What's a Freelance RPG Writer Worth?

Freelance writers (as opposed to those on salary) tend to be paid per word. The rate varies from publisher to publisher, and on how experienced the writer is. Ed Greenwood, for example, can command a much higher rate than a new writer can. Obviously only you, the freelancer, can decide what your labour is worth - and if you're an experienced freelancer you probably already have a pretty solid idea what that figure is. But if you're a new writer, you may be a little lost. In this article, which I'll continue to update with new information, I'll tell you what rate a new writer can expect from various publishers.

[Note - this article will continue to be updated and tweaked; folks are suggesting excellent advice to include, so it's worth checking back]. Using publisher submission information on their official websites, and publishers advertising for writers I have compiled the below list. In some cases, publishers have kindly volunteered the information; thank you! At the moment, it's a bit sparse; but I hope it will grow. New writers can use this page to help them determine their own value and check out publishers that interest them. I don't want to tell you what to charge for your writing services, or what to pay freelancers, but hopefully the information here will help - a little bit - in making an informed decision. You can click through to apply for opportunities that interest you.

Advice: Here are a few things to be wary of. They don't have to be dealbreakers, they aren't necessarily bad, and you may well be OK with them, but you should be aware of them. This applies to new writers (and artists, for that matter).

• If you're doing work for somebody, and you're not being paid, you are being exploited. (Doing work for somebody is different to doing work with somebody). Volunteer work obviously falls outside this category, but volunteer work should clearly be volunteer work, not work paid in "exposure" (see below).
• Never work for the promise of "exposure", or for "experience". You should work for money. This is a common tactic, and is often puffed up with nice language, but it is exploitation and you should look out for it.
• Also be wary of jobs offering payment solely in royalties (or a percentage), unless the company has a verifiable track record of good sales - and they should be able to provide you with solid figures. Do not be afraid to ask for these figures; they're asking you to trust them and take a risk by working for royalties only, and if they refuse you those figures you should proceed with caution. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but do it carefully. Royalties on top of a fair rate is perfectly reasonable.
• Be wary of contests which grant the copyright of your work to the company; that's often a way of getting people to work for free. Look for contests which allow you to keep the rights to your work, or which will pay you if they publish your work. There is a caveat to this -- it's reasonable for companies to protect themselves from future claims of similar development to past contest entries, but, as Paizo's Erik Mona says, even then "If we publish it, we pay for it. Period."
• Look at what's being sold. "Work for hire" means the publisher owns the output completely. Other options include "first publication" (in which you retain ownership but the publisher gets to publish it first) and non-exclusive licenses. All of these are OK, but the last two are worth more to you than the former, and may make a lower per-word rate more palatable. If you're writing for an existing setting, keeping the rights to your work is far less valuable to you, because you're unlikely to be able to re-use it (you're not going to be able to re-use material about Drizzt or Yoda, for example). Be wary of work-for-hire combined with a low per-word rate.
• Be wary of pay-on-publication work. That means a publisher can shelve your work and never pay you for it. Take pay-on-acceptance work. Some publishers will portray their policy of paying-on-acceptance as a beneficent act: it's not; it's the baseline you should expect. That said, it's OK if the payment doesn't come instantly, as most publishers do their payments en masse on a periodical basis - but make sure you know when to expect it.
• Don't do "audition work" for free. You should be paid for that, too, although it is fair that that be at a lower rate. Game designer Ryan Macklin has a good article about this.
• If you re-use Open Gaming Content, it is reasonable for the publisher not to pay you for those words.
• If it's not in the contract, ask how stat blocks are paid.
• Finally, don't work in exchange for product.
• Remember, it's OK if a company can't afford you. There's things that all of us can't afford! And also remember that it's very, very difficult to make a living freelancing for RPGs. Some people manage it, but it's not easy!

Please feel free to send corrections or additional information.

The below list shows the rates I've been able to find published online for new writers.

