
Who Pays Writers? - jawns
http://whopayswriters.com
======
wpw101
Hi! This is the admin of Who Pays Writers. It appears that our site was down
for a bit due to high traffic but it seems to be working right now. Please be
aware that this is a small website run by 1-2 unpaid volunteers. While we love
spreading the word about these issues, we also feel the need to remind folks
that Who Pays lists rates for journalism only. We don't list rates for
sponsored content, content farms, legal, or technical writing. Thanks for
reading and sharing. -WPW

~~~
stubish
Thanks for the work! It is appreciated. Writing is an industry I've been
peripherally involved in for decades and certainly needs the visibility. And
poorly funded at the coal face, so we need volunteer efforts; nobody is going
to fund an impartial professional effort.

------
petercooper
Who Pays Writers has been around many years and does a good job of sharing
info. I wish there were more entries on it, though, especially in technical
disciplines.

BTW, if there's anyone here on HN who is genuinely good and can write about
modern JavaScript, Ruby, Go, React, Postgres, or front-end development
techniques, hit me up (see profile). We pay!

~~~
sixhobbits
I put together a tech focused version here [0] but it's still pretty small.
Can I add you to the list? Happy to share how much you pay and more details
about application process?

[0] [https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-
writing/blob/master/...](https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-
writing/blob/master/write-for-us.md)

------
DoreenMichele
Previous submission three years ago with meaty discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688397)

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
Thanks!

------
kristiandupont
It's a sort of bucket list item for me to write a Shouts & Murmurs. I would
never expect to be paid for that, so I guess I am undermining the market?
Obviously, as I have no professional writing or comedy experience I am very
unlikely to ever be published which makes the point rather moot but I still
wonder how the industry at large deals with this.

~~~
sago
Creative writing has an oversupply and underdemand problem.

Most novels are self published. Most don't even sell three figures. For short
fiction, there are hundreds of literary magazines, and more appearing every
day, but only a minority pay anything at all. In a niche such as poetry, the
minority becomes vanishingly small.

MFAs churn out tens of thousands of credible writers every year, plus all the
retirees (hai), midlife crises, career breakers, redundancy moneys, job
hunters, stay-at-home parents, etc.

So by and large the industry doesn't deal with it. To a first order
approximation, creative writing is a leisure pursuit.

~~~
throwaway123x2
As someone who's considering turning to writing from tech, this hurts. It's
probably true, but now I don't know how to handle my midlife crisis.

~~~
filmgirlcw
As someone who did the opposite (and as writers go, I was “successful” — I
reached the six figure mark and everything), I’m not going to say “don’t do
this” — because that’s unfairly glib, but I would say to consider your
options.

I’ve found that my skills as a writer and editor (and being good at
communications in general), are valued much more in my current job (I work in
DevRel and intersect engineering and product) than I ever expected.

Rather than leaving tech to turn to writing, perhaps you could find
opportunities in your current job to write. Even something as seemingly benign
as documentation is something! (And in truth, we need more good writers and
editors working on documentation. It’s not sexy but it impacts so many people
and often the difference between good and bad documentation is the ability of
the writer/editor.)

I’m also a big fan of scratching my creative itch with side-projects and then
seeing if that passion leads you to wanting to do something full time. That’s
what led me to professional writing to begin with.

~~~
edw519
_Rather than leaving tech to turn to writing, perhaps you could find
opportunities in your current job to write. Even something as seemingly benign
as documentation is something! (And in truth, we need more good writers and
editors working on documentation. It’s not sexy but it impacts so many people
and often the difference between good and bad documentation is the ability of
the writer /editor.)_

Great advice! I'd take it a step further: we need more good writers working on
the documentation that's needed _before the code is written_. Call it Business
Requirements, Functional Specs, Technical Specs, Stories, or whatever, almost
everyone sucks at it and almost every project suffers by the lack of it. No
one reads documentation written after the fact (it's not sexy), but projects
are saved and careers are made by those who can write anything that helps the
people actually building the software. I may be a little weird, but I think
that's _very sexy_.

