Last Friday, I spent the afternoon checking my phone, watching the minutes as they slowly counted down to five. There was no melodramatic reason for me to watch the clock. As a freelancer, my schedule has largely been my own, and while I try to end my workday at five, there’s no reason I have to conclude my day at any particular time. The only difference was that had I decided last Friday would be my last day as a freelance content writer.
For the last 11 months, I’ve written content for a dizzying array of websites, stringing together hundreds of thousands of words for a vast range of customers. Like most jobs, there were things to like and things to hate, moments of placid ease mixed with periods of perfect frustration. And now, nearly a year later, I’m stepping away.
Like so many of my other career moves, I fell into the role of content creator. With the theatre industry still reeling from COVID and my interest in set building waning, I was searching for a new career path, albeit without much of a sense of what I really wanted to do. After months of passively waiting for freelance editing jobs on Upwork, I hitched up my pants, put my pride on the shelf, and went trawling for something to help kill the incipient frustration borne of excessive idleness.
I applied for a single editing job, and I heard back within the hour. I did a quick editing sample, not really knowing what I was doing, and sent it back to the job poster. She asked a few questions about my experience, and I sent her a link to this blog. Shortly thereafter, she called me and offered me a freelance writing position with her group, creating content outside of the Upwork fee structure.
The organization was a good one, and she took care of her writers. Unlike many other freelance jobs, we got paid before we wrote, meaning I didn’t have to chase down clients to get my money. I gained a ton of experience, and I learned a lot about the writing profession, both from what I was asked to do and from the work that was done before assignments ever came my way.
It was a really good situation, right up until it wasn’t. I started to feel a growing dissatisfaction with the work. It’s possible that content creation isn’t my jam—or maybe I just wanted to be better paid for what I was doing. Somewhere along the line that balance jumped way out of whack.
Look, I get it. There’s a lot of work that goes into getting clients lined up, as well as determining the specifics of each assignment. The actual writing is only a part of a larger process. But it’s also the heart of the process—if it wasn’t, then companies would just do the work themselves.
Freelance rates aren’t great, especially when you’re not negotiating from a position of strength—or at all, really. I rarely worked anything close to an eight-hour day, and I could spread the work out in a way that worked best for me. Still, when looking at my hourly rate, it was a significant dip from where I had been before, even with the part-time schedule, and it was even less when you consider the research I would need to do for some pieces.
Another problem with the gig was that the person paying me was based in California—which means I had to pay California taxes. You all probably know that California tax rates are high. What you may not know is that if you pay California state tax on part of your income, you have to pay it on your entire household income. This includes money that wasn’t made in California, that never even smelled California. It’s bad enough that at least one of my friends refuses to take any freelance work from California—it completely wrecks your taxes.
You can offset those taxes with what you pay to other states, but it rarely covers everything. With my low income and my wife’s much higher earnings, we figured out that if we continued the current arrangement, I would basically be working for free, paying most of what I earned right back to California.
But what really drove me away was the content itself. I started out writing piece after piece for the home improvement industry. Blogs about windows and HVAC repairs, landing pages for plumber after plumber, all optimized for location and keywords, designed to bring maximum hits with minimum cost. And it was right in my wheelhouse. I was good at those pages. I could churn them out one after the other, all of them unique and, in my opinion, all of them pretty good.
Soon I started getting other assignments. That was all well and good—as a freelancer working for a growing enterprise, I knew I was going to need to be flexible with what I wrote about. The problem was that these new assignments generally required much more research in order to write them. Economics, human resources, and biotechnology were just some of the subjects I had to tackle, and while many of them were interesting, others were…less than inspirational.
One of the assignments I enjoyed the most was creating self-help content for someone who does national speaking engagements. Over the course of a month or two, I created several “long blog” posts, which I’m pretty certain are going to become his next book. While this ghost-ghosting came in at an awfully low rate for the work I did, I got some heckin’ good clips out of it, and I actually found the process enjoyable.
Eventually, though, I was asked to start writing shit. Just pure shit. I realize that what I was doing was essentially marketing, selling products or services via the internet, and in many cases you don’t get to decide what you’re selling. But when we started working with for-profit colleges urging companies to offer worthless development courses to their employees, or beauty spas dressed up as “clinics” providing Botox and other expensive and questionably effective beauty treatments, I started to really question what I was doing.
The moment things really broke down was when I started writing for stem cell treatment clinics. These “alternative” therapy sites had some strict rules about what you could and could not say, and those restrictions laid my complicity in stark relief. We had to avoid saying that stem cells would provide cures or relief or, like, any measurable benefit at all. Instead, we had to say that stem cells may have a positive effect, while minimizing (or omitting) any negative outcomes.
