Are Writers the New Slave?
November 21, 2007 by Deb Ng
Filed under Freelance Writing
Here’s some fodder for discussion:
Markus Mertz has a post up at Performancing asking if writers are the new slaves. He quotes an ad where the blogger is expected to write five posts per day for $55 a month.
As you know, this is something I can go on about forever. If you wish to discuss freelance wages (and I know you do), do stop by Performancing and add your two cents.
That was a really good post. Now I feel like an idiot too.
It’s funny, when I am writing articles I know when a job pays lousy and don’t even consider it.
With blogging it is different. I finally got a job blogging for an actual blog network but it only pays $10 a month plus extra per 1000 page views. At the time I was excited because it was a blog network so I felt official.
Now I am wondering what in the world I agreed to. I guess it has potential, but for the time I put in I could be making money now instead of waiting until my page views build up.
At times I feel like I need to jump at everything just to build my earnings. It is hard to wait for gigs that pay reasonably and then hope I get it. I guess I just lack patience.
I totally agree, writers are the new slaves!
It’s also getting more common that people post ads and expect free writing services without so much as a please or a thank you.
I have stumbled upon several of these over the past few weeks where the poster requests a writer should have excellent writing ability and success meeting tight deadlines. Now here’s the catch… “This is a non paying position.”
Some don’t even offer a byline or freelance exposure. Do we become writers on a ‘FREE’lance basis just to help others make financial profit out of our hard work?
Okay, rant over
Kathleen,
I have just read your post. I would look around for something better if you feel it’s a waste of time. Then put it down to experience.
Good luck!
Another problem I see with the low-paying jobs is, if you take one, you’re taking away time you could be spending to find higher paying jobs.
But it could also result in exposure or clips in an area that you might not otherwise be able to get … it’s a tough call sometimes.
Shell
I have been considering that. But then I feel guilty for not following through. I should have thought it out before I jumped on the job.
It’s funny how I get so annoyed looking at bidding sites that want articles for $2 and then I do something just as silly.
Live and learn I guess. Once I get to a point where I can support my family I won’t feel like I need to jump on every job I see.
Kathleen,
You and I must have just joined the same blog network. I made a whopping $2.50 for my first two weeks working there. It’s taking up way more time to write up each post too, because they have certain guidelines you have to follow for each post in order to get paid. Like you, I joined it because I was finally happy to land a paying blog job, but as my husband says, “the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
Deb,
I came across a Craig’s List ad the other day that made me sick to my stomach. A local family publication was looking for a writer to write restaurant reviews of family friendly restaurants for $20 per review. It read as if the whole family was supposed to go to get an idea of how family-friendly the place was. Here’s the kicker — no expenses were reimbursed. So basically, the writer would have been paying them to write the review. WTF???
It is really sad how many people look at us as “just a writer”. Seems I was reading another post about this issue recently. Teflon Brain Syndrome prevents me from remembering where.
As someone mentioned in the Flakey Freelancers post, I think most freelancers work harder than some at traditional jobs because time is money. So why is that hard work so often rewarded with just peanuts if that?
I don’t want to be a rich-and-famous writer. I just want to pay the bills.
My first writing job (almost a year ago, w00t!) was blogging. I started at over $200/month for 35 posts a month. I’ve got another one now that pays more, but I still do that one because I enjoy the topic. I also do some magazine stuff, but have made a more steady (second) income with blogging.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to replace my original job with writing, but I’d prolly be willing to giver ‘er a go!
I don’t agree that writer’s are the new slaves. Seriously, a slave has no freedom. No choice. People who write for next to nothing choose to do it.
No one is forced to apply for a job that pays poorly. I know that everyone has a different definition of what poor paying is. For some people, if they can average $10/hour writing, it truly is more than they could earn working outside the home. For others, $10/hour is unacceptable. It would seem to most of us that $55/month for the amount of work asked in this ad would be unacceptable to everyone. But apparently, it’s not. The person who accpets this job is not a slave. Perhaps he or she is inexperienced, desperate for clips or money, or uneducated about finding better work. But a slave, no.
