You may have seen this picture below doing the rounds on Facebook last week. And if you did and you’re a creative, you may well have chortled knowingly. Because the sad fact is, most creatives I know have experienced this at some point in their careers.
Cartoon: The Oatmeal
For some reason, being a creative isn’t always seen as a “proper” job. At least, not until you’ve reached a certain level. Graduate entry-level jobs in other industries might come with a low-ish starting salary – but even then, many don’t. And yet if you dare to try being a creative or choose to work in the arts, somehow this is code for, “I don’t need paying very much – or even anything at all.”
Is it really down to competition? I’m not sure. After all, if you want to study medicine at university, then you do so in the knowledge that you’re trying to get onto one of the most competitive courses in the country. Becoming a lawyer is also a very tough road, according to several of my lawyer friends. And yet both professions seem to do rather more than ok money-wise after a relatively short time once they’re qualified.
I’ve been a copywriter for a long time now, so now I don’t have quite such awkward conversations about day rates and so on. Apart from one time very recently. I was approached by somebody on LinkedIn to see if I was interested in rewriting their company website. So we went back and forth a bit, emailing about the project, and then she asked me for a quote.
It’ll look GREAT on your CV!
When I told her my day rate, she asked if I meant that would be my fee for the entire website. Er…no. I didn’t. Given that we’d established that it would take up to four days, this logically means that she expected me to charge her little more than £100 a day. That’s before tax, of course.
Even for a graduate, that would be just about borderline ok for a day rate. Or a permanent employee who also had the benefit of paid leave, sick pay, pension, security and so on. For a freelance copywriter – and a senior one at that who works on global campaigns and runs a consultancy, it’s definitely not ok. Luckily, she did stop short of telling me the project would look great on my CV, but that line has been trotted out to me on a number of occasions in the past.
Let’s not forget, though, that this approach came via LinkedIn. Therein lies the problem to no small extent. Frankly, I blame online networks for this trend in bargain-bucket recruitment and freelance work.
If you’re a member of any LinkedIn groups, you’ll know that the jobs boards are constantly awash with ‘great opportunities’, and many of these receive effusive replies by willing professionals in poorer countries. I read of one copywriter in India who would work for £7 an hour. But in the Western world, to offer a professional £100 a day for their time and talent is really unacceptable. It’s also the way these jobs are presented as ‘great opportunities’ for which I and many of my highly qualified peers should be grateful that also winds me up.
So anyway, that was unfortunately the end of that potential project, because I politely declined. To put a positive spin on it, one could argue that I’m lucky to be able to turn work away in the first place. The fact is, my time alone is worth more to me than £100 per day gross. I’d rather sacrifice that money and work on my novel, for a start.
Hello, monkeys. Fancy some peanuts?
Perhaps these companies who think offering £100 per day is reasonable will end up shooting themselves in the foot. As the saying goes: if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
So thank you very much for the offer of pocket money (or peanut money), but I’m staying in my pyjamas till midday and drinking tea while working on my novel. Oh, and look – I’ve got a few episodes of Dr Who to catch up on too.
Ashley is a copywriter, blogger and editor
