Do you think the recession is creating more competition for freelance writing jobs? Do we have any new members of this community as a result of recession layoffs? I’m still seeing a lot of freelance writing jobs, many paying a very good wage. Do you see the effects of the present economy on your freelance writing career?
Leads…
- Freelance Writers to Complete Books
- Outdoor/Climbing Blogger- $20/post
- Freelance Content Writer - Economics
- Freelance Writer for BrotherSpeak
- Freelance Investment Writers
- Freelance Newsletter Article Writer
- SEO Article Writer – Atlanta
- NASCAR Writers/Bloggers
- Writers Needed for Content Development Team – Austin
- Business Reporter - Austin/Telecommute
- Web Content Writer
- Fine Art/Art History Questions
- Grant Writer Wanted
- Book Editor
- Managing Editor - E-Newsletter
- Seeking Writer for Sales Letter
- Writers for New Urban Lifestyle Magazine
- Need Help with Query and Book Proposal
- Experienced Writer Needed
- Article Writer
- Freelance Blogger
- Writer for Diet Website
- Gaming Writer
- Business Plan Writer
- Educational Content Writer - $4000/project
- Grant Writer
Hope you have a great day! Lots of good luck to you all…
One thing I’ve noticed is that some of my best employers are announcing they have too many writers and not enough work. While I used to get jobs weekly from these companies, now I get work every two weeks.
I woke up this morning to two job offers. One was from a guy willing to pay $12 per article for a batch of 25 articles that had to be a minimum of 500 words, but he wanted the articles completed by this afternoon. Quite honestly, twenty-five 500 word articles is asking a lot from any one person and I told him so. His response was that he’d found someone who offered to do them and even for a lower rate. I just can’t compete with people like that.
The other offer offer was for 1/2 cent per word.
It’s days like these that make me think sometimes freelancing just isn’t worth it. But then I stop and think about how hard it is to find an outside job that would allow me to arrange my schedule around high school pick-up and drop-off times. While the school is working at finding a way to restore bus service, it’s not going to happen this year and the high school announced they are changing their school hours come fall. So I keep waiting for that golden opportunity to come my way.
I’ve been laid off since November from my steady freelance employer. They keep assuring me they love to work with me it’s just that they have barely enough work to keep the staff writers busy. Supposedly I’m first on the list for overflow work, but there isn’t any. I have found a couple of decent gigs since then (Thanks Deb!) but I’ve also passed over a few low paying offers like Anne mentioned.
The economy has hit my regular clients hard and they have taken what has been some very lucrative assignments over the past two years in-house. Another really good and regular client cut my per word fee in half. Since I love the work, the client, and need the business, I am still working for this client while we all ride out the economy.
What I have noticed is a lot more (brazen? cheap?) ill-informed people running ads because they think they can get really good, experienced writers for next to nothing–(like the previous 1/2 cent per word fee mentioned earlier.) I am not even interested in responding to these foolish offers
In my case, I know that my best business clients will need to advertaise and describe their products and value add propositions some time before the end of this year if they are going to generate new interest in upcoming or older producta, Therefore, I have every reason to believe this lull is only temporary. Until then, I have no desire or interest in giving my work away for free or next to nothing. I’ll work at Mickee-Dee’s before I work for a fraction of what the quality of my writing is worth.
I just count myself blessed to be in a position where the recession isn’t really hitting me.
However, I absolutely felt the crunch of the recession prior to our move. I went from making 65k a year to barely clearing 38k in the matter of 2 years, and had to double my hours-per-week just to make what I made in 2007.
I can’t speak from personal experience, but I deal with a lot of people from family and friends who are on all sides of the fence. I have a buddy who works for Microsoft as a contract technical writer, and he’s clearing upwards of 8k a month doing ridiculously low hours. He showed me a project that was published recently that took him two hours to complete and he got paid 800 USD for it. His co-workers are so swamped with work that they’ve been paying him as a sub-contractor to cover some of the slack they haven’t been able to cover.
But then I have my sister and her fiance, who went from comfortably enjoying 2-3 nights a week out at restaurants to making just enough to cover the house payments + maybe 1 or 2 weekends out per week. He works for the government in agriculture, so he’s making a good wage, but my sister had to find a new job about 5 or 6 months ago, and took a major pay cut.
