From TechCrunch: Scripted Gets Funding For Its Online Marketplace For Freelance Writers

TechCrunch writer Colleen Taylor reported yesterday that Scripted, a company which pairs freelance writers with companies looking for written content, has raised funding in the area of $4.5 million. That’s not the kind of news I would normally cover, but I was struck by the following interview with Scripted CEO Sunil Rajamaran:

Many of the writers on Scripted’s platform aren’t actually professional journalists, Rajamaran said. Often, they’re people with day jobs in other fields who are passionate about sharing their expertise on either their professional vocations or their hobbies. “We had an audio hardware company looking for content, and the guy we matched him to has a day job of working as an engineer at Pixar,” he said. “We’re not a journalism company; we don’t pay professional journalist rates. We’re selling to businesses, and what businesses need are subject matter experts.”

Which means that the majority of Scripted’s reported 80,000 writers are most likely people looking to add to existing incomes rather than use writing as a full-time means of support. And there’s nothing wrong with that — but it is one of the reasons that full-time writers are having trouble making ends meet.

(And, as somebody who started her tech journalism career basically rewriting articles written by computer engineers who were experts in their field, but who couldn’t put two coherent English sentences together if their lives depended on it, I can’t help being just a bit doubtful about the quality of at least some of the content produced by these enthusiasts. But that’s being cynical..)

From The Star Online: Love Letter from a Freelancer

An accurate assessment by writer Alexandra Wong writing for The Star Online: Not really a love letter, though — more like a listing of the various myths about the freelance life. Myths such as not having a boss (no, now you have lotsa bosses), no more politics (think again), and that freelancing is a solitary profession:

The biggest myth about being a freelance writer is that it’s a solitary, lonely position. Far from it. On a direct level, your very survival depends on whether your editor trusts or likes you enough to assign you that plum assignment, and once you’ve landed it, whether you have enough contacts to track down that lead.

From policymic: 3 Pro Tips For Millennial Freelance Writers

Writer Cassandra Leveille writes a short piece called 3 Pro Tips For Millennial Freelance Writers in which she talks about how millenials often choose to freelance rather than take a traditional job. She offers three specific pieces of advice: learn how to negotiate payments and contracts, save money so you have something to fall back on, and be political:

Our generation has to be political by necessity of the cultural moment we find ourselves in, one defined by transition. Moving forward, freelancers must advocate for a less convoluted tax code so they can see more of their income, and for benefits to carry over outside the confines of the traditional work place, which no longer offer them. Because traditional models don’t take freelancers into account, they often risk their financial security.

Good advice for any freelancer of any age.

From TNW: How to price your services as a freelancer

One of the most difficult things about being a freelancer is figuring out how much to charge for your work. Charge too little, and you’re cheating yourself, and possibly undervaluing yourself to your client. Charge too much, and you may lose that important assignment.

This situation is exacerbated by the problem that some freelancers may be good at what they do, but are not very good at marketing themselves — and what you charge isn’t only part of your income, but part of how you’re presenting yourself.

Amber Leigh Turner has written a nice column on “How to price your services as a freelancer” for TNW. She offers several tips for figuring out what to charge, including the always frustrating-but-true: Every single freelancer’s situation is different:

For example, a freelancer living in New York City who is married with three kids and the only breadwinner in their household has different priorities and responsibilities to someone who is single, with no kids, and who lives in a very rural part of Europe. There are just too many factors differing from one freelancer to the next that it is impossible to generalize and make sweeping statements that group thousands of freelancers together when it comes to pricing.

She also offers links to some interesting resources, such as the FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator, which is something I could have really used when I was freelancing.

From B2C: Landing Your First Freelance Job

Mike Wood writes some excellent advice for beginners in his article on the site B2C (Business2Community) called Landing Your First Freelance Writing Job In A Cluttered Freelance Market. He talks about the necessity of charging less for your work than is practical — but just in order to get started:

One of the main rules that you must live by is to never discount your worth (charge what you are worth as people will pay for it if you are actually that good); however, you must break this rule in the beginning in order to get your career going.

It is a good way to start. When I was first starting as a freelancer, I was lucky in that I had a backlog of articles that I had written for that travel magazine that I had worked for when I first graduated college. However, I also wrote local theater reviews for a neighborhood newspaper for about $5/shot plus free tickets to the productions, just so I could plump up my scrapbook (and in those days, it was literally a scrapbook). Those, and a few additional assignments, enabled me to ask for reasonable rates from later publications.

