What comes to mind, Amy, to help out Samantha here or Sam?

Yeah.

No, there's a few different ways that you can go about this when it's like, okay, well, what does the value – Because most of the value of a project that you join as a freelancer is perceived value of what does this mean emotionally to the client? What does this mean of potential business success? And you can't know all of their numbers and their metrics.

So then there's the other side of it is what is your time worth and what is all of your experience worth? And this comes to a place where you can do the math of thinking about what is your value and try to kind of put that together.

But I actually think that it's a little different.

It's thinking about what is the difference between if somebody hired me as their memoir ghostwriter versus someone hiring me to rewrite something they wrote with ChatGPT into an e-book they're going to publish on their website.

And the value to those two books are very different for those two types of clients.

So I

I don't know if it's a lack of confidence or if taking money makes me feel like I'm selling out, but how do I get over the emotional block I have about charging for my creative work? so I know Amy you're a writer I've dabbled in graphic design mostly done web design but have done quite a bit of creative work that I've gotten paid for over the course of my career and my own business how does Beatrice overcome this idea of like I'm an artist you know I don't know if I can charge my work or I don't know if I feel good making people pay for art what do you think

Yeah.

So this is actually part of the reason why for my book, Right for Money and Power, I spent the first third of the book just talking about mindset.

Because I think as freelancers and creative people, this is the thing that holds us back the most and creates limiting belief about what we can or cannot do.

And this is something that I've dealt with in my career as well, coming, especially in my past, I came up as a TV writer in Hollywood and we were told like the starving artist is like this badge of honor.

It's this myth.

We, we shouldn't, you know, we should be happy to do work for free for people who are studio executives.

um like how do i bring value that ai can't bring you know i know amy you write like you ghost write memoirs that's a that's an intense project it's not like a quick chat gpt prompt um but you know unfortunately beatrice there are lots of really good digital art tools made you know with ai that can generate some pretty good art and so you have to start asking yourself like where do i add value that that technology can't do you have thoughts on that amy

Like you said, how does that feedback loop, how does it feed back into my current business and help me charge higher rates? So if David is thinking through this and he's like, okay, what Amy's saying is making sense, where does he get started? What should he do first? Because I think for me, the question would be like, well, how do I keep making money to keep myself afloat? while I still do some of these other things, which I'm guessing, you can tell me if I'm wrong, Amy, won't make money at first and will take some time to build up, but then may spin off money later.

Yeah, no, and this is kind of why I put together an entire chapter of my new book, Right for Money and Power, that has a 12-month roadmap for how to kind of intertwine these different things, especially if you're trying to be on track to architect your first seven-figure year.

And so the thing about Substack is that, or any paid newsletter, it can be on any platform, Substack's just the one that I'm on that I'm a fan of, is that when you're writing to build an audience, one of the things that I see and recommend to the memoir ghostwriting clients that I work with is to use a paid newsletter as kind of your testing ground lab for chapters of your book.

So when you're putting chapters of your book, whether you're writing a memoir or a nonfiction piece, or you have a longer piece that's kind of brewing, using Substack is that piece where you can test things out.

And so you'd be surprised how many people on Substack want to support writers.

And so when you're able to build a paid newsletter in a community, A lot of the writers that I've worked with and I've seen have success with their Substacks were able to start to get a base of paid subscribers early.

And so not everybody is going to have like a big jump in income from Substack.

How it works into your business, how it makes you money.

So what comes to mind for Hero when he says, my biggest struggle is pricing?

Yeah, I think that there is, first of all, this limiting belief that there is a ceiling for how much we can charge.

And to illustrate this, I'll share a story of the first time that I really increased my rates on a pretty high level.

I was really burned out.

I was charging about $90 an hour.

And I was sure that no freelance writer could ever make more than that.

I'm like, this is a ceiling.

So Amy, what kinds of questions should we be asking ourselves to know if we're in a niche that makes sense for us?

How can he structure his week? with everything he's got going on without overloading himself?

Yeah.

Malik's question I think is really important because burnout is the number one blocker of a lot of freelancers that keep a lot of us from getting to that next level.

And the thing that I cover in my upcoming book, Right for Money and Power, and what I talk about a lot is this idea that most freelancers are undercharging.

And that is one of the sole causes of burnout because if you're not charging enough, then you have to then spend more hours on client work and then you have to spend more hours on marketing.

And if you're doing a lot of marketing but not landing clients, then potentially you might have the reverse problem of your rates might not be high enough to really signal you as an expert writer in your field.

And I know this because at many stages in my career, when I've been completely burnt out, I've, you know, my partner Kyle has often observed me and being like, Amy, you're doing too much.

What else comes to mind for you, Amy?

What's the first process I should do Do you have any thoughts for Jonas as he asks about systems and processes and where to even get started with that? That can seem overwhelming when you're just a solo freelancer to begin with.

Yeah, when it comes to systems and processes, this is kind of the lifeblood of us solo freelancers, founders.

And I think that the best way that I started to actually understand how to automate was by doing a time audit.

I swear by using this time tracking tool called Toggle, which you can attach to your browser and you just turn on whatever you're working.

You can change between different options.

different types of tests and things like that.

And so for the last three years, I've been religiously tracking my time.

But before the break, I was talking about this maybe missing question, which is like, does this need automated in the first place? Should this even, should I be spending time on this? Does this even need done? Does that, uh, ring a bell for you or ring true for you at all? Amy?