Who Pays Writers? | Hacker News Reader

Who Pays Writers?

whopayswriters.com

283 pointsjawns81 comments

Hi! This is the admin of Who Pays Writers. It appears that our site was down for a bit due to high traffic but it seems to be working right now. Please be aware that this is a small website run by 1-2 unpaid volunteers. While we love spreading the word about these issues, we also feel the need to remind folks that Who Pays lists rates for journalism only. We don't list rates for sponsored content, content farms, legal, or technical writing. Thanks for reading and sharing. -WPW

I love this site! My company started because paying freelancers was such a headache...it is a pain point close to my heart. https://outvoice.com

Thanks for the work! It is appreciated. Writing is an industry I've been peripherally involved in for decades and certainly needs the visibility. And poorly funded at the coal face, so we need volunteer efforts; nobody is going to fund an impartial professional effort.

Who Pays Writers has been around many years and does a good job of sharing info. I wish there were more entries on it, though, especially in technical disciplines.

BTW, if there's anyone here on HN who is genuinely good and can write about modern JavaScript, Ruby, Go, React, Postgres, or front-end development techniques, hit me up (see profile). We pay!

I put together a tech focused version here [0] but it's still pretty small. Can I add you to the list? Happy to share how much you pay and more details about application process?

[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...

We're looking to work with a copywriter too at our company too. If you're genuinely good, please hit me up!

Previous submission three years ago with meaty discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688397

Thanks!

It's a sort of bucket list item for me to write a Shouts & Murmurs. I would never expect to be paid for that, so I guess I am undermining the market? Obviously, as I have no professional writing or comedy experience I am very unlikely to ever be published which makes the point rather moot but I still wonder how the industry at large deals with this.

Creative writing has an oversupply and underdemand problem.

Most novels are self published. Most don't even sell three figures. For short fiction, there are hundreds of literary magazines, and more appearing every day, but only a minority pay anything at all. In a niche such as poetry, the minority becomes vanishingly small.

MFAs churn out tens of thousands of credible writers every year, plus all the retirees (hai), midlife crises, career breakers, redundancy moneys, job hunters, stay-at-home parents, etc.

So by and large the industry doesn't deal with it. To a first order approximation, creative writing is a leisure pursuit.

Anyone looking to make money in creative writing should consider erotic literature. Erotic content on Patreon is a growing segment.

I thought Patreon specifically banned erotic content / porn?

They're playing the game of trying to ban some of it but not all of it. For erotic literature specifically, they're trying to forbid certain genres. It's a weird cat and mouse game and I'm having trouble picking sides.

I'm generally upset at them over their weird ban-not-ban. I can understand they have to deal with credit card processors, etc - but please give the community clear guidelines and don't play the part of the censor.

I'm not certain there's a way out of it. On Quora I've been seeing pedophiles creating accounts with the intent on pushing boundaries. It's pretty disturbing seeing it taken out of a literary context. I don't envy Patreon's task here.

Super interesting. Is there anywhere I can find a list of the allowed erotic genres vs the banned genres?

Thanks.

Romance novels sell pretty well also consider how much there are low-quality novels in market https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/01/freelancer-gig-economy-...

Yup. Come up with an amusing and obvious penname (Robert Harder, Felatia Organica, that kind of thing), and then start writing stories about people having sex with monsters/bears/dinosaurs. Crazy market for monster erotic literature.

If you can find a way to convince furries to pay for your stuff then you've really got a goldmine. They've got tons of free fanfiction to work with though so that might be hard.

As someone who's considering turning to writing from tech, this hurts. It's probably true, but now I don't know how to handle my midlife crisis.

Write as a leisure pursuit!

If your motivation is commercial rather than leisure, I suspect the answer lies in what you already know from tech.

It's about marketing. It's about finding a niche. It's about building an audience. It's about luck. It's about presentation. It's about finding a product market fit. It's about failing fast. And somewhere down the list of priorities, you'll need to be competent writer.

Doing what everyone else is doing, and expecting to win by the sheer force of brilliance, is probably a bad plan. Fortunately, 99% of your competitors are following that plan. But it does kind of rely on you writing somewhat cynically. Rather than for love of art.

