Cherie Burbach posted an interesting article over at Working Writers today in which she discussed whether to take “low paying” work.  For anyone who is interested in freelancing, I’d recommend having a read of this.  I’d also like to expand on the ideas she raised myself.

I’m all for getting the most return out of your work, whatever that work may be.  Each and every one of us has bills to pay, and we deserve to be able to pay them if we’re producing something other people want; be it building industrial grade filters in a factory (one of my summer jobs before I went to university), analysing tax returns or writing the next summer blockbuster.  If you do something others value, you deserve to get paid. No exceptions.

But how much should you be paid?  Well, that sometimes comes down to what you can negotiate, and sometimes to what the other side will pay you.  As a freelancer, we don’t often have the benefit of rocking up to a job and being told “everyone else gets X per hour, so that’s what we’ll start you on.  Turn up at 9 tomorrow for your induction”.  We usually have to either take a job on the amount being advertised, or negotiate ourselves.  In both cases, you need to know two things before you can tell whether the job is worth your time:

1. How much you need to earn per hour in order to pay your bills; and
2. How long the project is going to take you.

I’ve explained the process of determining how much you need to earn per hour in this article for Suite101 on setting attainable goals.  In essence, you need to know what your monthly bills are, so you can break that down into daily amounts. Then you adjust for how many hours per day you can work, and go from there.

Now you know what you need to earn, you can compare it with the rate you’ll get for the project, if the project has an advertised rate.  If it doesn’t, you know how low you can go in negotiations.  I’d advise starting higher than your lowest rate when negotiating because it’s easier to come down than go up.

As a rule of thumb however: don’t settle for less than you need to pay the bills.  If you need to earn $15 an hour (or whatever), get $15 an hour or move on.  There are others who can survive on less, so let them take the jobs that are low-paying.  Always remember that you’re worth what you need to survive, and probably more on top of that.

There has been a lot of talk in the freelance writing community about how revenue from online sources is falling off at the moment.  I have to admit that I’ve often fallen into the trap of looking at revenue and wondering if it’s worth all the time and effort I put into my writing work, because the returns are so small.  When you look at the time you’ve spent and think you’d have been better off behind the counter at Greasy Joe’s Crispy Burger, it’s hard not to be demotivated.

So don’t do it.

Sometimes I feel like a bit of stuck record when I keep bringing up the time I spent in sales but in all honesty, although I was a terrible door-to-door salesperson, I learned a lot from the intensive training course that was part of the job.  One of the things I learned was how to induce self-motivation in even the worst of situations; and another was to recognise when I was being my own worst enemy.

You’ll know when you’re demotivating yourself because you start looking at all the bad things that are happening, and concentrating of finding more of them.  Maybe you start your day by looking at how much you earned yesterday, and you find it’s not very much.  You compare it to last week and see a drop in your ad clicks, or whatever, and that begins the cycle.  Then you look at how many other bad revenue days you’ve had recently.  Thoughts like “more people are starting to use ad blockers and that’s going to kill my revenue stone dead!” start going through your mind.

Soon you’ve decided there’s no point in writing more articles because you’re throwing away more time you could better use getting a real job with a steady salary.  Now you’ve lost interest in writing articles, or stories, or whatever; and if you somehow manage to hack out a few hundred words, they’re going to show the reader just how unimpressed with your work you are.

Of course that’s not going to make people want to read anything else you’ve written, is it?  So let’s see how we can turn the situation around.

Right now, the chances are that revenues are down because businesses are cutting back on advertising.  I run two webcomics that rely on advertising to bring in new readers and because of that, I have loads of adverts firing out across the web for most of the year.  Right now, I’m not paying even a quarter as much as I used to have to for the same advertising space, because I don’t have to compete as much with other advertisers.  As a result, the people hosting my adverts aren’t getting the same income they did last year.

Should they pull the adverts?  No.  Then they’d get no revenue at all.  What they need to do instead is increase the number of pages where my adverts will appear.  Compensating for the lower revenue per page by increasing the number of pages has two advantages:

1. In the short term, it will bring the advertising revenue back up; and
2. In the long term, it means there will be far more revenue when all those pages start earning decent money again.

The downturn in the economy won’t last forever and if you’re writing good, readable material it will keep on earning for you when the recession is over.  Okay, you won’t be earning the megabucks on each piece you tap out right now but ever little helps to offset the fact that we’re getting less per page than we used to,

So if you remember that once your stuff is out there it will keep on earning, you can see this not just as writing for now but as preparing for a better future.  That always makes me feel better, and I hope it will for you, too.