The many ways to cheat a writer

Making a living as a writer is tough, tougher when it seems the world is out to get you unless you hustle like a maniac. Even some of the big name writers need to take university teaching jobs or other part-time work to keep their head above water.

Last year the results of a study by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in the United Kingdom found that a professional writer’s annual mean income there was 11,000 British Pounds, which is below their national minimum wage. In their case, a professional writer was defined as a person who spent at least half of their working life working as a self-employed writer. A professional earning less than a minimum wage?  It sort of makes me want to cry.

And yet wherever you look, folks are trying to not pay writers, some are even proud of the fact that they are treating writers like their own personal slaves.  Like the UK Huffington Post editor Stephen Hull who said recently, “I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.” Huffington Post allegedly makes a monthly income of $2,330,000 and they cannot pay their writers?! And yet what is a newspaper without writers? A bunch of blank pages - or blank screens in this case.

Editor's Comment
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