NY Times profiles the Freelancers Union

Although I’m not a freelancer right now, I’ve been one for long periods of my working life, and for part of that, I was a member of the Freelancers Union. Because of my membership, I was able to get reasonably priced health insurance — which is one of the major concerns of independent workers, both in my experience and according to this article in the NY Times, written by Steven Greenhouse.

Things are a little different than when I was a member. Then, the Freelancers Union contracted with a number of outside insurance companies; now, it has its own clinic in downtown Brooklyn (and an agreement with Blue Cross/Blue Shield for those outside the city). Sounds like a really interesting setup, and one that I would probably seriously look into should I find myself once again an independent worker:

Historically, through the power of collective bargaining, labor unions helped reverse that equation, enabling many unskilled workers to earn middle-class incomes. But as traditional labor unions have steadily declined in size and power, groups like the Freelancers Union, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and Domestic Workers United have stepped up, trying to give collective voice and power to often-marginalized workers.

And the dialogue continues…

I have a Google alert set on the phrase “freelance writing,” and it’s been picking up blog entries written about Nate Thayer’s answer to the Atlantic Monthly editor who asked him to edit down a previously-published article so they could publish it for free. As Thayer says in a later blog entry, this certainly seems to have hit a nerve, especially among freelance journalists.

One of the blogs that my search dredged up was a defense of the Atlantic Monthly’s policy (titled “Freelance Writer Sends Atlantic Editor Most Self-Righteous E-sermon Ever“) from a self-described “fairly novice blogger,” who is scornful of Thayer’s insistence on payment.

I was initially bemused by her comparison of The Atlantic Monthly to a “PTA Mom.” (I imagine the well-paid editors of that publication would be as well). However, I think the point of her piece can be summed up in this paragraph, which basically says that the quality of the content doesn’t matter any more; it’s how well you publicize yourself:

Because while I haven’t spent a ton of time as a freelancer, I am certain of this hard reality about being a freelance journalist in 2013: Your value has very little to do with how carefully you arrange your special snowflake words in a Word doc. It has to do with the impact you have on your audience, and, stock though it sounds, how well you forge relationships. Readership and network are your only capital. If you want to withhold your precious prose from the public eye as a stance against creative leeching, then fine, but you won’t be missed.

The idea that a writer feels that how she arranges her words (and, presumably, the research behind them) is of little importance is not only a nasty reflection of how many people see the craft of writing today — but I find it rather sad.

Some interesting discussions on what writers should be paid

The recent incident where a journalist Nate Thayer was asked by an editor at Atlantic Monthly to edit down a piece for publication for free — and then blogged about it — has resulted in a good deal of discussion in the freelancer community, especially after a senior editor at Atlantic wrote a lengthy response.

I found an interesting discussion at a site called Branch.com between a group of writers and editors — called How Much Should A Writer Be Paid, If Anything? — and thought I’d link to it. There are some fascinating points made. Is it wrong for a beginning writer to work for free in order to build up a portfolio? What is the difference between being paid for a blog and being paid for a researched article? At what point does it become exploitation when a professional publication pays salaried workers well but drops its freelance budgets?

It’s an ongoing conversation, and this is an interesting piece of it.

The Rewards—and Risks—of Freelancing: from US News and World Report

Susan Johnson, in this article from U.S. News and World Report, interviews Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union, an advocacy group for freelancers that’s almost 20 years old now. She talks about the current state of freelancing and how even staff positions are becoming more short-term:

Freelancing used to be a euphemism for unemployment, and that’s just so over, as people who are laid off after a full-time career are freelancing and people who are graduating from college are freelancing. People are freelancing in all sorts of professions, from doctors to programmers to security guards.

New resource: The Freelancer’s Bible by Sara Horowitz

Sara Horowitz, who founded the Freelancers Union, has written a new self-help book for independent workers called The Freelancer’s Bible. A review in the Washington Post by Ibby Caputo says it’s a good resource to have:

“The Freelancer’s Bible” is a self-help book packed with useful tips and tools sure to benefit new and seasoned workers. There’s advice on what terms to include in a contract, how to plan for complicated self-employment taxes, and how to negotiate intellectual property ownership. The book also includes recommendations on how to set up your work space to minimize distractions and how to network with people you already know. No aspect of a freelancer’s life is insignificant to Horowitz.

I’ll be adding The Freelancers Bible to my list of Books and Publications on this site — and possibly to my personal library as well.