And the madness continues.
In a slow month in which I’m poised to earn over $10K, there is still proof that some job posters think that writing is a fire-sale endeavor. Thanks to my chum Sharon Hurley Hall, I was alerted to this job. Well, let’s not call it a job. It’s more of a “huh?” moment.
I’d love to show you this ad. Really I would. However, something incredibly disturbing happened on the way to the link — it’s gone. That means one thing:
Some writer took that awful job.
So here’s the entirety of this installment of This Job Not That Job:
Paying $45 for 1500 Word Articles
Seriously, that’s enough.
Usually, we go through these gigs and ferret out the parts that suck. With this one, we don’t have to go beyond the subject line. For 1500 words, even if it’s writing without research or interviews, you’re getting $45. That’s all. Having written enough 1500-word pieces, I know they take time. They take a few hours at best. So let’s assume this is a topic that requires three hours of your time. Divide that $45 by three hours and your hourly rate is….
That’s right. You’re now making what someone working at Amazon makes.
You, my writerly friend, can do better. Try something like this:
Scrap
A publication of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc., Scrap provides news, features and resources for scrap recyclers.
Pay: $800-1200 for features.
Writers, how low would you go in terms of payment?
What needs to be there for it to work for you at a lower rate?
5 responses to “Freelance Follies: This Job, Not That Job”
Oh, ffs.
How low would I go? As you did, Lori, in evaluating that crappy job, I think writers have to look at their hourly rate.
I have a client for which I write seven 750-1,000 articles a month–been doing it since 2008; he’s my longest-term client–and I get paid $2,147. Sounds low. It’s not.
I have a great system for these articles. I interview four sources, each for a half hour, who speak to all seven topics. So that’s two hours. Maybe add another hour for finding and arranging interviews with the sources. Then it takes me a day to write all the articles and about more two hours to proof them.
So that’s two business days max on this work at more than $1K per day, which roughs out to well over $100 per hour.
What needs to be there to take a lower rate? Great systems. If you’ve been at this a while and have great systems that allow you to work really, really efficiently, you can entertain offers that don’t, on their face, hit that $1 per word writing baseline most people use.
By the way, I took that client three years after I began freelancing, and I took it after turning the guy down first. He offered me too little. I stuck to my guns and politely told him I couldn’t take such low pay (I don’t even remember what it was at the time). A few months after I turned him down, he came back and said he’d pay me what I asked. It was lower than I’d wanted at the time, but I thought I could do the work efficiently, and I saw value in having regular, monthly work instead of chasing one-off assignments.
Best decision I ever made. Over the past 13 years, he’s broadened the work he gives me. I also moderate a monthly webinar for him, for which I also have a great system to get the work done. I choose the topics, find two panelists from among the sources I’ve cultivated over the past 13 years, and then moderate the hour-long webinar. About three hours of my time, for which I earn $600. I oversee another writer’s work for that client for $150 a month. Takes an hour to review her proposed topics and review the turned-in copy to provide feedback.
Long story short, I’ve earned more than $300K from this guy (much more, but that’s using a $2k per month baseline for 13 years). I was able to do that by sticking to my guns on my value and creating great systems.
On the straight-up word-count articles, my lowest is $1 per word.
How low would I go? Hard to say. But it ain’t $15 an hour. Sheesh.
P.S. Sorry for the long-winded example, but you got me going on this Monday morning!
Gabriella, I absolutely love your reactions to these posts. 🙂
You sure did make a great decision there. Great system, too. It makes your life, and their lives, easier. Pretty sweet! And look how that’s turned into more work. How great is that? No apologies — your example is one we should all be following.
I had a job not long ago that paid $1/word. Great! Except it took me four solid days to finish it. The actual payment based on my time put into it was more like 4 cents a word. That $1/word wasn’t really paying off for me. It turned my $150/hr. rate into a $23/hr. rate.
Conversely, another job I have monthly pays $900. It’s a three- to four-hour investment. So while the pay is lower, I’m actually getting paid more for it because I’m not spinning my wheels for days — correct my math if it’s wrong, but I’m figuring $225/hr. Plus, this is the client who gives me special projects on top of that, so I can expect roughly $14K annually from this one client.
Yea, I’ll keep that one over the first one.
That pay rate was unbelievable, Lori. As a freelancer, you definitely have to work out how much you’re actually earning. An easy job with sa system like the one Gabriella describes can work out to a high hourly rate. Another job that looks good on paper, less so.
Lori, that four solid days for a 1,500 article? That’s awful. I know you. And I know that wasn’t due to you. Ugh.
I earned more than $45 per article when I first started freelancing in the pre-internet dark ages. And that was writing profiles and human interest articles for a small, low-budget weekly paper. They gave me solid clips that I used to start working my way up the food chain.