Working off Paula Hendrickson’s post yesterday, I want ask: when you left that 9-to-5 or opted to leap straight from school into freelancing, how well did you weigh that decision? If you were leaving a full-time job, you probably spent more time considering the things you’d lose – 401(k), paid vacations, paid health care, paid sick days. I bet you didn’t even consider that you’d be leaving behind raises and bonuses, did you? No, neither did I. While a few writers have reported the happy news that they’ve received bonuses, it’s a pretty rare commodity. Yet what’s most disturbing to me is the set-in-stone pay scale.
Paula’s post yesterday said this:
“One magazine I’ve been a regular contributor to for over six years started out paying writers an okay 25-cents per word. Now they assign me 800-1,000 word stories for $200, and they encourage me to “write long.” So six years later, I’m making the same if not LESS that I did in 1991, and that’s only after I berated them to upping my pay from $175 to $200 per article! (And now I’m submitting articles electronically, so they save time not having to key in my work.)
…It’s true some publishers believe writers are a dime a dozen (and at 10-cents a word, they may be right). One editor even admitted so much to me when I was bold enough to ask why I hadn’t been paid for $1,000 worth of already published articles.
Unfortunately this is perhaps the one industry where ‘you get what you pay for’ doesn’t ring true; even writers with several years’ experience and numerous national clips often get below-poverty-level pay. Since 1991 I’ve sold over 140 articles, most of them to national publications, yet less than two months ago I had an editor tell me she pays 10-15-cents per word, depending on her budget, but it usually comes out to be 13-cents per word. Oh yeah, no by-line either. And they want professionals.”
For me personally, pays have not increased, and in some cases have decreased. Employers may argue we have no overhead, we get to work in our pajamas, we save commute time and dollars, but that was so 50 years ago, too. The only difference is we work in our pajamas because now we can’t afford actual clothes thanks to cost-of-living increases that are not offset by pay increases.
We try to combat this by setting our own rates. That works well until you get to magazines. Magazines don’t necessarily accept your rates – they tell you theirs. We’ve accepted that business model much too long, but with print publications heading toward extinction, we don’t have much bargaining power.
One thing Paula says that sticks out to me: “…even writers with several years’ experience and numerous national clips often get below-poverty-level pay.” There’s the problem. Writers look on this pay as something they get not something they earn. Meaning this: if instead they saw the pay and said, “No way” how would that change the pricing structure? Too often writers will take what’s offered with minimal thought or negotiation. That has to stop.
So how can we stop it?
Lori, you said it yourself. "We try to combat this by setting our own rates. That works well until you get to magazines."
That's precisely why I don't write for magazines, with one exception. I have one gig writing executive profiles that works out to about $150-$200 an hour because I can work so quickly. But other than that, magazines are simply not worth my time. All my other work is niche-specific copy, and if someone doesn't want to pay my rates, I just move on to the next prospect.
Since I only worked in the 9-5 world as a temp, learning early that I could not function well in an office environment, I never had to give up perks.
We don't get bonuses in theatre; we do get raises, as per our union contract, but they are under the cost of living most of the time.
What we get to do is pick and choose our clients. We get to look at a publication; if we're passionate about it, they treat us well, and, in the big picture, working for them serves the overall career, there's wiggle room in the rate to a certain extent, for a short period of time.
If a client offers a rate we don't like and we feel there's not enough outside of the money to make it worth our while, we don't take the gig.
We need to stop buying into the mind-set that because print publications are struggling, we have to play by their rules. One of the reasons they're struggling is because the content has gone so far downhill because they're not always hiring the best people, and their subscribers feel the publication is no longer a necessity.
Let those publications fail. Let new, inventive publications rise out of the ashes, publications that offer outstanding content and treat their writers well.
It's cyclical. It takes time, but it will happen.
I'm delighted that there are lots of people who love niche-specific work. That means I don't have to worry about it, and I just hunt down and land assignments in a variety of fields that interest me.
I weigh each opportunity individually across a wide range of factors, and I see how it fits in with my overall vision of my Body of Work.
Everytime I've made a decison based SOLELY on finanical factors, either positive or negative, I've regretted it.
That doesn't mean working for crap rate, but it means seeing how every single project fits into your overeall career.
One reason I said "get" instead of "earn" is because every writer I know puts in enough effort to earn far more than what we're paid.
I wish there were a way to enforce union pay rates for writers. Other unions have real power – a threat to cease work carries more weight for teachers, autoworkers, etc… In writing, publishers just go out and find one of those people willing to work for pennies on the dollar, which drives down rates for all writers. It's a twisted cyclical thing.
Even copywriters' incomes are being jeopardized by the plethora of bidding sites. Not all businesses will go with the lowest bidder, but desperately low bids still bring down the average amount those businesses will be willing to pay.
I really like Devon's last sentence, above: "That doesn't mean working for crap rate, but it means seeing how every single project fits into your overeall career."
That's definitely what I try to bear in mind each and every day.
Unfortunately, freelancers gotta … free. Editors know there's a dozen people within cat-swing who will do the job for pennies, and it doesn't seem to matter that what you get for nothing is nothing. I know one editor who spent a year doing multiple rewrites on a dreadful writer's work rather than pay more for someone who could actually do the job — perhaps it's their insecurities we're fighting against, not our own.
In any case, creatives seem to be dealt with as "oh I suppose we have to use you, but you're the bottom of the pay stack, so get used to it." Actors in town will work for peanuts (almost literally) just for a chance to act. I stunned a musician I'd asked to play in a show I was producing when I said, "And we'll pay you."
It seems the only artistic people who get away with asking for, and receiving, respectful rates are designers. Let's ask them how they do it.