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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve Conan Trustrum" data-source="post: 7659237" data-attributes="member: 1620">[NU][/NU]Except here's where your argument fails. Utterly.The writer decides what their work is worth TO THEM. What a publisher is able to earn on a product actually decides what the work is worth in the market. Ultimately, it's going to be that market that decides the worth of a writer's work.A freelancer can tell a publisher all they want "hey, my work is worth X amount and no less. If you don't pay that, you're exploiting writers!" but if the market is not willing to pay a price at sufficient sales that allow the publisher to actually pay someone that rate, while allowing the publisher to earn enough money to make the project worth doing, then quite literally, no, your work is not worth that rate. By every definition except "what it is worth to ME, as the writer," the work is not worth the rate.That's not exploitive. That's market economics -- it's supply and demand. And, of course, it's also only exploitive if there's coercion or the like involved. A publisher who offers a job that is entirely voluntary is not exploiting anyone because no one is being forced or compelled to apply for it. Saying "well, I'm an RPG writer, and there's a lot of competition, so publishers offering this low rate because they know this are exploting me" is not exploitation -- again, it's supply and demand. There are certainly more lucrative writing jobs out there in other markets for professional freelancers who are actually skilled enough to get them. And, well ... if you don't have those skills and writing for RPGs is all you can get, perhaps you want to consider that you don't have the chops to be worth what you think you are.Oh, I know ... I'm just speaking as an exploitive publisher here, right? I'm the big bad enemy portrayed in this article. As Morrus put it in his twitter feed, I'm one of the publishers who showed up to have a "tantrum".But I'm also a freelancer and professional writer who works in the latter capacity outside the RPG industry. I've also spent the last 4.5 years extensively hiring freelance writers outside the RPG industry for both long-term and short-term work. I've worked in and outside of RPGs as a freelance writer for $0.01/word and less within the past year for various reasons ranging from the work being of the sort that I can crank it out so quickly that if you calculated my rate per hour, it would actually be pretty high, to being desperate for cash at the time -- ANY cash, to the point where I couldn't afford to be picky. I certainly was NOT being exploited by taking that work because I made the choice to go to them and apply for the job. On the other hand, I've also netted jobs that paid me $100 for a 1,000 word blog I cranked out in an hour and a half. (Of course, with the latter, I needed to utilize my valuable SEO knowledge to land that particular job, but that's part of having the chops to get the higher paying jobs some other writers aren't qualified for. What you bring to the table counts for more than just your ability to use grammar properly and put in the time needed to get the work done.)Frankly, the ideas regarding "what my work is worth" and "exploiting" writers expressed in this thread are the results of people who don't actually know what freelance writing is like in the world beyond the cottage industry that is RPGs. A true professional writer isn't fooled by such beliefs that there is actually some sort of magic number that you should calculate and say "this low and no less." If you're actually a professional writer looking to make a living freelancing, each job is taken on a cost-benefit analysis that includes numerous factors that don't get brought up here because everyone is too busy waving around the idea of a minimum rate per word like it's some sort of talisman. Factors like:a) how long will the work take one to do? A small pay rate that takes one little time to do can very easily actually pay off better than a higher pay rate that requires slogging through the content, and thus more of the writer's time.b) what else is on one's plate at the time? While hunting for higher paying work, are you doing anything else? Instead of waiting to hear back, filling the time with lower paying work because there's nothing else on your plate at the time is still earning you more money than hunting for the higher paying work alone brings in. Especially if the hunting ends up in no results.c) is there some other benefit to taking on the lower pay rate? And no, I'm not talking about the "work for exposure" aspect that seems about as far as RPG writers are able to consider because they don't have experience in other industries. Writing professionally outside of a cottage industry means building relationships (well, it actually means that in the RPG industry too, but people don't want to seem to admit that, so we'll pretend it's irrelevant here) that can lead to more and better work down the road. That $100 for $1,000 word job I got? That was the result of building a relationship with a lower paying gig first.d) is taking on the lower paying job actually going to teach me something I can translate into a sellable skill for other work later? When I was doing content management for a multinational company, I had a big problem in that far too many writers looking to write blog content knew jack <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> about SEO best practices. That means many of them never made it past my paid trial. If some took on some low paying, quick turn around jobs that let them hone their SEO techniques, they would not only not get on my bad side by wasting my time applying for jobs their trial work illustrated they weren't capable of doing, despite it being in the job description, but they'd also end up qualifying to get the job. The same can work out in the RPG industry if the writer wants to use that connection with the publisher to ask questions or the like. Much of the knowledge I brought into Misfit Studios as a publisher was learned by spreading myself out as a freelancer writer first. If you're focused on your pay rate and just getting the job done, you're missing out on that.e) am I actually likely to get paid? While working as a freelance writer in the RPG industry, I had higher pay rate jobs I never actually got paid for because the publishers didn't follow through on their contract. All the favourable terms in the world don't mean squat when a contract is broken unless you have the resources to pay the matter. On the other hand, the lower paying gigs have almost always followed through. So, from that perspective, getting $0 actual money in pocket at a higher pay rate doesn't really do me much good. But, hey ... any writer in the RPG industry knows how rare it is for a publisher to stiff their freelancers, right?And, much like how people should be approaching the idea of a pay rate, none of the above are absolutes. They have value sometimes, but sometimes they don't. Each and every job should be approached from the perspective of a cost-benefit for that particular moment in time. If that's not what you're doing -- if you're operating purely under the belief that there's nothing to it but deciding on your minimum pay rate and nothing else -- well, you don't actually know what it means to be a professional writer. You just happen to be a writer who knows enough to sometimes get paid for one's writing.And my final qualifier on all of the above: I am currently working full-time as both a small press publisher in the RPG industry and as a freelance writer in other, more lucrative fields. Misfit Studios, which operates primarily on a digital product model, hasn't used freelance writers in about 7 or 8 years (EDIT: well, until recently -- I currently have a job where I'm paying a flat fee of $5 per creature to convert a OGL 3.5 creature to M&M3e stats, so no pay per word there), but when we did it was at about $0.01/word, negotiable. (Because, as a publisher, I also recognize that considering a pay rate to be an absolute isn't realistic to how a project requiring freelancers functions within the RPG market.) Since then, instead of taking on freelancers, all writers other than myself have been on a royalty basis or as a collaborative project. So, I'm not just talking out of my ass without perspective from both sides, and because I haven't actually hired on any freelance writers for so long, I'm not here "having a tantrum" under the convenient excuse that I'm defending my company's "exploitive" payment policies.</blockquote>

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