I've Been Full Time Freelance a Decade Now. It's Been Tough
Roughly ten years ago, I was laid off from The Dissolve about a month and a half before it went out of business. The Dissolve began as a dream job. Getting fired broke my heart. A decade later, I still haven’t gotten over it. I probably never will. There will never be closure, just a sizable wound that never heals.
For the first time in seventeen years, I did not have a job, benefits, coworkers, a workplace, or any of the things that come with full-time employment.
What I had was a name I had built during my time as the first and, to date, only head writer of The A.V. Club and a staff writer for The Dissolve.
I was fortunate in that respect. A number of prominent websites wanted to get into the Nathan Rabin business. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I vaguely remember having twelve or thirteen columns simultaneously on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, The A.V. Club, Splitsider, Decider, and TCM Backlot.
In a grim portent of what was to come, I lost one column after another until all that was left was TCM Backlot.
I learned then what my name was worth on the free market: not a whole hell of a lot!
Rotten Tomatoes paid me lots of money for The Simpsons Decade and Sub-Cult, two ongoing columns they had no idea what to do with. They ran randomly and infrequently in a manner that guaranteed that they would never find a following.
The Simpson Decade was replaced by The Zeroes, a column where I wrote about movies that received the dreaded zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That seemed much more commercial and on-brand, but that column didn’t last long either.
I figured that My World of Flops was safe, since it had a long, distinguished history at The A.V. Club but roughly eight years ago, around my birthday, it was killed. That was tough.
The only columns that were not killed or retired were First and Last and The Fractured Mirror. TCM Backlot went out of business in 2021, but my wonderful editor, Yacov Freedman, gave me permission to rerun all of the pieces at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.
A mere four years and an insane amount of time and work later, The Fractured Mirror is a 524-page behemoth that will come out within the next two months. I could not be more proud of my book, and all the effort that went into it, but I incurred a massive amount of debt writing it. I haven’t had a new book to promote or sell in four years, and my older books do just fine on Amazon, but poorly on my website’s shop.
I included a link to a Backerkit page where The Fractured Mirror was available for pre-sale at the end of articles on Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place for a while but I got so discouraged that I stopped.
I discovered that if I aggressively promote my books, they sell almost nothing, but if I don’t aggressively promote my wares, they sell nothing. Incidentally, you can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here and my other books here.
I was born in April 1976. I got laid off from The Dissolve in April 2015. The A.V. Club killed My World of Flops in April 2017. I began my career as a full-time freelancer in April 2015, and I launched Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in April 2017.
April is consequently the hardest month for me emotionally. I wish I felt entitled to a victory lap for making it on my own for a solid decade, but the truth of the matter is that I haven’t really been making it. I never stop struggling. In the eight years that Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place has been my career, I’ve had several things work out and several dozen that did not.
I hoped that The Joy of Trash would be a big success that would lead readers to my website. It didn’t work out that way. I sell almost no copies of the book through my store, and four years later, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place is much less successful and lucrative than it was at the time of The Joy of Trash’s release.
Because I am Bipolar, autistic, and have ADHD, I have a lot of shortcomings and limitations that I didn’t know about when I was still a staff writer. There are many things that I cannot do. Shit, I’ve only figured out commas in the last year or so and I have been doing this shit for a LONG time. I’d think of myself as an idiot-savant, but considering me a savant is overly generous.
Because my executive functioning is terrible in many ways, I need a lot of help. Unfortunately, because I am Bipolar, autistic, and have ADHD, I have a very hard time asking for help and accepting help because that involves other people. I find other people confusing and intimidating.
A decade of doing almost everything on my own has driven home that I can’t do everything by myself. I just can’t.
I wish I had somebody to help me monetize Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, because I am not a great or even halfway competent businessman. I don’t know what people want or how to give it to them, but through trial and error, mostly error, I’ve figured out what people don't want, which is very different and much less helpful.
I’m proud of the community that I have built at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I wish it had a larger audience, but I’m very happy that I've carved out a place on the internet where nice people have thoughtful, considerate conversations with other nice, intelligent, considerate posters.
I’m similarly proud that I bucked the odds and published two books with my brilliant illustrator Felipe Sobreiro—The Weird Accordion to Al and its coloring book spin-off, The Weird A-Coloring to Al—that sold thousands of copies independently and had a real cultural impact. All I needed was the enthusiastic support and participation of “Weird Al” Yankovic, one of the most beloved entertainers in American history.
I’m proud of the My World of Flops pieces I’ve been doing for The A.V. Club for the last few months, and I’m happy that the extra work and effort that I have been putting into my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, has resulted in consistent growth. And it was incredibly validating when I had a GoFundMe for my dental implants, and people were generous. Made me feel like George Bailey.
I think of Substack as a crowded mall where my newsletter is surrounded by thriving businesses, whereas I see the Happy Place as an island in the middle of nowhere that people need to swim a long way to reach and that not many people know about.
I’m not proud of my increasing inability to come up with trenchant metaphors.
I wish I could fast-forward to two months from now, when The Fractured Mirror will be available for purchase and I will have launched my next Kickstarter campaign, for a book that is much different from any I have put out before. I just need to figure out a way to get to that point with all manner of debt and not much in the way of savings.
I was feeling depressed about my career and my finances yesterday, so I threw myself into the fifteenth draft of The Fractured Mirror and felt a lot better. Nothing takes my mind off struggling financially and professionally quite like working.
THAT, perhaps, is the secret triumph of the past decade: I love the work. I love writing. I have that, and that is a lot. And I have a readership that may be modest but who have stuck with me throughout everything, including more sad blog posts about struggling than is at all proper for a repressed former Midwesterner.
It’s been a difficult decade. Hopefully, the next one will be a little easier.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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