This is just starting rates only. Experienced writers will already know what rates they usually get, and already have relationships with various companies, so they don't really need the information below. If there's an asterisk, then I've been able to confirm that the company in question pays experienced writers more, but it's generally safe to assume that these minimum rates are increased depending on the writer.

I've included links where I can so that you can apply to the companies that interest you.

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Publisher	Rate/word for new writers	Notes
Paizo Publishing	$0.07*
Wizards of the Coast	$0.06*	Freelance articles for D&D Insider; other writers work on salary
Pinnacle Entertainment Group	$0.06*	"Higher for some folks, plus a % of any crowd funding we do if they're one of the principle creators."
Evil Hat Productions	$0.05
Atlas Games	$0.05
Steve Jackson Games (Pyramid / GURPs PDFs)	$0.04 (Pyramid) or royalties (GURPs)	After publication. "Pyramid pays 4 cents a word, shortly after the article appears in final form in our PDF"; "...our base royalty is 25% of the cover price (this can go up for authors with a strong reputation that helps sell books, and can go down for inexperienced authors or those requiring very heavy edits)."
Vorpal Games	$0.04
Posthuman Studios	$0.04
Pelgrane Press	$0.03*
Goodman Games	$0.03	Link is to Level Up magazine submissions; other submission calls have the same figure
EN Publishing	$0.03*
Drop Dead Studios	$0.025
Fat Goblin Games	$0.02
Dreamscarred Press	$0.02
Purple Duck Games	$0.01*
Frog God Games	$0.01*
Kobold Press	$0.01 - $0.06	"...strict minimum of 1 cent per word... Our rates for established, proven freelancers vary from 2 to 6 cents/word."
Bards & Sages	$0.01	25% on acceptance, rest on publication
Rite Publishing	$0.01*	Rates go as high as $0.11.
Raging Swan Press	$0.01
Open Gaming Monthly	$0.01	"If your submission IS selected, you will receive 1 cent per word for your first published work. If your work requires very little editing (fixing typos, fixing grammatical errors etc.) then that will likely be increased to 2 cents per word. If your work receives great reviews and we use your work in future issues or products, you'll receive 3 cents per word in those future products."
Obatron Productions	<$0.01	Savage Insider; Word Count: 2,000 – 5,600 | $15 – $35
LPJ Design	$0.005* (half a cent)	Up to $0.02 with experience
Rogue Genius Press	royalties only
Ephemeric RPG	royalties only	$1.00 for every PDF or e-book that is ordered

What the Publishers Said
Discussing this subject with numerous writers and publishers turned into a fairly lively debate. Some of the statements made clearly illustrated why it's important that writers make themselves informed. Louis J Porter of LPJ Design says that "You kind find was to save money at the beginning that pays off very well in the long run [sic]" and that "Do I think I could get to a point were I make $10K month doing this, Oh Hell Yes!"

The way LPJ Design finds ways to save money in order to make $10K a month is to pay writers half a cent per word. As he says "if you are a first time writer never have sold ANYTHING to ANYONE, sorry you bring no value to my company... You guys sound like the college grad who wants to get paid $50K for just showing up. LOL!" I found myself very uncomfortable with Porter's language; he later said to one writer "You can die from exposure. Just prove to me why I should pay you more? You do that, you get paid better." and to that writer he later said "And there is the problem, you think this is an equal relationship. It isn't."

That said, the same company's calls for freelancers on various RPG forums take a different tone: "So if you are interested and not sure you think you can be good at this, I will just say, don't miss out on your dreams because you are afraid to go after them...It is your job to loose."

I can't help but feel that "I can't afford writers" isn't an great reason to underpay writers. It's OK to not be able to afford something but the solution is to find some other way to afford it, or accept that you can't afford it. Many small publishers have addressed this issue by using services like Kickstarter, Patreon, and others, which are great alternative models, although not for everyone. Erik Mona asked about products with margins so low that $160 is too much (assuming a 10-page PDF at $0.02 per word) "Does it make sense to put effort into projects that garner so little interest from the paying public that they require shennanigans like that? Is $80 a fair wage for what amounts to 4 days of work?"

