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Summary: If you're a professional writer, it goes against grain to write for free. But it may just be best move you ever made.

Total words: 850

Category: Writing

The Writer's Dilemma: Should You Write For Free?

Copyright (c) 2002 by Angela Booth

If you're a professional writer, should you ever write for free? I used to be adamant that that way lies madness. However, I've changed my mind. Sort of.

I still believe that if you're writing for a major publication which accepts advertising, you should be paid, and paid well. If a magazine, newspaper or Web site charges thousands of dollars for advertising, they can afford to pay writer for content which delivers eyeballs to that advertising. Without writers, there would be no advertising, and publication wouldn't exist.

However, there are problems.

=> The problems with paying writers' markets

Here are several of problems I've identified:

* Declining pay rates for writers. If you write for major magazines, you know that you're getting paid less today than you were in eighties.

* Stiff competition. You send your query in, and never hear. This is understandable. Major magazines receive hundreds of queries every week. If they replied to them all, staff would never get anything else done.

* Editor churn. Even ten years ago, if you sold to a major magazine, you formed a relationship with editor. You sold her other pieces over next year or two. Nowadays you're lucky if editor is still with magazine when issue with your article in it hits newsstands.

* Slow payment in tough times. Even with pay on acceptance markets, you may wait months for your check.

* Wasting time. You can spend days wracking your brain and researching, to find perfect story for a particular market, and then receive reply, thanks, but: "We're running a story on that in our next issue" or "We've just signed a writer for that".

What's upshot of all these problems? If you can't stand heat, get out of kitchen. I've turned to copywriting, that is, writing for businesses, rather than put up with hassles of writing for magazines.

=> The benefits of writing for free

It makes sense to write for free if you're being paid in other ways.

For example, as promotion. My sister and I have just partnered in a new Web site Digital-e --- Info to Go:

http://www.digital-e.biz/ .

The Causes

What causes writers block? In my case, I've found a few causes.

The idiots of world - Occasionally I'll write something and get a negative comment. In past when I was in my twenties (seems like a different lifetime now) this would stop me cold. I'd get a comment like "this isn't that great" or "you should change your article thusly..." and bam, I would stop writing for weeks or months.

Some other failure in life - I've found that when I was failing somewhere else in life I would stop writing. You know, hard times at work, lost love, that kind of thing. When life seemed to hit me particularly hard, I would find that I didn't feel like writing at all.

Something I didn't understand - Sometimes I would want to write an article but I would find myself stopped cold. Later, I would often discover that I didn't understand something, some critical piece of information. Once I filled in that gap, I started writing again.

Illness - Something about throwing up just makes it difficult to write ...

Too much introversion - I've found that I have to extrovert occasionally in order to be able to introvert enough to write. Does that make sense? On those occasions where I could not get out, my writing suffered.

Not writing something of interest - Occasionally, I've found I am attempting to write an article about a subject which is of no interest at all. It makes it really difficult to write something when you don't care a hoot for it.

The Solutions

What are solutions?

Write something every single day - I have taken a few writing classes, and one common denominator (and perhaps only meaningful information from any of them) was so simple as to defy imagination. Simply write something every single day.