Last week, author and Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton wrote an essay about the seven things he did to reboot his life. The Huffington Post, a publisher recently purchased by Verizon Communications for $4.4 billion, offered Wheaton the opportunity to republish the essay in exchange for the “unique platform and reach our site provides.” Wheaton declined. His now-viral rebuttal to Huffington Post’s offer has once again raised the question of whether writers and creative content makers should produce for free. Salon examines the issue of balancing free and paid work:
Writers, shooters, graphic designers, musicians, and others do need to get their work, and their names, “out there” – they hear this all the time! Many run their own blogs for this very purpose. But unlike start-up types who first raise money on the basis of something they’re hoping to do, these craftspeople live off the work they produce. And they constantly, in a digital age that has already destabilized their earnings, are asked to do it for free.
12 responses
Okay, but the Rumpus does not pay and never has, so.
from your FAQ:
“Why don’t you pay for the writing you publish?
The Rumpus is a small site run by a lot of volunteer editors who are incredibly enthusiastic about beautiful writing. In an effort to keep advertising minimal and keep our site free to readers, we pay only our managing editor. Writers who publish their work on our site retain the copyright, and many have had their work discovered by agents or publishers who found them here.”
Um, this blog doesn’t pay their bloggers.
I hope all of your unpaid bloggers read this and revolt.
Precisely. They work for exposure.
“Writers who publish their work on our site retain the copyright, and many have had their work discovered by agents or publishers who found them here.”
Just though it was funny because the Gawker main page told me it was. I’m a drone.
Precisely. They work here for exposure. Last line.
Just though it was funny because the Gawker main page told me it was. I’m a drone.
As an editor here, what I really hope is that the people who write for us find places that can and will pay them for their work and that they publish there. I edit the poetry section here, and I’ve told many of the people who review for me that if they have paying work, they should absolutely put anything they’re even thinking about writing for us to the side and get paid. I’ve lost out on work from some really excellent writers because of that, and that’s how it should be. I don’t even give my writers deadlines because I feel it’s not right that I impose on them when I can’t offer them anything beyond the possibility that they might be published and the ARC I’ve sent them.
As the Managing Editor of the site, I’d like to add that we wish we could pay, both our writers and our editors. Everyone who works for me works out of love for the site—The Rumpus makes enough to keep running. We are very up-front about this, and it’s the reason that our writers maintain full ownership of anything we publish. We don’t have writers sign any kind of contract, as many other sites (which pay nominal fees) do. Personally, I thank my editors and writers again and again for their amazing work, and I try to help promote their other projects whenever and wherever possible. The Rumpus is a family, and a labor of love. Further, we know that the subject of paying for writing is important to discuss, and that’s why this post went up on our site (in spite of the backlash that could have, and did, occur).
Brian and Marisa, you two are obviously kind and thoughtful people and I am sure nobody at the Rumpus is making a fortune. But if the site makes money, no matter how little, using other people’s unpaid labor, then its business model is predatory. Just as you (hopefully) would not expect anyone to come in and clean your office for free, or to provide food for you for free, your employer should not expect people to give away their writing for free.
Lauren,
I’ve been writing and publishing poems for 17 years now and I’ve been paid for them in something other than contributor copies exactly once. I didn’t even get paid for my book, which was published by a university press. I got author copies which I was able to hand-sell and made some money that way, which was a form of compensation, but it’s not like I got a check or even royalties. My point is, I knew this going in. I know it every single time I submit poems to a journal, and I submit anyway, because yes, the system is predatory and it’s shitty that it’s predatory but it’s the system we have for now.
And I have to take exception with your last line. We don’t ask writers to give us their writing for free. Our writers retain full ownership of their writing, and we don’t get anything monetarily when they sell that writing elsewhere. The most we get is an acknowledgement in the pages of the books where their work later appears, and if a writer decided not to give us credit as first publisher, there’s really not anything we could or would do about it. We don’t sell permissions because our authors don’t need to get permission from us to re-run their work elsewhere because it’s their work. It never stops being their work. And no one is happier for our writers than we are when that work reaches a bigger, more lucrative audience. Is it an ideal arrangement? No, but it’s not quite the exploitation you’re suggesting it is either.
Lauren, I appreciate your note. I think Brian has covered most of what i would have said, but I’d like to add that The Rumpus is not “making money,” past the money we make to run the site—and some months, we struggle to make enough to do even that. To suggest we are predatory is extreme and inaccurate. If there were any extra money, I would use it to pay my editors and writers. There simply isn’t. We aren’t, as you suggest, making a profit.
No one is forced to write for us. Those who do, I believe, understand our mission and our goals, and understand why we aren’t able to offer monetary compensation.
If our financial situation were ever to change, I would immediately move to pay my editors and my writers. But that is not our current situation, nor has it been our past situation.
As a writer who earns a living off writing and as a contributor to the Rumpus and the assistant books editor, I’d like to say that working here is completely different. This conversation is not black and white. I work here for FREE, because I love good literature and as a writer and reader I know that good things don’t always earn money, so I have to find a way to support what I love to keep it going. For me, this is in my sweat and blood. Or maybe not quite blood. I don’t have tons of money to give the site, if I did, I’d donate.So, I work for them. I wouldn’t do this for Gawker (whose sister site Jezebel I do write for). It’s different, because Jezebel is a great site, but they also have a commercial side that the Rumpus doesn’t. It’s like comparing a food bank to a grocery store. We need to start thinking of lit mags like churches–here to provide food for our writerly souls. Places of faith, hope, and lots of good words. Sure, some churches pull in tons of money. But others don’t. I work here for free because I’m part of a cause I believe in. I also write for money and I do that because I need to make money. The two are different, but also the same. It’s not quite as easy as some of you want to make it sound.
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