Buck a word; why there are no old freelancers

It seems that a few years ago, most larger books got up to the $1 a word threshold for freelance writing and simply stalled. Many smaller and regional books never even got close and have paid the same 30 cents a word they've paid for years. Or $100 for a feature, believe it or not. They appear not to have noticed that the Consumer Price Index was not repealed and that Canadian cities have become expensive places to live. (Or are simply so small, skint and dependent on government grants that they cannot afford more.)

The Periodical Writers Association of Canada have gamely, and so far mostly in vain, tried to generate some interest in a scale of fees that would ensure that their members and others could make a decent living writing for Canadian magazines.

But even if everybody agreed on a minimum of $1 a word, what does it mean, anyway? It means that a good freelancer, working diligently will earn about what an executive assistant makes in a downtown office tower. Consider this scenario:

A freelance writer in a year writes about 10* pieces of an average 3,500 words, for $1 a word. Total income, $35,000. Income tax (29% on taxable income of about $23,000) is $6,675. Take home pay = $545 a week.

*This would be good going, assuming that you could work more or less seamlessly and invested half of your time in development, pitching and querying.

This implacable math more or less guarantees that such a freelancer would eventually feel compelled to search around for a regular gig, effectively removing herself from the marketplace. No matter how much they loved what they were doing, they couldn't afford a one-bedroom apartment above a store.

Doesn't this provide opportunity for younger freelancers to come into the market ? Yes. But only to repeat the pattern. Editors I talk to lament the fact that there is a shortage of trouble-free, creative, one-draft writers available to them. Well...

When I raise this issue with publishers, they look at their shoe tops and mumble about low margins etc. But for most consumer magazines in this country, the article fees amount to , at most, 10 or 15% of total outlays. A decision to raise fees by, say, 20% would have a negligible impact on the bottom line.

Every national consumer magazine in the country could take the last full year of article fees and divide it by the word count of the articles published to come up with the average paid per word. Then it would be a simple matter to calculate what difference it would have made at the year end if they'd paid their writers $2 a word.

A toonie a word. Think about it.