Writing professionally – get paid and paid well
January 2nd, 2005 by Bill
What I love about the Paddi Lund story (see Seth Godin’s blog, the post News from Australia) is the “why” of the change he made and what it led to. It was essentially about improving the quality of his life; it resulted in a degree of success I don’t think even he expected. It got me thinking about what I do as a writer and how I have gone about it.
I’ve noticed some writers, or at least aspiring writers, are willing to give away their work, usually for the sake of being able to say they are paid, honest-to-goodness writers. The desire of so many people to write creates a glutted market. You can almost always find someone who is willing to write for peanuts.
However, you can’t always find someone who writes well for that price.
One of the best decisions I ever made professionally, and one I’m most proud of as a writer, was to not only be paid but be paid well for my work. (Mind you, “paid well†is relative.) It isn’t just about money, though. I decided I wanted to be paid well but also do work (writing) I enjoyed.
A few years ago a project came along and I made a proposal on it. There were “x†number of short audio scripts required and I gave them a price: “x†number of dollars per script based on what I estimated the time involved would be. (Research, to varying degrees, would be required for each script.)
Despite knowing the decision makers in the company well (I had worked for them on previous projects), they went with another writer who worked very cheap. His price way below mine.
This other writer came in at such a low price because he wanted the job and wanted to get in with the same company. On the surface, it seemed a good move. It was an investment of sorts – lowball to get the contract with a view to more projects in the future. (However, I’m not sure he considered the wisdom of establishing an expectation of cheap writing.)
Then reality kicked it for the other writer. Once started, he realized what was involved. It wasn’t just hammering out a bunch of quick scripts; it was hammering out those scripts only after doing research and getting a handle on each script’s subject matter. It was hugely time consuming. He would be working for pennies an hour.
In the end, he cranked the scripts out as quickly as possible just to get them done – all of them poorly written, uninformative and, to be blunt, crap.
So … the company, having opted for the cheap price, got what they paid for. They ended up with scripts they couldn’t use. The writer never worked for them again. (This company would have been a good reference for other jobs as well.)
And I ended up getting the contract, re-doing all the scripts, the ones that followed after them and numerous other jobs as well … and all at my price.
My thinking then, and now, is this: I will always write because I’m essentially a writer. It’s in my character. Even if I’m not writing in my job, I will be writing at home – after work, on weekends, etc. While I love writing as a job, I don’t need to write for a living in order to write. If the pay is going to be lousy, I won’t do it. I’ll do something else because there are quite a few jobs out there that I can and do enjoy. (For example, one of my favourite jobs ever was as an assistant manager at a book store.)
When you give your work away you do two things, both of which are extremely detrimental to your writing. First, you devalue yourself and what you do. And this is never a good thing. If you respect yourself and respect your métier, you can and should be paid well for it – at least to a degree that reflects your merit. If you’re just starting out, you probably won’t be paid as well (and shouldn’t expect to be). But you should never give it away.
Secondly, you turn something you love to do, writing, into drudgery. While there may be some less than exciting projects you need to handle in order to keep money rolling in, and every job has its tedious, maintenance aspects, when writing becomes a matter of cranking out sausages, I’m out of there. That was a decision I made when I left radio. No more sausage factory writing. I’m not going to work at something that makes me hate my job and hate writing. And I’m especially not going to do that for a mere pittance.
Life’s too short to spend so much of it doing something you can’t stand. And writing is too important a skill to waste it on sausages. Don’t just be a dentist; be an Australia dentist. Be a Paddi Lund.
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