With this huge caveat that I write for fun, so I'm pontificating. Take what I say with a cellar of salt.

At least try it out before, say, quitting your day job. Submit some pieces, get some feedback, go through a few rounds of that. Don't do anything for free, that's horseshit and teaches/proves way less than selling some words.

If your thing's literary fiction then LOL good luck, otherwise you'll probably be fine if you've got a bit of a knack for it, some patience to deal with the business side of it, and can follow directions.

Write as a leisure pursuit as the sibling comment says, but also consider writing short <10k short episodic stuff and put it on Kindle. As an experiment I published something under a pseudonym (no, not telling you) that was thrown together a few years back largely to see how quickly I could do it, and a single work will only make you money if you're a fantastic writer and do a lot of work to market it (or get someone, like a publisher, to do it for you)

But multiple shorter pieces gives more visibility and cross promotion opportunities, as if you're lucky your readers like one to go on to buy more, and the more you have on sale, the bigger the average payoff per converted fan becomes. It also lets you place it at a price point that is very low risk for people, and as you build up a back catalog you can further expand it by selling collections.

My experiment didn't exactly pay great, but it did pay, and importantly it keeps selling in small numbers several years later. At this rate, in a few years my hourly pay for writing it will actually be decent... See that both as encouragement and a warning that this is not a "get rich quick" approach.

I think if you want to commit to it but don't feel like being a starving writer on an elusive quest for a best seller, start writing short stuff (be it manuals, DIY guides, novellas, collections of poems are whatever you want) as a sideline and build up a back catalog and income stream from it. See every new thing you write as another tiny little sales vehicle for your full back catalog, rather than expect to get a sudden payday from every one thing. It keeps the commitment low - you can write as little or as much as you like - and it lets you build up an income stream until it seems realistic to make it your job as opposed to a side income.

I've been toying with the idea that the time spent creating by artists (musicians, creative writers, fine arts, indy game devs) is valued at $0 by society. Because there have always been an will always be people who do it for $0. What is valued and rewarded is the effort involved in marketing, distribution, performance and all those bits people don't want to do for free but have too. If you want art to pay as a full time job, you need to (at least) put in full time hours to the 'work' part and be capable of doing them at a somewhat professional level. It kind of justifies why publishers, galleries and similar still exist, despite this being the age of direct creator -> consumer sales. You are often better off getting a day job and outsourcing the boring parts of your hobby to a publisher or paying gallery commissions.

I think you're mostly right. We value specific output, not the time that went into it, and so we're prepared to pay nothing for the bulk of what is created, but a lot for a tiny little proportion.

With the caveat that you can make a lot of this pay reasonably well if you're willing to see your hobby as a craft where there is a trade off between quality and effort as opposed to art. E.g. I can write reasonably well, better in my native Norwegian than in English, but I realize that to reach a level that would let me write a novel that a "real" publisher would be prepared to publish, for example, would take a massive amount of effort with no guarantee of ever achieving it, and publishing something in Norwegian would be less likely to earn me anything than getting published in English.

But if I'm prepared to churn out quarter-novel sized English-language serialized novellas for Kindle, I'd have a decent shot at making a living at it (though not anywhere near my current salary), I think, based on my experience and the assumption that I'd need to basically churn out 10k words every 1-2 weeks at least. I believe that speed would be sustainable for me, but at a quality level that is at best craft rather than art, and I don't think it'd be sufficiently enjoyable to be worth it.

But some of the most prolific fiction writers do sustain that for a long time, and some manage to gain success that way. E.g. the original "Morgan Kane" series of 83 novels is one of the most successful Norwegian book series of all time, selling a combined ~20 million, despite only about half the books even having been made available in print in English. Most of them were written in about a month each, and while their aggregate number of copies sold over time are high for a Norwegian author, he achieved that through long term notoriety built up over more than a decade of having new novels published every 1-2 months (he wrote other series as well), rather than overnight success - the number of copies sold per book was not that high, and when he "came out of retirement" to write six more books 20-30 years ago, despite his fame, people ridiculed his publisher for doing a 100k first print run for the first of the new books, as 100k is a lot for a western book in a market of 5m people and he was not seen as someone writing high quality best sellers but as someone churning out decent, fun cheap paperbacks that'd take 10+ years to reach those volumes. They were wrong, but they were probably wrong largely due to lots of pent up demand from fans of his back catalog combined with the fact he spent 6 months to a year per novel in the new series rather than rush them out to hit a 1 month deadline.

