The Freelance Writing Jobs I Avoid
The convenience of the Web has made freelance writing more convenient. Jobs are easier to find, but rejection letters can arrive much more quickly! The Web also has opened up a new range of business practices, some good, some bad. Here are the types of freelance writing jobs that I steer away from, if possible, having tried most of them:
- Revenue sharing. The Web counterpart of straight commission sales, they’ll pay you, if they ever make any money from what you write. If not, they may not care. Usually these companies want you to promote their website in hopes of increasing the ad revenue you’re hoping to share.
- Subsidy publishing: a very old industry, where companies pretend to be regular publishing houses or literary agents, but want you to pay them to get published. If you’re willing to spend money to get a few copies of your book, you might do better with print on demand companies such as Lulu or Booklocker.
- Web content writing: The Web counterpart to water pollution (I was going to say counterfeiting). Often their goal is not to produce literature that people will want to read, but web pages designed to fool the search engines into thinking that people actually want to read them. Sometimes these articles are not much more than keywords artfully strung together. Software has been developed to do this work more cheaply than humans.
- Article directories: Usually a collection of web content for revenue sharing. They invite publishers to buy articles at very low prices. Writing for these directories is not something you should put on your resume.
- Academic writing: You get paid to write papers for students. They are advised not to pretend that they wrote these papers themselves, but to use them as “models.” But you know better.
- Freelance job banks: The Web counterpart to a slave auction: when you offer to write for two cents a word, someone in India offers to write for one cent. A common source for low-paying Web content writing jobs.
- Pay-per-comment: Junior high school students in India earn half a cent a word to write comments on neglected forums and discussion boards so that visitors will think they are active.
- Pay-per-post: Bloggers devote a post to review the company that’s paying them to do it. But it makes me wonder if anything they say is really from their hearts.
- Sample writing: Sometimes a company will advertise a job opening, insist that every applicant send a sample article on a particular subject, sell all the articles, and hire no one. On the other hand, the reputable companies will pay you for any articles they use.
- Contingency payment: Stay away from start-up businesses who apologize that they “can’t pay anything now, but just think of how rich you’ll be when we hit the big time.” If they don’t have money to pay their writers, what else don’t they have money for?
My advice: look for people you’d be proud to write for, more than for people who are willing to let you write for them. If you follow the money, you may find there isn’t any. But if you follow your sensibilities, you can look at yourself in the mirror and feel proud of what you’ve written.
Michael on September 7, 2007 
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This was really interesting to read.
I recently debated with a fellow (amateur) writer the ethics of helping high school students write their admissions essays. I said I didn’t feel comfortable with it, and he said he didn’t care.
It’s nice to see another acknowledgment of these kinds of questionable writing assignments, and more examples of them as well.
I guess you don’t consider blogs, web content writing.
You would think that anything written for the Web should be called web content writing, but somehow the term has been adopted by employers who don’t care what they publish, as long as it’s “keyword-rich” and “SEO-optimized.” I feel better when employers advertise for Web writers with a knowledge and love for their specific subject.
Add to this list: grant writing. Too many people honestly believe that there are zillions of grants out there to help them start a business or stay home and work on needle-point. They will expect the write to wait until the grant is accepted before paying.
Well, first off, there are no such grants, per se. And what grants there are, are few and far between, take months to get through and rarely have any administrative expense reimbursements in them, you end up working for free.
Avoid them like the plaque!
I want tips for writing especially Fresslance and Grammatical tips for generall writing
what is up man
Excellent advice. Too many of the sites about writing-for-money do not explain exactly how to do this, or how much you can make. I sometimes write for Associated Content at $3-7 per article, which isn’t much but breaking into the business writing is fierce and competitive.
Even bloggers don’t explain that its not so much the writing that makes the money as the number of hits to their sites. It delves into marketing- not how well you write- that ends up being the bottom line.
Good writing jobs in America pay $1 per word, while in India, it is Rs. 1 per word. One $ is forty rupees.
So, even writing for a cent a word is big bucks for middle class Indian students. I don’t think it is fair on your part to demean their work.
Why not blame those bloodthirsty businesses who will do anything and everything to promote themselves online? So, even advertising, copywriting and marketing should fall in this category!
Many have a choice when it comes to choosing their job… but not all and not at all times! For instance, I work on both assignments I detest but that which pay the bills and Jobs I love and am proud of but give me no return.
If I concentrated only on the latter, then I will be famous for my genius and hardships after my death. However, my practicality makes me life life to the full, enjoy my work and have fun.
Even clients and editors prefer a smartly dressed rich writer to a penniless genius. Isn’t that so?
Archana, I wasn’t demeaning students or other writers from India, just explaining, as you said, that they’re willing to accept less pay than professional writers in the US or UK. So I don’t try to compete against them. A basic principle in business, or even job hunting, is to aim as high as you can (a little higher than your comfort zone), because there’s less competition for the jobs that require the highest qualifications, the most experience, the greatest perseverance, or the deepest knowledge.
I work for a content company based in India named Chillibreeze. And Archana, I actually agree with most of what Michael says here even though I am from India. At Chillibreeze, we never take on such jobs either. We work with Indian freelance writers on a day to day basis. And we have had several problems with some of them (though I must say some of them match international standards!), so much so that we published this article on our website http://www.chillibreeze.com/re.....y-sins.asp
However, Michael, if you are an established writer, you can pick and choose. What if you are a budding writer or someone trying to get into the business? Most high end clients would prefer established writers, such as you:) How does a novice squeeze their way into the freelance writing world?
Great article, Nishi. Actually, even though I’ve been writing for years, in many ways I still consider myself a novice freelance writer. So I can’t always pick and choose either! It takes a lot of practice to hone your craft and I wrote about some ways to get that practice in my post Entry Level Freelance Writing. Since I wrote these posts, I’ve become even more convinced that maintaining your integrity as a writer is not only a moral, but a professional, imperative. Taking jobs that pay so little you have no time to do a good job: that doesn’t teach you how to do a better job. It teaches you how to do a worse job. It makes you less qualified for the best jobs, not more qualified.