how i became self-employed (part two)
aka how tiktok changed my life
🌧 click here to listen to my ‘hot girl fall’ playlist, cause it’s the energy we all need right now
hello my favourite people!
to be completely honest, i have been feeling a little ill over the last few days (not covid, i got tested). it started off as a sore throat which lasted two days, and now i’m just congested.
i haven’t been sick since february 2020 (i don’t think it was covid, but who knows), so it is very strange to feel symptoms other than allergies. i had an interesting realization that i only really let myself take a guiltless break when i get sick, and that prior to the pandemic, it was the only way my body knew how to tell me to slow down.
after not getting sick for a year and a half, i think i needed another reminder. yesterday i ate soup, napped and didn’t do much else. and today i feel better! would you look at that, rest works.
where is the moon?
by the time you’re reading this, the moon will be in aquarius.
it’s funny that i can’t really put my finger on aquarius moon energy… i think that’s kind of the point. aquarians can be aloof as hell 😂 it’s definitely a feeling of, “do whatever you want, i don’t care,” which is nice to embrace every once in a while. let your freak flag fly today 🏁
we have another full moon coming up already! if you want to get the paid subscriber update for the pisces full moon on monday, you can subscribe here:
how i became self-employed (part two)
if you missed last week’s letter, you can read part one here.
the tl;dr
i started posting poetry on instagram in 2016, posted a poem every day for four months in 2017, had enough poems to self-publish my first book in march 2018, got depressed/burnt out, got beatrice, and then published you’ll come back to yourself in august 2019. basically, i learned a ton by writing poetry on the side while having a full-time job.
i got a few questions about self-publishing since my last letter, so if you want more specifics on how i actually published, check out my faq and self-publishing guide.
(ed: now that i’ve written most of this, i want to add an addendum–i am fully aware of my privilege as a cis white able-bodied small fat woman who grew up in a middle class family. i know it makes a lot of things easier for me. because of this, i am dedicated to continually educating myself about anti-racism and the dismantling of white supremacy, amplifying the voices of creatives of colour, and paying reparations to people of colour)
now that you’re all caught up… let’s go back to june 2020.
tiktok isn’t just for dancing
before 2020, i thought that tiktok was just teenage girls dancing. more power to them, but that wasn’t something i was interested in, so i never downloaded it.
but then the pandemic rolled around, and i had a lot more free time. so i ended up downloading it in june to learn the meg the stallion savage dance.
after many failed attempts to learn the dance (which will never see the light of day), i saw that a few poets were using tiktok to read poems (shout out to catarine hancock, who i think was one of the first).
i posted my first tiktok on june 24, 2020, and to no one’s surprise it was of bea (i was obsessed with this audio).
i took that month to understand tiktok, following people that resonated with me, getting my ‘for you’ page to be more tailored to my interests (the secret to this is literally just watching/liking/commenting on what you like and quickly scrolling past everything else… eventually you will end up on gay plant/dog mom astrology therapy poetry tiktok, or whatever your personal version of that is).
once i felt like i understood the platform, i started posting poems from my books every day. i didn’t get very many views at first, but i was ok with that, because the more i watched tiktoks, the more i saw how much it helped small businesses and creatives. i saw videos of people packing a hundred book orders, selling out of products after one viral video, getting signed to record labels, quitting their jobs to do tiktok full-time. tiktok was changing lives!
and so i said, that will be me too.
my viral tiktok
the more tiktoks i watched, the more i understood how the algorithm worked. tiktok likes watch time, it likes storytelling, it likes music (it was started as musical.ly), it likes creators who embrace the magic of the ‘for you’ page (essentially an endless opportunity to scroll through whatever the algorithm thinks you might like).
i also saw how followers didn’t affect views at all. people who only posted one tiktok were getting millions of views.
the 10th tiktok i ever posted now has over 1.5 million views and 355k likes (more engagement than i’ve ever received on instagram).
even more importantly, that engagement translated directly to book sales (which never happened for me on instagram). even though that tiktok went viral on august 12, in august, i made 80% of my full-time job’s monthly salary in book sales.
sidenote: depending on how familiar you are with tiktok, you may have heard of the creator fund, which pays you for views. unfortunately, it isn’t available in canada, but i feel super lucky to have had a way to make money from tiktok from the get-go without the creator fund.
