The Pointless Prison of Word Rates

Nothing makes sense when charging for, or paying for, professionally written words. As both a writer and editor I firmly believe that writers (and editors!) are underpaid, sometimes abusively so, and declining freelance rates have certainly had a chilling effect on the quality of writing available to read, and the quantity of writing assignments worth pitching for.

But word rates have always been an arbitrary construction used by writers looking for some scrap of sanity in negotiating payment. I am producing X number of words like somebody producing X number of widgets, my price per widget-word is Y. Now we have achieved rationality in terms of agreeable cost for my labor.

This is and has always been nonsense, albeit mutually agreed nonsense between writers and publishers. A word is not an observable, standard product of labor. A word, or any particular number of words, is certainly not a standardizable signifier of value. Word rates emerged as the tiniest step into the concrete, away from a completely arbitrary abstraction of how much a writer’s labor is worth.

Of course it’s more true than ever that a writer’s worth is what they can get for it, and no more. Malcolm Harris had a nice meditation from last year about the declining history of word rates and the impact of that decline on the writing profession. He spoke with other writers and editors about how anyone could possibly make a living with rates continuing to drop. The brass ring of $1/word has always been mythical for 95% of writers, and probably more like 99.9% now. But why is that so? And why was it ever a goal to begin with?

As an aspiring freelancer (how sad is that), I used to make earnest little lists of all magazines with known word rates, and I would send my pitches and drafts starting with those which paid the absolute most, which at the time was usually Playboy. My cost-benefit analysis decreed that a low-chance hit for lots of money was worth more than a better chance of success with a lower-paying publication. Shockingly, I didn’t place anything until I started writing for alt-weeklies at chump rates, and absolutely making no kind of living at it. But they were flat rates, like $25 or $50 or $100 for movie reviews or restaurant lists or interviews with idiot musicians.

This is because the number of words I produced had no relation to the value those words provided. Play the freelance game for enough years, and the intensity or difficulty of your labor has less and less to do with how long you write. In fact it gets easier to write more words, rather than less! (Just look at this email, for example.) If my long, easily-written essay gets published, should my word rate drop because it was a cakewalk? Of course not. As far as my editor should know, I sweated every syllable.

Which makes the word rate even more pointless when I, as an editor, then go in and cut 30% of an article submitted by a word-rate obsessed freelancer. Or when I rewrite the intro and finale myself, or delete some pointless quotes, or add transitions here and there. Whose labor went into these words? Whose words are more valuable?

One the one hand, writers cling to the $1/word threshhold as a professional achievement, or a way to avoid work they’d rather not take when they have plenty to choose from (must be nice). Publishers may throw around high rates for some writers as a self-aggrandizing hype move. Far more common these days are publishers who grandly brag about how little they pay for content.

Strip away the personalities, and the cold economies emerge: writers need income, and publishers have budgets. As an editor, I prefer to cut to the chase and just offer flat fees, as writers can judge far better than I if the likely time investment (regardless of length) is worth the pay. I feel the same as a writer. But if you take what amounts to a lower word rate, does that mean you can’t ask for your higher rate later? And aren’t you driving down the market for everyone else?

First of all, it’s adorable to think you should ever base an ask for more money on the principle of simply deserving it. It’s my rate! Far better to explain why the higher rate is justified in one case (on the difficult article), where perhaps not in another (for an easy article). Difficult-to-produce things are expensive. Even an accountant understands that. And secondly, no human taking a lower rate is going to make a quantifiable addition to the devastating damage already inflicted by market forces on the freelance writer economy. Of course, none of these rules apply to those who can afford to say no, consistently, in which case your rate is your brand.

Beyond its purpose as a labor quantifier, word rates might have once made slightly more sense tied to word counts in print, where physical constraints had some impact on article length and cost to produce the physical print product. This economic abstraction has an important corollary in advertising, where until recently rates where also often tied to the real word through barely concretized abstractions like print circulation. And what mortally wounded rates for both content and advertising was the reduction of abstraction in the form of audience data.

As the advertising industry got access to more and more granular data, they became less enthusiastic about paying lots and lots of money for abstract returns. Would you rather spend a million dollars on (a) a back cover of a big glossy magazine where you also get invited to a nice party, or (b) six months of targeted ads that you can refine on the fly and which tell you exactly who saw your ad and what they clicked and bought. Especially when option (b) lets you go back and get more money to spend on the next campaign based on all that rich data. Though that nice party had some good passed plates and an open bar, for awhile.

Audience data is even worse on writers. It is now effectively impossible to justify paying more than a few hundred dollars for anything, any kind of writing at all, if you focus purely on whether a given article “earns out” versus digital revenue it may plausibly “produce.” In the vast majority of cases, you can barely justify spending a few dozen dollars, assuming you have a robust programmatic or e-commerce revenue setup. In fact, let me posit a grim bit of speculation for all my well-paid writer friends: your high rates are a loss leader at best, subsidized by all the other underpaid writers and staff and content drones, and they likely always were and always will be.

Fortunately—well, sort of—modern publishing operations must be diverse and manifold affairs when it comes to attracting both revenue and audience, so one usually is not expected to literally earn out your writer’s fee on a merciless per-article basis. But don’t fool yourself into thinking some version of that calculation is always back of mind over on the business side, strategically speaking.

High rates (word rates or otherwise) are predicated entirely on the superstar status or niche expertise of the writer. For almost everyone else, word rates now most often represent a metric of downward pressure, as opposed to a ladder you climb to that precious buck-a-word. Freelance marketplace platforms offer conservative guidance on word rates to both writers and publishers—see rate lists and surveys from outfits like Contently or ClearVoice or ContenFly. What’s striking is how word rates are being appropriated by… well, less publishers, and more like entities one might charitably describe as “content buyers.” Stringently pegging word rates to projects and budgets and revenue streams allows them to generically commoditize words and, more importantly, demonstrate that they need to be less expensive. Much, much less expensive. This has done more to drive down freelance market rates, such as they are, than any freelancers taking poorly-paying gigs will ever do.

I have no new solutions for earning more money that you haven’t seen everywhere else, but I do suggest embracing the abstraction of how you charge for words. As a writer, experience will tell you whether a certain total number of dollars is worth the time and effort it will take to earn those dollars, regardless of how many words you have to write, or rewrite, or cut. For most writers, leaning too heavily on word rates is an equation that will be used against you, eventually if not already. If you don’t control the abstract connection between your labor and your value, someone else will.