With the economy the way that it is freelance writers are going to have an even tougher time than in the past recession at making a living.

The first issue is that we are generally on the last hired, first fired lists of most companies and publications. For example, if you eanr at least part of your income buy producing written materials for companies, such as white papers, tech writing, sales brochures, books, web content, and etc., companies are going to increasingly be cutting back. Of course, this is also true for publications because as ad revenue shrinks, the content hole will also become very small increasing the competition among us to provide the text to fill that hole. As in times past editors and companies will go with more visuals, which are cheaper to produce and sell well, and with the Internet and word processing prgrams making it easier for anybody to enter the freelance matrketplace, they will have a ready pool of moderately talented and experienced people from which to draw and continue to under-pay. This will make for more work for editors (as a former editor I know), but will save the budget, which is becoming an even more important imperative.

So what is a freelance writer to do? I don't know. Short of giving up and getting into some other line of work these are simply tough times where even experience and talent are not gaurantors of a steady income.

As such, I would love to hear how others are approaching this situation and what they think is going to happen to the world of writing as the economy sinks and there is a plethora of free content being generated.