#15: Anna Codrea-Rado

A Best-Selling Substacker You Might Like!

This week’s person is…

Anna Codrea-Rado

In 2024 I’ll have been a freelancer for 20 years.
Not only does that make me feel old, but it makes me realize just how much I’ve had to learn about being one’s own boss, being accountable (financially and otherwise), and trying to run your own shit.

It’s hard. It sounds fun and liberating, but it’s really, really hard.

When I started to properly panic about the Pandemic (I’m a late bloomer) in March of 2022, one of the most useful posts I’ve read dropped into my inbox. It was a newsletter aimed at freelancers called A-Mail written by Anna Codreo-Rado. It was the most useful information packed into the shortest amount of words, and forever more I have been subscribing and reading her work with great interest.

Anna Codrea-Rado

is a writer and journalist with bylines in theNew York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Wired, Vice, and more. She is candid about how she makes her money, how she does it, and what challenges freelancers face in real time, now. (not in 2004.) If you’re a freelancer, I highly recommend you support and subscribe. (She just became a Best-Selling Substacker!)
She always posts something with some swift illustrations byLéo Hamelin

I just made her a spinning avatar (above) using her logo. One day later, both of us were laid out with back injuries. Coincidence?

Anyway, Anna sums it up:

If we met at a conference and you asked me for career advice, would you buy me a coffee to say thanks? Probably. Why not support A-Mail instead – you get the same wisdom for less and you don’t even have to leave your sofa.

A-Mail is a newsletter about work, money, and power. You know, just the main forces in our lives.

Paying subscribers get access to my roundup of productivity recs, as well as my quarterly income reports where I share exactly how I made my money in the previous three months. Reader support also funds my stories, essays, and critical thinking on the chaos of modern work.

Here are two recent A-Mail posts:

How I made over $25,000 as a freelance writer in three months

The myth of the restful vacation

Read and Support A-Mail. Your career crisis will thank you for it.