We also have friends who are regularly making choices about which bills to pay on a monthly basis: do we pay the electric bill, take our sick kid to the doctor, or put a tank of gas in the car so we can get to work?
I was reading recently (about two weeks ago) that places like Monster.com and Careerbuilders.com had seen something like a 40% increase in hits during the month of February…from EMPLOYED people. People are so paranoid about losing their jobs that they are actively job-hunting even if they actually have present employment. I don’t know about everyone…but I think the majority of the public are absolutely feeling it.
As far as freelancers go…I spend about 1-2 hours per day browsing various jobs sites for things that are up my alley. I regularly see high-paying gigs for qualified candidates. If you mosey on over to the Men With Pens website you will see regular copywriters and freelancers who are charging upwards of 150-200 USD per hour…and regularly getting work. To be honest, the 21st century is the digital age. More and more jobs are getting pushed to the world-wide database, rather than just local. The US Post Office is debating whether or not to cut down mail delivery from 6 days a week to 5 days a week…because people are using paper mail less and less, and the cost of transportation is ridiculously high.
As people become more and more concerned with their carbon footprint and more people join the “green” bandwagon, jobs are being pushed to the internet. Regardless if you voted for him or not, the new U.S. President had something unique to say about the situation a couple of weeks ago, and I fully agree. It really doesn’t matter anymore where people live. The company who is looking to hire an IT guy may find that the kid from Dubai is more qualified than the kid who graduated from the college just around the block, and as long as the Internet is available…digital jobs are going to continue to flourish.
Honestly, I see more Freelance work than anything else. I see millions of people losing their jobs every month but more and more freelance/internet jobs continue to crop up. The downside is you see more and more content farming websites cropping up as well, preying on those individuals who are hurting so bad financially that they are willing to work for pennies. I’m sorry but writing a 1k word article for 1 dollar (we’ve all seen them) is ridiculous, but there are people out there who will do it. I think that’s definitely caused by the recession.
Also, it depends on where you live. I’m in a part of the world that has some of the lowest wages around. Bulgaria has the lowest wages in the European Union. The average wage here is comparable to Mexico…as in, the average Joe…the guy working the gas station register or at the grocery store, is only making about 400 USD per month. That being said, people here are not as “industrialized” as the Western world. They are slowly getting there, but they only joined the EU 2 years ago, and are still recovering from years of Communism. What that means is people here are not addicted to consumerism, so they aren’t feeling the bite of the recession as badly as Americans because they don’t have expensive addictions to feed, like the need for iPhones, an X-Box 360 + Wii + PS3 + 2 to 3 personal computers per household + an SUV + 500 channels on TV + a 50 inch widescreen + surround sound + the latest and best in everything.
In America people panic if they suddenly can’t afford to have cable TV, or an X-Box 360. In America, if you don’t have a flat-screen TV that’s over 45 inches, you are behind the times. Everyone has to have the biggest, the best, the brightest, the fastest. Up until about a year ago the SUV craze was just ridiculously. EVERYONE had to have an SUV. As a result, America has been hit the hardest because suddenly all of those things people have taken for granted over the years are becoming too expensive to maintain.
Now, for people over here, who aren’t addicted to those luxuries (and yes, they are luxuries. You don’t need an X-Box 360 to survive, and you don’t need 500 channels and a 50 inch TV to survive, or a giant SUV), despite the relatively low wage, they don’t suffer. Why? They aren’t blowing their money on ridiculously frivolous luxuries.
That’s not to say they don’t exist. My wife’s job (she’s in skin care…dermatology, but I don’t know her exact title because I always forget!) is fairly lucrative. She’s only part-time, still a student, and she’s only been there a year, but the girls she works with are mid 20′s to mid 30′s and are pulling in around 1500-2k Euro a month. If you have a degree and relevant work experience and work for a EU company or a foreign company you will make 35-40k USD per year…which is no different than the average US wage or the average Australian/UK wage. 40k USD is the median wage.
It just depends on where you live and if you can adapt. Something I never thought about when I was living high on the hog was growing my own fruits and vegetables. However, now that I’m not high on the hog, I take a lot of things into consideration. We recycle, we conserve energy as best we can to reduce our electric and heat bill. This winter we kept the heaters as low as possible and simply put more blankets on the bed, and wore sweaters in the house. Quite frankly I’d rather wear a sweater and slippers than pay an extra 200 or 300 dollars a month for heat/energy bills.
