Novice Writers, Beware
I should have known better. After all, the signs were all there.
And, truth be told, it — looked — professional. I mean really professional. There were several stages to the application process, so it looked like each step was designed to weed out the dreamers and optimistic novices.
A slick, seamless video began with humility, by thanking the applicant for considering ‘The Urban Writers’ as an employer. This was strategically followed by congratulations to the applicant for meeting the standards TUW has established for itself in the ghostwriting and copywriting industries. This reputation attracted the best clients and TUW writers could count on ‘above market’ pay.
Then the video revealed that as a TUW writer, your problems finding clients would be a thing of the past. They could supply all the work you wished for. Plus, they would always have your back, regardless the issue, and unending support.
Best of all, you could get paid almost the very next business day.
Turned out it was just another con.
The thing about a con or any other nefarious offer is that the perpetrators leave the payoff until the very last, when their promises had coagulated in your imagination and you were already paying the bills in your head and most likely to overlook their truth — their actual rate of pay.
But, just in case any part of your brain was still paying attention, they disguised the pay rate in a visual illusion.
100 words for $1.00.
Their use of the ‘$’ sign and the duplication of ‘100’, despite the decimal point in the second reference, hides their deception regarding pay. Their ‘above market’ rate, it turns out, is ONE CENT PER WORD.
For reference, when I first wrote for a local paper in the 1980s, I earned four cents per word. That’s four times this rate forty years ago. Think about that.
If you write an article of 1500 words, estimating a writing time of three hours with two for research, your take for that 5 hours is $15.00. That’s $3.00 per hour. That’s the better part of your day. Nor is it over. You are paid by the word in the final version. What if you receive extensive instructions to rewrite? You might end up earning less than a dollar per hour.
This is not a thing justified by ‘it’s just business.’ This is beyond that threshold; it is a symptom of particularly poor character, indicative of not just their untrustworthiness but also their disdain for you, after their declaration of support.
‘The Urban Writers’ are a con in corporate clothing. STAY AWAY.
And they’re not alone. Job boards across the web offer many versions of this con.
One very profitable enterprise seeks copywriters for product descriptions. Of course, you want to impress, so you see investing extra time as having a return in the future, when what you’re really doing is providing the company with new, creative datasets for them to feed their AI, which, under a separate corporate entity, offers cut-rate, AI-generated product descriptions to their customers.
Beware, beware, beware. For all the benefits the internet offers, the opposite is equally true — the opportunity to be cheated by strangers.