We get so up in arms about people who offer low paying jobs. I think it’s a waste of our time and energy. Don’t apply to the jobs. Educate and mentor newbie writers about how to find higher paying jobs (which Deb does all the time – thank you!). Get on with your work.
Oh, and now that I’m done ranting – Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I don’t think the writer meant slave in an old fashioned sense, it was just used as a general term.
Writers can refuse such low paying gigs and frankly ignore them. However, there are some people who are desperate to make a living and may accept such low payment. Perhaps someone was made redundant and needs to fill a gap, or may be a person has left college and needs experience. In a sense, some people don’t have much choice while others do.
I think it is more of a case that writers can be easily exploited.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that some writers accept the low-paying gigs. I know it’s difficult to find steady work but we need to be strong enough to stick together and refuse to work for next to nothing.
I was thinking that offers should be at least minimum wage. However, minimum wage in one area is a lot of money in another and vice-versa.
Though anyone who would agree to the rates that were posted should seriously think about another line of work, rates have definitely gone down.
A few years ago, I heard on a radio report that in the 1960s a writer for Good Housekeeping or a similar pub made $5 a word in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Granted, speed of such writing was limited by the equipment of the day — I would be starving if still using a manual typewriter like the ones I used in high school — but even $1 a word gigs are few and far between.
Some people have posted here before that they write up to 10,000 words a day. If someone can produce that fast, some of the low-paying items might be OK. But burnout/carpal tunnel is a real concern at that level.
Personally, I find 250 words an hour is the maximum speed I should plan on. I can exceed it at times, but that rate figures on interviews taking up part of the hour and actual typing taking up only a short amount of time. Even at that rate, I don’t expect to write 2,000 words each and every day. I’m a writer, not a typist.
“Slavery” can be avoided by constantly increasing rates and looking for better paying clients.
Tammi said exactly what I was going to. As long as writers keep accepting jobs that pay nothing, editors and publishers will refuse to pay more.
I agree with you Phil. I have also suffered from RSI (repetitive strain injury). Years ago in my late teens, I was in fact a typist!
As a writer, I believe in quality over quantity. That is what good writing is all about. You’ve got to give yourself time to think and plan a good article, not just type anything that comes from the top of your head and then relay it in gibberish fashion.
Phil’s point about words per hour or day was interesting.
It reminded me of something I had read in Larry W. Phillips “Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” So I went back to look it up:
“I loved to write very much and was never happier than doing it. Charlie’s (Scribner’s) ridiculing of my daily word count was because he did not understand me or writing especially well nor could now how happy one felt to have put down properly 422 words as you wanted them to be.
And days of 1200 or 2700 were something that made you happier than you could believe.
I found that 400 to 600 well done was a pace I could hold much better and was always happy with that number. But if I only had 320 I felt good.”
Page 56: “Letter to Maxwell Perkins, 1944.”
Link to the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Ernest-Hemingway-Writing-Larry-Phillips/dp/0684854295/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195665189&sr=1-3
What do you all think of the Helium Marketplace. Basically, publishers can request specific articles. Hundreds of people try to writer that article. Then the publisher picks the best and that person gets paid the $20-$200 the publisher is willing to pay for it. Sounds like a great deal for publishers, horrible deal for writers.
Yeah, I about died when b5media told me they were paying $50 per month plus $1.65 per 1000 page views for 6 articles per week (they recommended writing two posts per day). I pay my own bloggers $10 per post.
Danielle, about Helium. I did a rant about this recently at one of my blogs. See Bursting the Helium Bubble – This Freelance Writer’s Review of Helium.com.
Regarding Helium, I have a similar issue with the classified ads for ehow/Demand Studios that have been cropping up everywhere. They say they pay $100 to $250 per assignment, but fail to mention that an “assignment” is a group of about 10 articles. So we’re basically talking about $10 an article, which could easily net down to below minimum wage if you take the time to follow all their formatting suggestions and templates. I personally cannot crank out quality work in less than an hour!
Yep, I got one of those eHow offers this morning. $150 for 10 articles, 400 words minimum each, with a whole long list of instructions. Early in my freelance life I might have said yes because I would have been looking at the dollars, but considering what I can get paid for writing 4000 words now . . . I wrote back to say the pay is unacceptable, sorry.
