The Global Marketplace Can Be a Bad Place to Market Your Services

I don’t know whether to laugh or be offended.

I am a freelance editor with accounts on several online job-locator service boards that seek skilled service providers all over the world. I usually skim past all the low-paying jobs and bid only on the plum assignments. I’m not interested in writing fifty (low-quality) articles a day for ten cents an article. And my profile clearly states my rates as $50/hour.

So I was pretty excited when I got an e-mail saying that someone wanted to hire me for a private project. Awesome, because a little extra money would be nice.

I went to the site to check out the project. The guy has sixty-five 500-word articles and sixteen 1000-word articles written by non-native English speakers. He wants them edited for correct grammar, proofread, and put into a specific format — within two days. He will pay up to AU$40 (which is about $38 USD).

In other words: He wants me to proof/edit nearly 50K words in 48 hours for $33. (I have to pay $5 to the job-finder site.)

The average novel these days is around 60K to 90K words. So we’re talking the equivalent of a book, here. I can do a simple edit on the average novel in three or four 8-hour days. He wants it in two days, so that makes it a rush job. I usually charge $40/hour for this kind of editing, and I upcharge 25% for rush work. So my quote for a project like this one would usually be around $1000.

Yeah, I turned down that job. And I’m totally disgusted at the slave wages that people think an expert like me, with more than 25 years of experience in the field, will work for. But I can only laugh. Did this person REALLY think I would work for less than $2/hour? REALLY?!

Tags: editing, freelancing, hum, low wages, True Stories, Work Life