Every so often my natural masochistic tendencies kick in and I feel compelled to respond to people on Linkedin. So there I was, minding my own business, when a message popped up: Jane Doe (not her real name) would like to connect with you. What the hell, I thought. Why not? I clicked on Accept, and almost immediately I received a message to thiis effect:
Hi. We’re starting a new publication and we’d love to have you write for us. Please note that this is an unpaid opportunity, but you don’t have to pay anything to take part.
Oh boy, how could I refuse? Quite easily as it happens. I love the use of the word “opportunity”, by which I presume they mean the opportunity to donate my time and expertise in order to make someone else some money. Although I suppose I should be grateful that they don’t want me to actually pay for the privilege.
Still, this was very useful, because it enabled me to see how chilled I’ve become in my old age (that’s a figure of speech, by the way: I indentify as 25). A few years ago I was offered a similar “opportunity”, although at least on that occasion they told me the reward would be “exposure”. I emailed back as follows:
Thank you so much for reaching out to me with this exciting offer. I should love to take you up on it, but first I just need to ask my mortgage provider if, instead of my monthly payments, they would be happy for me to put up a notice on my property stating that this house has been financed by Acme Building Society. After that, I will contact my local supermarket to ask if they will let me have my weekly supplies for nothing as long as I walk around carrying a bag with their logo on, to give them exposue.
Strangely enough, I didn’t receive a reply.
This time I have decided to just quietly ignore it.
Another strange thing is that I’ve almost never worked just for “exposure”. (I say “almost” because I have spoken at one event where some influential people were going to be in attendance. As far as I can tell, it led to no extra commissions, but one can never tell I suppose.) True, I’ve written for no money on my own blogs and in my own newsletters for years, but at least the copyright belongs to me and I don’t have that horrible sense of having been ripped off.
Why is it considered OK for writers to write for nothing, or give talks for nothing? Not just writers either. I was approached by a company a few years ago to ask if I would speak at their conference. They were charging £300 per ticket, and expecting 1,000 people. They were paying their speakers nothing — even though without those speakers nobody would turn up to the conference. I offered the organisers a polite version of the Bartleby response (In Bartleby The Scrivener, by Herman Melville, Bartleby’s response to every request to do something is, “I prefer not to.”).
.Everyone has to do what they think best for themselves of course, but I’ve always thought that if someone puts a value of £0 on their own work, why would anybody else offer them a high rate than that?
I had a dramatic illustration of that around twenty years ago. I was doing educational consultancy work, and some new kid on the block came along charging a third of my daily rate. I stuck to my guns, and the work kept flowing in. After a few months, the new kid gave up and went back into teaching.
This article was first published in Eclecticism.