We also shop for groceries according to whether or not we can cook in “bulk”. We’ve actually reduced our grocery bill to around 200 USD a month for two people, and we eat healthy. I cook 3-4 nights a week, and the off-nights we have left-overs. I try to make dishes that make the most out of the groceries we buy so we aren’t being wasteful. We rarely go out to a restaurant because it’s a waste. Maybe once every 3 months, really only for special occasions. We do McDonalds once a month, and order pizza on Fridays.
My mentality has completely changed now that I’ve been away for over a year. I worry about the utility bill now, about making sure the lights get turned off if I’m not in the room. About recycling. I’m glad to live in the city because I don’t have to have a vehicle, and I can take public transportation everywhere. In the U.S. my truck payment was 300 USD a month, my insurance was 100 a month, and my gas payment in 2007 was upwards of 800 USD per month…it was costing me between 1200 and 1500 a month JUST to drive a vehicle in the States, and that was BEFORE gas prices skyrocketed in 2008. I would have spent over 2k a month just to be able to DRIVE if I was still back in the States.
We plant a lot of herbs and spices and put them on the balcony, so we don’t waste money buying them at the store. I literally just ran out of basil this week, and I’ve been using the same batch since last September when I dried it.
I rambled a bit here
My apologies. The point is…it’s all dependent on where you live, how many mouths you have to feed, and whether or not your family can cut back on consumption. Whatever happened to kids playing baseball or riding their bikes through the neighborhood? Instead, most American families are reliant on forms of entertainment that cost hundreds of dollars per month to keep their kids occupied. Necessary? I think not.
There is definitely more competition now. I used to get responses to about 50% of the jobs I applied to and my acceptance rate was 10-25%. Now, I`ve applied to about a hundred gigs in the past month and not a single bite.
I`m having the same issues with some of my clients in that they are slowing things down, so gigs I had before are no longer as lucrative.
However, I`m with Anderson . . . I live in Guatemala, so we get by on a lot less than the average American. My family of four lives in a 3 room home that is less than 200 square feet and we eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies that are dirt cheap in the market. Lifestyle counts!
I have been laid off from a company I fulfilled many roles for (editor, writer, producer, manager, etc.) since November; I worked for them for about four years, straight out of college. I decided to try freelancing since then; it’s not been easy, and we have had to cut a lot.
TW…you are generalizing a bit there! NONE of my family or friends own an SUV, giant flat-screen TV, or any of those other “necessities” you mentioned. I am quite content with my simple life, and so are many, MANY other Americans. I lived in Asia (with my husband and two kids, and NOT on a military base, by the way) for three years and I would never think to generalize about Asians. So please…think before you write!
My husband lost his job due to the economy. We are barely making ends meet. We are thankful our 10-year old minivan still runs well. We are thankful our kids are in good schools. I am thankful that I still have plenty of well-paying freelance work!
I started doing freelance writing because I am out of work. I used to work for a notic to owner firm in florida. I left that job because no work was coming in. I am actually glad I left because of the stress. We had to meet deadlines, can’t hold the work to long. Only 45 days on the job to notice. My sister knows someone in PR, and she gave me some releases to write. So that is how I got started, due to the recession. I got luck and also due writing for a local magazine in florida. I feel that alot of people started doing freelance because of the recession.
I was making cold calls today, and all of my promising leads had or were in the process of cutting their publications and using in-house writers instead. Not good.
I think it’s pretty much bad all over. Even though the leads continue to show, there’s also a rising number of companies who are cutting hours, reducing staff, or asking employees to take a pay cut. Nearly everyone is feeling the pinch.
