The Future of Freelance Writing?

Working as a freelance writer is a difficult thing these days. Better stated, finding work to do that pays reasonably as a freelance writer is difficult these days. There are a number of problems.

The good news is that there are lots of freelance writing web sites now. The bad news is that they’re full of jobs that offer to pay a penny or two a word or less. For this fee, they expect to you to do research, write on a deadline and the work can be rejected if the buyer decides it’s too close to something already written. Oh, yes, a large percentage of them are simply dragging in Craigslist ads from across the country. The going rate for those ads? Maybe a penny a word.

Print media is sick if not dying. I have seen several rags I know discontinued and others that have cut their number of pages in half. Advertising revenues as well as readership is down almost universally. Some publishers are making a last stand by moving from print and web offerings to web only. It’s a different model. Now they are totally ad revenue based but at least they don’t have the costs of print and distribution to factor in.

What about the writers? Many of these sites use mostly freelance writers but their rates for these writers have been lower and considerably lower in many cases than the same writer was paid to be published in print. The 2000 word articles have dropped to 500 to 700 words online. The readers supposedly have a shorter attention span. Maybe that’s to do with the quality of the writing but I digress.

There seems to be a death spiral here with the publisher and writers hanging onto each other as they spin ever downward toward the literary abyss. The publishers are in survival mode and cutting the pay of the writers is one of the few ways they can cut costs. Less pay, less writer. Next the ad revenues drop because the readership does. They still want quality and, these days, for free. The writers say, screw this; I’m not working for peanuts. People in other countries, however, will. Is the quality as good? Sometimes but often not. Readership drops. Can you feel the spin?

Maybe the answer is for all of us freelance writers to start writing video scripts. Youtube has proven many times over that the web viewership will watch essentially anything resembling a moving picture. Apparently the dumber the idea and production, the better the chances of going viral and gaining a following.

You can draw your own conclusions about where writing is heading. Hey, anyone can write, right? They teach that in grammar school, right? Anyone can cut you with a knife also but I don’t set that as a minimum set of skills for my surgeon. Well, they aren’t doing as well these days either. Umm. Social medicine has already taken its toll there with more to come.

Maybe you should put your last few bucks toward a discount video camera you can use for online. If that doesn’t work out, there are a couple of extra spots to stand up near the U-Haul place by me with the rest of the day laborers. $10 per hour and no taxes is beginning to sound like an alternative. Do stock up on the liniment.