to slow down and prepare for this enormous change, from stocking a nursery with the help of my family and friends to getting to attend my sister’s wedding last week without interrupting it in the most dramatic way possible!

Now, as I wrote in How I’m preparing to take maternity leave as a freelancer, all that’s left is to keep my expectations very low. I have no idea what my life will be like after tomorrow or what I’ll be capable of, so I’m setting a baseline of zero. I’ll let my new baby set the pace for what comes next, which is a very scary thing to say for this freelancer who only recently began taking weekends off. Even just a few years ago, I could never have imagined wanting to have a kid of my own—I was very work-focused and wouldn’t that just cut into my productivity? (The many reasons I changed my mind are a blog post for another time.) Now I’m starting a new role and accepting from the start that I’ll be out of my depth. But I’m more excited to rise to this challenge than perhaps for any job I’ve had before. Thank you for your patience while I figure it out. 

Photo by Jessica Smith Photography.

“How dare she?”

I was recently quoted in a Rolling Stone article about Belle Delphine, an Instagram model who takes a lot of inspiration from kawaii culture and Japanese style aesthetics. Belle has gained an enormous following for her risque cosplay, but recently went viral for selling jars of her supposed “gamer girl bathwater” to “thirsty gamer boys” for $30 a pop. 

Skipping over how proud my parents should be on having a daughter who was asked to define ahegao to a mass audience, my favorite part of discussing Belle’s story was talking about her fearlessly entrepreneurial nature. She found a lucrative market and exploited it. 

Good for her! If guys want to spend their money on her bathwater and she knows it, then it’s awesome that she’s making bank on that concept. But it’s undeniable that part of the reason this went viral is because people can’t believe she’d have the gall to do it. How dare she make money off of her cartoonishly desperate followers? How dare she claim ownership over her own sex appeal? How dare she make a profit over something so esoteric, even if it did sell out twice?

“How dare she?” is a line that has followed me internally through a lot of my career. It’s the question I can always picture on my imaginary critics’ lips. Nobody has ever actually said it to me, of course, but it’s always the first accusation that flies through my mind.

How dare she quit a perfectly good job to start a business that might fail? Even after six years of being successfully self-employed, I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing.

How dare she raise her rates or negotiate for higher pay? Every time I ask for a better price for a lowball payment offer or consider raising rates for writing or web design, I wonder if this is the time that I’ve finally gone Too Far and will lose a client, but it hasn’t happened yet. 

How dare she charge a consulting fee? The “nice” thing to do would be to answer questions for free, not to charge a fee for an SEO analysis or to tell strangers emailing me basic journalism or blogging questions to check out my books on the topic. 

I think the presence of an outsized inner critic is particularly common among the self-employed. You don’t get day-to-day feedback from colleagues or a quarterly review with your boss to gauge how you’re performing. You spend a lot of time throwing things at the wall, ideally as minimum viable products, in order to see if they’ll stick. Some of those ideas, like gamer girl bathwater, can be a little out there! I doubt even Belle realized how well that one would go. 

The part of my brain that asks “how dare she?” is imposter syndrome at work. Imposter syndrome remains one of my favorite topics to write about because it’s especially pervasive among the people in my life who appear (to me) to be the most capable. Instead of listening to this inner critic, better to check in with your friends and colleagues about whether a practice is really as audacious as it might seem inside your head. 

How dare you? Chances are you’ll learn that, if anything, you should dare more. 

Other posts I’ve written about imposter syndrome:

How making money online has changed in 2019

As I get ready to take two months completely off work, and as I get increasingly fatigued while doing basic tasks like walking to the store, I’m thinking a lot about passive income and how to make more of it.  

Passive income, as I’ve written about it in the past, is an income stream that continues to generate money even when you’re not working. For me, nothing can compare to the feeling of waking up and realizing I’ve made $50 while I was sleeping.

What passive income does not mean, however, is “income stream that you set and forget.” Especially this year, I’ve realized that several of the ways I make money need an update.

Can you still make money niche blogging?

Here’s a four-part series I wrote in 2016 about setting up a profitable niche blog. While I still agree with most of this advice, I’m aware that on this blog, at least, my earnings have plateaued. Why? Because I don’t update as much and that penalizes me in searches (Google prefers sites that update at least once every 30 days). So this blog isn’t truly generating “passive” income.

In 2019, this blog has made $61.41. Well, not counting my books, which made an additional $25.92. The point is, that’s $17.44 a month in income, which is barely a dinner order. (Or maybe it is near you, DC prices are ridiculous.)

