How much can freelance writers make? According to a couple of writers' blogs, competent freelancers should have no problem earning at least $1 a word. To me, this sounds promising for a career change.
For planning purposes, a work-year consists of 2080 hours. (Of course, as a salary-paid peon, I work closer to 3000 hours a year without any overtime.) So ... if I can create 100 sell-able words an hour during a "normal" year, that's a hefty pay raise to $208,000!
Ah, I can dream.
I say this because I visited a couple of popular work-for-hire sites. Their jobs offers expect you to be happy with a tenth of a penny per word. Yes, some jobs are much more generous with a penny per word, but even with those high payers, I still couldn't support my family of four on $2080 a year. Who can?
Well, someone must be. Those low-wage gigs have tons of people submitting proposals.
How is that possible? For one reason - the bulk of responses to these slave-wage jobs are from people in countries where you can live comfortably on pennies a day.
So how is $1 per word earning possible? Do you have to spend $0.99 a word looking for work? Or, do you just have to have lots of blackmail material on your prospective clients?
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