Cost of Entry: How Much Does it Cost to Become a Freelance Food Writer?
The allure of food writing is intoxicating. Ah, the food to be eaten! The places to visit! The stories to be told! Let’s be honest though: setting up as a professional food writer takes some investment – sometimes time, sometimes money, and sometimes both.
But it doesn’t have to be expensive. The great thing is you’re not paying for a conventional start-up here – you are essentially paying for tools and infrastructure, and the total cost can range from a budget-friendly minimum to a serious investment.
Let’s have a look at what expenses fall into each category, starting with someone just setting off on their freelance journey, up to someone looking to invest in improving their skills and resources in the interest of developing their craft into a career.
Starting Out (£0-£250 Annually)
You are a business, and for the most part you need to look like one. Leaving out the obvious parts of the equation for now (such as laptops or desktops, writing software, and internet service providers), a couple of these are non-negotiable if you want others to take you seriously as a professional:
Domain Name and Hosting: A professional website to host your portfolio or clips is your digital storefront. You can expect to spend around £60 to £200 per year on registering your name and hosting your webpages – this Squarespace site, for instance, costs me £170. Some options however – albeit without all the bells and whistles – are free.
Professional Email: Pitching from an address like spicyhotfoodlover69@gmail.com is unlikely to win much professional street cred. Invest in a dedicated email address (often included in your domain hosting package or as a low-cost subscription).
Accounting Software/Tools: You need a system to track invoices and expenses for tax purposes. A basic spreadsheet or something like the excellent Harvest is up to a point free, but a low-cost service (like the "lite" version of QuickBooks or Xero) can be worth the £50–£100 annual fee for the time and stress it ultimately saves.
Headshot: Editors will be looking to add a shot of your face to your bylines when published, so it’s good to have one ready. Make sure to have a good one anyway, when it comes to marketing yourself through social media. Obviously all this you can do yourself, but a pro photographer with a proper camera (for which you’re looking in the region of £50 a session) can make all the difference.
Investing in Skills and Access (£0–£10,000+)
You can start writing for free, but paying for guidance significantly shortens the time it takes to get well-paid gigs.
Institutional Writing Course: You, like I did, might enrol in a university degree to better understand the ins and outs of what makes good creative writing, or the principles of journalism, or media law. However life-changing, these are heavy on time and money – at the time of writing, a standard full-time three year course at a UK university costs £9,535.
Professional Course or Mentoring: While not mandatory, dedicated courses (like So you want to be a food writer?) or mentorships can accelerate your learning and pitch success rate. Happy to be proved wrong on this, but such courses do seem to be the most time and money efficient way to learn focused, necessary skills – and in good time. Pitching courses and mentorships can tot up to £500 or more, but often pay for themselves quickly through higher-paying commissions.
Transcription Services: Depending on what kind of stories you’d like to pitch, usually you’ll need something to help you record and transcribe your conversations with interviewees. This can cost you nothing (I use Audacity and transcribe manually or via Rev’s free plan), or if you’re doing a lot of transcribing, somewhere in the region of £10-£20 per month.
Guild Membership: Though far from necessary, joining a professional body such as The Guild of Food Writers, offers credibility, networking, and resources, usually for an annual fee of around £100.
The Cost of Researching and Reporting (£0-£∞)
Probably the highest variable you’ll encounter from story to story is the cost of doing the actual work, whether it’s travelling to places, eating at places, or any other expense. As they tend to say, a writer is never not at work, so the lines may blur a bit here as to when you’re paying for lunch on a professional level, or when you’re doing it for leisure.
Do note that, depending on your local tax laws, you can claim some or all these expenses in order to lower your taxable income.
When pitching or being commissioned a piece that involves you going to eat somewhere, generally you will not be expected to pay for travel or food. Or rather, you will, but such expenses should be claimed back on your invoice – of course, this is something you should be clear about with the editor when they commission.
If you’re not on commission when visiting a restaurant however, obviously you will foot the bill. Such is the cost of some research, and the same goes with things like phone bills and newspaper or magazine subscriptions – all very valuable in the interest of research, just remember to expense such items on your tax return each year.
Main takeaway
As you’ve probably gathered by now, freelance food writing is more of a time-driven pursuit than a particularly costly one on the money front. That said, spending a bit of money here or there is a good way to make money – some expenses are worth much more than their weight in gold.
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