Incidentally the author of the Morgan Kane series got rich from it, but was also least once, before his latest series, denied entry to the Norwegian Authors Association because one of the criteria was that you needed to have published three novels of sufficient literary quality. The admission committee all agreed he'd done so, but they initially at least couldn't agree on a set of the same three books. I believe they decided in the end it was a sufficiently unique case that he was granted entry anyway.

> We value specific output, not the time that went into it, and so we're prepared to pay nothing for the bulk of what is created, but a lot for a tiny little proportion.

The hard truth is that most aspiring artists are not particularly good. The finished art, no matter the medium, varies in quality by a gargantuan amount, with only a tiny proportion of artists possessing the talent and skills to make something that a sizeable number of people will pay to experience.

As someone who did the opposite (and as writers go, I was “successful” — I reached the six figure mark and everything), I’m not going to say “don’t do this” — because that’s unfairly glib, but I would say to consider your options.

I’ve found that my skills as a writer and editor (and being good at communications in general), are valued much more in my current job (I work in DevRel and intersect engineering and product) than I ever expected.

Rather than leaving tech to turn to writing, perhaps you could find opportunities in your current job to write. Even something as seemingly benign as documentation is something! (And in truth, we need more good writers and editors working on documentation. It’s not sexy but it impacts so many people and often the difference between good and bad documentation is the ability of the writer/editor.)

I’m also a big fan of scratching my creative itch with side-projects and then seeing if that passion leads you to wanting to do something full time. That’s what led me to professional writing to begin with.

Great advice! I'd take it a step further: we need more good writers working on the documentation that's needed before the code is written. Call it Business Requirements, Functional Specs, Technical Specs, Stories, or whatever, almost everyone sucks at it and almost every project suffers by the lack of it. No one reads documentation written after the fact (it's not sexy), but projects are saved and careers are made by those who can write anything that helps the people actually building the software. I may be a little weird, but I think that's very sexy.

100% this. There are a lot of opportunities for creative work in content marketing, devrel, and so forth. Writing, video, etc. Also a great way to bridge with doing if that’s your thing.

It’s obviously not the same as literary fiction, etc. But it can be a good gig. If you have some other particular interest do it as a hobby/sideline.

One downside is that you may not be credited but even that’s not always a given. I get a byline for most external things I write as part of my job.

As someone wrapping up his Writing MFA, I'd add, first that it's possible to treat writing and making a living as two mutually exclusive problems to solve. With a significant tech or dev background it's possible to work freelance to make a living, while carving out time to write.

And since, second, writing takes years to be good at, this is a great strategy to have anyway. It's highly debateble how long one should persist pursuing writing before giving up. But, I'd guess, most of the "successful" writers of today took 5-18 years of writing before they achieved "success". That is my opinion, but I've heard it said by many other "successful" writers (George Saunders, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Strout, etc. etc.). Again, "success" != money.

With one caveat: a few (hard to get) MFA programs fully fund (tuition + living stipend) their students (usually in return for teaching). It's one of the few ways to be paid to write for 2-3 years, and admittance to one of those programs is a good goal to strive for, even if you think of those 2-3 years as a break from a tech career. Similarly, the programs where you pay for your MFA are generally poor financial decisions.

If you're interested, at least, you can try combining the two. I moved into technical writing full-time five years or so ago. I'd been a tech blogger before that, just with my own sporadically-updated blog that I never quite figured out how to monetize despite it having hit what I'd consider "B-list status" (showing up on Techmeme occasionally, linked from bigger blogs, etc.); in an odd way, moving into documentation was monetizing the blog, since a startup came looking for me after their CEO read a few blog posts and liked them.

