Who Pays Writers?

by duck • 10 years ago

240 93 10 years ago

mdorazio2• 10 years ago

Is per-word pricing actually how writers still get paid, or is this site just reporting that as a common metric? Most of the freelance writers I've spoken to have gotten paid either per-piece (lots of blog shadow writing), or per-hour.

movedx• 10 years ago

If you look at each entry, there is a little bit of grey text that has some additional detail. They show the really low per-word rates were actually "$50 flat rate per piece" (one says.)

Hope that helps.

mdorazio2• 10 years ago

Thanks, I totally missed the additional detail text.

GCA10• 10 years ago

Per-word is usually a rough yardstick that's invoked when trying to figure out the flat rate for pieces of various sizes. It lets publications quote 500x for shortish pieces of about 500 words; 1,200x for mid-sized pieces of about 1,200 words, and so on.

I've never known a publication to count the words exactly, once the story is delivered. A finished piece of 970 words or 1,050 words will get paid the standard rate for 1,000 words, without any adjustments.

partiallypro• 10 years ago

It's not a common metric, however, when you free lance right you are often told, "I need a piece about x & y, 500 words long." So based on that 500 words, let's say you make $200. So you just made 40 cents a word. But then next article, the editors says "I need a piece about x & y, 800 words" This time you make $400. So instead of trying to explain it like that in these metrics, it makes more sense to just aggregate the numbers together; because the piece lengths vary.

cstross• 10 years ago

Per-word pricing is standard in trade fiction (short form -- e.g. magazine markets, which are mostly dead outside the SF/F genre field).

It's also how I used to be paid as a jobbing IT reviewer/columnist/journalist in the British newsstand computer trade press (caveat: I switched to writing novels full-time in 2005).

danthewireman• 10 years ago

Accelerando is currently blowing my mind. Very cool stuff.

rveeblefetzer4• 10 years ago

Per-word rates are the most common in English; in German language, it's per character. Sometimes news outlets will establish a relationship with a freelancer that use dto be called a dedicated stringer, and some of those contracts would include a base retainer for the month, with a specified sum extra for words or whole articles over the base agreement. Just recently I heard of a freelancer agreement with Forbes that included a low base sum for four articles a month (very low, tho I can't recall) and US$0.05 per click, and they'll take just about anything she pitches. Some people are excited about the model (including the freelancer doing it). I do think raises questions about whether important topics would not get addressed because they're not grabby enough, but that's less of a problem for an outlet like Forbes than it is for, say, a city or local newspaper (e.g., a routine city hall or school-board meeting)

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

I realize "its the web" is a thing but back when I was doing freelance writing for tech magazines I found the Writers Market[1] very handy. For print publications it had print calendars and editorial descriptions of what they liked to publish. I've not bought one since the rise of web journalism but I expect there are resources out there which have this info.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published/...

bhickey• 10 years ago

This is pretty much old hat. Duotrope[1] is one of the larger market listings. There was a big huff after they turned to a subscription model, which led to the creation or expansion of The Grinder[2].

At Aliterate[3] we've seen about 25% of our inbound submissions coming from each of The Grinder and Ralan[4]. The balance is some mix of Duotrope and smaller players.

[1] https://duotrope.com/

[2] http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

[3] https://www.aliterate.org

[4] http://ralan.com/

vonnik• 10 years ago

What's amazing is the variance, even within one publication. Businessweek, for example, pays anywhere from $0.08 to $1.75 per word, which I assume depends on a writer's fame, relationships and maybe even writing skills. ;) Other key considerations, which this site can't really address, are who has a budget for freelancers, and when do they have that budget? Many publications have a yearly budget and by late fall, that budget is gone.

loudandskittish2• 10 years ago

I was shocked to see $0.08 for Businessweek, but read the additional details -- that was a kill fee. I'm actually not sure why they included it.

sandebert• 10 years ago

What's a "kill fee"?

elmalaak• 10 years ago

Is anyone else a bit surprised at these wages, on the high side? I mean certainly it's not a lot hourly and there must be a lot of uncertainty (writing pieces on spec etc) but Buzzfeed giving $.50 a word for a 6000 word article is $3000... Which is better than I had assumed. But maybe that's just me.

aaronbrethorst2• 10 years ago

    Heavy/Investigative reporting

Buzzfeed paid $3000 for something that likely took several times longer to investigate than it did to write. If it takes you a month—from start to finish—to create a piece like this, then you're making $36,000/year. And that's if you're lucky.

ghaff8• 10 years ago

It's hard to say what "heavy/investigative reporting" means in the context of Buzzfeed. I don't expect we're talking multi-month government corruption investigative journalism. But a couple of weeks to a month is still pretty reasonable for a 6000 word story that requires setting up and conducting a bunch of interviews and doing other research.

My rule of thumb has generally been about 1000 words a day not counting any heavy research so your numbers seem pretty reasonable.

Furthermore, freelancers rarely have a fully booked schedule and they need to spend time on tasks like prospecting for new work.

In a prior life, we'd get paid very nicely on a daily basis for consulting and other custom/semi-custom work. But the reality was that we weren't actually on the clock very much and spent a lot of time maintaining the knowledge base that let us do those jobs when they came along.

cylinder• 10 years ago

These pieces involve lots of investigation and travel to meet sources, I'm pretty sure. The last BuzzFeed in-depth report I read certainly did. If so, this is really a paltry sum. It's not a 6000 word opinion essay we're talking about, there's heavy loads of research involved.

loudandskittish2• 10 years ago

I was in journalism school in 2004 and almost all the older journalists I met lamented the fact that high end publications were paying $1.00 per word and had been since the 1970s. There had never been any kind of adjustment for inflation.

dasil0032• 10 years ago

With the rise of the internet, I think the written-word sector of the economy has inflated more than any other.

scholia• 10 years ago

Average payments have gone down. In my experience, the best rates are for stuff that gets printed, where rates have historically not changed much for decades.

