Six new books that will help you flourish as a freelancer

Thankfully, there are inspirational and informative books about freelancing coming out all the time. In this post, we bring you six of the best recent releases and explain how they can help you flourish as a freelancer.

1. Business for Bohemians: Live Well, Make Money by Tom Hodgkinson

Whether you dream of launching a startup or profiting from your creativity in your spare time, Business for Bohemians equips you with the tools to turn your talents into a lucrative, enjoyable business. Written by Tom Hodgkinson, the founder and editor of The Idler, this guide is refreshingly candid, frequently funny, and full of practical advice to help free you from the nine-to-five.

2. This Year Will Be Different by Monika Kanokova

This Year Will Be Different is essentially a series of interviews with 22 entrepreneurial women. From bloggers to designers, consultants to photographers, these women operate across a variety of different creative industries, and their stories will inspire anyone seeking to follow in their footsteps and go it alone. The first book by veteran blogger and consultant Monika Kanokova, it also includes plenty of tips and advice along the way.

3. My Creative (Side) Business: The insightful guide to turning your side projects into a full-time creative business by Monika Kanokova

Another book by Monika Kanokova, this one is aimed at creatives seeking to develop multiple income streams from side projects. Again, a series of insightful interviews with female entrepreneurs form the backbone of this book (14 this time), and there’s lots of solid, up-to-date advice about how to go about emulating them with your own side projects.

4. Do Fly: Find Your Way. Make a Living. Be Your Best Self by Gavin Strange

Do work you love: it’s a simple idea, but in reality, it can be a lot more difficult to achieve. Gavin Strange, a creative working by day at Aardman Animations and by night on a variety of side projects under the name of JamFactory, is the perfect guide to your journey. This is a hugely motivational book, filled with advice, encouragement and inspiration to help you pursue your own creative side projects. Learn more about Gavin and his book here.

5. Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions and Get REAL Work Done by Jocelyn K. Glei

Going freelance is all about becoming your own boss. But even when you escape the spectre of a physical boss watching over you all day, the relentless demands of your email inbox can be just as domineering and stress-inducing. In this helpful book, Jocelyn K. Glei explains why email is so overwhelming and addicting and lays out practical strategies for limiting the energy you spend on it. The aim is to stop letting email dictate your mood, your focus and your to-do list, and making you feel more in control of your working day.

6. Don't Get a Job... Make a Job: How to make it as a creative graduate, by Gem Barton

Most graduates in creative subjects expect to walk into a job with an established company. But imagine for one moment that there were no employers, no firms to send your CV to, no interviews to be had – what would you do? That’s the premise of this book by Gem Barton, a senior lecture at Brighton University. Rather than offering job-seeking advice, it instead explains how students and graduates need to evolve to adapt to the increasingly competitive modern world, and offers strategies to gain exposure for their work and make money from it.