This little Chinese girl reading a book may well soon be a big threat to American writers. Creative people in the United States have seen a precipitous erosion of their fees as more and more jobs go overseas. Want proof? Go to those Ebay-type creative sites (Elance.com, Guru.com, RentACoder.com) and you can see jobs for writers, artists, designers, and web people where people want high-quality work–and lots of it–for virtually no money. I’ve seen people advertising the glorious fee of $5 for an article or $100 for 100 articles. These aren’t gibberish articles, they are real articles that require research and careful construction.
A former freelance writer told me that 20 years ago, she could get $1 a word from some of the big New York glossy magazines. Today, you may still be able to get $1 a word from that type of magazine, except most of them are gone. But you can get about a penny a word on the big sites.
The weird thing is that the Internet gobbles up content. Most website owners are desperate to get articles, reports, and other types of content. The plethora of new TV and broadcast stations burns through lots of content. But despite the increased demand, the rates are dropping.
That’s because the economy has globalized and many international people are competing for writing jobs. Sometimes they even speak English.
Meanwhile, if you talk to buyers of this content (mostly website owners), they will complain about the low quality of some of these super-cheap writing projects. How incredibly surprising that a 500-word article that cost you $5 would not be Nobel Prize material.
But what do writers do? The reason that people want cheap content is that many of them are involved in marginal enterprises. Most website owners can’t pay top dollar for content because they do not make a lot of money from their sites. Despite what Internet gurus tell you, the profit margin on many websites is razor thin. A website can’t pay $1 a word for content and make money, period.
So let’s come back to creative Americans who are finding that they make less than minimum wage doing their chosen professions (which often require college degrees, special skills, and some home equipment like computers and Internet connections).
- Sell quality. You can’t beat the low-cost writers when it comes to cost. Many live in countries where $5 for an article is a reasonable payment. So if you can’t beat them for price, you have to emphasize what you can deliver. I’m hoping that thing is quality. The number one complaint I hear from people who buy cheap art and cheap writing is that, "it’s not that good."
- Find specialized clients. Magazines are in trouble, and there just aren’t many opportunities there. Lots of electronic sources are buying tons of material, but they don’t pay well. Before you mourn this, get mad, or complain … how about using your time to find clients who want high-quality content and are willing to pay for it?
- Learn some new stuff. One way to make yourself attractive to specialized clients is to get some specialized new knowledge. Financial companies, medical manufacturers, energy companies, charities, and lots of other groups hire writers and have some jobs that pay well. However, you may not be able to get them to train you in their specialty. Learn on your own and bring your credentials.
- Stay positive. Most people write poorly and more than that dread writing assignments. The world needs good communications. Your job is just to figure out how you can still angle the better jobs. There are good-paying jobs, but you have to get out of the mainstream, a bit, to find them.
More and more creative work is going to be outsourced overseas. That may be regrettable, but we’ve seen this happen with all sorts of manufacturing jobs. Writers didn’t take to the street when factory workers or the automobile industry jobs were lost. Now it’s happening among our ranks.
Some parting advice:
- Think of yourself as a communicator rather than a writer or artist.
- Start to think like a business person and explore businesses as a potential consultant/contributor.
- Learn new skills even if you don’t see an immediate application. You should be constantly learning new things to make you more attractive as a writer, um, I mean communicator.
- If there is an easy job application process, then the job probably does not pay much. Start to talk directly with business people (contact the Marketing department) and see if they have work. For example, call up your local hospital’s marketing department to see if they need some writing help for their website or patient pamphlets; call the marketing department of a major business to see if they need writers or editors for their annual reports or brochures. It helps if you have done your homework and have some relevant work samples to wow them.
- If you need to decide if you want to take a low amount of money for a job, ask yourself this: am I selling "dead time"? If you have zero work and need money, then any money is better than what you’re getting. So if you can’t fill your day with writing or communications projects at your usual rates, you may be better off getting something. On the other hand, if you can get better money for your time, do it.