I’m surprised so many writers find the Demand Studios gig unacceptable. That just goes to show how important perception is when it comes to which pay rates are and aren’t acceptable to an individual.
I recently completed my first assignment for Demand Studios, and it was the easiest writing experience ever. Once you read the instructions carefully and understand them (which isn’t that difficult, by the way, particularly if you’re already experienced with writing for the Web), completing the so-called eHow “articles” is actually a breeze. The more you know about the topics you checked off on the application, the easier it becomes.
The posts at eHow.com amount to little more than lists of five or so steps, with a brief introduction and an optional brief closing. I come up with topics while I’m watching TV, grocery shopping, riding the bus, using the bathroom, eating, etcetera. Then, I spit out the main text, fattening short steps with relevant clarifications.
I completed the ten “articles” in my audition assignment in less than one day. Yes, the uploading process is a pain because of all the different boxes you have to cut and paste into. But, even that goes faster once you get into the swing of it.
The pay was definitely worth the time spent–there’s no complaints at all from this writer. Now that I’m past the first hurdle, I can also write about whatever I want, within the guidelines, of course. Sounds good to me.
When we first started in this business, we took a lot of low paying jobs because we were new, needed to build a reputation and didn’t think we’d be able to get any work by charging the rates we really wanted to charge. It did help us to build a client base, but also locked us into low rates on work we eventually found to be labor intensive.
We’re still learning and it’s tricky. Now that we have experience, and the credibility that goes along with it, we’re getting closer to the ideal rate for us.
Many of the blog writing gigs offered are glorified SEO positions. I fail to see how that model can advance anyone’s writing career. If you’re going to blog. Blog for yourself and provide links to orignal clips an editor might actually want to read. Rather than show how you can dutifully conform to someone elses expectations of executing an online marketing plan.
This is probably not immediately relevant here, but I am wondering how many of you have either writing qualifications such as a journalism degree or diploma, or how many of you have been published in major print publications such as newspapers, or magazines with a high circulation.
I don’t believe writers are the new slaves, but I do believe that there are a great deal of people who now want to make their living from writing and who don’t think they need experience, qualifications, or real skills. Those are the people who take the $2 SEO jobs, and low paid blogging jobs.
The reality is that you can easily set up a website of your own, place ad units on it, and make your own income stream. I don’t even look to write for other people anymore because writing for myself is infinitely more lucrative and provides an ongoing income stream.
I now see blogging jobs as being suckers of my potential earnings, for a measly couple of dollars I hand over my work, my ideas, to someone else who makes many times what they paid for them. It makes no sense to do that.
Not to wave the xenophobia flag too vigorously, but the flattened earth is likely to depress pricing in an unexpected way. I’m a modestly successful freelance writer – by-lined, established business – who recently saw the writing on the wall, so to speak, in the form of an unsolicited email from an Indian company offering “low cost writing services.” It promised filler articles on any subject with a day’s notice, and quoted teaser rates of 20-CENTS per page. “Page” was not defined, but I rather doubt they were alluding to dull nibs and longhand on Post-it® notes.
In effect, editor’s will now be able to supply an already dumbed down American reading public with pure dreck cranked out by English-speaking foreigners who (likely) have no direct experience with the subject matter as it may relate to current/local events, geography, climate, regional jargon and idiosyncrasies, etc.
This should go over big during the writer’s strike. If Leno’s monologue suddenly fills with cattle and curry jokes, you’ll know where he bought them.
I write extensively for Associated Content. When I was churning out several articles a day, I was getting about $200 a month. It wasn’t much, but I was building an online portfolio to connect me with higher paying publishers. Now I get around $55 a month, give or take, just for sitting on my rear end. I can’t imagine working full time for that amount.
Now I write for Demand Studios. I can typically make around $800 or so on that site per month if I keep pushing out the articles. Given the hours I put in to create quality work, it isn’t exactly a high wage. But I enjoy what I do and I can work from the comfort of my home. It’s priceless not having to stick my poor kids in day care.