Diana Vilibert has been writing professionally since she was an undergrad. After graduating from  New York University in 2008 with a double-major in journalism and psychology, she took a job at Marie Claire, where she eventually worked her way up to web editor, a position she left in April in order to freelance full-time. Today, the Brooklyn Heights resident covers women’s lifestyle (sex, dating, beauty, fashion, and health) for web and print while balancing an eight-hour-a-day job in fashion copywriting. Most recently, she has a story in Coming & Crying, an anthology of true stories about sex, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell and self-published with Internet-solicited funding from Kickstarter.

Going to school in New York must have been a great way to cut your teeth in the industry. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you got started? I started by interning a lot while I was in school—I would schedule my classes around my internships (In total, three semesters at JANE, one at CosmoGIRL!, and a semester and a half at Marie Claire). My first clips were at those magazines, from tiny blurbs to full-page pieces. In the meantime, I also did a little bit of blogging for CollegeCandy.com and Nerve.com—the former, via a Craigslist ad, and the latter via a job listing on Ed2010.com.

How did you wind up working for Marie Claire? Halfway into my second semester interning at Marie Claire—my first semester of senior year at NYU—a freelance (unofficially “permalance”) web assistant position at Marie Claire opened up, and I started that part time while I finished up school. That’s where I stayed, moving up the ladder until I took over as web editor. I quit in April 2010 to freelance full time.

Do you actively pitch and look for clients? I’ve been lucky in that about half of my clients have come to me, via recommendations from fellow freelancers and former bosses. The other half came from cold pitching—either meeting an editor or being introduced and following up, or sending pitches or an e-introduction to editors I have no prior relationship with.

Any inside tips on how to get a pitch through the door at Marie Claire? What are the easiest sections to break into? Unless you’re an established writer, your best bet may be to start small instead of pitching big packages or features. The Love/Sex section definitely saw many freelance pieces while I was there. Fashion was mostly covered by staff.

How can young freelance writers figure out which stories are worth pitching and which are likely already taken by staffers? A good rule of thumb—for any magazine—is to familiarize yourself with the masthead of the magazine you really want to write for, and go through each section to see if bylines are generally coming from the masthead or not. Go through a few months of issues, and if it looks like a particular section is filled with different and unfamiliar names each month, you may have some luck pitching there.

What’s your salary range since you’ve gone freelance? It’s such a huge range that I hesitate to answer in fear of jinxing myself! I’ve been freelancing full time for six months. The first three months varied wildly. I think I made about $6,000 one month and then barely $1,000 the next. My most lucrative and stable freelance gig right now is fashion copywriting, which I’ve been doing for about three months. That, combined with what I’m currently pulling in with other clients, puts me at about $8,000 a month—frankly, more than I ever thought I would be making at this point in my freelancing career.

 That said, that could all change tomorrow, and that’s the most difficult thing about freelancing full time.

As a long-time resident of New York, do you think that it’s viable to freelance full-time and live in the city? When I quit my job, my rent was lower than it is now, and I was planning to move to a cheaper place when my lease was up because I didn’t think I’d be making enough money to stay. That changed practically overnight. But it could change again and I’d be paying my rent with my savings account. So, I do think that freelancing full-time is possible, but it’s certainly not for everyone. It needs to suit your personality, first of all—both in terms of the actual day-to-day working from home and lack of office atmosphere sense, and also in terms of being able to accept the instability and roll with it, without going out of your mind. And in order to keep the crazy at bay, I think it’s really important to be financially prepared to jump into freelancing. If you have a decent chunk of change saved up, the bad days/weeks/months won’t be as scary as they would be if you were on your last pack of ramen.

Like you, I have really good months with a ton of work and then I have complete dry spells. Do you have any advice on how to bridge the gap? My horror stories—and others I’ve heard—mostly have to do with getting paid in a timely fashion. It can take a really, really long time, which is why, again, I can’t stress enough how important it is to have money saved if you’re making the jump from a stable job to freelancing. It doesn’t always take forever to get paid—especially with regular blogging gigs—but for one-off projects, it often does. I completed my first freelance project in April for $2,000 and got the check in the mail in the final week of August. You cannot count your chickens before they hatch—do not spend or assume you have money unless it is in your hands.

Several readers have been asking me about how to negotiate fees for freelance projects. This is always kind of an awkward process for me, so I’m interested in hearing your opinion. Almost every freelancer I know says this is the hardest part of the job, and it often is! I’m still learning, but my rule of thumb is to try to get as much information about a project or piece in terms of what exactly the editor wants, so that I can figure out how many hours it might take me. From there, I decide on the hourly rate I think is fair for that specific project and convert that into a per-word or per-post rate for the editor. It’s definitely a trial-and-error process, and sometimes you’ll come away feeling like you undersold yourself, but that’s how you learn for next time!

As for the actual “negotiating” part, I just force myself to stand up for myself and ask for what I think is fair, even if that means asking for double what I’m offered. I write out the email, close my eyes, hit “send,” and leave the room. That’s my process.

What are the typical rates for freelancers at Marie Claire? I was on the web side (which, for the most part, didn’t pay freelance writers), so I can’t really speak to print rates, though I believe they are competitive with standard print rates. [Ed note: The accepted industry standard for print is typically $1/word.]

Given that you’ve done both web and print work, how much does the pay differ? Do you tweak your rate accordingly? Pay, in my experience, is almost always higher with print than web—how much higher depends on the size of the magazine, the piece you’re writing, and so on. That’s why I tend to use my formula of converting a per-hour rate to a per-word or per-post rate, but I do tweak my rate accordingly.

How do you balance work from all your different clients with your social life? Can you give me a sense of what your average day looks like? My average workday depends mostly on the fashion copywriting gig—that one is a regular 8-hour gig, so if I’m in the office, I’ll wake up about two hours before I need to start getting ready in order to work on other blogging and writing, if I need to. If I’m working on that from home, I tend to also start on the earlier side (meaning, earlier than I would need to be at the office) and take a long “lunch” break, to send out some pitches, do some bookkeeping, just wander around my neighborhood, or meet friends for lunch. Either way, I try to keep my nights free. When I don’t have that on my plate, my day is less structured and I tend to work around my social life—I had none while I was on staff, so it’s a nice perk! So if I stay out late the night before, I might sleep in and have a lazy start to the day before working in the afternoon and evening. If I have evening plans, I may start and finish working earlier. Same goes for taking days or weeks off—if I have a vacation coming up, I’ll hole up and work evenings and weekends so that I’m not worried about losing out on work and money while I’m away. Overall, I try to keep my schedule very malleable, both in the short-term and the long-term.

Freelancing is also hardly as romantic as some people make it out to be. I’ve learned that it’s not just about “writing whatever you want”. It’s also a livelihood. How do you strike a balance between writing as a passion and writing as a job? I think it’s important to be realistic as to what kind of writing will keep you afloat financially. For me, it’s currently the fashion gig that makes the difference between scraping by and living comfortably. Maybe for you, it’s a white paper every three months or sponsored editorial content here and there. It doesn’t mean you’re a sell-out—it means you’re smart. No, it’s unlikely someone is going to pay you the equivalent of a month’s rent for poetry about your cat. So spend 50% of your time writing poetry about your cat and rest of it on writing you enjoy that also brings in money. As times goes on, that percentage may start shifting—your rates will go up, and you’ll bring in new clients—but when you’re just starting out, don’t get discouraged or feel like it’s impossible to make a living freelancing just because you’re not swimming in hundreds and writing exactly what you want every second of the day.

If you liked Diana’s interview, you can find her online on Tumblr and Twitter.