Writers Must Decide

The never ending controversy over the pay offered to freelance writers is often played out in forums and on subscription based writers’ email lists. I’ve been in the writing business a long time, and the one unchanging trend I’ve noticed is that writers’ compensation has steadily decreased in the last 20 years. This is true for book-length work from royalty-paying publishers to freelance writing for print and electronic media.

This blog post is aimed at those who aspire to be professional writers, not at someone who has a full-time job and dabbles in writing as a way to earn a few extra bucks. There’s a vast difference between the expectations of a professional and an amateur. I think a rift has arisen because many who started out as dabblers now consider themselves professional, but they don’t have the same professional expectations of writers who have been in the trenches for years. This may be one reason people write for writer mills and are happy to receive the small fees paid.

Old School

For those of us who have been around a long time, we feel forced to tilt at the windmill of better pay for writers. As professionals, we know how hard it is to craft an educational and entertaining article and present it articulately and compellingly to an audience whose attention is sought by Internet, TV, video games, books, periodicals, and more.

The Situation

Virtually no entertainment, from greeting cards to movies to websites to video games, would exist without writers yet we are the ones who end up with the smallest piece of the pie. Witness the Hollywood writers’ strike a couple of years ago. It was all about writers trying to get compensation for new media rights. What they wanted amounted to about a nickel from a DVD sale.If you haven’t watched Harlan Ellison’s rant, view it now because it’s the absolute, bottom-line truth.

10 Guidelines

For all of you who are trying to carve out a niche as a freelance writer, here’s a little advice that might help you understand why it’s a good thing that someone is critiques companies that use writers, as Angela Hoy did in the report she recently published about Demand Studios. We all need those who believe in the impossible dream of adequate compensation.

1. Don’t kill the messenger.

When someone critiques a company such as DS or any of the other writer mills, don’t feel compelled to launch an offensive on the person making the report.

2. Do feel compelled to read and analyze.

If your own experience is dissimilar, do your own fact checking to see if your experience is unique or the report is false. This is easy to do by creating a keyword phrase like “complaints about XYZ Inc.” and entering it in one of two search engines of your choice. It’s easy to find information if you truly want to discover the truth or falseness of a claim.

3. Don’t fail to read the Terms of Service.

No exceptions. For any business for whom you intend to write, know exactly to what you are agreeing, how it will be used, how and when you will be compensated, what rights you are selling, and how your private information will be used.

4. Do know what remedies are available to you if things go badly and always have a plan B.

5. Don’t accept rudeness from anyone.

Rudeness should not be tolerated, on either side, in professional writing relationships. A true professional knows how to critique in a way that helps the writer produce better copy. A pro editor wants to build a solid relationship with writers where respect is given on both sides of the desk.

6. Do meet rudeness, if you get it, with calm professionalism.

Every person, even freelance copy editors, have someone to whom they answer. Find out who that someone is and file a complaint about the person, but be sure you can back up your complaint with evidence other than hearsay. Keep a paper trail of correspondence and be ready to produce it.

7. Don’t let others make your decisions.

Read, research, and reflect. Draw your own conclusions. If Ima Writer says the company you write for sucks, don’t feel bad even if you personally agree. You have your own reasons for staying with them. If Ima Writer says they’re wonderful, but you don’t think so, don’t feel as if you have to persuade her to avoid them. She has her reasons.

8. Do make conscious choices about the clients for whom you’ll write.

If you choose to write for low pay, then acknowledge that it’s low pay and that you have valid reasons for doing it, but don’t try to convince others that it’s not low pay. Don’t deny the facts of the situation. Suck it up, do the best work you can, and look for better jobs.

Occasionally, there are times when all writers knowingly write for less than they should. They do this for many reasons from economic necessity to hoping it paves the way to a bigger job.

If your spouse is out of work, and you’re scrambling to just create some income, then you may take any job that comes along. Why? Because your ability to earn bucks supercedes the value of your time.

You may write for low pay because the client promises you a brass ring if you do X number of jobs at a low rate. Of course, we all know from experience that sometimes the client makes good on his promise, but sometimes he doesn’t. It’s a crap shoot. I know a lot of writers who have been disappointed with this scenario.

9. Don’t take it personally.

Life is too short to get bent out of shape over what other people say. Sticks and stones. When you read something that questions the integrity of a website or client for whom you’re writing, don’t take it as a personal insult to you and your decision to write for them. Again, your decisions are your own. The writing business is hard and competitive, and it can grind your soul to dust if you let it. Don’t let it.

10. Do learn how to write excellently.

On the Internet, writers in North America compete with writers from India and the Philippines where a buck an article for 100 articles is considered good pay. That writing though is sometimes not very good because idiomatic English is a skill not usually possessed by those who learn English as a second language.

For us in the U. S., compensation like that is not something we can live on, and I don’t truly believe anyone can turn out 100 well-written, researched articles in a week or less. You have to know from the get-go that you’re going to lose a lot of jobs to writers whose first language is not English because they’ll work for pennies an hour. The answer is not for you to attempt to do the same, but for you to polish your skills and become a consummate professional. You’ll get the higher paying jobs from clients who want excellent writing and who will respect your ability.

Takeaway Truth

If you want to call yourself a professional writer, use every writing job as a stepping stone to something better. To do this, you must be able to claim your writing. That means you need a byline on everything you write that’s published. In print writing, samples of work are “clips.” Use your clips or published work to create a portfolio of work to show prospective clients to get better jobs. You deserve adequate compensation.

Tags: business of writing, demand studios, rules for writing, writers, writers mills, writers strike