This doesn't mean giving up creative writing, either; I still do that, and in fact started that first job with "so, uh, two weeks after the date you want me to start, I'm going to be attending a residential writing workshop in Lawrence, Kansas for two weeks; will that be a problem?" (It wasn't, fortunately.)

What little pay remains in short fiction is almost all in genre fic. Not that there's a ton there, but there's way more than in literary fiction.

Though even those are cutting editorial staff and want much more polished, nearly-publication-ready submissions these days, so brush up on your editing skills.

> To a first order approximation, creative writing is a leisure pursuit

Writing music is the same ... though FWIW writing music is a really fun leisure pursuit

Game development is heading in the same direction. Great fun as a hobby, but it’s getting ever harder to make a career out of it

On the idea of leisurely pursuits:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

— John Adams

If anyone is curious about the short fiction market, I've been knee deep into that for the past year or so (coming from tech), I'm happy to chat and give advice.

In short: do it for leisure, hobby, or the love of the craft.

There is a path to getting published in S&M without past experience. Namely, get published elsewhere first. I strongly recommend checking out McSweeney's Internet Tendency https://www.mcsweeneys.net/ Not only because they publish great comedy writing akin to S&M, but a) because they respond to submissions very quickly and b) because the New Yorker's editorial team reads it. A number of frequent contributors to McS IT have made it to S&M in the New Yorker. Sure, they often have other things going for them too. But it's not unheard of.

> It's a sort of bucket list item for me to write a Shouts & Murmurs. I would never expect to be paid for that, so I guess I am undermining the market?

I'm surprised that you wouldn't expect to be paid for writing something that got published in a prominent magazine?

Here's also the top earning writers on Patreon: https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing

I give $30 a month to number 10 Wildbow because I greatly look forward to his stuff.

Is it a joke like nobody pays writers, or is the site actually down?

It was up when I checked ~30 mins ago. It appears to be down now though.

It seems to be down: https://web.archive.org/web/20190722133107/http://whopayswri...

It's meta fictional.

Hug of death.

Though when I looked earlier this morning, I saw some sweet $0.03/word and $0.00/word "jobs" /s

If they want to go that route, they can return HTTP status code 402 Payment Required.

At the bottom, a link goes on to explain:

> The Compensation Foundation is a public, online, platform for collecting, sharing, and analyzing how contingent workers (freelancers, contract workers, creative professionals, permalancers) are compensated.

> Information clearinghouses empower workers to negotiate their compensation agreements and make more informed decisions about their careers. We hope that increased transparency will create competitive conditions for employers, as well as foster environments where standards and best-practices can emerge.

What exactly are sites like these running on, that they can't handle MAYBE a few hundred simultaneous users? I don't get it.

https://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://whopaysw...

Even the cheapest droplet can handle that workload. I've spun up dozens of projects at that level, and few have gotten hugged without any adverse affects.

It's worrying that it's on Digital Ocean and seemingly can't handle at best a few thousand connections. I know HN is a popular site, but I imagine that a good number of people coming across the link today skipped by it.

I've got a $5 droplet on which my personal site is hosted. Is there any way to estimate what kind of load it can handle?

I've used jmeter to load test for cheap. You can spin up a VM and hammer a site pretty good.

The problem isn't going to be that it's on DO; the problem is going to be that whatever they're using isn't proxied or optimized to handle the kind of load you get when you're on the HN front page.

Has nothing to do with Digital Ocean, and everything to do with how the website is designed (which is often, but not always, a function of what framework was used).

Stick a properly configured nginx or Varnish in front of whatever they're running, and we'd not be having this conversation.

Even then, since the cache-control headers are not being set correctly, it would all just by-pass nginx or Varnish anyway.

Thus "properly configured". However, I actually just look, and at least now, they in fact appear to be setting etags properly, so their HTTP server is returning a 304 on all the static files being served from their domain, despite max-age being set to 0, and the rest of the static files are on CDNs.

That said, nginx caching proxy or Varnish would still be a dramatic help in front of the couchdb instance they're using for their API (since their data isn't constantly being updated, they could do this).

Making a wild-ass guess, I'd say they were running the couchdb on the same droplet as their static file server, and with no caching, the couchdb instance pegged the CPU, causing the HTTP server to fail.

https://loader.io

Lawyers probably get paid the most for writing.

