Every piece of freelancing advice I have read says the same thing: build a pipeline. Always be prospecting. Keep the top of the funnel full. I have never done this, in eight years, and I want to describe the alternative honestly rather than pretend it is a strategy.
How work actually reaches me
Four academic publishers, two of whom I have worked with for six years. One of those accounts for maybe half my income, which is a well-known and correctly-diagnosed risk that I have done nothing about.
New work comes from editors moving houses and taking me with them. That is it. That is the entire business development function. It works because indexing is a small field where competence is scarce and reputation travels, and it would not work in a field where it doesn’t.
The cost, stated plainly
- Two genuinely bad years, 2021 and 2024, where a client restructured and I lost a third of my income in a month with nothing queued behind it.
- Rates that have risen slower than they should, because I do not have competing offers to point at.
- A persistent low-level anxiety in quiet months that no amount of savings entirely fixes.
Why I still do it this way
Because prospecting is a job, and it is a job I am bad at and hate. When I have forced myself to do it, the hours came out of the actual work, and the actual work is what generates the reputation that brings the work in. There is a version of me who spends Fridays on outreach and earns thirty percent more. I do not want to be him.
The honest framing is not “you don’t need a pipeline.” It is: I have chosen a smaller, more fragile income in exchange for spending my week doing the thing I am good at. That is a real trade with a real downside, and I would not recommend it to anyone who cannot survive a thin year.