Oliver Franklin-Wallis is a features writer and the author of the acclaimed book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. He has reported from Liberia on the Ebola virus. He has chronicled the global race to build a hyperloop. These days, he earns up to £60,000 a year by balancing his deep-dive journalism with corporate brand strategy and live event hosting. It keeps his daily routine deeply social and financially secure.
In this interview, Oliver talks about the financial mechanics of his writing life. He explains the reality of why writing simply does not scale, noting that the sheer hours poured into a magazine feature rarely multiply your final paycheck. He also admits that winning prestigious industry awards does absolutely nothing to increase his baseline freelance rates. If you want to understand the financial reality behind thriving as a longform reporter without romanticizing the hustle, this one’s for you.
What you do: Author and features writer.
Years writing professionally: I started in around 2010.
Earnings range: £40,000–£60,000 per year.
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Honestly, it’s hard to answer this question, as I just finished nearly four years working a staff job at Condé Nast, and freelance income in my experience has changed so much year to year. The majority of my income right now comes from journalism, with a little from commercial work. Books and speaking are another source of income, and in my limited experience of writing one book so far, those two things do seem to come hand in hand.
The last time I was freelance – from 2018 to around 2022, when I was writing Wasteland – I found it hard that the difference between landing one or two big US magazine pieces could be the difference between a decent year and a real struggle. You’re so much at the mercy of the market and your relationships. I’m very new to Substack and other direct-revenue platforms… but then I’ve never had a ‘beat’, so it’s hard to know what readers want from me.
One often thinks about an observation once made by my friend Helen Lewis, that writing doesn’t “scale well”– no matter how much time you put into an assignment, you get paid the same amount, and the opportunities to increase the monetisation of that thing are limited unless you’re the kind of writer who can turn the same project into a book, screenplay, podcast, and movie. That’s not historically been how I work, though I envy those who do.
Mostly, I’m interested in finding work that rewards deep research and reporting. The nice thing about writing a book is that you at least feel (perhaps erroneously) that there is some direct link between you and the reader. But the finances of book writing, as everyone knows, are sketchy as hell.
You know, I honestly can’t. I remember doing work experience at the London Evening Standard (now just the London Standard) and getting a mention on the front page, which thrilled me. It was either that, or something fitness based in Men’s Health. I spent several stretches of my last year of university skipping lessons and sofa surfing in London so that I could intern at various newspapers and magazines; my mum lived abroad at that point, so I needed to find a job, otherwise I’d have had nowhere to go. Somehow, I managed to pivot one of those, an internship at GQ, into a staff job for their website. That’s where I learned most of what I know about being a magazine writer.
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