@ AprilMay: It was absolutely a generalization. You may not agree with me, but that is neither here nor there
My cousin serves in the Air Force and was stationed in Japan for nearly 6 years and my aunt and uncle were in shock when they went to visit him because of how much his views had changed. I didn’t really understand until I went through the transition myself. As someone who has lived overseas yourself I’m sure you can see the distinction. Generalization is not wrong, it’s simply summarizing. Whether or not people fall into the category isn’t really relevant, because generalizations categorize the majority, the average, the “normal” person. And statistically the generalizations I made are true, nation-wide. I’m not just pulling random theories out of thin-air…I’ve actually had the honor of publishing a series of articles about these topics. Most recently I covered a series of articles specifically regarding the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia and the direct results of the “normal” citizen’s wages, consumptions, and cost of living due to non-necessities, and the direct correlation with the record-breaking immigration numbers of people fleeing the U.S. and the U.K. to Canada and Australia due to more jobs, higher wages, and lower costs of living. Some people get offended by blanket generalizations but they are nothing more than a way to represent the average, normal, everyday person.
However, people are seriously curbing their spending habits and downsizing houses/etc over the past year or so due to job losses, pay cuts, and rising unemployment rates. So the demographics are beginning to change.
I truly feel for people who have children and find themselves in a position where one of the spouses is suddenly without work. We have close friends who have had to make seriously drastic decisions in the last year or so because of lost jobs and reduced hours at work combined with the rising cost of living. It’s not a pretty picture out there, no matter what kind of paint you use to color it.
I think it is a mixed bag. On one hand the economy is hitting everyone hard and employers need to seriously consider how much they can pay. On the other hand, I think some employers are trying to save money by hiring freelancers instead of full-time employees – which is good news for freelancers, not so good for those looking for full-time work.
Like Genesis said, I definitely had a better hit rate on my applications in years past than I do now. I think there are just so many qualified folks looking for writing gigs these days, even if the number of jobs available is about the same, there is more competition. Given the current unstable nature of “traditional” print media, with magazines and newspapers folding all the time, some well-paying markets are disappearing and being replaced by lower paying, but more pervasive, online markets.
@ Lori: That’s something that I specifically covered in one of my UK-to-Australia articles. The numbers for 2008 indicated a 32% increase in immigration from the UK to Australia. We’re talking several hundred thousand migrants over 2007. The main reasons?
Australia offers a lower cost of living but similar, if not better, wages. In the UK people are not only struggling to find jobs, but there is so much competition for jobs that it makes it almost impossible to find one because there is an over-abundance of qualified candidates. Furthermore, the number of jobs that have salaries high enough to balance out the increased cost of living are relatively few in number, and the competition for those jobs is even fiercer than your average job. By comparison, Australia offers less competition for jobs, similar wages, more opportunities for growth, a stable employment rate and relatively stable economy, and the cost of living is anywhere from 30 to 50% LOWER than it is in the UK. They are expecting the numbers from 2008 to rise an additional 50% or more for the 2009 year, but because of all the jobs available, Australia is one of those countries welcoming immigrants with open arms because there are plenty of jobs to be had and they welcome the cultural diversity and economic growth.
That’s just one country. It’s an interesting topic, and one I’m going to be covering in my blog in the coming months, but with the Western economies failing drastically, countries who have in the past been the red-headed step children of the “industrialized” nations are now becoming the flagship countries of opportunity, similar to what the U.S. and U.K. went through in their past. The thing with print media is that yes, it’s going out of business. More and more magazines and newspapers fold every day, or they transfer everything to on-line. Jobs that previously went to people working in an office are going to people from anywhere in the globe, and for far lower rates, because as an employer you don’t have to deal with taxes for a subcontractor, and if that subcontractor is from, say, India, or New Zealand, and they are more qualified than the person who used to take up desk space and required Social Security, Unemployment tax, FICA, and all the other taxes required by an employer to hire a citizen to work for them as an employee…well you can see how the picture goes from there.
There’s no such thing as “local” anymore. People need to stop thinking of things in terms of countries, because those borders went down the moment the Internet became global. Anyone with an Internet connection has access to jobs these days, not just people from a local area. I think people are just now starting to realize the implications of this, and one of the downsides is that it’s transferring the work force of yesterday–the cubicle-driven workforce who required miles of paperwork and taxes and insurance–into the workforce of tomorrow, which is the streamlined world-wide database of potential employees who are willing to work for far less than an American citizen (for example).
While I can understand the frustration of someone marketing a 1k word article @ 1 dollar, you have to realize that for a lot of people out there 1 dollar can represent far more than it does to a U.K. or U.S. resident. And while I also agree with the sentiment that it’s important to make sure that fair standards exist and that writers are paid fairly, I can also see the other side of the page, which is simply this: if a guy in India (persay) is just as qualified to do the job as I am, but he is willing to do it for 1 dollar because to him 1 dollar is worth (for example) 15 of my dollars…I really can’t stand in the way and do anything about it because he is just as qualified.
