Writers Are Like Any Other Supplier… But With One Key Difference
When you’re a professional writer, you’re also a businessperson. This is inescapable, and writers who ignore the business side of the writing profession are doing themselves a massive disservice. I understand that writers aren’t always natural businesspeople; I also understand that writers don’t know everything about business. I don’t know everything about business, or, in comparison to an actual businessperson, it’s better to say I don’t really know anything about business. But I need to if I want to be a professional writer. So do you.
You’re going to make mistakes. When I started, I didn’t think about any of the stuff I’ve written about in this article. When I started, I thought that freelance writing and the little stories and how-to books I wrote were just going to be pocket money, so “business” didn’t really matter.
I was wrong. Stupid, even. You need to think about your business from the start. I’ll tell you why in this article.
The long and short is: We are manufacturers. Writers are manufacturers, arrangers and suppliers of words. In the same way that a supermarket is supplied by the butcher, greengrocer and dairy farmer, our clients, or the public who read us, are consumers of goods we supply. You might think that providing a box of cereal or a bottle of milk is completely different to producing an article, and you’d be right: But in terms of the economics of the situation, there’s only one key difference.
The Key Difference
There’s a single key difference, and if I were in a mischievous mood, I’d put this section right at the end and make you deduce that difference before explaining it. I’m feeling pretty content though, so I’ll spell it out.
A writer licenses their words on a temporary basis unless there’s a contract saying otherwise.
This is a key difference.
When a supermarket buys a bottle of milk from a farmer, they own that milk unless there’s some mitigating contractual factor. (For what it’s worth, I can’t see a scenario where that would be the case.)
When a writer sells a story to a collection or an article to a website, said buyer doesn’t own the product unless there’s a mitigating contractual factor. (I.e. you sell ownership of your words on a permanent basis to the contractor.)
(Please note: This is not specific legal advice.)
This key difference is the key to one of the best things about being a writer; you own actual assets every time you write something. I’ll go through some examples in this article because it’s all feeling a bit clunky thus far.
Freelance Work For Clients
I’ve written about this before: I was an idiot when I started freelancing. That mistake cost me thousands in intellectual property. (I’m not even joking or exaggerating that figure.) It could do for you too.
When I signed up for various freelance websites, I didn’t specify the nature of the license. That meant that the contract I signed with my clients was along the guidance lines of the sites: Most of which state that ownership belongs to the client on completion of the work.
WE DON’T WANT THIS.
That meant that for every $5 article I wrote, the client was getting the absolute right to get my work and I could never use it ever again. If somebody had have told me what this article is telling you at the time, I might have thought, “It’s only $5.” Stupid.
Specify that your client gets the rights to use your article for the first six months exclusively and then after that six months you are allowed to use it as you see fit. State that explicitly and if a client doesn’t like it, renegotiate at a higher price or tell them “no.”
You might think “It’s only $5” or “It’s only a thousand word sales page worth $20” but when you add up a $5 article a day and a $50 sales letter a week, you have millions of words at your disposal in a year.
Following the advice I’m giving you, I have whole books’ worth of material that I own the rights to on various subjects. Whilst I wouldn’t just copy/paste these into a word document and upload them, I can use those words forever. These are subjects that I’d never have come up with on my own and the actual words have been paid for by clients already.
For a nice metaphor: Imagine if you were a builder, and somebody asked you to build them a house. You built them a house with their money, and then they lived in it for ten years. Now, as a builder, you don’t care because after you get paid, you get paid and then the house belongs to the person living in it.
Imagine if you were that builder and after ten years you had a contract stating that the occupant no longer owned the house and you did. That’s what your articles are like.
Freelance Work: The Sites
Think like a supplier.
Another big mistake I made early on was thinking as though the freelance sites I worked on were my employers. They’re not. They don’t care about you, don’t think of you as an employee and they’re certainly not going to pay your pension.
So you need to think of them as just a consumer of your product. No exclusivity is required for any freelance site, and you shouldn’t ever give it. If you’re grinding your wheels on Upwork and you’re worried it’s all going to go away and take your livelihood with it, then you need to have started planning yesterday. There are no downtimes for a writer.
Working For Yourself: Guest Posts and Contributing To Other Sites
A lot of writers write for other sites. I’ve done so recently – I took part in a round table critique for some fellow website creators. So I’m not going to tell you that you can’t write for other sites. However, there are two things I’ll say about guest posting and writing for other people in terms of this article’s subject:
- Your website and your properties should always be your focus. Don’t write more for other people than yourself.
- Remember that you are the owner of your copyrighted words unless there’s a contract stating otherwise. People don’t have the right to publish your work without your say, and they don’t have the right to edit, change or misrepresent you without your permission either.
Most of these things will be taken care of if you vet people properly. If at any point you feel like you shouldn’t be working with someone, pull the plug. If you have to, cut your losses and move on. Your words can earn you money for the rest of your life and so it’s rarely worth getting into long-term troubles over short-term confusion and fears.
Final Thoughts: Valuing Your Creative Property
This article has gone on longer than I thought it would. In fact, I’ve had to delete a few bullet points about fiction and book writing, which I’ll come back to at some stage.
The point of this article is that you are a businessperson licensing a tangible product as a writer. Your copyright over your work is automatic and it lasts from the minute you publish it until seventy years after your death.
Do not trade this away lightly.
Do not value it lightly either. Let’s do some math to finish the article and get the point across.
Imagine you’re a twenty-five year old man. You write a sales letter for some product that gives you a ten-dollar profit for every item sold.
Let’s assume that it’s not in a fixed form. It might be a direct letter, it might be a web page or it might be in a book.
It makes you one sale a month.
Not very much, but you can buy a cheeseburger and fries with it, and you write a sales letter every day so you don’t have time to think about it that much.
In the first year that sales letter has earned you $120.
You forget all about it.
You live to 100.
75 years at $120 a year is $9000. You could leave your four grandchildren a couple of thousand each and they could buy their first car on their seventeenth birthday or something.
It doesn’t stop there though.
You’ve got another seventy years of copyright ownership before this sales letter enters the public domain.
That’s $8400 more.
That is $17400 in total across one-hundred-and-fifty years for a single article. Your grandkid’s grandkids could also have their first car. That’s assuming the money you make only makes an inflation-rate interest, and the article only ever makes $10 a month.
It’s a simplified example, but that figure could go up or down. However, the point isn’t about the figures, it’s about the power of copyright ownership.
It should make you think about signing away the lifetime rights to a book for $2000 or writing a news article for exposure or something.