On a related topic, a lot of tech companies will pay you $100-400 per blog post. For example DigitalOcean pays $200 per 1500ish words for in depth tutorials.
That's a little above 13 cents per word for a complex tutorial which solves a real problem and potentially has source code.
> "Sometimes we just feel an article isn't a good fit for our readers."
Is there a way to submit a topic for an article for review without going through the trouble to submit the entire article? I'd hate to write an article that seems interesting to me but doesn't match Scotch's intended audience.
Definitely (that would blow and be a waste of time for everyone). Our FAQ [1] outlines that. Basically you have two options:
1. Email us at pub@scotch.io first
2. Submit just the outline of the post for review as a normal post with comments at the top. We'll see it's just an outline and be able to provide feedback
We've been working with guest writers for well over a year now and really try to work with everyone as best we can. I would say almost all our writers have had a good experience with us.
You can imagine though that some of the post people want to write are really not fit at all for scotch.io (we have no choice but to maintain some sort of general theme and quality control). That's also why you can publish instantly whatever you want (well written, poorly written, on cats, tech, ice cream, whatever) to The Pub's community post section.
We just launched The Pub like a month or so ago to streamline guest writings, so any feedback is super welcome.
Similarly, Exoscale (Swiss cloud hosting firm) are paying writers on tech subjects. Again, it's for a tutorial that solves a real-world problem but also for introductory pieces designed to get someone new acquainted with a subject.
In many cases, a good place to start would be various online community-oriented sites that accept contributions from outside writers and have editors. They won't typically pay, but they'll give you experience and help you build up a portfolio that will be useful if you want to start doing this sort of thing more systematically.
Speaking as a professional writer who covers technology and business, that's awful. If you want to write to have something to add to your programmer resume, go for it. Everyone else, just say no.
I would actually blog for tech companies on occasion if they were willing to pay 5 - 10k per post. It seems like companies are only willing to pay for very cookie cutter stuff though.
Generally speaking, unless the writer/organization (e.g. analyst firm) is a "name," companies are mostly looking for relatively vanilla straightforward content to educate users, keep eyeballs coming back to the company's site, etc. And because this is relatively commodity stuff, companies don't pay a lot for it.
I understand the economics. But if you look at firms like USV, you'd have to imagine that the dealflow from Fred & Albert's blog/twitter is worth at least $1,000 per hour. So it's not like the opportunity to create valuable permission assets doesn't exist in the marketplace, it's just that companies aren't willing or (more likely) able to invest in capturing those. This seems like a possible market failure to me.
There are actually tons of examples in that general vein. For example, CEOs regularly write books that their companies use as marketing tools because they're believed to (at least indirectly) bring in sales by positioning the company as a thought leader in some way. "Advertising Value Equivalent" is even used as a marketing metric for such things whether or not it's a good one.
But that doesn't mean that this can be replicated by just having a freelancer pretend to be writing as the CEO. (Though PR folks, editors, etc. help with such projects.) And even when books are largely ghost written for celebrities and such, the ghost writer is still just going to collect a fairly modest word rate.
> But that doesn't mean that this can be replicated by just having a freelancer pretend to be writing as the CEO.
The freelancers can just write under their own names. Mathematically, people who can create substantial value by creating high-end content who are also CEOs must logically be a subset of the total population of folks who can create valuable high-end content. So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
Right now there are a handful of individuals who have landed one-off gigs doing this, but there isn't any sort of marketplace.
>So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
There is. It mostly exists in the form of subscription newsletters and paid research reports of various types. Specific examples include subscriptions to IT industry analysts such as Gartner. (Typically subscriptions include personalized services in addition to reports.)
In general, this has become a much tougher gig outside of a handful of large firms--because of all the competition with free content.
I already run a publishing platform that allows folks to turn email conversations into blog posts, the idea being to get the same benefits as blogging but with 10x less work. E.g. here is something that was just published today:
> That's what companies pay for a finished small-medium scale coding project.
It's also substantially less than the 15 - 20k that people pay to make a two-minute startup demo video. Is there something about writing that makes it fundamentally less valuable?
E.g. look at that guy who was shorting Lumber Liquidators due to the toxic materials issue. That ended up blowing up anyway, but would you claim that if he had paid someone a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content around that issue (think Groklaw) that he would have been unlikely to see a good return?
