16 ms·

Who Pays Writers?

240 points by duck 10y ago

mdorazio 10y 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 10y 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.
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    Thanks, I totally missed the additional detail text.
- GCA10 10y 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 10y 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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cstross 10y 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 10y ago
    Accelerando is currently blowing my mind. Very cool stuff.
- rveeblefetzer 10y 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 10y 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/dp/1599639378/ http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published/...
- bhickey 10y 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/ https://duotrope.com/ [2] http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ [3] https://www.aliterate.org https://www.aliterate.org [4] http://ralan.com/ http://ralan.com/
vonnik 10y 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.
- loudandskittish 10y 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 10y ago
    What's a "kill fee"?
    - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
      Featured snippet on Google for the search term "kill fee": 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.
    - iNerdier 10y ago
      Something you charge but don't write the piece. Either you or they decide they don't want it from you but it stops you being messed around so much and having your time entirely wasted by people who are being mean/indecisive/silly.
    - tfm 10y ago
      It is a cancellation fee for freelancers - if the publication sees your work and decides not to run it, you get the kill fee and you're free to shop the story to other publications. The fee is specified in the contract, commonly 25% but rarely higher. 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.
elmalaak 10y 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.
- aaronbrethorst 10y 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.
  - ghaff 10y 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.
    - jdietrich 10y ago
      Buzzfeed are producing some truly remarkable investigative work. https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigations-we-published-in-2015 https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigat...
    - greedo 10y ago
      My tech writing was pretty lucrative since I was pretty fluent in the content. I spent more time coordinating review units, generating good photos (when PR provided imagery wasn't suitable), and dealing with editors. I could write 2-3k words in a day after having mentally written it in my mind over the previous weak. If the subject matter was something that I was unfamiliar with, the time investment to be able to discuss it consumed more. I was always better when I procrastinated anyways; pressure would require me to distill my writing down to the core essentials.
quincunx 10y ago
A lot of these reports are for "fob"s. Does anyone know what that means in this context?
- huxley 10y ago
  It stands for "Front of Book", often where shorter news pieces appear on a magazine
santa_boy 10y 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
- rveeblefetzer 10y 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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nickjj 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    As a developer how would I get into technical writing like this? Start writing a tutorial and send it to them?
    - ghaff 10y ago
      In many cases, a good place to start would be various online community-oriented sites that accept contributions from outside writers and have editors. They won't typically pay, but they'll give you experience and help you build up a portfolio that will be useful if you want to start doing this sort of thing more systematically.
- scotchio 10y ago
  Shameless plug: We do the exact same thing on https://scotch.io https://scotch.io [1]. * Publish near instantly through our writing portal called "The Pub" [2] or https://pub.scotch.io 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 https://scotch.io [2]: https://pub.scotch.io https://pub.scotch.io [3]: https://scotch.io/tutorials https://scotch.io/tutorials [4]: https://scotch.io/bar-talk https://scotch.io/bar-talk
tsmarsh 10y ago
I shudder to think what my pay would be if we calculated it as $/token
- _lce0 10y ago
  Even better, sometimes we get paid to remove tokens!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pnewman3 10y ago
Best I ever did was $2/word from ESPN the Magazine.

240 points by duck 10y 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 10y 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.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  Thanks, I totally missed the additional detail text.
GCA10 10y 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 10y 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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cstross 10y 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 10y ago
  Accelerando is currently blowing my mind. Very cool stuff.
rveeblefetzer 10y 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 10y 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/dp/1599639378/ http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-Published/...

bhickey 10y 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/ https://duotrope.com/ [2] http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ [3] https://www.aliterate.org https://www.aliterate.org [4] http://ralan.com/ http://ralan.com/

vonnik 10y 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.

loudandskittish 10y 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 10y ago
  What's a "kill fee"?
  - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
    Featured snippet on Google for the search term "kill fee": 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.
  - iNerdier 10y ago
    Something you charge but don't write the piece. Either you or they decide they don't want it from you but it stops you being messed around so much and having your time entirely wasted by people who are being mean/indecisive/silly.
  - tfm 10y ago
    It is a cancellation fee for freelancers - if the publication sees your work and decides not to run it, you get the kill fee and you're free to shop the story to other publications. The fee is specified in the contract, commonly 25% but rarely higher. 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.

elmalaak 10y 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.

aaronbrethorst 10y 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.
- ghaff 10y 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.
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    Buzzfeed are producing some truly remarkable investigative work. https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigations-we-published-in-2015 https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigat...
  - greedo 10y ago
    My tech writing was pretty lucrative since I was pretty fluent in the content. I spent more time coordinating review units, generating good photos (when PR provided imagery wasn't suitable), and dealing with editors. I could write 2-3k words in a day after having mentally written it in my mind over the previous weak. If the subject matter was something that I was unfamiliar with, the time investment to be able to discuss it consumed more. I was always better when I procrastinated anyways; pressure would require me to distill my writing down to the core essentials.

quincunx 10y ago

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

huxley 10y ago
It stands for "Front of Book", often where shorter news pieces appear on a magazine

santa_boy 10y 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

rveeblefetzer 10y 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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nickjj 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  As a developer how would I get into technical writing like this? Start writing a tutorial and send it to them?
  - ghaff 10y ago
    In many cases, a good place to start would be various online community-oriented sites that accept contributions from outside writers and have editors. They won't typically pay, but they'll give you experience and help you build up a portfolio that will be useful if you want to start doing this sort of thing more systematically.
scotchio 10y ago
Shameless plug: We do the exact same thing on https://scotch.io https://scotch.io [1]. * Publish near instantly through our writing portal called "The Pub" [2] or https://pub.scotch.io 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 https://scotch.io [2]: https://pub.scotch.io https://pub.scotch.io [3]: https://scotch.io/tutorials https://scotch.io/tutorials [4]: https://scotch.io/bar-talk https://scotch.io/bar-talk

tsmarsh 10y ago

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

_lce0 10y ago
Even better, sometimes we get paid to remove tokens!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pnewman3 10y ago

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