The Otaku Journalist is going on maternity leave

Writing

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 to give yourself a quarterly review

Careers

These slow summer days are the perfect time to put some juice back in your business. Whether you’ve got a side hustle or you’re a full-time freelancer like me, a business lull is a great opportunity to spend some time evaluating your progress and setting goals for the future.

Believe it or not, we’re already in Q3 of 2019 (according to the US freelance estimated tax schedule), and in September it’ll be time to put it on the books. That makes it a great time to assess how Q3 has gone and prepare goals for Q4. 

 

 

This week, I’ve created a worksheet to make this easier for you to do. I’ve made this resource flexible enough that you can redo the exercise every quarter!  

Download the worksheet

Simply choose three main areas in your business that are ripe for improvement. Then, set immediate tasks for how you can improve them, plus long-term goals to track progress next quarter. Here are a few areas that I’d suggest focusing your worksheet on, plus some ideas for end of quarter tasks and next quarter goals: 

Focus Area: Online Presence

End of Quarter Tasks:

Next Quarter Goals:

  • Launch a newsletter.
  • Write 1 new blog post per week.
  • Download and use a time-tracker to make online time more productive.

Focus Area: Clients

End of Quarter Tasks:

  • Check-in with an old client you haven’t heard from in a while.
  • Track down any overdue invoices.
  • Figure out which client you like best and how you can work for them more. 

Next Quarter Goals:

  • Find 2 new paying clients.
  • Fire 1 current client who is more trouble than they’re worth. 
  • Prepare a holiday gift (or just a card) to send to each client in Q4. 

Focus Area: Finances

End of Quarter Tasks:

  • Update finance tracking spreadsheet or software. 
  • Calculate how much income you made this quarter.
  • Make sure you have enough money for Q3 tax payment.

Next Quarter Goals:

  • Make a new savings/debt repayment goal and start putting money into it. 
  • Start or contribute to a retirement fund. 
  • Set a new quarterly earnings goal and figure out how you can reach it. 

Focus Area: Business Development

End of Quarter Tasks:

  • Make a pie chart of different types of work you do. Are you satisfied with the breakdown?
  • Brainstorm new types of income you can add to your business.
  • Use your blog or social media to self-promote a recent business accomplishment. 

Next Quarter Goals:

I even filled it out myself—here’s how my version looks. 

If it’s hard to see, right-click and select “open image in new tab.”

Like most self-employed people, I do all my work in a well-lit place with a succulent plant and this definitely wasn’t staged. Kidding of course. As you can see, it was pretty hard for me to come up with future goals right before I take two months off. If you’re comfortable with sharing, I’d love to see your review, too!

Download the worksheet

Here’s to a clarifying Q3 wrap-up, and for those of us not about to go on maternity leave, a strong Q4!

Top photo credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.

“How dare she?”

Careers, Writing

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:

What happens when your feelings get in the way of your reporting

Careers, Fandom, Journalism

I want to start by saying there’s no reason for me to get nervous about being on the radio.

I started making semi-regular radio appearances when I worked at tech blog ReadWrite. If they thought an article I’d written recently was timely, I’d show up on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago and talk about stuff like the Apollo 11 spaceflight. After I moved on to Forbes, I got to talk about topics closer to my heart, like Isao Takahata’s legacy as a Studio Ghibli cofounder for BBC radio, or this extended interview on cosplay for CBC radio’s q show.

I’ve also been on TV—a local Fox News channel interviewed about my book and then again about cosplay in general. I still haven’t watched either video, so there’s probably something emotional to unpack there but that’s not the point of this blog post. 

The point is that last Thursday morning, I found myself processing my feelings about the horrific Kyoto Animation fire in front of a live international audience in my worst radio interview ever. 

Here’s the episode, though I’m not sure how you listen outside of Canada. Host Tom Power covered the basic facts and then asked me for details about why the studio had made such a big impact on the anime industry. As usual, I’d been prepared in advance with the questions and even did a rehearsal. But about halfway through, I think it was after Tom asked me something like, “What’s the fan reaction to the news of the fire?” I froze. Mentally, after years of public speaking, I knew logically that I only stopped talking for about two seconds. But two seconds feels like forever on the air, for both you and your listeners. I had been simply repeating my prepared notes when suddenly the impact of the question hit me. I’m one of those fans, too. 

I found out about the fire around 3 AM. I’m pregnant and uncomfortable enough that I wake up at 3 AM pretty consistently most nights, check Twitter, and go back to bed. Our world is such a hellscape nothing I saw on Twitter interrupted my sleep, until Thursday night. As more details unfolded, I couldn’t look away. I ended up giving up on sleep at around 4:30 and started work for the day. Around 8, I heard from my contact at CBC, who asked if I could provide some background on Kyoto Animation’s legacy and appeal. I didn’t think twice about accepting, because I’ve been on the radio so much in the past. 

What I didn’t think about was how, in my sleep-deprived state, I had mostly been considering the situation as a journalist—just gathering the facts. I was upset, to be sure, but more in a numb way. It wasn’t until halfway through that interview that the full reality of the situation hit me. After I got off the radio, I finally cried for the lives lost, for the senselessness of this attack. Talented creatives whose only crime was bringing entertainment to millions—gone. 

Since 2011, I’ve spelled out my personal credo in what I call the Otaku Journalist Manifesto. The news landscape at large has changed immensely since then, but I still love this part where I champion authentic, not objective, reporting: “I’m not saying to take sides. But don’t be a cold observer. Bring yourself, your experiences and intuition, to the article.” It’s a great sentiment, but not one I’d ever examined this deeply. How do you report on a story so close to your heart that you’re barely holding it together during the process? 

I have immense respect for the reporters like Crystalyn Hodgkins who kept covering the tragedy all day. I couldn’t do it. I took time off until evening, when I wrote a piece for Forbes including all the things I wanted to say on the radio but couldn’t. This is not one of my blog posts that wraps up with a neat solution: nothing can undo the KyoAni attack, and it’s not something I or anyone will stop grieving overnight. But I wanted to share what it felt like when something I care about personally came crashing into the work I do. Please take time for yourself to grieve. Send a message of support to KyoAni through Crunchyroll (I’m told they’ll be translating as many of these notes as possible). And be kind to your fellow fans—including the professionals still working despite this—who are just as frustrated and wrecked by this news as you are.

Photo credit: Matt Botsford on Unsplash.

How making money online has changed in 2019

Careers, Tech, Writing

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