i feel like y’all are good at reading between the lines, but i just want to explicitly state that i’m not writing this to brag about how good i am at social media. i’m writing this to tell you that if you have a small business or you’re a creative, a little dedication to tiktok can go a long way!
considering self-employment
up until that viral tiktok, the most i had made from book sales in a month was around $1,500, and that was during the launch of when he leaves you in 2018.
i had no idea whether or not i would be able to keep making almost my salary from book sales, so i decided i would just double down on tiktok. i kept researching trends, i saved popular sounds that were going viral, i posted every day.
on september 10, i got an email from my now literary agent, james, asking if i wanted to chat. he watches the poetry book charts pretty diligently and saw how well you’ll come back to yourself was suddenly doing. within a week, i had signed with him, and we discussed pitching my first two books along with my third unfinished book (please love me at my worst… now finished and coming out in less than a month!) to a publisher.
my goal during this time was to keep book sales going so i could get a publishing deal. i obsessively checked sales, i posted on tiktok every day, i lived in a highly anxious place, and i had kind of convinced myself that i needed to feel like the world was on fire for my dreams to come true.
my therapist at the time tried to talk me out of it, but unsurprisingly, i did not listen. looking back, i can tell you that being obsessed and anxious had nothing to do with getting my book deal, but luckily the book deal came before i had a chance to burn myself out again.
on october 18, i got an email from james asking if i had received his email, which i had not. i like to think this was my nana’s way of saying congrats, since the anniversary of her death is october 18, and 18 is a very special number to me (my birthday, my brother’s birthday, and the release date of both of my books).
this was a day of grief and joy for me. grieving my nana and my relationship with my mom. feeling sadness around covid cases increasing again and not being able to celebrate with people. and so much joy that my dream of being traditionally published was coming true.
though i wouldn’t say signing with an agent and getting a book deal were why i decided to become self-employed, they definitely felt like signs that i was going in the right direction.
deciding to quit
after signing the book deal, i kept crunching numbers and trying to pick the perfect time to quit. i wanted to have a steady salary from my books for at least six months and a good amount of savings.
but then november came around, and… i made my entire yearly salary in a month from book sales. yes, this is bonkers to me too. and yes, i feel weird sharing this. and yes, i wouldn’t even look at my bank account because it gave me anxiety (funny how money anxiety doesn’t just disappear when you suddenly have money). i know how lucky i am, and i hope sharing this lets you see that your entire life can change in four months.
i chatted with my brother and my dad, and they kept saying things like, “well, why don’t you just keep your job for a little bit longer to see how things play out.” but i kept coming back to how i made my entire salary IN A MONTH while doing poetry part-time. imagine what i could do if i had all my brain space dedicated to it! eventually my brother and my dad came around. in a lot of ways, “convincing” them helped me convince myself too.
i think the hardest part of quitting a job to be self-employed is believing in yourself. even though financially, i was lucky enough to feel stable, i still had to talk myself into the fact that i would figure it out, no matter what happened.
if book sales dipped, i would figure it out. i could always freelance. i could write more books. i could find new ways to promote them. i just had to believe that i had this.
full transparency: november was my best month yet. i didn’t expect to continue on that trajectory (cause it was literally bonkers), but things have stabilized to where i’m making more than my previous monthly salary every month, and i feel extremely abundant and like i have more than enough.
i’m gonna include a post by vanessa of @mintworthyco here, as, like i’ve said in previous letters, her perspective on money mindset is so helpful. i particularly love that she’s a Black woman talking about money in a way that resonates with people from a ton of different backgrounds.
quitting
i put in my notice on december 10, 2020, and my last day as a full-time employee was december 23. even though i had pumped myself up and had the support of friends and family, it was still one of the hardest things i’ve done. i had been at my job for three and half years, and a huge part of why i was able to pursue poetry part-time was because my coworkers supported me and my job was flexible. of course they were excited for me, but having left jobs in the past, i knew in a lot of ways, i was closing the door on that part of my life.
it’s really hard to leave people! i’ve been left in the past (i did write a book called when he leaves you after all), and when you’re the one leaving, you feel a similar type of grief. i will always cherish that job and those friendships, but i’m glad i decided to go all in on self-employment.
the pros and cons
now that i’ve been doing this for nine months, let me tell you my favourite and least favourite things about it. i was gonna do it as two separate lists, but they all go hand in hand in a way.
