I’ve been writing since 2013, when I opened a blog to distract myself from a breakup in law school. My dad silently follows my work, but whenever we talk, he always refers to my writing as a 'side hustle'. It's hard to blame him though: creatives are hardly respected in Nigeria.

A few months ago, I stumbled on a Twitter ad calling for content writers in respect of a fashion blog. The terms included “two articles per week, N500 naira for every approved two”. To put this in context, writers would be paid N250 for each APPROVED article....

....meaning that there’s a chance that someone could rack their brains writing two articles and none would be “approved”, never mind the risk of being published without your knowledge.

I’ve also had someone tell me how she was offered 25 kobo per word to write an article. I can remember the last time I wrote anything for less then N5 per word…and this intelligent lady was being told to accept 25 kobo. Basically, for a 3,000-word article, she’d get only N750!

I’ve never seen a set of people who get so much disrespect like writers do.

“Is it not just writing?”

“I’d have done it myself o, but because I don’t have time”.

“It’s easy na, I could have done CTRL + C and CTRL + V, I just want to support you o.”

Four creatives line up for a megaproject. The photographer gets N500k. The graphics guy gets N200k. The sound guy gets N300k. The writer has their payment delayed, gets N10k after lots of mail correspondence, and expects to be grateful, after bleeding themselves dry!

Then there’s this scenario many of us should be used to:

“We’re looking for creatives with unique stories for a thriving brand. We’re happy to pay handsomely”.

“Ok, what are your rates?”

“We recognize that writing takes skill, so we’ll gladly pay N1 per word”.

I remember one conversation last year which went like this:

“Mr. Chiemeke, we’d love you to write a 6,000-word essay. It should be ready in 2 days. We want detail, we want nuance, we want ghjnmtrsdfgh…. we would be happy to pay you 50 kobo per word, you know, for the culture"

In September 2019 the manager of an Israeli startup approached me with an offer of N175,000/month to work remotely. I almost took it up, before I realised that it wasn’t my kind of writing, plus he wanted to add graphic design to the JD. I sent a mail politely turning him down..

This Israelite replied me with words like “you should be jumping at the chance to work with a foreign company” & “I’ve seen your writing samples, they’re nothing special. You have a day to reply”. All I wanted to type was “Mister, FUCK YOU”, but home training made me just ignore

See, you have to learn to attach value to your craft. Know when to “sow a seed”, when to pay forward, when to walk away. I would know a lot about this: I’ve come a long way from writing unpaid columns in 2016, to being paid R2000 for a short story.

Furthermore, be confident enough to turn down ridiculous offers that go to insult your skillset. You may be hungry for a minute, but you won’t die. If you let them get away with paying you scraps, that could be their assessment of your worth, and they’ll never bring you big jobs

Of course, some low-paying clients lead you to the big gigs by way of referral, but that’s less than one-thirds of the time. They won’t tell you these things in school.