I could do things to make Otaku Journalist earn more. I could place more affiliate links, use ads on every page, nevermind that my ads are performing 50% worse than they did in 2018 thanks to the mass adoption of ad blockers—which I don’t fault, I use those too!

More importantly, I could blog more often, centering my posts on valuable SEO keywords. For a more passive version of this, I could go back in my archives, view the current 20 most popular Otaku Journalist posts, and load them with new keywords and affiliate links.

But here’s the real best use of my time: focusing on more niche blogs.

The “late-stage buy cycle”

Otaku Journalist is a grab-bag of posts about my freelance life, geek careers, and anime and fandom topics. It doesn’t usually target readers who are looking to make a purchase. If you still want to make money blogging in 2019, you need to focus on people in the late-stage buy cycle.

No, this has nothing to do with late-stage capitalism. (Well, maybe adjacently?) Basically, you want to write to a very specific audience of people: not those who are thinking, “Should I buy an anime character body pillow?” but those who are wondering, “Where can I see a comparison of different anime character body pillows before I choose one to buy?” We are talking about people who have already decided to buy, so there’s no sales pitch involved anymore. All you need to do is research the products for them and ease that purchase process along. So if you’re focused solely on passive income, instead of writing posts about how fandom has improved your life, you can write posts listing the ten best anime of 1999 and where to get them. This is why Anime Origin Stories is my least profitable blog (well that, and its low recency score.)

This is a lot more transactional and a lot less fun than the kind of blogging most people like to do. It’s informative in a very specific window for a specific group, and not the kind of thing that is particularly shareable. So yes, you can still make money blogging, and perhaps even a fairly good living, but not while blogging about the things that matter most to you.

Of course, this is assuming corporations don’t screw you first.

The danger of relying on corporations

My niche blogs rely on Amazon’s affiliate program. In the past, Amazon has made several changes to make this program less profitable for affiliates—for example, the commission structure, which used to increase the percentage you earned depending on how many products you recommended to buyers, is now set flat depending on the department. This is good or bad depending on your department: it hurts my Gunpla blog (Toys, 3% commission) but boosts my candle blog (Home, 8%).

Amazon has all the power, and it has no responsibility to me or anyone else to keep its commission structure profitable. Even if the company doesn’t decide to eventually shut down the program altogether, there are other reasons I could lose this income stream. For example, Google may kill the affiliate link economy by superimposing its new shopper recommendation algorithm, promoting its own affiliate program above Amazon’s.

This is the deal with the devil that many online earners face. If you’re a YouTube vlogger, you have to contend with YouTube’s pro-harassment policies and the mercurial algorithm which no longer treats corporate and indie content creators equally. If you’re a Patreon user, you have to roll with the whims of the company’s ever-greedier shareholders. Even if you use PayPal for transactions, you have to be aware of the company’s Puritan morals, which have it freezing the accounts of not only adult content creators but weirdly, ASMR video makers, too.

Of course, there’s still one passive income stream that bypasses most of these issues.

Products and services still come out on top

The people who are really making bank online aren’t making content to promote corporations. They’re making products and services people can use.

I know this. I’ve written a couple of books, and I even wrote a guide to creating your own profitable side income by building a product or service. The problem is that this is the passive income stream with the most work up front and the most risk—so I find it the most intimidating. How do you know if your product or service is something people want? How do you tell people you have it for sale when you’re just starting out? This is why it’s so vital to create a minimum viable product until you know you’ve landed on something people are demanding, so you don’t waste your time putting a lot of effort into something that won’t be profitable. But each time I’ve let this kind of thing slow me down from releasing a product or service, my biggest regret has been not doing it sooner. A lot of the anxiety was all in my head.

Products and services can never truly be passive. My book sales waned after a couple of years, so I either need to update them to get with the times and re-release, or write new books that resonate better with 2019. Meanwhile. any service I provide, like generating niche SEO keywords for a select group of clients, will always involve active work from me (so really, the “passive” part comes from not having to look for clients, who usually just seek me out). And I still rely on big companies—Amazon Kindle for books, and Quickbooks Self Employed (owned by TurboTax the Terrible) for invoicing—so it’s not perfect.

Products and services are currently my most recommended suggestion for your next online income component, but I’m certain there are revenue streams out there I haven’t heard about yet. Just like early adopters of the Amazon Affiliate program made bank I couldn’t conceive of today, there’s always going to be a better way to earn online that risk-takers will find and capitalize on first. As my good friend Kyle said, “If I knew the next big way to make money online, I wouldn’t be talking to you about it, I’d be doing it.” It’s up to you to find it.

