Rules of a creative ‘space’

Yada Yada Collective’s founders Shubhashree, Vidya Gopal and Megha Vishwanath

Looks like someone's touched a pulse in the shape-shifting world of creative freelance. From making portfolios and pitching to clients to reading between the lines of terms and conditions, signing contracts and understanding copyright and licensing, and navigating the disputed tides of pricing - The Pitch-hiker's Guide to Creative Freelancing has generous inputs for every freelancer.

Written in a Douglas Adams style (pitch-hikers, hitchhikers, get the link?), the sci-fi epic lends inspiration to the title, theme and flow of this 52-page handy guide, keeping it light and breezy, not preachy. We like that the book discusses important topics like diversifying income streams, communication and freelancer ethics too. "When very senior experienced illustrators tell us that this book should have come around 15-20 years ago, at the start of their careers, we feel it's worth all the effort," says Megha Vishwanath, co-founder Yada Yada Collective, a platform for Indian freelance artistes. From registering copyrights to drafting contracts and negotiating fees, imagine young freelancers having access to all this information in one place, from the very beginning of their careers. "It helps build better practices in what is still an informal sector. It's been a very meaningful exercise," adds Vishwanath.

The book is the coming together of the founders' personal lessons learnt in their respective journeys, the research they did for their content for Yada Yada Collective, and the conversations they had with the community. Shubhashree adds, "In addition to that, a couple of months of intense work went into the book to present our learnings in a manner that's easy to consume. In the process of putting it together, we can safely say that we now know more than we did when we started working on it."

At the Yada Yada Collective, there is an ongoing survey on ‘what they pay' for illustrations and design. Co-founder Vidya Gopal tells us, "It is an anonymous survey that helps us get some insight about the pricing of work and the overall process including advance payments, licensing and contracts. From our survey results and engagement with the community, it came to light that there are several information gaps concerning the business of freelancing. We started by creating some content around this on social media, which was very well received. We then decided to expand it into a book. The book is an amalgamation of everything we learnt in the last year. We hope that with this information at hand, creative freelancers feel more confident and sure to take on new work and clientele."

WHAT: The Pitch-hiker's Guide to Creative Freelancing
WHERE: www.yadayadacollective.org
FOR: Rs 350 (paperback); Rs 250 (PDF version)