Freelance Writing Jobs - September 10, 2008
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008Quote of the Day: To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
–Joan Didion
There’s a few responses today to Anne’s question from yesterday.
First is Marion’s:
“In answer to Anne’s bleak query, I take the time–foolish of me, I know—to respond by telling the advertisers they have a typo in their ad, and the pay rate is off by a quantum factor. I sometimes get an answer that yes, there was a mistake. Other answers vary from How dare you? We have thousands of people delighted to remove a kidney and left eye as well as write for a whole dollar, etc. I do think anything below $.10 a word is an error. There is no one in this country who could stand up to that regimen for that little. And the “article” would be nothing at all.
I think it important to tell each verminous advertiser that we are no less than plumbers or electricians or sanitation or dentists in that we have rents and expenses, and our experience counts too. I often use a back figure of $20/hr for babysitters in NYC (true) and $40/hr for illiterate and unschooled and unskilled and inexperienced cleaning persons (also true).
Some people are abashed and say “Wow, I had no idea; thanks for the heads-up.”
We are responsible for our livelihoods (sigh).”
Phoenix is next:
“The story with these web article writing jobs is to steer clear of almost all of them if you are serious about writing for a living. I have been a professional writer for twelve years and watched the emergence of these web writing jobs. I even worked for a few, had my own blogs, wrote for other blogs, contributed to numerous e-zine, websites, start-up sites and on it goes.
The best e-job I was one post a day that I pushed to $10 in payment per post. It took me 30 minutes a day to create each post. That does not actually translate to much if you have business overheads.
If a client wants 20 articles written in five days, at 500 words each and they only pay one measly dollar per article - yes it is a joke - of the most insulting kind. For us. For them they are getting some very inexperienced person who may not realize they are being ripped off.
These are not writing jobs but a type of exploitation. And yes I agree that ‘who ever agrees to write 500 words for a dollar is bringing down the pay for all freelance writers’. If no-one wrote for this type of pay, the payment would go up for web writing.”
And Danny:
“In response to Anne’s question of the day about $1 articles, unfortunately it’s the likes of GetAFreelancer.com that have introduced this market. Take a look on their “freelance website” and you’ll see hundreds of these jobs - I don’t even know how they can advertise themselves as a freelancer’s site with the ridiculous projects on there.
Also, the proliferation of writers from India for whom a dollar is a decent amount of money means these projects will always be around. And, like Anne says, they’re usually just for filler content so quality isn’t too big an issue, which is why many of them are re-spun time and time again.
True clients know if you want quality content, you have to pay quality rates.”
Thanks Marion, Phoenix, and Danny!
More tomorrow. Have a good day!
*SmiLes* Suzanne
P.S. We posted 44 new freelance job leads today – if you don’t have a subscription to our daily job source newsletter get your free trial today http://www.freelancedaily.net