Who Pays Writers?
whopayswriters.com
whopayswriters.com
That's a little above 13 cents per word for a complex tutorial which solves a real problem and potentially has source code.
* 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
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.
1. Email us at pub@scotch.io first
2. Submit just the outline of the post for review as a normal post with comments at the top. We'll see it's just an outline and be able to provide feedback
We've been working with guest writers for well over a year now and really try to work with everyone as best we can. I would say almost all our writers have had a good experience with us.
You can imagine though that some of the post people want to write are really not fit at all for scotch.io (we have no choice but to maintain some sort of general theme and quality control). That's also why you can publish instantly whatever you want (well written, poorly written, on cats, tech, ice cream, whatever) to The Pub's community post section.
We just launched The Pub like a month or so ago to streamline guest writings, so any feedback is super welcome.
So you want a monthly salary of 5k (your low end per day) * 24 days = 120k per month?
That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy given that there are magazines that cost 100k per year to subscribe to, with dozens or hundreds of corporate subscribers. That's obviously not the market that most tech companies are going after, but there is precedent there in general.
>That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy
yes it is.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-gets-a-...
The founder of the last startup I worked at made 100k per month and wasn't even the CEO, and that was pre-product and pre-revenue. He just raised a bunch of money on a pitch deck.
I'm definitely not saying that's common, but it's not unheard of either. Inside Silicon Valley there's a tightly prescribed set of norms that tend to be followed, but outside of there money tends to change hands a lot more quickly and fluidly. That's the benefit of being in a place like NYC, because people tend to be motivated more by self-interest rather than by trying to look cool or fit in, so it's a lot easier to pitch folks on stuff if you find a novel but rational opportunity.
Of course it's possible to make a lot more than that! Just not as a salary. It would be interesting to know the details of their package. Also, how come you happened to know?
That wasn't the exact base salary, but that was basically total compensation not including stock. (So including a few hundred thousand dollars per year in an expense account and an additional couple hundred thousand for serving on the board.)
Actually lots of people do. In TV, for example, even for a small European countries, such as that I know of, you can make like $500K per year if you're one of the 20-30 "stars" of the various network channels (head presenter, show host etc).
In the US: "In the depths of the recession in 2009, there were still 236,883 individuals who earned more than $1,000,000 in the United States. We know from other research that, by rough estimates, 90 out of 100 men and women reaching this income level are self-made with little to no inheritance. Almost all have college degrees. Men dominate the field, and almost all own or started their own business or work as an executive for a large business".
I wouldn't call 230,000 people "nobody".
Journalists for established media do all that (and more) as part of getting the facts for their articles, and still take in something like $2-$3 per month or less.
I've never been, but if you go to some of the big leadgen conferences then I suspect that you'd meet or at least hear about a lot of folks like this.
I get paid a very high rate to edit and clean up articles written by techies who have this viewpoint.
When you are imparting technical knowledge that you know conceptually, it's easy to just jot down a few thoughts. They make sense to _you_, after all. But in most cases, experts don't recognize the assumptions that a reader might have, such as "what this is" and "why it's important." Like writing code, there's a difference between "make it work (at least the compiler doesn't crash)" and "make it wonderful." That's just the same for writing.
Personally, when I write in-depth articles, I spend a minimum of three days on it. It usually includes researching the topic, interviewing other people who know something about it (or wish they did), and writing the prose. Then I edit the prose. And I edit it again. Because I do my best to be clear and understandable, and to leave out the parts that people skip.
Object Storage versus Block Storage: Understanding the Technology Differences: http://www.druva.com/blog/object-storage-versus-block-storag...
The authors really know their stuff. They spent that "just a day" writing down what they wanted to say. I spent two full days editing it for readability, querying them about technical details ("I'm not sure what you meant when you said... Could you clarify this point?"), and ultimately making them incredibly proud of the result. (Which was very popular in terms of pageviews, because it's good and useful data.) It still was their voice and their expertise; I was there to help them get the message across.
A good editor is like a good hairdresser. When she is done and you look in the mirror, you aren't surprised. But you think, "Yeah, that's what I WANT to look like!"
I'm paid a lot. I'm worth it.
https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/ZxGZJm44TYa8DhcU0UAeGg/react-a...
But that doesn't mean that this can be replicated by just having a freelancer pretend to be writing as the CEO. (Though PR folks, editors, etc. help with such projects.) And even when books are largely ghost written for celebrities and such, the ghost writer is still just going to collect a fairly modest word rate.