Call it “end times” or whatever you want, but I really think a global currency is the only way to fix it. We’re a long way away from that, but it’s what it will come to eventually. As the borders of countries evaporate with the expansion of the digital world, communication boundaries are no longer an issue, and the employee pool is suddenly expanded from your own country to the entire globe…and there are a *lot* of people out there willing to do the work to put food on the table for their families.
My very favorite (not to mention best paying) client hasn’t had any steady work for me since December. She used to keep me hopping. I just heard from her today with a small assignment and hopes that at the end of the summer things will pick back up. I found her thanks to Jodee and Deb and I love working for her. I’m applying like mad to other things to supplement our income while my favorite client rides out this dry spell. I write grants in addition to the usual blogs, press releases, etc. Grant writing has picked up in the last six months, I’d say so that’s a good thing.
The jobs are slowing down – but from what I here this is not unusual for online work at the first of the year (I blame it on tax season). I’m still picking up some steady work but we are tapping into our reserves at this time to get us through the push.
Struggling to GET jobs makes me want to create my own opportunities. It seems that the more control I have over my income then the better off my situation will be no matter what happens with the economy.
@ T.W – although many of the people that I know DO drive SUVs it is because of the need for more seats (larger families) and power (to work on the farm or haul items). I don’t know a single person with a 45 inch flat screen tv. And we NEED more than one car because of where we live (no public transportation). Sometimes things that seem like a luxury to one person is actually a need for another. It depends on where you live and what your day to day life requires. A farmer NEEDS a truck. A large family NEEDS a large vehicle. Someone working online NEEDS cable or highspeed internet.
I fully agree with the concept being creating your own opportunities. I’ve always been a self-driven individual, and I’m always looking for ways to expand.
For example, at present my wife and I are expressing interest in producing a magazine for our region of the globe. There aren’t any here in the nature (other than two publications) of what we are looking to pursue. Will it generate tons of cash? We aren’t sure, but if we can get an extra 500-1k a month from it, it’ll be worth it. And so far the prospects are looking good. We’re planning on spending the summer putting things together and then launching in the fall with a quarterly publication to start, and then see where it goes from there.
However, any business can fall to the pressures of global recession, and any investment is a risk. But considering we are doing all of the footwork and content generation on our own the only costs we will have are going to be production and marketing costs, which makes it a relatively low risk venture with the chance for a small profit. At the very least we should break even because the initial investment won’t have been much in the monetary department, only time. And since the time we plan on working on it is what we consider a hobby, it’s not really “work” per-say. Coupled with that is we have an investor who would be willing to front the money for production/marketing costs, so we won’t be out a dime in the long run if we decide to pursue it with any real vision.
I’m 29 years old. The only job I’ve ever had outside of working for my old man was when I was 16 years old and worked at Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Wendy’s for about the course of a year. I’ve been self employed since I was 21 years old. I absolutely believe in making your own way through the world, not relying on other people or random opportunities. By doing it on your own you control all the elements (within reason! Random things can crop up from time to time!) and be relatively sure of the outcome.
Struggling to get a job is extremely frustrating. I went through it last year because I was just starting out and I had A) no relative experience; B) no college education; C) no high school diploma; and D) only a small clue of how to go about doing what needed to be done.
Here I am a year and a couple months later and I’ve got a healthy work flow coming in, I’m continuing to build up my client base, I’m selling more short stories, and my business plan is about 95% on track. However, I’m also not shooting for the moon. I don’t bother applying for the 50 dollars per hour or greater articles/jobs because I know my relevant experience isn’t going to cut it. I get jobs that fall into the 15-25 dollar-per-hour range, and I’m happy with it. I make what I need to make, and that’s that. Would I like to get those 50 dollar an hour jobs? You betcha…but I’ll wait until next year to apply for those, when I’ve got 2 years under my belt and a larger list of clients.
