The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career

To be a freelance academic is to recognize this bifurcation that we contingent professors face, and then to try to mend it. Yes, I worked for a university as a contingent professor. But I also wrote and researched. I realized that I didn’t have to let any part of me be squelched or allowed to wither.

Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you. The course I took paid for itself within a week after I sold a story that I had workshopped during the course.

read everything you can about how to start making money for the hard work you do.

First, I made my research publicly available by posting it on my own website and on open-access repositories that are indexed in Google Scholar.

“Be honest and always link it to the larger trends and structural issues.”

Kelly J. Baker noted in her 2014 Chronicle Vitae column on shifting her career to freelance writing (“To Write or Not to Write”),

By linking any critique I might make on my blog to larger trends, I would make my critique more substantive, less like a personal hatchet job and more like journalism (or even, gasp, scholarship). And it follows that this substantive critique would hopefully be protected by something like academic freedom (if academic freedom actually protected the

For those of us living alternative-academic, post-academic, and freelance academic lives, we don’t have set tracks that we must follow. Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally (there’s that word again) are what we make them.

We just have to start letting clients (including academic institutions) know what we need to get the job done.