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Let's have a quick thread to talk about freelance pay rates per-word, anchored on some realistic numbers. Let's assume that someone can consistently write 1000 words of quality text in a single, 8-hour workday. [Thread]
Let's start at the generous level of the current RPG industry pay scale, of about 20 cents/word. A day's work at that rate with this model would come to $200 USD, which comes to about $25/hour. This is actually pretty decent as a rate and above the US average wage. Good stuff!
How about a slightly lower but good rate of 15 cents/word? That gets you $150 which is $18.75/hour which is just slightly under the US median wage identified by the Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/
The rate of 12 cents/word is a benchmark of sorts. That rate will get the freelance writer $15/hour or a total of $120 for a day's work. That's what a lot of activists have been fighting for as a minimum wage and comes close to the highest minimum wage rates in the states.
Rates of 10 cents/word are not great, but decent. This will earn the freelancer a per-word rate of $12.5/hour for their labour. This aligns with the state minimum par rates of places like Arizona, New York State (outside of NYC), or Colorado.
The Science Fiction Writers of America have just set their minimum pay rates at 8 cents/word for professional markets. This comes to an even $10/hour for your work which is about Arkansas, Michigan, or Minnesota minimums. https://www.sfwa.org/2019/09/03/sfwa-minimum-pro-rate-now-in-effect/
Their old minimum pay rate was at 6 cents/word, which is means our hypothetical writer would only earn $58 for a day's work. This is slightly over the US federal min wage, so you could legally be paid that in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Tennessee.
If you were an employee in the territorial United States, any rate at 5/cents a word would be illegal, but let's not discount some of the US territories. Someone working in publishing in American Samoa could still be paid at that rate. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/ASminwagePoster.pdf
A pay rate of 4 cents or less is illegal anywhere in the US according to minimum wage laws, outside the literal involuntary servitude known as penal labour. Don't worry, you can pay folks in Hong Kong, Portugal or Turkey at this rate.
So, a pay rate of 3 cents/word can still meet the minimum wage requirements of places such as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia. or Romania. For those at home, this is also equivalent to $30 for a day's work.
A pay rate of a mere 2 cents/word could still exceed minimum wages for someone working in Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, or the Philippines. This is a single $20 bill. You could feed yourself with unlimited breadsticks and salad at The Olive Garden to fuel your day's labour.
For those experiencing the schadenfreude, one cent a word comes to $10 USD. This is about a meal at McDonalds in the states. You could legally pay someone in Russia, Iraq, Kosovo, Ukraine, China, Mexico, or Afghanistan that little.
Over at Genesis of Legend Publishing, I am sorry to say that our minimum per-word rate prior to September 2019 was only 6/cents a word. Our current minimums are 10 cents/word for freelancers staff, and 5 cents/word for ourselves. https://www.genesisoflegend.com/about/freelancers/
I am absolutely sympathetic to the brutal margins that the RPG publishing industry has. It's a painful process to make ends meet and many self-publishers can only afford to do this because they have other income. This means only the privileged get to create art.
But, let's make things crystal clear. If you are an established US-based publisher unable to pay your freelance writers the US minimum wage? I cannot in good conscience purchase or promote your products. Let's do better as an industry.
Let's also note that we need to also pay _ourselves_ something more than ramen and passion. Many publishers such as yours truly do a lot of labour for which we fail to compensate ourselves. My personal struggle is in ensuring that I pay myself something for my writing and layout.
For many of us, this means that we need to make some structural changes to how we operate. We need to raise prices so we are not actively losing money on every product. We need to make books in a more affordable manner. We need to smooth distribution chains. It's a challenge.
I want us to work on improving the publisher income streams in a fundamental way, then translating that to paying our labour fairly. We need to make our industry and the production of books sustainable rather than a meat-grinder that is chewing us up.
