I was very excited a couple months ago when I got what seemed like a steady writing gig for a fair, even GOOD amount of money. With filmmaking essentially shut down, getting paid $2250 for 20k words was a godsend. A miracle. The one good thing this year.
And then

As I’ve watched happen at one internet-based company after another, two months in they announced a “new and exciting!!” deal for writers. In exchange for giving us self-publishing rights after a year, we would now be writing
Wait for it
40k words for $1600.

Yeah.

So double the work for 2/3rds of the pay, not to mention the immense unpaid work of self-promoting, marketing, finding a platform to self-publish...a year after writing the thing.

I’ve watched this happen at company after company after company. When things look sketchy or they aren’t getting the traffic they want, instead of investing in more marketing or hiring higher-profile writers for *more* money, they turn on the writers and slash their pay.

And hey, freelance writers are desperate souls. We need gigs and money. So will most writers swallow the pay cut? Sure! But now you have a new problem: you’re going to get garbage content, and not out of spite, but because writers now need an additional gig to make up the loss.

Creative writing isn’t working on a manufacturing line. You cannot write well 14 hours a day. If you want a 40k story from me in five weeks, while I’m also trying to juggle other gigs, I guarantee you’ll get something half as good as the 20k version.

And so sites devolve into content farms that only exist to sell ads or other things, the high-profile writers leave, and pretty soon the owners are left with a domain of crap. An internet graveyard.
I’ve seen this dozens of times in 12 years of writing online. It NEVER works.

Anyway please hire me to write things now, because I can’t spend 50 hours a week writing for 4 cents a word.