Lead photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

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

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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

2018 in Review: 9 questions to help you process and reflect

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Welcome to the last Otaku Journalist post of 2018.

Usually, I mark the end of the year with a holiday shopping guide for anime fans, or some remarks on Otaku Journalist’s birthday (turned nine in November!), I’ve decided to wrap things up a bit early this year. As a freelancer, my work grinds to a near halt after Thanksgiving and doesn’t pick up again until January. I’ve decided to take advantage of that by visiting friends and family, traveling for the holidays, and celebrating at least 5 birthdays including my own.

The end of the year is a particularly arbitrary benchmark into which I assign a LOT of importance. My New Year’s Eve ritual involves at least an hour of journaling on what I learned in the past year and what I hope to accomplish in the year ahead.

And so, for this last post, I’m revisiting an exercise I started last year, and which I encouraged readers to join in on, too: looking at my year through nine questions. Fittingly, that’s now one for every year this blog has been in existence! Read my answers, and maybe try it for yourself, too.  

What made up your body of work this year? Which parts are you most proud of?

What were your top 5 moments of the year?

  • Watching the sun rise over the Kamogawa River from my rented Kyoto villa.
  • Guesting at Anime NEXT and getting to talk to a new audience about geek careers and Gunpla building. Also, en route, having the best Philadelphia cheesesteak of my life.
  • Moving the final item (a Skyrim figure) to our new house.
  • Taking the Japanese English conversation club to the Maryland Renaissance Fair and realizing it’s weird no matter which culture you’re accustomed to.
  • Hearing the laughter and applause at our midnight Otakon panel on Gundam humor.

What are you really glad is over?

The move! John and I lived in our apartment for seven years and accumulated a lot of stuff. We thought since we were moving a block away, it would be easy to just make lots of trips before and after the movers came. Instead, we unwittingly made it a lot harder.

Then there was the process of getting unpacked, buying furniture for a larger place and figuring out where to put it, all the while fixing any surprises that came up. My weekends disappeared as we spent them working on home improvement when we’d rather be playing video games.

By the time we hosted Thanksgiving, we had a fully-furnished downstairs, two guest beds, and I even knew where all of my plates were. That’s when it finally felt like home.

How are you different today than you were 365 days ago?

I devote my time to different things. I used to put a lot of emphasis on putting aside time for myself and my work; these days I’ll drop everything for my friends. I think that means my values have changed. I care less now about making my mark on the world and more about just living.

Is there anything you achieved that you forgot to celebrate?

I wrote a lot more fiction than I have in years. I think completing NaNoWriMo 2017 made me more comfortable with creative writing. Also, allowing myself to write stuff without immediately sharing it with the world has made it easier to experiment with my writing style.

What have you changed your perspective on this year?

Living with uncertainty. I’m trying to remember that motivational advice about how life is not a dress rehearsal, it’s happening whether you’re ready or not. So I just need to live in spite of not knowing, enjoy the good days without worrying if bad days are on their way.

Who are the people that really came through for you this year?

John was incredibly handy, replacing a burnt-out dryer cable, rewiring the ethernet through the attic, and bypassing more than one $300+ electrician bill with a $4 part and some Gunpla tools. He also made a great travel partner and fellow convention panelist. And of course, he’s been supportive of me in general no matter what. We’ve been married for five years this year!

My Japanese English conversation club became a much bigger part of my life. We began with weekly study groups and expanded to weekend events like pumpkin carving and a painting party. It’s been amazing to realize I’m still capable of making new, close friends in my 30s.

What were some pieces of media that defined your year?

The Danganronpa franchise. I can’t thank Sarah enough for recommending I try it at Anime NEXT. It led to a new obsession for me and my friend group plus my first cosplay in a decade.

Avatar: The Last Airbender. Believe it or not, I never watched it before 2018! My friends and I have been doing a remote watch-along for a couple months. Much like The Good Place last year, it’s given us some common ground and a handy topic everyone likes to discuss.

What will you be leaving behind in 2018?

Feeling personally responsible for everything. It’s hard to relinquish that illusion of control, the belief that if I could just be… better I could force the world to work a certain way, but it’s a much more reasonable worldview to realize that I can’t.

I hope the end of your year is marked by time spent with the people most important to you, plus plenty of downtime for catching up on 2018’s truly impressive anime releases (I suggest beginning with Laid-Back Camp, Hinamatsuri, and Zombieland Saga). And in between all that, I hope you’ll consider thinking about these questions, too. See you in 2019!