What is This Obsession With Working for Free?
…and why you should never apologize for asking to be paid for your work
Writers and creators live in a tough world many other vocations don’t have to contend with. You’d never get upset with your plumber when she hands you an invoice, after unflooding your flooded bathroom. You wouldn’t shake your head and call your brain surgeon a greedy pig once she billed you to remove that baseball-sized tumor from your melon. And you surely wouldn’t scoff at the idea of a jeweler preposterous-enough to extend a hand and ask for your credit card after you chose the perfect watch from the glass case.
But for some reason we creative types are capitalist swine if we dare charge our worth when we present our best work to the world.
I believe it stems from the idea that writers and creators are one of the only vocations that have the ability to create alchemy — something from nothing. Gold from iron ore.
Part of this free epidemic is our fault.
As creators we work tirelessly for free. We create free content. We write books in advance, sometimes for years, in the hopes our work will pay off at some future date. We create projects on spec, and hope if we built it they will come. We give all kinds of free goodies away to entice new clients…