The freelancers can just write under their own names. Mathematically, people who can create substantial value by creating high-end content who are also CEOs must logically be a subset of the total population of folks who can create valuable high-end content. So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
Right now there are a handful of individuals who have landed one-off gigs doing this, but there isn't any sort of marketplace.
There is. It mostly exists in the form of subscription newsletters and paid research reports of various types. Specific examples include subscriptions to IT industry analysts such as Gartner. (Typically subscriptions include personalized services in addition to reports.)
In general, this has become a much tougher gig outside of a handful of large firms--because of all the competition with free content.
That's what companies pay for a finished small-medium scale coding project.
It's also substantially less than the 15 - 20k that people pay to make a two-minute startup demo video. Is there something about writing that makes it fundamentally less valuable?
E.g. look at that guy who was shorting Lumber Liquidators due to the toxic materials issue. That ended up blowing up anyway, but would you claim that if he had paid someone a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content around that issue (think Groklaw) that he would have been unlikely to see a good return?
For one, the logistics involved are infinitely simpler than for the video, which needs a team of at least 3 and usually 5 to 10 people, plus expensive equipment, props, a script, voice over talent and more.
Second, way more people can write decently than produce a decent startup video. Supply vs demand, etc.
Third, nobody much cares for a piece of writing. A two-minute startup demo video can catch millions of eyeballs. A writing will mostly go unnoticed.
Seriously, I've written for some media outlets and did some technical copy for a few companies. If you think you can get anything like $5K per piece, you're in for a very big surprise.
>E.g. look at that guy who was shorting Lumber Liquidators due to the toxic materials issue. That ended up blowing up anyway, but would you claim that if he had paid someone a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content around that issue (think Groklaw) that he would have been unlikely to see a good return?
He'd pay people "a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content"? Are you in ANY job market currently?
That's of the scale of the whole advance for a very popular book author (think NYT Best Seller list level, and not even all of them) -- not copy writers kind of money by any means.
Nope, working on my startup. When working as a consultant though I usually look at how much what I'm going to do is going to increase the paper valuation of the company, and then target making 10 - 15% of that as cash. That way the employer gets 85-90% of the upside, but they're also the one bearing the risk since there might not be any future payout.
However, when you get into the $10K-20K price for whitepapers, you're usually not just hiring a writer. You're typically paying in part for a research firm's reputation and, possibly data.
I'm not sure how much we pay for straight writing under our logo. But it would be significantly less unless it came as part of a package with advertising etc. as deals through online news channels often do.
While some of these are written by analyst firms, quite a few are not. They're work-for-hire, often by techies or journalists who know the area in great depth, and who can ask the in-house experts the right questions and turn those answers into something genuinely useful. (Well, when they're good. Mine are good. :-) )
We're probably just quibbling over terminology. The people I know use whitepapers to mean more business-oriented, less vendor-specific thought leadership pieces. And use other terms for technical deep dives--which can indeed be longer.
Most professional writers/reporters would consider that a terrible wage.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published/...
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.
Definition: The kill fee is a negotiated payment
on a magazine or newspaper article that is given
to the freelancer if their assigned article is
"killed" or cancelled.The vague intention of the kill fee is as insurance against an article being a bad fit, but generally the contract wording is intentionally vague. You can imagine any number of abuses by unscrupulous publishers who have the option to solicit far more material than they intend to publish.
An analogous situation might be a software house outsourcing a task for a flat fee, then dickering around with payment and eventually announcing they've decided your software doesn't pass their new test suite and you can accept a 75% pay cut or gtfo. Bear in mind that day rates for writers aren't what they used to be, and generally can't do a great deal of investigative journalism in your pyjamas.
The treatment of articles upon which publishers "choose not to proceed" is very important knowledge going in. Perusing the whopayswriters JSON feed* there is a wide variety of behaviour described, not all of it making everyone look good.
* In the absence of full-text search, left as an exercise to the reader
Hope that helps.
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.
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).
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
Heavy/Investigative reporting
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.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigat...
Of course, it varied. We often talked in terms of "memo grade" writeups for things like summarizing an advisory day which fell more in the 2K words/day range. On the other hand, I've spent the better part of a day trying to figure how to get into a piece and then ending up throwing away the whole introduction the next day.
Too true! My wife always talked about how much I was paid per word; not understanding that I might write 5000 words for a 2k article. I got much better over time, but that was due to honing my skills at procrastination more than anything else.
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.
Though hard to know depending on the article.