And, definitely, the majority of small publishers do not intend to consciously underpay anybody. It would be unfair to point at a bunch of publishers and chastise them for being exploitative, and many tiny publishers can really only afford $0.01 per word (although James Ward observed "At $.01 a word you get what you pay for.") As Raging Swan Press' Creighton Broadhurst (who is a very small publisher and pays $0.01 per word) said, "If I thought I was exploiting people, I would stop doing what I do. But I don't think I am as I'm forcing no one to work with me." And I myself know what it is to be a tiny publisher with incredibly low sales, so I can certainly empathize with that position -- most micro-publishers are run by decent people paying what they can afford.

I have no idea where the line lies, though personally I feel uncomfortable these days offering anybody less than $0.03 per word (I have in the past), and wouldn't consider paying $0.01 per word. But that's just what I choose to do. Most writers I've spoken to agree that 2,000 publishable words per day is a fairly reasonable rate. As game designer Rich Baker observed, "It's hard to knock down 2000 word days, day in, day out. That's an honest 8 hours of work. At $0.05 per word, you'd be making $12.50 an hour... I am frankly appalled at the idea that someone might pay (or take) $0.01 a word in the 21st century. That's saying a writer is worth $2.50 an hour." Paizo's Erik Mona feels that "1 cent a word is not 'bordering on exploitative'. It is exploitative FULL STOP."

[As a side note, using Rich Baker's estimate of 2,000 words per 8 hour day, that works out to $10 per day at half a cent per word, $20 per day at $0.01, $40 per day at $0.02, $60 per day at $0.03, $80 per day at $0.04, $100 per day at $0.05, $120 per day at $0.06, and $140 per day at $0.07.]

With luck, this article should give writers some of the the information they need to inform themselves when considering freelancing, and ensure that the relationship is an equal relationship. I'll keep the table above updated as best I can, and folks can make their own decisions. Please do feel free to correct inaccurate figures or provide additional information! Also, if you're a freelancer, feel free to share rates (don't break any NDAs, though!)

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[Zak S]

Undoubtedly so. I bought paper for R&PL, and I only buy a handful of paper RPG products in a year- the physical artifact was worth having.

Thanks!

This basically boils down to "make something noticeably better in all possible ways than the standard market output", and it's undeniably good advice.

I mean something slightly different--and advice I think is more generally useful:

Make something that is, at least, the best you can do.
Make something that you yourself would actually use.
Do not assume the way thing are usually done is the way you need to do it.

I think this is advice everyone can follow--I see a lot of freelancers complaining that they did some writing on some thing---some thing they essentially don't really believe in and don't take responsibility for and that they only feel good about a part of---isn't selling. The RPG equivalent of a writer doing ad copy to make money, or an artist making cigarette money doing graphic design on the side.

In most of the world, this is sometimes necessary--you need money to keep afloat. In RPGs, it's silly: there's no money to be made. If you're working on projects you don't totally believe in, well: they're gonna suck. Expect that. Make your cigarette money writing outside RPGs--there's more of it. Only write RPG stuff if the entire package is something you can be proud of.

The average self-pub RPG creator has nowhere near that kind of skill reserve to call on.

Everybody has something to say. The trick is to say it and feel responsible for making sure you said it as well as you could rather than saying part of it and kind of making a hash of the other part and then praying it goes over anyway.

But for the average apprentice RPG publisher, just getting out a respectable-looking print product with modestly useful content and a few good ideas between the covers is a real challenge.

For those people, I'd suggest starting at a scale where what is there is something you can feel good about.

Raggi started with a zine. I started with a blog. Don't tackle something bigger than what you're confident you can do right.

Shooting for sublimity is what every self-respecting publisher wants to do, but my concern is for novices who try to buy excellence. They think they need to spend a lot of money patching over their own limited skills- buying a lot of art, a lot of writing, a lot of layout support, a lot of everything, really, because they've got a grand vision and they know that if they just make their product sufficiently awesome that it's bound to sell well. They're like kids playing in their father's workshop, hammering stuff together and waving around tools they don't exactly recognize. And like such kids, they've got a tendency to get hurt when their shambolic contraption doesn't quite come out the way they'd hoped. And then they get bitter, and write off self-pub as a horrible idea because they invested too much before they had sufficient skill to control their creation.

