I'm not asking for money, but ...

I am wishing you a Happy Holidays! And maybe asking for money.

Over the past year, people have more and more asked how I make a living. So, I thought it might be interesting to share that with you here. Welcome to: the ups and downs of being a freelancer.

First, I do have a protective shell. I work for the Canadian Association of Labour Media for 22 hours per week. There, I get a salary and the chance to travel all over Canada. CALM is my lifeline and I’m not only lucky to have it, but I’m also lucky to love the work.

But enough with the boring stuff, bring on the juicy details.

Sandy and Nora: Thanks to the podcast, I make a monthly stipend. This amount has dropped by 25% over the past years but in 2024, remained stable. The advertising revenue hasn’t been enough to increase our own stipends, and the Daily News hasn’t, on its own, brought in enough to increase it. The podcast world is not lucrative, especially when your podcast is geriatric in podcast years (it’s hard to keep sustainers for so long when you’re not able to grow). But there will be some big news in 2025 that will mean some expansion in the Sandy and Nora Universe and, maybe (maybe!) even a new tour that will allow Sandy and I to pay ourselves. (No, we’ve never paid ourselves for any of our live shows.)

Journalism: journalism accounts for a small amount of my overall income — under 30% or so. 2024 was the year where I really felt the walls close in. A bunch of forces conspired to decimate my paid journalism work. Compared to 2023, I had a 100% decrease in my income from the CBC. That represents the loss of the panel show The Conversation but also I was not asked to do CBC Radio (usually syndication) once. It has been a signficant blow. Less of a blow was the 100% loss of income from Canadaland. It’s a much smaller amount (maybe $400?) but still. And for The Maple, where I walked away from having a column over personal differences, I didn’t do much journalism for them in 2024. And that represents a 74% decrease versus 2023. Overall, it was bleak, though I picked up a J-Source feature and am working on a Walrus feature that will be published in 2025. Plus, I got to do some writing for Truthout.

Book writing: forget about imagining what I got from books. The royalties are so little they are barely worth mentioning and each book I’m working on came with a $3000 advance (advance as in you only get royalties after you make your portion of $3000). I always joke that the year that my kid put his foot through his bedroom wall (the wall was rotten, we discovered), I paid more for a guy to drywall it in two days than I was paid for my last book. Also, on the economics of book writing — when I wrote my first book in 2013, I was paid $5000. No advance, no royalties. I think it’s still the most I’ve ever made even though I am now at book five. (Why do I do it? Great question). Anyway, thanks to everyone who has bought a copy over the past few months. It has been on the independent bookstore bestseller list for most of the fall.

Non-journalism: 2024 was a good year for things that were not journalism: speaking gigs, editing academic papers, etc. I had a 178.09% increase over 2023 in my non-journalism income. Thanks to the groups that brought me in this year especially — I needed that support!

Substack: Finally, I started Substack two years ago to both be an outlet for me to write and to create a stable income source for my journalism. While my Substack audience has grown over the past year (not by a ton, though), the amount of money it brings in has dropped. For example, where I’ve had more than 100 new followers in the past month, I’ve lost 25 paid followers. Not a great ratio. For all of 2024, I had a growth rate of 0.6% in paid donors, but were a lot of issues with credit card processing and so I have slightly less this year than I had last year. (The issues are on the user end, not mine).

The key to making this all work is to have a lot of different income streams. When when collapses, you have to be able to pivot to one that is functional. I don’t know where my gross income will be in 2024 compared to 2023 until I suck it up and do my taxes next April but it will likely follow a multi-year trend downward. Luckily, that trend isn’t going down too quickly.

So if you are feeling generous and you want to send me the money that you’re saving off of Justin Trudeau’s tax holiday (that is a joke, have you noticed any savings? I have not) please consider donating! And if you can’t or won’t or don’t feel like it or intend to but then forget? That’s good too. I’m not a very good salesman so forgive my awkwardness.

Happy holidays! I hope you have some time off. I’m almost finished a puzzle that I need to get finished before guests come over tonight. But I am trapped with a big question: Do I prepare supper tonight or do I keep searching for the blue pieces? My guests can eat chips, right?