Building a Career on Your Own Terms with Mandy Collins
The traditional workplace isn’t disappearing, but it’s no longer the default. Freelancing, the gig economy and self-publishing have moved from fallback options to deliberate career choices, and a growing number of professionals are betting their livelihoods on them. The harder question is what it actually takes to make that bet pay off over years rather than months.
In this episode of Meet the Management, Tabitha Oxford speaks with Mandy Collins, a freelance writer, editor and self-published author, about what building an independent professional career really looks like once the novelty wears off.
About the guest
Mandy Collins has spent close to three decades writing for a living. She trained as a journalist, holding a B.Journ from Rhodes University and a BA (Hons) in Sociolinguistics from UNISA, and began her career covering television and film before moving into consumer magazines as features editor at True Love. From there she returned to freelance writing full-time, with her work appearing across most of South Africa’s major print publications, and won the inaugural Embrace Award for health journalism in 2005.
Beyond journalism, Mandy has authored and ghostwritten a number of books, two of which became bestsellers in their genre in South Africa, and now runs her own writing, content and communications consultancy, built around a passion for plain language and clear, confident communication.
Why this conversation matters
Freelancing and self-publishing are often sold as a kind of liberation, set your own hours, write what you want, answer to no one. The reality, as anyone who has actually done it will tell you, is a lot more administrative than that. Income is irregular, marketing yourself doesn’t come naturally to most writers, and the discipline that used to be imposed by an employer now has to come from somewhere else entirely.
That gap between the pitch and the practice is exactly where this conversation lives. Mandy has built a long career on the independent side of the desk, through changes in publishing, media and now the platforms themselves, which makes her account less aspirational and more operational: what actually works, day to day, and what doesn’t.
It’s also a space where the mythology tends to outrun the mechanics. Social media is full of survivorship bias, the breakout self-published bestseller, the freelancer who “just decided” to quit their job and never looked back, with very little said about the years of inconsistent income, the chasing of late payments, or the marketing graft that has nothing to do with the actual writing. Getting independence wrong costs people real stability and, eventually, their confidence in the work itself. Getting it right means treating it as a discipline with its own skills to learn, not an escape hatch from a job you didn’t like, which is the distinction a near-three-decade career like Mandy’s is well placed to draw out.
In this episode
This is a practical look at what it takes to sustain an independent career, not just start one. It covers:
- the case for choosing freelancing, gig work or self-publishing as a genuine long-term career rather than a stopgap
- the daily realities of modern freelancing that don’t make it into the highlight reel
- the sharpest business lessons Mandy learned from self-publishing her own work
- managing your time and output when no one else is managing it for you
- “blowing your own trumpet”: marketing yourself and your work in a crowded marketplace
- what actually separates a sustainable independent career from a short-lived one
Watch the full episode to hear Mandy Collins unpack the realities of life outside the traditional workplace, the business lessons that came out of self-publishing her own books, and the habits that make independence sustainable rather than precarious.
What it means to write, edit and publish independently
Freelance writing and editing is a craft and a business running at the same time. The craft side, the writing itself, the editing eye, the ability to shape a story or a sentence, is the part most people train for. The business side, finding clients, pricing your time fairly, chasing payment, and building a reputation that holds up project after project, is the part most freelancers learn the hard way. Working across journalism, copywriting, ghostwriting and editing also means constantly shifting voice, tone and deadline, often for several clients in the same week, with no employer absorbing the risk when the work dries up.
Self-publishing adds a different layer of independence again. The royalties are typically far higher than traditional publishing offers, but every part of the process a publishing house would normally handle, editing, design, marketing, distribution, becomes the author’s job too. Writing the book turns out to be only one part of the work; selling it, and continuing to write while doing so, is usually the part that decides whether the whole thing is sustainable.
