I heard Bill Maher say: "Pay peanuts, get monkeys," or something like that.
I realize I'm not the only one to say how lame it is that people expect writers to work for very little money, or for free! I mean, what is that? Do you expect to throw a rock and hit a good writer, or even a competent one? (I pay the people who do work for me. Do you expect your hair dresser, accountant, plumber to work for free?)
My question is, how can people afford to write for such a low rate? I see some offers for a penny a word, some even less. One person wanted to commission me to write a novel for something like $400 (I didn't take it). Another offered me 5K to write an ENTIRE psychology textbook (in two months!). I told them I couldn't afford it and they raised it to 7K. I didn't take it. That's particularly bad when you consider how much money text publishers have. They have expensive books and a captive audience.
Others, if you were prolific, you might earn $12, if they throw enough at you (like some blogging jobs).
I made the bad move of writing a long piece for a reference book. It was a lot of work and took a long time, but I thought it would be a feather in my cap (it wasn't, not really). It paid $250, which is probably something like $2/hr. How do they find people to write these? I think most of the writers were academics, and I know that academics don't get a whole lot of prestige getting published in encyclopedia.
Well, I could go on and on about offers I've taken and left, but my question is, like for the encyclopedia, who takes them?
Sarah
I realize I'm not the only one to say how lame it is that people expect writers to work for very little money, or for free! I mean, what is that? Do you expect to throw a rock and hit a good writer, or even a competent one? (I pay the people who do work for me. Do you expect your hair dresser, accountant, plumber to work for free?)
My question is, how can people afford to write for such a low rate? I see some offers for a penny a word, some even less. One person wanted to commission me to write a novel for something like $400 (I didn't take it). Another offered me 5K to write an ENTIRE psychology textbook (in two months!). I told them I couldn't afford it and they raised it to 7K. I didn't take it. That's particularly bad when you consider how much money text publishers have. They have expensive books and a captive audience.
Others, if you were prolific, you might earn $12, if they throw enough at you (like some blogging jobs).
I made the bad move of writing a long piece for a reference book. It was a lot of work and took a long time, but I thought it would be a feather in my cap (it wasn't, not really). It paid $250, which is probably something like $2/hr. How do they find people to write these? I think most of the writers were academics, and I know that academics don't get a whole lot of prestige getting published in encyclopedia.
Well, I could go on and on about offers I've taken and left, but my question is, like for the encyclopedia, who takes them?
Sarah