Good craftsmen start simple. You learn how to cut a board or how to hammer a nail or how to sand a corner.

Yes.

You learn how to lay out a simple two-column page of text, how to set to a grid, how to compose a unified spread...Then, someday, after years of ferocious effort and study, you'll be ready to make that 300-page artbook.

Well, this I have a little bit of a problem with--I think people thinking the standard bag of graphic design tools is actually what you need is part of the problem. It creates a barrier to entry that's both high and in the wrong place.

Most graphic design in RPGs sucks--especially the most professional graphic design. It doesn't do what GMs and players need it to do.

If you only know two chords--write a song which uses two chords. But make it BETTER than anything Emerson Lake and Palmer could ever write. A limit on experience is not a limit on good ideas.

I think good RPG stuff starts with outrage at how terribly, uselessly done even the most well-funded corporate product is. You can start small--but challenge the world with that small thing.

Each time you think "Oh well I'll just learn to do it the way they usually do it" you've just tied an anvil to yourself. The way they usually do it doesn't work.

 

[arjomanes]

Well, this I have a little bit of a problem with--I think people thinking the standard bag of graphic design tools is actually what you need is part of the problem. It creates a barrier to entry that's both high and in the wrong place.

Most graphic design in RPGs sucks--especially the most professional graphic design. It doesn't do what GMs and players need it to do.

If you only know two chords--write a song which uses two chords. But make it BETTER than anything Emerson Lake and Palmer could ever write. A limit on experience is not a limit on good ideas.

I think good RPG stuff starts with outrage at how terribly, uselessly done even the most well-funded corporate product is. You can start small--but challenge the world with that small thing.

Each time you think "Oh well I'll just learn to do it the way they usually do it" you've just tied an anvil to yourself. The way they usually do it doesn't work.

Zak, this is extremely useful advice. I'm a graphic designer, and I never really thought much about the graphic design of RPGs.

It's funny how much time I spend thinking about design in my regular job, yet I never applied any of that thinking to RPG design. There are really interesting ways to quickly get information across when running a game and those LotFP books are great inspiration.

 

[Zak S]

Zak, this is extremely useful advice. I'm a graphic designer, and I never really thought much about the graphic design of RPGs.

That's why I wrote this:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/arrows-and-boxes-and-columns-and-bullet.html

RPGs are a whole undiscovered continent for real graphic and information design. The top-dollar product still just defaults to hiring a designer who has never played or GMed and going "Make it look expensive"

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

As someone who has embarked on self-publication this past Sunday, this thread is directly relevant to my interests.

First of all... I am not doing this for the money. I realize that only a small minority of RPG authors can make a living from their writings, and I suspect that all of them make less money than I do with my day job. Thus, I am not going to pretend that a profit is my primary motive - my financial goals are not to make a loss, and if something is left over that do reduce my not inconsiderable RPG-related bills then that's a nice bonus.

I've long dreamed of publishing my own material, but for many years I had this vague notion of a huge magnum opus - releasing the fantasy world I've been working on ("Urbis") as a massive tome. Unsurprisingly, I never finalized it.

Then I had the opportunity of publishing a smaller setting I had written ("Doomed Slayers") with a small publisher, back in 2012. A number of reviewers said some nice things about it and it managed to become a "Best Silver Seller" at DriveThruRPG, so there is that. However, the publisher decided to close down last year, which meant that this seemed to be a good opportunity for going into self-publication.

Which I did. The second edition of "Doomed Slayers" was released past Sunday, and I hope to be able to release a first supplement early next month (the manuscript is in the final stages).

