Who Pays Writers?

[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.

[scotchio]

Shameless plug: We do the exact same thing on https://scotch.io [1].

* Publish near instantly through our writing portal called "The Pub" [2] or https://pub.scotch.io. We might open this up to other blogs one day too.

* Write with our easy-cake custom markdown editor.

* Your name and profile always stays associated with the post.

* You can write about almost anything web dev related for our "Tutorial" category [3].

* You can write about almost anything tech/dev scene related for "Bar Talk" category [4].

* Get tweeted with your handle by our Twitter account 40k+ followers, go through our RSS feed, and get in front of our 1-2MM monthly visitors

* Also, if you don't like ads but our writing tools, you can optionally host it on our site for free without ads in the community section.

Two of our guest authors got their current well-paying jobs through their posts. Not a bad way to show off your skills (obviously I'm biased though).

[1]: https://scotch.io

[2]: https://pub.scotch.io

[3]: https://scotch.io/tutorials

[4]: https://scotch.io/bar-talk

[mprev]

Similarly, Exoscale (Swiss cloud hosting firm) are paying writers on tech subjects. Again, it's for a tutorial that solves a real-world problem but also for introductory pieces designed to get someone new acquainted with a subject.

[vtlynch]

"For example DigitalOcean pays $200 per 1500ish"

Most professional writers/reporters would consider that a terrible wage.

[CrankyBear]

Speaking as a professional writer who covers technology and business, that's awful. If you want to write to have something to add to your programmer resume, go for it. Everyone else, just say no.

[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.

[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/...

[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/

[2] http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

[3] https://www.aliterate.org

[4] http://ralan.com/

[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.

[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.

[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).

[partiallypro]

It's not a common metric, however, when you free lance right you are often told, "I need a piece about x & y, 500 words long." So based on that 500 words, let's say you make $200. So you just made 40 cents a word. But then next article, the editors says "I need a piece about x & y, 800 words" This time you make $400. So instead of trying to explain it like that in these metrics, it makes more sense to just aggregate the numbers together; because the piece lengths vary.

[GCA10]

Per-word is usually a rough yardstick that's invoked when trying to figure out the flat rate for pieces of various sizes. It lets publications quote 500x for shortish pieces of about 500 words; 1,200x for mid-sized pieces of about 1,200 words, and so on.

I've never known a publication to count the words exactly, once the story is delivered. A finished piece of 970 words or 1,050 words will get paid the standard rate for 1,000 words, without any adjustments.

[rveeblefetzer]

Per-word rates are the most common in English; in German language, it's per character. Sometimes news outlets will establish a relationship with a freelancer that use dto be called a dedicated stringer, and some of those contracts would include a base retainer for the month, with a specified sum extra for words or whole articles over the base agreement. Just recently I heard of a freelancer agreement with Forbes that included a low base sum for four articles a month (very low, tho I can't recall) and US$0.05 per click, and they'll take just about anything she pitches. Some people are excited about the model (including the freelancer doing it). I do think raises questions about whether important topics would not get addressed because they're not grabby enough, but that's less of a problem for an outlet like Forbes than it is for, say, a city or local newspaper (e.g., a routine city hall or school-board meeting)

[movedx]

If you look at each entry, there is a little bit of grey text that has some additional detail. They show the really low per-word rates were actually "$50 flat rate per piece" (one says.)

Hope that helps.

[quincunx]

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

[huxley]

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

[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.

[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.

[aaronbrethorst]

    Heavy/Investigative reporting

Buzzfeed paid $3000 for something that likely took several times longer to investigate than it did to write. If it takes you a month—from start to finish—to create a piece like this, then you're making $36,000/year. And that's if you're lucky.

[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.

[rtpg]

6000 words takes a lot of time to write. That's a lot of conversations with sources, research, etc.

Though hard to know depending on the article.

[tsmarsh]

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

[_lce0]

Even better, sometimes we get paid to remove tokens!

[pnewman3]

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