That, right there, was my breaking point. I sat at my desk one morning, reading the assignment card and the associated websites, and I realized I was a charlatan. I was a snake oil salesman. I was peddling false hope to people desperate for any way to improve their health, whether they suffered from chronic pain, an autoimmune disease, or a degenerative condition that could only result in death. I was asked to make these people believe that stem cells, in their current iteration, may provide the cure that had thus far eluded them.
I was basically recruiting unwitting lab rats. Stem cell treatments may hold great potential, but these clinics put the cart miles before the horse, injecting stem cells in various forms and mixtures into areas where it hurts. In most cases, any patient improvement was likely due to the placebo effect, and the treatments came with a demonstrable risk of adverse effects. And because these procedures have not been approved by the FDA, they are by definition experimental.*
* I wonder how many anti-vaxxers believe in the power of stem cells. I’m guessing it’s a pretty large number. After all, they’re a “miracle cure” that the meddling government is trying to keep from the people behind miles of regulations. Because that’s how Big Medicine makes money, I guess.
And that’s when I quit. Between the money and the content, I couldn’t bring myself to do the work anymore. We’re lucky to be in the position where I could turn off that faucet, but in reality, the work was grinding me down, to the point where the smallest thing could set me off. It was unhealthy, and I’m the better for having put it behind me.
Now that I’m done, though, I think there are a few things you should know about content creation. Here’s some inside dope:
Most Content on the Internet Is Written by Me
Well, people like me, anyway. Take home improvement. What do I know about roofing or plumbing or HVAC? Next to nothing. I have some building experience in the theatre, but that work is only intended to last about six weeks. Sure, there’s some overlap, but it’s a fundamentally different process. For things like accounting or technology, I have even less knowledge.
I don’t have numbers, but I’m guessing that the number of subject experts writing for the internet is extremely small. Instead, you get people like me, who are incentivized to do as little research as possible to create compelling copy that reflects an expert level of understanding. The result is endless iterations of content already on the internet, a copy of a copy of a copy, a simulacrum of knowledge. Content creators are a prime example of postmodernism in practice, an empty idea that pretends to significance.
SEO Blows So Very, Very Hard
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art of crafting copy so that it appears near the top of the results you get from your search engine (Google. It’s always Google). You have to include key words and phrases that reflect the terms most searched for, while creating unique copy that won’t be flagged by search engine AI as an attempt to manipulate those search rankings.
This means a few things. First, it creates unrealistic expectations on the part of the client. I’ve had more than one overoptimized assignment. One 750-word blog, for instance, had 160 keyword phrases, each with more than one word. More than a third of the piece was made up of technical jargon, and it meant that I had to spend two and a half hours torturing words into something approximating prose. My hourly rate cratered.
Beyond stilted writing, SEO also ruins the efficacy of search engines. Nowadays, companies are so good at manipulating search results by location and subject that it’s almost impossible to find reputable sources. Everything is sales, and if that makes me sound like I’m 80, then so be it.
Know Your Sources—And Trust No One
It’s never been a good idea to trust the internet, but that advice holds true now more than ever. As someone who participated in this great fleecing, I can tell you that most of the information you find online is written by someone looking to make a sale. The better the writer, the more likely you are to take the material as genuine, but trust me, it’s all a sales pitch.
You can do some things, of course. For instance, you should pay attention to domains. Sources with a .edu or .gov are usually more trustworthy, and .org can be good too. However, even this isn’t foolproof. Organizations of all kinds hire writers like me to create their content, because we’re cheap, fast, and in many cases, willing to push moral boundaries. Be warned.
Again, the organization I worked for was a good one. They treated their writers well, responding to my questions quickly, listening to my critiques and comments on the assignments, and always, always paying me for my work. My boss engaged with her writers, and built a Slack community for those who wanted that kind of environment (I very much did not). But in the end, the work wasn’t right for me.
Over the course of 11 months, I wrote 673,347 words—and those are only the words I was assigned. Typically, my submissions would have five to 10 more words, making sure there was enough content to satisfy the customer’s request. I ended up with a little bit of cash, a complicated tax situation, some decent clips, and a better understanding of what it means to write for a living.
What now, then? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. Now that the freelance work is done for the time being, I plan to take some time for reflection, looking into what’s important to me. I did enjoy writing, but I didn’t care for the material or the pay. If one of those two had been better, I may have stuck with it a little longer.
Perhaps I’ll try to work with some nonprofits. Or I’ll try writing more of my own work, for my own pleasure, and see if anything comes out of that. I could work my way into editing, especially developmental work where my talents are strongest. Maybe I’ll get back into theatre in some form—or maybe some other entertainment field.
Speculation is fun, but I could do that while I was working as a freelancer. What I have now is time to do less speculating and more planning. Less thinking and more reflecting. Less getting along and more planning my endgame.
In the words of Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding, “Get busy living or get busy dying…that’s goddamn right.”
MetaFrizzics 