Since I am a very small publisher and don't have much of a budget to work with, I have to do most things myself - therefore:

- Layouting is done with LaTeX, since I am familiar with that from my academic years.
- I still had the rights to some artwork from another artist from the previous edition. While the artist fully deserved his money, this also took an enormous amount of money out of my budget. Since I have started with dabbling in digital artwork again, I plan to do further illustrations on my own, saving me more money.
- Instead of massive tomes, I will largely focus on smaller PDF supplements - these are far less of a hassle to create, and easier to cram into my busy schedule.

"The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good". I am still at the beginning of my RPG writing career - I will have to assume that all my relevant skills will improve over time. The main thing is that, right now, I am doing something which will give me experience and feedback - instead of thinking about it.

So, what's the payoff like?

Well, this gets a bit complicated - basically, I managed to get the "first edition" of Doomed Slayers transferred to my new imprint, and then updated the files with my new edition.

The first edition had 136 "non-free" (that is, without comp copies) sales at a sales price of $3.99 - which was enough to make it a "Best Silver Seller" (that is, among the top 14.26% of products at DriveThruRPG). Subtracting the 35% that DriveThruRPG gets for the "non-exclusive" contract, that left $362.71 to be distributed between the publisher and myself. That probably counts as a "success story" in RPG publishing - remember, at least 85% of all products sell less than this!

For the new edition, I decided to try out the "Pay What You Want" option and turned the $3.99 into the "suggested price". Obviously, after only five days there is not yet much hard sales data to evaluate. Nonetheless:

- It has been "sold" 24 times
- Of these, 18 "sales" were set at a price of $0.00.
- The six others paid $0.25, 2x $3.99, $4.00, $5.00, and $7.85

It is too early to say whether customers who first got it for free will repurchase it later at a higher price to show their appreciation (the DriveThruRPG sales reports do show customer numbers, so it's possible to track this). I also hope that they will consider giving money for future products. Furthermore, I hope that increasing my presence through the "Pay What You Want" option will increase my "brand name recognition" so to speak.

I will probably publish some statistical analysis of the sales every month or so for the first few months - as a trained scientist, I find this interesting, and I hope some other aspiring publishers will find this useful as well.

 

[Nellisir]

Update. On February 4th, I switched The Basic Illusionist on RPGNow from free to Pay What You Want.

In the 8 days previous, I "sold" 19 copies.
In the 8 days since, I've "sold" 5 copies. Two were on the 4th, and it's not clear whether they occurred before or after I change the price. If before, that changes the figures to 21 vs 3.

No one had paid anything for it.

I might leave it alone for a few more days, but PWYW definitely seems to hurt free downloads.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Since I am planning on two lines of products, I think I will make the "core product" for each "Pay What You Want" - and for one line all will be "Pay What You Want", while for the other the rest will have fixed prices.

That should give me some data for comparison's sake.

 

[CardinalXimenes]

Since I am planning on two lines of products, I think I will make the "core product" for each "Pay What You Want" - and for one line all will be "Pay What You Want", while for the other the rest will have fixed prices.

That should give me some data for comparison's sake.

That... does not sound like a highly-optimized sales plan, to be honest. I'm assuming that these two lines cover fundamentally different topics- and if that's the case, then the only parity between them is that they're both written by you. People who love sci-fi kelpmen may not be the ones who love intricate explorations of life as a macrame cultist, even if your name is on the cover of both products. Even if they're loosely connected, such as both targeting the same system, product lines have their own identity- or should, at least.

If you make one line entirely PWYW, everybody who likes that topic but doesn't care about the other has just dropped out of your customer base. Sure, they might throw you some spare change, but I've never heard of anybody actually making meaningful money off of a PWYW product. You'll get very little from them, aside from those print fans who insist on ordering the POD for a given product. Worse, you won't get enough to support further development of the line- there won't be the "publish one, collect money, roll it into the next" cycle that actually enables a healthy line.

There's also the issue of uptake. If you want to go with a free core product, you want it to be free. You want it to waft into the hands of multitudes, lifted to them by the slightest breeze, descending upon their fevered brow as lightly as a mesh of dew-pearled spiderwebs, except less creepy. You want absolutely nothing to stand between the public and that first hit, and PWYW is a substantial barrier for a lot of people. They just don't want the implicit social obligation. They have "free" and "not free" categories in their head, and PWYW is not in the former. Once you get them hooked on your limpid prose and splendid topics, then you start charging them full freight on the supplements.

