The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career

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

First, you can upload the PDF of the actual journal article to your own website along with some language the publishers require you to use about it being an “author posting.”

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

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.

I’m telling this story because I want to encourage you to put yourself in a position to engage publicly with your research. Freelance academics are perfectly aligned with the work of public engagement—but too often we worry that we aren’t. We feel like imposter academics.

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

Start pitching articles in your area of expertise that are “pegged” (tied) to current events. Turn your discerning academic eye outward. Those coffee-shop conversations about what’s wrong with the world? Write them down.

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.

We take our kids to play on the quads and tell them stories about the old buildings—and the slaveowners whom they’re named after. We’re proud to have attended school here. I’d be proud to have my kids attend school here—and, at the same time, I would hope those buildings would all have different names by then.