Opinion: Freelance writing's big issues, demand vs. rewards

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The demand is for web content, copy, technical and business writing, grant writing, creative writing, and articles. With that demand has come a real mishmash of fees and situations.

$5 a post for a 100 word blog is OK… unless you’re also spending time inserting keywords, using style, and doing 500 words in rewrites and emails about grammar.

This is bread and butter stuff, and if you’re getting a little bread and no butter, it’s not much fun.

Better business for writers is the editorially less fossilized version, where you can be creative, expressive, and maybe see more than $5 for your work.

Then there's the "keyword" saga, in which websites are somehow convinced that using words which get a lot of hits does much more than make them one of the crowd. I was working on a site with a 1.5% keyword ratio, and I promise you, for flow, it's murder. I earned my money on that one.

The steady income streams are the real business. They pay regularly, and if you get a few of them, you’re paying your way. Job quality is another issue. A good paying gig is great, a grindstone is still a grindstone.

However, it’s not a one way street for crying poor.

Buyers get some pretty raw deals, too, as most people will have seen from the apathetic/pathetic stuff piled high on websites. People pay for this stuff, mainly because they don’t know any better.

The result is one very messy business.

Anything on six legs can call itself a writer, and even when trying to find a writer, people have to wade through the results of a crippled vocabulary, lousy training, and very vague ideas of the uses of a spellchecker. Imagine reading something like 200 pages of misspelt, formula “this is how we were taught to write copy” garbage.

Some buyers have a problem with the word “pay”, which doesn’t seem to be part of their vocabulary. This presumably genetic defect among buyers costs lots of time and a certain amount of foaming at the mouth for writers.

Worst of all are the essay writing scams, well documented by Essayfraud.org, where writers are “hired” by sites to produce materials which they endlessly recycle and usually never pay for. There’s at least one woman I saw who figured out she was owed $16,000 for over 30 jobs, and never saw a cent. The site claimed to be based in the UK, and was actually based in Eastern Europe. Legal comebacks? Nil.

The two way ripoffs haven’t done much to create an impression that writers need to eat, and should be paid. The scams, in particular, are a good reason for buyers to have become understandably worried about quality, and particularly plagiarism, which is rampant.

Cut and paste merchants seem to move on from spam manufacturing to “writing”.

They usually make more money than from spam, so they’re happy, the lawyers are happy, and after all, isn’t that what life’s about, making criminals and lawyers happy?

Meanwhile, inevitably, they use up money which could have been spend on real writers. They’re probably the biggest single turnoff for buyers.

One good thing has come out of this chaos.

It’s created the rise of sites like Elance.com and others like it. Writers bid for jobs, and buyers have to sign contracts. There’s even an escrow system. Contract terms can stipulate “no plagiarism”, and writers can be sure they have some sort of legal claim on their payments.

This bit of sanity has raised the budgets of buyers, and definitely the incomes of writers. Some of Elance.com’s budgets are six figures. The level of protection, and someone to arbitrate, has made everyone a lot less paranoid.

The bidding system on Elance is pure competition, both quality and price. That's a good way of killing off the cut and paste geeks, because they really can't cut it in that environment. It works like an antibody in the writing trade.

It’s happened at the right time, too. Demand has been going through the roof. I’ve been talking to some advertising agencies, and they’re prepared to look at freelancers for their outsourcing. Seems the budget thing cuts both ways, and the agencies also don’t need to tie their in house staff down with “piecework”, one-off pieces, at the expense of agency accounts.

The rest of the freelance writing story is about the online writing jobs sites. These range from anything and everything on craigslist to sites which just copy ads from other sites and/or run their own, like Online Writing Jobs.

The security level for writers on these sites isn’t terrific, although I must admit I’ve been working with someone I found on one of those ads for 10 months.

On the other hand I’ve spoken to:

· People about scripts which haven’t happened,
· Very enthusiastic people who never seem to get back to anyone,
· Sites who won’t tell you where your travel blog is being published,
· People who’ve never heard of PayPal,
· People who don’t publish e-books, and sign contracts saying they do,
· Cheery UK publishers who can understand a pitch for an article on Spirituality
from the perspective of how lousy an academic discipline philosophy has become,
· Industry magazines who don’t know what stock exchange disclosure rules are, and
· Suspicious, Beaver-like persons,

… and it hasn’t (spasm) affected me (twitch) at all (shudder) really, you (gnaw furniture) know.

There’s a lot of writers on Digital Journal, and they probably know the story about at least some of these sites.

However, I thought the other DJs would be interested to see an industry in a state of almost pure chaos, and the writers would be interested in Elance, if they haven’t seen it before.

Elance isn’t a purely writer site, though. It also works for other industries and services, and it may well be how business will be done in the future.

If you have a look at how these sites work, the rates, and the relative levels of professionalism, you can see a whole ecology at work.

Er, sort of…