What Determines Writer Pay?

Would-be writer Carolyn Davidson blogged to me recently that the concept of writer pay is a complete mystery to her. “How do they decide what to pay?” she asked.

So here’s a look under the hood at writer pay and how it’s set.

Factor one: experience. It’s true that many publications and corporations will pay more for a more experienced writer. They can tell from the quality and quantity of your clips how long you’ve been around. (If you haven’t put up a Web site where you can feature links to a substantial number of your clips to impress editors, do so immediately!)

Factor two: budget. Let’s look at print first. Magazines and newspapers have subscribers and advertisers who pay them. That gives them money to pay you (and their own salaries). If they have a lot of subscribers, advertisers are likely paying more for the right to reach them; if fewer subscribers, they have less money to pay you.

The exception to this scenario is if they have few subscribers but those subscribers represent a very desirable audience – says, CEOs of major corporations or wealthy jet-setters. In which case, their ads likely still go for plenty and they should pay good. This is why trade publications are often good-paying markets – their sub base may be fairly small, but they give advertisers a valuable opportunity to reach a very specific niche market – people who own hardware stores or do business consulting, for instance.

Online sites have various business models. Some companies who sell a product or service in the 3-D world consider their online content a marketing cost like buying ads in magazines. Depending on how big that company is or how lucrative their business is, they will have more or less money to pay you. This is why copywriters long to write for Fortune 500 companies – they have the revenue to pay well. While there are some very legitimate and good-paying all-virtual Internet companies, most are cheesy online sites that sell ads on their site and that’s the whole business model – and they tend to pay squat.

Factor three: the marketplace. Tempering these factors is the publication’s sense of going rates in the marketplace. We’re currently in a bad patch with this, as many people are out of work and apparently willing to write complex legal, insurance, tax or financial articles for $10 or $20, much less easier stuff. An increasing number of companies are falling to this bottom-pay rung right now, because they can – there is a surplus of people willing to write for next to nothing. So it’s a harder task to find the companies that still realize that if they want to build a reputation for quality, they need to hire a pro.

Fortunately, these times will end some day, I believe, and the pool of online sweatshop workers who speak English as a first language will vanish, leaving companies to hire people at a fairer, living wage. May this day come speedily and in our time!

Despite the economy, good-paying clients are still out there. So keep looking and get paid what you deserve!