2024 Professional Highs and Lows

As another year comes screeching to a halt, I finally have some time to look back and reflect on the last 12 months. What a year! As I’ve said in a few other posts, I truly never had a professional year like this one. I’m happy to say it’s ending on a high note, but the future looked very uncertain back in January 2024.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the highlights and lowlights of 2024:

Lowlight: Losing my two key contacts at my two anchor clients. In January 2024, I was down to one anchor client and a few “sometimes” clients (markets I’d write for occasionally). I picked up a second regular client in February. By early summer, my main contact at Anchor Client #1 called me to say she was leaving at the end of July. A few days later, the editor at Anchor Client #2 contacted me to say she was leaving at the end of that day. Whoa! Fortunately, neither client had any plans to stop working with me, which is always a fear when an editor or project lead moves on.

Highlight: Building good relationships with the replacements at anchor clients mentioned above—relationships I continue to cultivate with every project! I’ve been working well with my new contacts, which always makes the process easier!

Lowlight: Getting some feedback that shook my confidence—badly. I submitted a final draft for revision (per policy) to Anchor Client #1 and let’s just say it wasn’t glowing. It was so not glowing, in fact, that I sent the draft to my contact and asked that I be removed from the project. I questioned whether I was starting to lose my touch. It was not a good day.

Highlight: Receiving validation that I am, in fact, a good writer. Shortly after I received the scathing feedback, I got another email from another editor praising the piece I’d just submitted to him. I’m not saying I can’t sharpen my prose a bit, or simply step up my game a little (after four years, I admit I’ve gotten comfortable with most projects), but the complimentary feedback was the pat on the back I needed—maybe I hadn’t lost my mojo after all.

Lowlight: Sending out over two dozen LOIs to my preferred market—higher education institutions—with mixed results. I’d been focusing my outreach on higher ed markets (alumni magazines, President’s Reports, etc.), but frankly, higher ed is in a scary place right now. Instead, I had to turn to my tried-and-true—writing features for trade and association publications. As I wrote in a previous post, I found most of my leads through Writer’s Market and Google.

Highlight: Ending the year with six core clients and sticking to my strength of writing features for trade publications. I’m happy to say I’ve now been writing regularly for a handful of clients, now with three anchor clients. I didn’t realize how complacent I’d become, and how “touching base” and “reaching out” to clients I’d worked with previously doesn’t always work. Sometimes you really need to go back to Square One, tweak your pitches or LOIs, and connect with a whole new set of folks. It’s scary, but I’m happy to say it was worth it for me.

So that’s my 2024 in a professional nutshell. Here’s hoping the momentum continues through 2025.

What were your highs and lows of 2024?