>Is there something about writing that makes it fundamentally less valuable?
For one, the logistics involved are infinitely simpler than for the video, which needs a team of at least 3 and usually 5 to 10 people, plus expensive equipment, props, a script, voice over talent and more.
Second, way more people can write decently than produce a decent startup video. Supply vs demand, etc.
Third, nobody much cares for a piece of writing. A two-minute startup demo video can catch millions of eyeballs. A writing will mostly go unnoticed.
Seriously, I've written for some media outlets and did some technical copy for a few companies. If you think you can get anything like $5K per piece, you're in for a very big surprise.
>E.g. look at that guy who was shorting Lumber Liquidators due to the toxic materials issue. That ended up blowing up anyway, but would you claim that if he had paid someone a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content around that issue (think Groklaw) that he would have been unlikely to see a good return?
He'd pay people "a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content"? Are you in ANY job market currently?
That's of the scale of the whole advance for a very popular book author (think NYT Best Seller list level, and not even all of them) -- not copy writers kind of money by any means.
Nope, working on my startup. When working as a consultant though I usually look at how much what I'm going to do is going to increase the paper valuation of the company, and then target making 10 - 15% of that as cash. That way the employer gets 85-90% of the upside, but they're also the one bearing the risk since there might not be any future payout.
Whitepapers are generally shorter than that. Our internal guidelines are about 2500 to 3000 words. They'll sometimes creep up to 4K words or so but that's pretty much the upper limit. (A blog post will typically be under 1K words.)
However, when you get into the $10K-20K price for whitepapers, you're usually not just hiring a writer. You're typically paying in part for a research firm's reputation and, possibly data.
I'm not sure how much we pay for straight writing under our logo. But it would be significantly less unless it came as part of a package with advertising etc. as deals through online news channels often do.
White papers traditionally can be almost any length. I've written some that are 3 pages long, others that are 15-20 pages. Each with variation in technical information, ranging from "Here's what's important to know in this knowledge domain" to documentation of a proprietary programming language.
While some of these are written by analyst firms, quite a few are not. They're work-for-hire, often by techies or journalists who know the area in great depth, and who can ask the in-house experts the right questions and turn those answers into something genuinely useful. (Well, when they're good. Mine are good. :-) )
>to documentation of a proprietary programming language.
We're probably just quibbling over terminology. The people I know use whitepapers to mean more business-oriented, less vendor-specific thought leadership pieces. And use other terms for technical deep dives--which can indeed be longer.
that's pretty crazy. There's hardly a post you couldn't write in a day of hard work (because then it's too long! spend one day writing it, so someone can spend 20 minutes reading it, don't make readers take hours to read through months of your writing.)
So you want a monthly salary of 5k (your low end per day) * 24 days = 120k per month?
> There's hardly a post you couldn't write in a day of hard work
I get paid a very high rate to edit and clean up articles written by techies who have this viewpoint.
When you are imparting technical knowledge that you know conceptually, it's easy to just jot down a few thoughts. They make sense to _you_, after all. But in most cases, experts don't recognize the assumptions that a reader might have, such as "what this is" and "why it's important." Like writing code, there's a difference between "make it work (at least the compiler doesn't crash)" and "make it wonderful." That's just the same for writing.
Personally, when I write in-depth articles, I spend a minimum of three days on it. It usually includes researching the topic, interviewing other people who know something about it (or wish they did), and writing the prose. Then I edit the prose. And I edit it again. Because I do my best to be clear and understandable, and to leave out the parts that people skip.
this is interesting. could you give me a link to the kind of post you're talking about? If you don't want to link here you can also email me at the address in my profile.
The authors really know their stuff. They spent that "just a day" writing down what they wanted to say. I spent two full days editing it for readability, querying them about technical details ("I'm not sure what you meant when you said... Could you clarify this point?"), and ultimately making them incredibly proud of the result. (Which was very popular in terms of pageviews, because it's good and useful data.) It still was their voice and their expertise; I was there to help them get the message across.
A good editor is like a good hairdresser. When she is done and you look in the mirror, you aren't surprised. But you think, "Yeah, that's what I WANT to look like!"