However, rates for web-only stories are often much lower than for print, and sometimes you get a flat fee regardless of length.

The result is that you can produce more words today for less money than you made in the print-only 1980s.

CrankyBear6• 10 years ago

Sad, but true. I'm making pretty the same coin per word I always have. What was good in the 80s isn't so great after 30 years of inflation.

rtpg• 10 years ago

6000 words takes a lot of time to write. That's a lot of conversations with sources, research, etc.

Though hard to know depending on the article.

santa_boy• 10 years ago

Glancing through the site, it looks like most writers get their writings published through referrals / relationships with the editors.

Are there avenues where people can send writings / research into with an opportunity to publish on being compensated?

My motivation is around analytics, data research, visualization, mortgages, finance and real estate

rveeblefetzer4• 10 years ago

The phrase you would be looking to use in your pitch to the editor would be to offer it 'on spec'. Some publications mandate that the first piece they get from new freelancers will be submitted on spec. But when you're making a living from it, it sucks to hear that.

quincunx• 10 years ago

A lot of these reports are for "fob"s. Does anyone know what that means in this context?

huxley• 10 years ago

It stands for "Front of Book", often where shorter news pieces appear on a magazine

nickjj• 10 years ago

On a related topic, a lot of tech companies will pay you $100-400 per blog post. For example DigitalOcean pays $200 per 1500ish words for in depth tutorials.

That's a little above 13 cents per word for a complex tutorial which solves a real problem and potentially has source code.

mprev• 10 years ago

Similarly, Exoscale (Swiss cloud hosting firm) are paying writers on tech subjects. Again, it's for a tutorial that solves a real-world problem but also for introductory pieces designed to get someone new acquainted with a subject.

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

As a developer how would I get into technical writing like this? Start writing a tutorial and send it to them?

scotchio3• 10 years ago

Shameless plug: We do the exact same thing on https://scotch.io [1].

* Publish near instantly through our writing portal called "The Pub" [2] or https://pub.scotch.io. We might open this up to other blogs one day too.

* Write with our easy-cake custom markdown editor.

* Your name and profile always stays associated with the post.

* You can write about almost anything web dev related for our "Tutorial" category [3].

* You can write about almost anything tech/dev scene related for "Bar Talk" category [4].

* Get tweeted with your handle by our Twitter account 40k+ followers, go through our RSS feed, and get in front of our 1-2MM monthly visitors

* Also, if you don't like ads but our writing tools, you can optionally host it on our site for free without ads in the community section.

Two of our guest authors got their current well-paying jobs through their posts. Not a bad way to show off your skills (obviously I'm biased though).

[1] https://scotch.io

[2] https://pub.scotch.io

[3] https://scotch.io/tutorials

[4] https://scotch.io/bar-talk

wyldfire• 10 years ago

Also, if you don't like ads but our writing tools, you can optionally host it on our site for free without ads in the community section.

From https://pub.scotch.io/ideas:

"Sometimes we just feel an article isn't a good fit for our readers."

Is there a way to submit a topic for an article for review without going through the trouble to submit the entire article? I'd hate to write an article that seems interesting to me but doesn't match Scotch's intended audience.

jdietrich2• 10 years ago

Of the three featured posts I was shown on pub.scotch.io, two were get-rich-quick spam. I wouldn't want my name associated with that sort of thing.

http://i.imgur.com/HtrNbX5.png

Alex391710• 10 years ago

I would actually blog for tech companies on occasion if they were willing to pay 5 - 10k per post. It seems like companies are only willing to pay for very cookie cutter stuff though.

logicallee4• 10 years ago

that's pretty crazy. There's hardly a post you couldn't write in a day of hard work (because then it's too long! spend one day writing it, so someone can spend 20 minutes reading it, don't make readers take hours to read through months of your writing.)

So you want a monthly salary of 5k (your low end per day) * 24 days = 120k per month?

ghaff8• 10 years ago

Generally speaking, unless the writer/organization (e.g. analyst firm) is a "name," companies are mostly looking for relatively vanilla straightforward content to educate users, keep eyeballs coming back to the company's site, etc. And because this is relatively commodity stuff, companies don't pay a lot for it.

spriggan3• 10 years ago

I think 100/200 is pretty reasonable. Plenty of news site don't even pay their writers.

coldtea5• 10 years ago

5-10K per post?

That's what companies pay for a finished small-medium scale coding project.

CrankyBear6• 10 years ago

No one, but no one, pays anything like that much.

vtlynch• 10 years ago

"For example DigitalOcean pays $200 per 1500ish"

Most professional writers/reporters would consider that a terrible wage.

ohjeez7• 10 years ago

Most?!

CrankyBear6• 10 years ago

Speaking as a professional writer who covers technology and business, that's awful. If you want to write to have something to add to your programmer resume, go for it. Everyone else, just say no.

tsmarsh• 10 years ago

I shudder to think what my pay would be if we calculated it as $/token

_lce0• 10 years ago

Even better, sometimes we get paid to remove tokens!

pnewman3• 10 years ago

Best I ever did was $2/word from ESPN the Magazine.

Who Pays Writers?

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