The downside is that horror stories like what many people post here are not limited to just the freelance community. Employers are cutting costs at every corner…from hiring people who are willing to work at a reduced rate, to cutting staff, to reducing hours, to completely shutting down branches of business. It’s affecting everyone. And I seriously doubt it’s going to get any better over the course of 2009. Hopefully things will start to turn around by the end of the year but it’s going to take time. The new administration can’t just wave a magical wand and magically make things change. It’ll take time, and that means people have to be patient.
The downside is, not everyone can afford to be patient. Some people have kids to feed, and not everyone lives in an area where they can realistically cut things out, like driving. We have a friend in California who has parked one of their cars in the garage for the past 15 months and has been scheduling all of her grocery store trips + getting to work in time with her husband’s schedule. PLUS scheduling in picking up the kids from school. Not an easy task, but they can’t afford to put gas in two vehicles right now, and they don’t live in an area where public transportation is a reality.
I’ve not had any cuts (Thank God) in my freelance work from the recession. But I have seen expansion or opportunities for growth stalled in their tracks.
One company really seems to like what I write, but they can’t allow me an additional opportunity until the economy improves. They already had some things in development, and were not allowing anything new beyond that to start up. That extra opportunity would make a siginificant difference in my income for my household.
As it is, the opportunity I have with them is great and otherwise, has fairly generous limits. So I’m pleased to stay with them for as far as the eye can see producing great work. I’m hopeful that when the economy turns, they will have seen my body of work and welcome the idea of expanding with me again.
Another one had some extra work that they were going to take in-house to launch this new “product” on track and without expanding their budget. When this launches, I am well set to see an increase in my pay because it is an info-product (sort of) and we will all benefit from increased sales. But the extra job to help it launch was no longer mine.
If I can just stay steady right now, I’d be happy as a clam. Of course, I want to get more work where possible, especially since my youngest will be in school next year.
I think my husband believes I need to be working out in a full time job next year because I’m “not getting rich” doing this writing. Despite the circumstances, I’m bound and determined to prove him wrong. Not that much to pick from in my community that I would be qualified for and would be that much better than taking the fullest advantage of the oppportunities I have now.
The flexibility this year has been invaluable. Ten weeks in a row (including this one) of people in my house being down with illness and gone from school or work. I would have been certainly fired if I were full-time employed outside the home, even part-time. Way too many sick days. But I was able to keep chugging along with my freelancing, “getting rich” or not.
I don’t think my freelancing career could have come at a more important time for our family! It will get better and I won’t give up! Never give up!
I believe that I felt my first repercussions this week. I lost one of my clients due to not enough revenue and cost cutting. I think that it will really depend upon the type of clients/work that one has. In this particular case, it was for two retail websites, one that sells satellite radio supplies and one that sells home decor–pretty nonessential consumer goods that are likely going to take a hit in a recession. To be fair, I’d kind of been expecting that to happen because it seemed my weekly articles/blogs were far surpassing the pace that the sites were updated, so perhaps it wasn’t economy-related. However, I’m sure the recession didn’t help.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t think that the recession would affect web content that much. In fact, I could see it having the opposite effect–more people at home searching for work and information on the web, more traffic to be driven.
I’m new to the freelance world. In fact, the loss of my previous job was the catalyst that drove me to start freelancing in the first place, something I’d been talking about doing but had never followed through on. I’ve got a couple of regular clients, and they’ve been my lifeblood, but finding additional work has been slow going. I attribute that to my lack of experience. One of my clients, a market research firm, claims they’ve seen an increase in business because it’s cheaper for companies to outsource the work to them than to pay people to do it in house. That being said, I’ve noticed even their workload has slowed down.
I think freelancers are rather in the same boat as temp workers. They will flourish if it’s cheaper for companies to outsource the work. All I can say right now is, Thank goodness my wife is earning enough to pay most of the bills.
Deb, et al, just a note on the first job lead: Atlantic Publishing will pay you the amazing sum of $1,100 for a 289-page book, with all research, art, case studies etc. completed by you, the author. They will then engage in roughly six months of revisions – which you are required to make even if they seem silly or senseless. I speak from experience: see my book on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Green-Your-Home-Complete-Environmentally/dp/160138128X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227567555&sr=1-1). Not bragging, just providing proof that I know whereof I speak.
I’m glad that Austin ad asking for content writers was flagged. It’s for a MySpace project, which pays you in AmEx gift cards versus cash.