If there is research involved, each sentence or paragraph could easily take an entire day. E.g. a couple years ago I wrote a post about deaths caused by drug use/misuse, and just getting an idea of how many deaths are caused by smoking involved reading through several chapters of the Surgeon General's most-recent 800 page report. So I figure more like one post every 50 - 150 hours, for something 2,500 - 6,000 words in length.
That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy given that there are magazines that cost 100k per year to subscribe to, with dozens or hundreds of corporate subscribers. That's obviously not the market that most tech companies are going after, but there is precedent there in general.
Nobody makes a salary of 100k per month. That is $1.2 million per year. The CEO of IBM, a company that had revenues of $80 billion in 2015, made salary of $1.6 million in 2015.[1] If you want to include stock or options or a revenue share or bonuses or whatever go ahead - but that's not salary and your figures are completely, utterly ridiculous.
>That said, even a monthly salary of 100k+ per month isn't completely crazy
>Nobody makes a salary of 100k per month. That is $1.2 million per year. The CEO of IBM, a company that had revenues of $80 billion in 2015, made salary of $1.6 million in 2015.
Actually lots of people do. In TV, for example, even for a small European countries, such as that I know of, you can make like $500K per year if you're one of the 20-30 "stars" of the various network channels (head presenter, show host etc).
In the US: "In the depths of the recession in 2009, there were still 236,883 individuals who earned more than $1,000,000 in the United States. We know from other research that, by rough estimates, 90 out of 100 men and women reaching this income level are self-made with little to no inheritance. Almost all have college degrees. Men dominate the field, and almost all own or started their own business or work as an executive for a large business".
In the US news business, $100k/month is strictly the domain of TV on-screen personality presenters; i.e., not the reporters, but network affiliate anchors who are referred to in-house as 'the talent'. Absurd sums of money when you look at the rest of the newsroom staff salaries, but this is all about ratings, sweeps and very local/regional popularity.
The founder of the last startup I worked at made 100k per month and wasn't even the CEO, and that was pre-product and pre-revenue. He just raised a bunch of money on a pitch deck.
I'm definitely not saying that's common, but it's not unheard of either. Inside Silicon Valley there's a tightly prescribed set of norms that tend to be followed, but outside of there money tends to change hands a lot more quickly and fluidly. That's the benefit of being in a place like NYC, because people tend to be motivated more by self-interest rather than by trying to look cool or fit in, so it's a lot easier to pitch folks on stuff if you find a novel but rational opportunity.
I find it very hard to believe that was a a base salary. (Of course, I could be wrong.)
Of course it's possible to make a lot more than that! Just not as a salary. It would be interesting to know the details of their package. Also, how come you happened to know?
I know because it was publicly traded. (They raised a bunch of money and then bought a shell company.)
That wasn't the exact base salary, but that was basically total compensation not including stock. (So including a few hundred thousand dollars per year in an expense account and an additional couple hundred thousand for serving on the board.)
"If there is research involved, each sentence or paragraph could easily take an entire day." That's not how writers or the publishing business works. Presuming you made real-world top dollar, $2.00 a word, your $12,000 dollar article would bring you $40 an hour. Odds are you'll actually make a buck a word, so you're already down to $20 an hour. You can dream of a world where writers make 100K a month from projects like this, but with 30 years in the business I don't know anyone even close to that.
> You can dream of a world where writers make 100K a month from projects like this, but with 30 years in the business I don't know anyone even close to that.
I've never been, but if you go to some of the big leadgen conferences then I suspect that you'd meet or at least hear about a lot of folks like this.
>If there is research involved, each sentence or paragraph could easily take an entire day. E.g. a couple years ago I wrote a post about deaths caused by drug use/misuse, and just getting an idea of how many deaths are caused by smoking involved reading through several chapters of the Surgeon General's most-recent 800 page report.
Journalists for established media do all that (and more) as part of getting the facts for their articles, and still take in something like $2-$3 per month or less.
At my peak as a free lance tech writer for various computer magazines, I was making .40/word. That was pretty high on the scale for freelancers. And since then the bottom has dropped out of the market since print articles are largely dead.
Compared to many of the writers for the stable of publications I wrote for, it was at the higher end. Perhaps a named writer could pull more in at a better publication, but this was a very frugal and profitable (for awhile at least) group of magazines.
That's a little above 13 cents per word for a complex tutorial which solves a real problem and potentially has source code.