They are not exactly getting paid for writing, they are getting paid for their domain knowledge and certification. In the same way you could say devs get really well compensated for typing.

I'd think that most writers who get paid are writing about some domain knowledge. This would seem to be true of fiction writers, even if the domain is an understanding of human relationships, insights about sex or ambition, etc. Otherwise the pay is likely to be very poor.

A lot of their writing gets done by people making less than them, like legal aids. I've written content for lawyer's websites for not much money.

I also wrote legal notices as part of my corporate job. I started at like $9/hr and was make $12-something/he when I left.

Some letters got reviewed by the legal department and approved by my boss, but I wrote them (using a form letter to get me started, then fill in the specifics).

So, I've always wanted to write novels, and after some nice feedback on some vignettes, I've decided to give it a go. But, not quitting my day job as a programner. My wife is a visual artist: I know how that goes. The realities of the market are sobering if you think this is gonna be a lucrative side gig. But I like how writing creative fiction makes me feel; it'll save me mental health bills I guess.

I would have expected sorting, like who pays the best rate. But I guess it's more like does this publisher pay in timely fashion or at all.

When these posts on the site say 'cold pitch', what does that mean? Contextually I am picturing someone literally writing up a contact off the publisher website, saying 'Hey would you pay me to write this?' and they get back a 'yup, send it in and we'll pay you something'.

I have no awareness of this but I am fascinated by it.

> ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

Sounds about right.

Site crashed for me.

Hug of death

Anyone with any experience know what kind of load a site needs to be able to handle to avoid the HN hug of death?

I have had my own sites be featured on the homepage, and it's never been more than 400 active people on at a time.

Hardly a hug of death by my standards.

404 BOOYAH

This is also the 3rd time it's been submitted to HackerNews since 2016

If you really think writers are not paid, then you're wrong homie

For real. Who pays writers? Readers.

I got paid by buyers of my book and a startup that pays me for blogging.

For me, it’s tech companies and executives who need (ghost-written) content but lack the inclination or ability to write their own stuff. You can make a decent living, but it’ll never make you rich.

Yes. It helps to live somewhere with decent healthcare too.

At the end of the day, yes. But we get our pay checks from the publishing companies that commission our words.

As a former writer, the only market with real cash to spend for writing is commercial b2b/b2c. Everything else is a pittance unless you're the next twilight that hits critical mass and sells off the movie rights. if you're writing for the creative thrill, b2b works a good way to kill the soul.

creative writing basically has no real market, and even the best are going to be scrounging mid 5 figure incomes.

I think that's true of a lot of creative professions to be fair. Musicians don't have much of a market unless they're exceptional, same for artists. But there are ways to adapt your skills to be more valuable than they would be otherwise.

That said, programming is, in my opinion very creative as well, and that clearly does have a market.

Writing, music, and art are like other businesses. You have to actively find customers and a market fit that works for you, rather than putting something out there and hoping someone notices.

There's much less information on how to make this happen than there is on on creating the work. And success can depend as much on chutzpah and on working out how to bypass the usual selection processes as on talent.

Unlike software, they're extreme power law businesses. A handful of extremely successful people earn ridiculous money, a slightly larger number are comfortably professional, and an absolutely gigantic ocean of dabblers, wannabes, and part-timers earn little or nothing.

You can a completely mediocre developer and do just fine. It's not easy, but it is possible.

You can't be a completely mediocre creative. You have to stand out in multiple ways, through confidence and charisma, talent, originality, timeliness, presentation, and/or self-promotion. The ability to do that is - by definition - not mediocre.

you can be a mediocre developer and there's a decent job waiting for you making CRUD apps somewhere.

You can be an amazing/well-above-average writer/singer/other creative and make absolutely no money doing it despite all your efforts. the irony is that everyone wants to consume art but also wants to pay no money for it.

plumbing can be creative, but i wouldn't call it art.

TV/Screenplay writers can make great money on a popular show/film.

Other than that you're probably looking at startup exit odds of ever making 6 figures - maybe a 10% chance.

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