------
cm2012
Here's also the top earning writers on Patreon: [https://graphtreon.com/top-
patreon-creators/writing](https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing)

I give $30 a month to number 10 Wildbow because I greatly look forward to his
stuff.

------
fareesh
Is it a joke like nobody pays writers, or is the site actually down?

~~~
SimeVidas
If they want to go that route, they can return HTTP status code 402 Payment
Required.

------
overcast
What exactly are sites like these running on, that they can't handle MAYBE a
few hundred simultaneous users? I don't get it.

~~~
mooreds
[https://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://whopaysw...](https://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://whopayswriters.com/)

~~~
rchaud
It's worrying that it's on Digital Ocean and seemingly can't handle at best a
few thousand connections. I know HN is a popular site, but I imagine that a
good number of people coming across the link today skipped by it.

I've got a $5 droplet on which my personal site is hosted. Is there any way to
estimate what kind of load it can handle?

~~~
jnbiche
Has nothing to do with Digital Ocean, and everything to do with how the
website is designed (which is often, but not always, a function of what
framework was used).

Stick a properly configured nginx or Varnish in front of whatever they're
running, and we'd not be having this conversation.

~~~
mtberatwork
Even then, since the cache-control headers are not being set correctly, it
would all just by-pass nginx or Varnish anyway.

~~~
jnbiche
Thus "properly configured". However, I actually just look, and at least now,
they in fact appear to be setting etags properly, so their HTTP server is
returning a 304 on all the static files being served from their domain,
despite max-age being set to 0, and the rest of the static files are on CDNs.

That said, nginx caching proxy or Varnish would still be a dramatic help in
front of the couchdb instance they're using for their API (since their data
isn't constantly being updated, they could do this).

Making a wild-ass guess, I'd say they were running the couchdb on the same
droplet as their static file server, and with no caching, the couchdb instance
pegged the CPU, causing the HTTP server to fail.

------
Merrill
Lawyers probably get paid the most for writing.

~~~
sjf
They are not exactly getting paid for writing, they are getting paid for their
domain knowledge and certification. In the same way you could say devs get
really well compensated for typing.

~~~
Merrill
I'd think that most writers who get paid are writing about some domain
knowledge. This would seem to be true of fiction writers, even if the domain
is an understanding of human relationships, insights about sex or ambition,
etc. Otherwise the pay is likely to be very poor.

------
your-nanny
So, I've always wanted to write novels, and after some nice feedback on some
vignettes, I've decided to give it a go. But, not quitting my day job as a
programner. My wife is a visual artist: I know how that goes. The realities of
the market are sobering if you think this is gonna be a lucrative side gig.
But I like how writing creative fiction makes me feel; it'll save me mental
health bills I guess.

------
metalrain
I would have expected sorting, like who pays the best rate. But I guess it's
more like does this publisher pay in timely fashion or at all.

------
digitalsushi
When these posts on the site say 'cold pitch', what does that mean?
Contextually I am picturing someone literally writing up a contact off the
publisher website, saying 'Hey would you pay me to write this?' and they get
back a 'yup, send it in and we'll pay you something'.

I have no awareness of this but I am fascinated by it.

------
ben11kehoe
> ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE

Sounds about right.

------
montenegrohugo
Site crashed for me.

------
kallemoen
Hug of death

~~~
ahnick
Anyone with any experience know what kind of load a site needs to be able to
handle to avoid the HN hug of death?

------
gureddio
404 BOOYAH

This is also the 3rd time it's been submitted to HackerNews since 2016

------
narshaven
If you really think writers are not paid, then you're wrong homie

~~~
dondawest
For real. Who pays writers? Readers.

~~~
Veen
For me, it’s tech companies and executives who need (ghost-written) content
but lack the inclination or ability to write their own stuff. You can make a
decent living, but it’ll never make you rich.

~~~
sbisson
Yes. It helps to live somewhere with decent healthcare too.

