News and updates

SHOWING NEWS 341–350 OUT OF 727

DALL·E 2 PRODUCT DEMO

If you’re a freelance illustrator or microstock photographer, the new DALL·E 2 AI image generator is a huge game-changer.

As shown in a recent product demo, Dalle2 can generate high-quality illustrations and generic photorealistic images (in countless variations) from simple text descriptions.

Our take: Instead of replacing humans, Dalle’s AI may enable creators to produce more quality work and focus on creative idea-making, rather than laboriously processing those very ideas. AI power tools like these may be quite common in future creator’s toolkit.

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SPEC WORK EXAMPLES

Spec work is when an inexperienced freelancer is manipulated into doing some work for free or with a vague vision of a reward, reciprocal service, or other work. Here are some examples from The Freelance Way, chapter Business Negotiations:

• Submit your entry to the tender for our company’s logo, and if you win, $1,500 is yours.
• Prepare for us a sample of your work for free, and our next order will be paid.
• We don’t have room in our budget to pay you, but we can think up a way to barter for it.
• This one here will be for peanuts, but if you handle it, we’ll give you a lot more work.
• If your work is good, we’ll pay you. We’ll talk about the price later.
• Come work for us for free, in return for experience and references.
• The director needs a photographer for his fiftieth birthday party. Then once you’re there, you can talk about paid cooperation.
• We would love to order from you, but draft a proposal with a sample solution for us first.

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ORGPAD

OrgPad is a very handy online tool for visualizing ideas, creating mind maps, planning, and collaborative work on projects. It also allows you to create presentations. The basic version (up to 3 documents and 100MB of space) is free.

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THE FREELANCE WAY IN BULGARIA

The Bulgarian edition of The Freelance Way has just been published! The book is now available from Locus Publishing, and will soon appear in Bulgarian bookstores.

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ROYALTY EXCHANGE

Would you invest your savings in popular songs? Many freelance investors do. RoyaltyExchange.com enables anyone to buy and sell music rights and copyrights, as (arguably) the world’s largest royalty marketplace. For newbies, there’s also a guide How Royalties Work.

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FREELANCE BUSINESS MONTH 2022

Freelance Business Month is scheduled for October 1–31, 2022, as the world’s longest online event for freelancers, organized by our member Elina Jutelyte and her team. Here’s her Call for speakers open until May 31.

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WHEN TO RAISE PRICES

When is the right moment to raise your prices as a freelancer? Sooner than most freelancers do, as explained in this quote from The Freelance Way, chapter Pricing:

The vast majority of freelancers make the move to raise prices too late, when their workload is 100% or more — meaning that they are fairly bogged down by work stress. So they intuitively avoid raising prices all the more, because they want to avoid confronting client complaints. The result then is delaying a price increase for months or years, and an unfortunate state that is so chronic it can truly harm your health or reputation.

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ONE FREELANCER'S JOURNEY TO THE EAST

Jan de Graaf is a German business consultant for European trade with Asia and especially China, where he has spent 15 years. In this talk for Freelance Friends, Jan shared his freelance journey and described the rich cultural background of his successful freelance business:

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400 RESOURCES FOR FREELANCERS

We have already mapped 400 resources for freelancers in Europe: platforms, websites, marketplaces, communities, organizations, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, etc. — with a little help from our freelance friends, as well as a number of contributors from all over Europe. If you know of any European resources we have missed, let us know.

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WHERE DO YOU WORK BEST?

Here’s our question of the week for you:

Where do you work best as a freelancer?

Tell us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — or read how other freelancers answer this question there.

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