Exposure is what writers die of.
I say that having used exposure as a carrot myself, and fairly often, over the last couple of decades. Working for publications that had no budget to pay writers you generally have no other choice but to wave that “exposure” in front of writers, the promise of “clips,” of portfolio-padding. Writers respond to it. We think we have to. And maybe we do, at first. Maybe building up a clip file — that portfolio of things published in other venues that you can show an editor to give them a sense of your capabilities — maybe that’s worth writing for free a few times. A dozen, even.
I’ve been thinking of myself as a writer since 1989. I’m still getting offered “exposure” in exchange for writing.
I’ve had a lot of writers give me writing for free, some of them over and over. They include people who should be far better known and people who subsequently became far better known and people who have been well known since before I started writing. I’ve gotten free writing from prominent but unsuccessful candidates for President and Vice President, and from dozens of people who aren’t very prominent at all except to the people who love them.
If not for people who wrote for me for free I would likely have been fired from most of the jobs I’ve held since Reagan was President. I don’t have clean hands here. As an editor I have mainly worked for activist non-profits, which means that when I’ve asked writers to work for me for free — and photographers, for that matter, and artists and designers — I’ve essentially been asking them to make a significant donation to the cause. Apparently I’m persuasive. But I think it was in 1995 that Alexander Cockburn told me, when I was soliciting permission to re-run a piece he and Jeffrey St. Clair had already written, that sure budgets were tight, and the cause was good, but that few lefty publishers of his acquaintance had ever asked their printer to work for free.
The reason is that printers won’t generally work for free. Writers usually will.
There are a lot of reasons for that. Devotion to a cause is one, as we see above. Another is that writers generally want to write, they want to be read, and until that writer decides to make writing her sole activity getting published, and subsequently getting readers, is in itself a reward.
Sadly, it’s not the kind of reward that fills the writer’s belly unless your editor gives you pie.
This topic has been in the news lately, what with Tasini’s lawsuit against the Huffington Post. That link is to Jonathan Peters’ piece on the Tasini suit at MediaShift. I think I agree with Peters. The suit isn’t great, as much as I admire and sympathize with Tasini. Too many people willingly write for free for HuffPo, execrable as the site is, for a plaintiff to make a persuasive argument that HuffPo is benefiting unfairly. When you voluntarily sign on to row a galley across the Indian Ocean without a promise of pay, you don’t have much of a claim to profit off the sales of the spices you haul back to Europe.
The suit’s probably going to lose, in other words, and Huffington will walk away ever richer and even more annoying, because hundreds of writers think working for her for free is a great deal.
There is of course the issue of quality. To write well takes practice, and to practice takes time, and finding time is difficult if you have to make your living at some other, NON-writing thing. Making it harder for writers to earn their keep at writing makes it less likely that good writing will happen. But that’s not really a persuasive argument for a lot of people. One of the things that always made me wince back in the days of the Koufax Awards were the pieces of tossed-off, badly argued, cliche-speckled writing that would run neck-and-neck with writing from Michael Bérubé or PZ Myers or other skilled writers in the popular vote. People with talent who have had the opportunity to hone that talent had their work held up against people whose only talent was snark and pandering, and lots of people couldn’t tell the difference.
And what about blogs? I write for free here, mostly — though people have been generous with the tip button in the last couple months, and thank you — and I don’t think of myself as a sucker for doing so. True, sometimes in years past this blog has proved a great way to procrastinate from doing paid writing. Writing for myself seems different from writing for HuffPo, and in more ways than just the relative lack of Deepak Chopra hereabouts. You could call my work here promotion of my paid work, or developing my brand, or practicing, or cultivating a community of readers who will then help spread the word about my paid writing. My KCET and DPC gigs might not have happened if not for this blog. Would we be better off if personal blogs faded and some better, less-evil Huffington Post started paying thousands of writers a dollar a word, which is what I was offering Verde.com writers back in the days of venture capital for web sites? Writers who have no other obvious means of support might be better off, but readers would likely not be.
I really don’t know the best path to a humane, sustainable writers financial ecology that would serve the interests of readers, writers, and readers who want to become writers.
I do know that I can’t afford to write for free anymore, aside from on this site.
I seriously doubt that any volunteer opportunity will afford me more exposure than I’ve already gotten for this or this or this. The only additional exposure I need right now is to the desert wind.
There’s a story an old friend told me about Woody Guthrie, perhaps even a true story, that he was approached in the 1930s or 1940s by an East Coast Progressive doyenne, who asked if he would perform at a benefit concert. Guthrie agreed readily. “Certainly, Ma’am. My fee is one hundred dollars.” “One hundred dollars!” gasped the woman. “But Mr. Guthrie, this is for a good cause!”
“Ma’am,” Guthrie said, “I don’t work for bad causes.”
For forty-three years I worked blue-collar for a living. Before that I worked blue-collar to pay for school. Wanted to be a teacher but was black-listed. SF State, Berkeley, the 60’s—didn’t show for my draft physical. Arrest records are never totally expunged. They let me vote, call me for jury duty, but not teach. It was only until after my recent retirement that I returned to writing. It’s taken a year to get up to speed. Had to un-learn and learn anew. You’re correct that writing requires practice and discipline. I enjoyed reading this post. I have a dear friend, humorist, who writes for Arianne—for free. I’ m sharing your post with him
Speaking of the good, bad and ugly, I recall taking a 50% pay cut from a temp job at Goldman Sachs to be a reporter for the Davis Enterprise back in ‘87, then going bankrupt two years later over less money than I’ve since paid off on a monthly credit card bill.
