Looking back over my earlier posts, I do seem to spend a lot
of time and words carping about the status of the writing business. I think
it’s because I’m stuck with the memory of what it was 20 and 30 years ago, when
a freelancer could make a living working only 70 or 80 hours a week.
How to live with today’s five-dollar articles and
penny-a-word product descriptions?
If you can do an article off the top of your head in half an
hour, at five dollars per article you’re being paid at the just-above-minimum-wage
rate of ten dollars an hour. That’s THE RATE OF; you have to do it again to
actually earn ten dollars. And you have to do it all day every day to begin to
turn it into a living. I’d be interested to hear from people doing this
successfully.
I’ve conceded before that there has to be someplace for new
people to break in, and you’re not going to be paid reasonably until you’ve
shown what you can do. But looking up
the profiles of people I’m competing with, there’s some pretty heavy talent out
there. I haven’t been bidding entirely against penny-a-word beginners. So how
can prices be so low?
I guess it’s possible, what with the economy as it’s been
the past couple of years, that there may be a greater-than-usual number of hungry
writers around, good ones among them. But another possibility is that buyers
are going for the low bid, taking pot luck on the results; If I can get the message across, who cares? Sure, the mantra in work descriptions is
“perfect punctuation, grammar, and spelling,” but so what? You can lose all the
vowels in most written English words nd stll snd n ndrstndbl mssg.
While I can remember something of the Great Depression, I
don’t want to re-live it, and I don’t feel I want to come down to 1930s pay
rates. The result has been that searching the online job listings has changed
for me since I came back to freelancing two-and-a-half years ago. It’s gone from actually
looking for work to mostly collecting material for my blog about outrageously
low-paying job offers. It’s a great source of material. More to come.
