Writers Should Write for Free--All Other Workers Should be Paid
What's wrong with this statement??
“What happened to creating for the love of it? Sharing because you care? Engaging without an agenda? I’m all for making a living, but I’m also for keeping some things pure.” —a Substack member
In a world saturated with mobile devices and content, why is it that creative work is increasingly perceived as unworthy of compensation?
The installed base of mobile PCs (laptops, tablets) in the US alone is about 356 million units. There are an estimated 310M smartphones. And that is the root of my story about why a growing number of people perceive writing and creative work as unworthy of compensation. Selling your creative product is becoming shameful — akin to the typical reaction to begging in the streets. But why?
Is it beneath creative dignity to earn a living?
Cruise the internet. Read print publications. You’ll find books, articles, social media dreck, and all manner of material ranting about why attaching the idea of filthy lucre to a creative product is annoying at best and disgraceful to the soul of art at worst.
Hang out at the myriad of writing platforms available these days and you’ll see users commenting that writers are disgracing their art by using a paywall, a tip jar, or a subscription model to con people into paying for their work. It reads like this:
“I am sick of people thinking their writing should get money. It’s sickening how they promote themselves everywhere and expect us to pay them for what I do for free. I write for the love of words; art is my passion. Stop nagging us to throw money at you because you put words together.” (Real comment from a real person on a real platform this past week — edited so it can’t be traced to her.)
“I’m not ready to stop following indie authors for self-promotion. But I will have to if it doesn’t stop on its own.”
These comments appear multiple times daily on venues that connect writers and readers. Writers begin to feel that promoting their work is somehow beneath artistic standards—it dilutes their credibility. Marketing is categorized as a burden to self-righteous people who believe only they have soul, passion, and dedication to art.
If I write quality material (and I do), no one will know it’s there unless I show it to them. If I manufacture widgets, no one can understand their value if they’ve never seen one.
Okay, I’ll give you that spam and over-the-top self-aggrandization gets funky, but that doesn’t mean writers are not worthy of being paid. Writing is hard.
Quality writing is so very hard to do
I have written, by my calculations, 7.8 million words. Almost 40 thousand pages. That’s a conservative 3K words/week for 50 years. Some years, I have written far more, but no matter — that’s a lot of work and pulling those syllables from my tiny brain is no mean feat. I expect you feel the same way about your work.
To get those words down, I spent almost 20 years in school. I begged for and secured my first professional writing gig at age 16 (by way of sheer audacity and spunk).
Like you, as a creator, I’ve spent thousands of hours seeking publishers, drumming up clients, and searching for opportunities. When I found them, the real work began as I brainstormed, researched, interviewed, composed, revised, edited, typed (or handwrote), and submitted. Never mind the mundane tasks like tracking, organizing, accounting, filing, and cleaning my office (once in a great while).
People get paid to do all kinds of things, and almost all of them advertise, network, and promote their stuff. They drop pamphlets and business cards here and there. They run ads. They do telemarketing until we’re all ready to scream. We, as writers, put a link at the end of a piece of writing. Or post a callout for our latest work. Or write an article about writing.
I’m really going to consider phoning up a few thousand people and insisting they buy my books or subscribe to my newsletter. I mean it — I’m gonna try it when I get some spare time.
And so, with all this work, with all this effort, here is the current state of affairs.
The current state of affairs
I write for a living and have for half a century. I made a comfortable living and retired in a satisfying style. But over the past ten years, it has become much more challenging. People trying to come up as writers are failing in droves. Publishers and media outlets are dropping like flies — leaving a swath of crumbled writers in their wakes.
A while back, we struggled to compete with unethical businesses churning out sweatshop “content” for something like $5 per thousand words. Those writers made pennies a day. Then came AI-generated crap. I have nothing more to say about that fiasco. Pay rates fell again.
A skilled writer should command $1 a word. Okay, 50 cents in a slow economy.
But between the content mills, AI, the crash of the publishing industry, and the ubiquitous availability of technology, professional writers are devolving or vanishing. Maybe starving! Well-designed, effective marketing and promotion are the most potent survival techniques available to creative workers. There is no shame in survival.
The tone-deaf people ranting about earnings vs art can simply stfu from my viewpoint. We are entitled to be paid for our well-crafted work. So is any lawyer, accountant, house painter, or plumber. BTW they all make far more than most creatives. And how often do you see a lawyer lawyering on a street corner to drum up clients?
Those of us who write, draw, sing, play the tuba, or design websites for a living all have different yet similar motivations.
Passion
A desire to communicate
A need to improve the world
A hunger for wealth (misguided, yes, if you’re a writer)
A yearning to use our innate talent
Other kinds of workers feel the same.
But here’s the rub. Because anyone can access a pen, pencil, keyboard, or speech-to-text device, it’s easy to say that ANYONE can write. If anyone can write, there’s no value to writing — and we’re dangerously close to heading that way.
The truth is, anyone can put together strings of words and publish them. However, there’s writing and there’s skilled writing and they are not the same. Not everyone can manage the skilled part. I am a professional writer; I reserve the right to put my work and my skill in front of a potential audience.
I cannot and would not force anyone to pay for my product. But no one will shame me into not putting it out there with a price tag attached when appropriate.
Therefore, the point of this story is motivation. I encourage all creative workers who put authentic effort, skill, and diligence into their work to not suffer the fool who claims you should hide your light under a bushel basket. You are entitled to your promotions and marketing, to charge for your work product, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
(Please, don’t embarrass me by spamming, okay?)
Ok, here it comes:
Have a burning desire to know more? Well then, head over to my eBook store!
Oh boy, this is so true.
It isn't unique to writers, though. I earned a chunk of my living (variable over time but averaging out close to half) from photography and I saw the same attitude there. I'm old enough to remember pre-digital days, and even the days when autofocus was new and not that reliable, so there's a huge difference in the perceived skill level now. The idea that 'everyone can be a photographer' took hold gradually but has become highly pervasive. Ask a wedding photographer how it's affected their business, for example, or look at the way average returns from my stock image sales have been slashed to a tenth or less of typical fees in the 1990s.
The democratisation of culture isn't all bad, of course, but I can't see an upside to the devaluing of craft and skill.
As for the idea that you're some sort of evil mercenary if you should dare to enviisage getting paid for writing, it still makes my jaw drop. I have made a fair amount of shorter stuff freely available on Substack, but I very much hope that this will draw a few (or more than a few readers) to my novels—which are not free and not going to be, though the ebook of Three Kinds of North is very cheap.
I think the idea that writing (or practising any métier) for love is incompatible with professionalism is both laughable and tragic.
I definitely am guilty of too much free content. But I'm also firmly in the corner of the "It ain't for love, honey" crowd. For me, right or wrong (I won't die on this hill), free content helps drive people to my novels. Also, a lot of my writing is political (for now), because the country I live in is undergoing an existential political crisis, and I want as many eyes on my political rants as possible. Sadly, it's mostly an echo chamber, but sometimes a few things bleed out there to Facebook and other mediums.
But I'm glad you wrote this, and I'm glad you wrote it with some spit and vinegar.