
Who Pays Writers? - duck
http://whopayswriters.com/#/results
======
nickjj
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.

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Alex3917
I would actually blog for tech companies on occasion if they were willing to
pay 5 - 10k per post. It seems like companies are only willing to pay for very
cookie cutter stuff though.

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logicallee
that's pretty crazy. There's hardly a post you couldn't write in a day of hard
work (because then it's too long! spend one day writing it, so someone can
spend 20 minutes reading it, don't make readers take hours to read through
months of your writing.)

So you want a monthly salary of 5k (your low end per day) * 24 days = 120k per
month?

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Alex3917
If there is research involved, each sentence or paragraph could easily take an
entire day. E.g. a couple years ago I wrote a post about deaths caused by drug
use/misuse, and just getting an idea of how many deaths are caused by smoking
involved reading through several chapters of the Surgeon General's most-recent
800 page report. So I figure more like one post every 50 - 150 hours, for
something 2,500 - 6,000 words in length.

That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy
given that there are magazines that cost 100k per year to subscribe to, with
dozens or hundreds of corporate subscribers. That's obviously not the market
that most tech companies are going after, but there is precedent there in
general.

~~~
logicallee
Nobody makes a salary of 100k per month. That is $1.2 million per year. The
CEO of IBM, a company that had revenues of $80 billion in 2015, made salary of
$1.6 million in 2015.[1] If you want to include stock or options or a revenue
share or bonuses or whatever go ahead - but that's not salary and your figures
are completely, utterly ridiculous.

>That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy

yes it is.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-
gets-a-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-gets-a-
raise-2015-1)

~~~
coldtea
> _Nobody makes a salary of 100k per month. That is $1.2 million per year. The
> CEO of IBM, a company that had revenues of $80 billion in 2015, made salary
> of $1.6 million in 2015._

Actually lots of people do. In TV, for example, even for a small European
countries, such as that I know of, you can make like $500K per year if you're
one of the 20-30 "stars" of the various network channels (head presenter, show
host etc).

In the US: "In the depths of the recession in 2009, there were still 236,883
individuals who earned more than $1,000,000 in the United States. We know from
other research that, by rough estimates, 90 out of 100 men and women reaching
this income level are self-made with little to no inheritance. Almost all have
college degrees. Men dominate the field, and almost all own or started their
own business or work as an executive for a large business".

I wouldn't call 230,000 people "nobody".

~~~
rveeblefetzer
In the US news business, $100k/month is strictly the domain of TV on-screen
personality presenters; i.e., not the reporters, but network affiliate anchors
who are referred to in-house as 'the talent'. Absurd sums of money when you
look at the rest of the newsroom staff salaries, but this is all about
ratings, sweeps and very local/regional popularity.

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ChuckMcM
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/...](http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Market-2016-Trusted-
Published/dp/1599639378/)

~~~
bhickey
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/)

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vonnik
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.

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loudandskittish
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.

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sandebert
What's a "kill fee"?

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tfm
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.

~~~
rveeblefetzer
Just to be sure, I'm more used to seeing 50% kill fees, at least from Asia and
West Africa (for Western or Western-run publications). 50% is customary, and
with established clients, unsaid until the time comes

~~~
tfm
It certainly depends a lot on the type of publication (and the nature of the
article).

The treatment of articles upon which publishers "choose not to proceed" is
very important knowledge going in. Perusing the whopayswriters JSON feed*
there is a wide variety of behaviour described, not all of it making everyone
look good.

* In the absence of full-text search, left as an exercise to the reader

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mdorazio
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.

~~~
cstross
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).

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danthewireman
Accelerando is currently blowing my mind. Very cool stuff.

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

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

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santa_boy
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
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.

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elmalaak
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.

~~~
loudandskittish
I was in journalism school in 2004 and almost all the older journalists I met
lamented the fact that high end publications were paying $1.00 per word and
had been since the 1970s. There had never been any kind of adjustment for
inflation.

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dasil003
With the rise of the internet, I think the written-word sector of the economy
has inflated more than any other.

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mirimir
I find your comment puzzling. Are you arguing that volume has increased? I
can't imagine how average compensation has increased, given the prevalence of
free.

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dasil003
I sort of meant it in a reverse way, with words as currency. When a currency
inflates there is more of it and it is devalued, that's the situation with
article-style content these days. Instead of being obtuse, what I probably
should have said is that we have a supply glut.

~~~
mirimir
OK, I get it. Word inflation. Totally makes sense.

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

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eridal
Even better, sometimes we get paid to _remove_ tokens!

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pnewman3
Best I ever did was $2/word from ESPN the Magazine.