Now that everyone expects free content from the internet, writers might be in even worse straits than photographers when it comes to handing out freebies. You gotta wonder what all those lead-type printers who would never work for free are doing these days, too.
As a photographer friend put it so nicely, if you agree to work for free, you’re telling the bastards in no uncertain terms what you think you’re worth.
I love doing photography myself, and I even like to write. Thanks to my day job, I can do both.
I’ve welcomed much of the impact of the internet on writing—particularly the writing I care about most, poetry—nobody was making a living sheerly by writing poetry anyway, and the gated community of academic poets wasn’t doing much good to people on either side of the fence. But journalism scares me. People will write extraordinary poetry for free, but how many people will do dogged, careful, attempting-to-be-impartial research for free? Not very many. Not very many at all. Especially if they don’t have a hard-bitten editor pushing it back at them (or, even better, at someone else) and saying, “check every goddamn fact in this three times, because this thing is going to blow up.”
I guess I’m just hoping something turns up :-(
One thing’s for sure, I don’t believe that non-unionized individuals succeed in a capitalist economy by righteously holding their prices above market value. You have to be a corporation to pull off a stunt like that.
I’m not sure this is worse than the days of rejection slips, radio payola, and McCathy’s black lists. Then and now, only a few are really successful. The difference is the unpaid manuscripts are being read rather than sitting in attics. Most writers will always be poor - there are more writers of every kind than a reader could ever read.
These days, in music at least, the internet is creating a “middle class” of local and niche band that couldn’t be noticed in the days of the radio companies.
Becoming the rare, successful, paid writer (musician, actor, massgage therapist, whatever) requires business skills, extreme persistence and lots of luck (besides top skills of course). The most important factor - plain, dumb luck.
I frequently deal with this issue too, but from a photographer’s perspective. A few year’s ago, when approached by publishers, non-profits, etc.. for use of a photo, there was usually a request for information on how much I charge for image use. Now, I rarely receive emails that mention anything about payment, but just an offer of great exposure (of which I have already had plenty). I used to politely reply to such requests, but the year when I cared for Don during his terminal illness, I reached an internal impasse, of sorts. I stopped replying to requests from anyone who asked if they could use my photos “for free”. The requests were coming in so frequently, that I found myself spending too much of, what to me, was precious time with my husband, answering emails from people who had no intention of paying anything for image use. In spite of my polite replies, I noticed those who sent the requests would make indignant noises if I stated that I would grant free use of an image (if their cause seemed valid), but would require some nominal fee (usually twenty bucks) compensation for my time for digging up the high rez files from my storage drives - no small task as I have many thousands of photos stored in a number of drives. That would evitably provoke much squawking along the lines of, “But you have the best photo of a such-and-such species of salamander (wasp, spider, etc..) on the net and we’d really love to use it but we can’t afford to pay anything at this time.” Blame it on my state of mind, but something inside just snapped and, rather than deal with these people, I just stopped answering anything other than requests from school kids who wanted to use a frog picture in a project and were asking for permission. I’d thank them for taking the time to ask for permission and say they could use the low rez version out of my online galleries. By the way, after Don’s death, when I once more had more time to answer emails, that became my standard policy with non-profit environmental organizations, professors asking to use photos for slide presentations for their classes, etc..
These days, with so many people giving away use of their digital nature photos for free, it is almost impossible to make the kind of sales I used to make. I must confess that, my last “big sale” was for an image that a company used (without permission) on the packaging for one of their products Someone alerted me to this fact, so I sent the company a curt letter saying that even eight year old school children know enough to ask for permission before using my photos, so WTF did they think they were doing? They quickly negotiated a payment arrangement which, while not wonderful, paid for the modestly priced guitar that I bought for myself last winter. Anyhow, call me jaded, but I have pretty much arrived at the point where I feel that there is very little money to be made in photography - at least in nature photography. It’s perceived as something people do for fun and recreation, so it doesn’t have any tangible worth. My guess is that the same thing is happening with writing. Almost undoubtedly, the hacks writing promotional crap for products are still making bucks, but writing about nature or the environment? Somehow, I don’t think so.
Congratulations on a very good post on a very hot topic. Writers will always write for free, or accept low payment, because they have a burning desire to be read. Not all writers fall into this category, but enough of them do (myself included) because as you suggest, we like to write, we like to know that people are reading us, and we are often compassionate enough to contribute our work for free, or low pay in order to support a publication that we feel warmly towards (or an editor we enjoy working with) when we know they don’t have the capacity to pay our going rate.
My grandfather was in the newspaper business. He started out as a go-fer, worked his way up to being a lino-type operator, and eventually became the operations manager at a major New England daily. He told me when I was young, “Don’t become a writer. You’ll never make any money.”
He was largely correct, but I don’t have the ability to stop writing just because it’s not as lucrative as I dreamed it might be. Satisfaction doesn’t come with a dollar amount attached to it. It does come at the end of an article, column, or novel, however. At least it does for me. And that’s enough.
I was sometimes nominally paid in the old days of underground/alternative newspapers… but quite frankly, I loved the bartering that went on in those times… I got free tickets to local bands and Billy Joel and stuff… records, t-shirts, books, invites to fun places, free lunches at new restaurants that never seemed to last, illegal substances, political buttons and related detritus, etc…nothing you could actually live on, but at least the idea was that something was being exchanged. I do the same with tarot readings… it is interesting that people always expect to pay me for that, but not for writing. And there is no question which work is harder.
I feel like there is no respect for writing, since people are becoming more and more illiterate. Maybe I’m just pessimistic?
And Arianna Huffington can bite me. That whole situation *infuriated* me.