If you really do have two lines in mind, I'd recommend taking the most salable, doing a free core product, and then following it up a month later with the release of the next in the line at full-freight price. If you need to chum the waters a little, then toss in something small as a freebie, but I'd stay far away from PWYW if you have plans of serious line-building. Free is for marketing, pay is for earning, and PWYW is nowhere in what calculus.

As for the second line, well, I'd wait to see if it actually is feasible to maintain two lines. I've got two going myself with the SWN-derived games and the LL-derived material, and it is enormously hard sledding. If you can really keep two lines flying, then I'd start the second one off with a full-price core. It's your initial line's core that's the bait, and you don't need two core games worth of bait in the water. If they aren't sold on you by the first, they're not especially likely to jump into your line because of the second.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

That... does not sound like a highly-optimized sales plan, to be honest.

It's not. Money, for me, is a secondary concern - though it is a nice bonus, it will still earn me far less than what I earn via my day job. I do this because I enjoy writing settings.

But I am interested in some hard statistical data. Who, among those who got a certain product for free, will later pay for a non-PWYW from the same line? DriveThruRPG sales reports allow me to track this. So far, all I can see is speculation about the possible advantages and disadvantages of PWYW pricing, but selling my products in this way might provide some useful information on its actual effects (and I do plan to publish this information).

 

[Nellisir]

If you want to go with a free core product, you want it to be free. You want it to waft into the hands of multitudes, lifted to them by the slightest breeze, descending upon their fevered brow as lightly as a mesh of dew-pearled spiderwebs, except less creepy. You want absolutely nothing to stand between the public and that first hit, and PWYW is a substantial barrier for a lot of people. They just don't want the implicit social obligation. They have "free" and "not free" categories in their head, and PWYW is not in the former. Once you get them hooked on your limpid prose and splendid topics, then you start charging them full freight on the supplements.

I'll support this. By my admittedly scanty data, PWYW has caused "sales" of The Basic Illusionist to nose-dive with no benefit. I'm up to 6 sales and 0 dollars. I'd rather have 20 sales and 0 dollars.

 

[CardinalXimenes]

It's not. Money, for me, is a secondary concern - though it is a nice bonus, it will still earn me far less than what I earn via my day job. I do this because I enjoy writing settings.

But I am interested in some hard statistical data. Who, among those who got a certain product for free, will later pay for a non-PWYW from the same line? DriveThruRPG sales reports allow me to track this. So far, all I can see is speculation about the possible advantages and disadvantages of PWYW pricing, but selling my products in this way might provide some useful information on its actual effects (and I do plan to publish this information).

Well, I can give you some specific numbers up front. According to DTRPG, Stars Without Numbers' free version has been downloaded about 24,400 times. If I run a report on people who have bought both the free version of SWN and the expanded Core version, which just adds another 40 pages of content, I find 744 overlaps. It's hard to translate that number into a percentage of Core editions sold, because I've also distributed it two years running with the Bundle of Holding SWN offer, but if you're speaking only of DTRPG sales, that's about 3/4ths of the total Core sales there. When I compare SWN Free downloaders with those who've picked up Skyward Steel, a supplement that came out just a month after SWN, I see a whopping 964 of its owners had downloaded SWN Free as well, against a total 1108 copies sold through DTRPG.

Now, it's impossible to tell how many of those buyers got Skyward Steel first and then downloaded SWN Free, but I have to imagine that's a pretty rare event. What is clear is that the majority of supplement buyers have also grabbed the freebie entry-point into the game, and that these sales are converting at about a 25:1 ratio for me over a long timeframe. I don't really know how much validity that conversion rate would have for other publishers, and I don't know how PWYW would have affected it, but given the evidence that PWYW cuts general uptake I haven't a lot of confidence in that model.