Pay the creator

Creators deserve to be paid for their work. We put hours and days into our work, sometimes a lot longer. For an average writer who has to keep a day job to pay the rent, writing in snatched hours between meals and sleep, it can take months or years to produce a book. We sacrifice time with our families, time we could spend exercising and looking after our health. We sacrifice sleep to produce work that almost always goes unpaid. It’s a sad state of affairs and it has to change. Websites who expect a writer to create articles for no pay except “exposure”, especially those who turn a healthy profit, clearly do not value talent.

I previously wrote for Disinfo.com and Whatculture and neither of them paid anything. Whatculture would pay if you got a certain amount of hits to the site, but they were also meddlesome in their editing, which if you’re not paying people, you should not be snippy when it comes to telling them what you can and can’t write about.

I’d suggest an in depth article on the work of Clive Barker, how he changed the face of horror in the 80’s and the deep lying influence it had on subsequent horror writing and they’d go “…umm…can you do a list of the 12 best things to happen on The Biggest Loser instead?” If you’re good enough to be published, you’re good enough to be paid.

They get snippy because they aren’t paying you but they are still getting paid so will have a style guide they follow that also ensures their advertisers are happy.

Sadly it’s the way a lot of content is going.

The Huff Post is amongst the worst. And they are always chasing pros to write for free because they think their brand is payment enough? Please…

The problem is the number of people that are willing to let sites make money off them in exchange for “exposure”

It’s killing journalism as well.

I’ll admit that I wrote a couple of free stories for music publications when I first got to uni in the hope of building my portfolio. I quickly learned that a lot of publications rely on this free copy to make profits at little expense.

I’ve had editors call me up asking for free copy. Sorry but free don’t pay the bills.

Best bit of advice I got from a lecturer was “If it’s worth publishing it’s worth paying for.” Sadly not enough lecturers teach that at university.

Lesson being – if you are a writer, do not accept “exposure” as payment. At first it might seem like a good deal, but you’re basically working for free and it means that the rest of us have to work for free too.