1. i don’t feel like i work
i kinda never feel like i’m working. taking pictures, making tiktoks, researching trends, responding to comments and DMs, posting instagram stories… none of it feels like work to me (except for tracking my expenses and calculating my taxes). and the more i separate myself from the shackles of productivity culture and feeling like i need to prove to people that i have a job, the happier i am! i used to say things like, “oh i don’t know if i could be self-employed or even retire, i’d be so bored.” but that, my friends, was capitalism talking! being bored is wonderful, and a lot of the times it just means you get to rest.
that said, i do occasionally feel guilty that i don’t “work”. this is something i’ve talked about a lot in therapy, and my wonderful therapist tells me that i have to see myself as a trailblazer redefining the way we work, not feel shame that i’m not tied to an employer or a schedule. i DO work, it’s just untraditional. i DO work, i’m just living in flow.
another downfall of never feeling like you’re working is that you never stop. i’m still figuring out how to set boundaries with my phone, whether that’s leaving it at home while i go on a walk, or turning it off for an evening. but honestly, i am not very good at it.
2. i get to do whatever i want
i’m working on this one too. yesterday, i went to post to my instagram story that i was watching a tv show in the middle of the day, and i still heard that inner voice. “people are gonna think i don’t work, people are gonna think i’m lazy, it’s gonna seem like i don’t do anything.”
though i am good at doing whatever i want during “traditional work hours”, whether it’s going to get coffee, running errands, going thrifting or plant shopping, getting my nails done or watching tv, i am still working on doing that publicly without feeling shame (honestly, i know, boo hoo, poor me, i’m mainly including for self-employed people or people who are thinking of being self-employed that will feel this way too).
3. i’m alone a lot
if you know me, you know this is mainly a pro. i love being alone! it’s nice to not feel accountable to anyone but myself. i don’t have to tell anyone when i have appointments, no one expects me to be online or to show up somewhere every day, i don’t have to ask to take vacations. if i’m grumpy, i can just be a grump by myself. and i don’t have grumpy coworkers to deal with!
but, especially with the isolative nature of the pandemic, i can be too alone sometimes (remember that date i went on after not talking to anyone for a week?). having the option to go to a coworking space has been great and i’ve gotten better at connecting with friends in-person too. but i can’t lie, it’s not the same as having coworkers that double as friends you see all the time.
4. i have no set schedule or routine
the first couple months of being self-employed, i truly had no schedule. and i didn’t really recognize the small bits of my life that were a routine as routine.
for example, i get up every day, have a glass of water, light incense, feed bea, get ready, take bea on a walk (often to a coffee shop), come home, listen to music and journal. but i wasn’t seeing that as a routine, because it just felt like a bunch of random things. it’s funny how a lot of my pros and cons just have to do with perspective.
now that i recognize that as my daily routine, i feel more grounded in it. honestly, writing this newsletter every wednesday has made me feel like i have a little more structure too.
the flexibility of self-employment is awesome, but i definitely have to have extra awareness around my grounding practices to make sure i stick with them.
i bid you adieu
i really never thought self-employment was in the cards for me, and i feel grateful every day that i get to be a full-time author (my inner child literally squeals at the thought). i appreciate you supporting me, whether that’s through reading this letter, engaging with me online, or buying my books. it is so cool to be able to have such a close connection with someone who made this dream possible for me.
i thank you, as always, for reading ❤️ and if you’re self-employed or work alone or are considering self-employment, i hope this peek into my last year resonated with you.
if any of this hit, or you have questions, or you want to share your own experiences, leave me a comment!
there are now 500 of you! thanks so much for being part of the pitter patter fam. if you know someone who would enjoy this letter, you can share it with them here:
xoxo
m
hey, thank you for sharing your inspiring journey with us!! i blew on tiktok as well before it got banned here (India) Excited to read your new book. get well soon, if you’re not already by now. say hi to Bea for me!
so awesome to hear about your journey! super inspiring! missed the poetry prompt but your newsletter never disappoint!