The Value of Good Copywriting

How Much is Your Work Worth?

I received an e-mail solicitation this week from a woman with a foreign-sounding name. She was not anyone I know or have met, and I'm not sure how she got my e-mail address. But her offer was this:

• Article writing - 100 words @ 1USD
• Blog writing - 100 words @1USD
• Free article submissions to 10 unique PR article sites, 10 directories & 10 social bookmarks

You've probably read some of those articles written by non-native English speakers. They come up in my Google Alerts on various subjects from time to time, and they're always good for a laugh.

Anybody who's worked with copywriters before, or who has paid for quality copywriting, knows that you can't get it for $1. Good copywriting requires skills and knowledge. It takes time for research, development of target audience profiles, analysis of the product/service being promoted, and a certain amount of "gel time" as the thoughts percolate in the copywriter's brain. And that's all before you even write the first word of copy itself, which requires certain skills in wordsmithing to pull together all the background work into persuasive copy that sells. It could take several weeks, at best, to accomplish. And that copy could be worth millions of dollars to the company buying it...certainly worth every penny of the thousands of dollars it should have cost them to obtain it.

I replied to that hapless spam e-mailer, expressing the opinion that her offer cheapens our entire industry and hurts us all. It makes prospects think, "Well, if this company is offering copy for $1, why should I pay any more?" They don't understand the copywriting process, nor do they respect the amount of work or training that go into writing truly quality copy. If this company is doing it right, they can't possibly stay in business and offer copywriting for that price...even if the writers are all working in a sweatshop environment and writing in broken English.

Writers, if you're going to enter this business, do your due diligence first. Find out what rates you should be charging. Don't put yourself out there as offering the same product as someone with years of experience, then undercut their prices. We already have enough clients who don't respect what we do because they don't appreciate the effort and training it takes. They don't recognize the difference between good and bad copy. They want to pay us less than we can afford to live on. When you come into our industry and offer bargain-basement prices because you're just starting out and don't have a lot of experience, it reinforces their perception that what we do isn't worth much. This hurts the entire industry, along with your future earning potential as a copywriter.

Do your career and the industry a favor: before you go out on your own, get a job where you're writing for someone else. Work with different types of clients and learn what it takes to write successful copy. You don't learn it all in school, even with an advanced degree. Practical experience is essential. Develop some marketing skills beyond your writing skills so that you understand how to do audience and product research. Get involved in the local chapters of some industry organizations such as the American Marketing Association, International Association of Business Communicators, Public Relations Society of America, or the American Advertising Federation to develop your professional skills, and seek additional training whenever you can. While you're drawing a salary for that work, start building the nest egg you'll need to start your own copywriting business one day. Then you'll have what you need to delivery quality copy to your clients.

If you're considering becoming a professional, self-employed writer, my series of e-books, A Professional Writer's Ladder to Success, was designed to help you. It walks you through planning for, researching, and launching a successful business as a professional writer. Each "rung" of the ladder builds on those before it to help you prepare your very own Ladder to Success Action Plan. Whether you choose to pursue being a copywriter, a book writer, a publicist, or any number of other types of writer you can be, following such a course is an important step you can't overlook.

Show Me the Money!

New Referral Rewards Program for Client Leads!

Who could use a little extra cash? Pretty much everybody, these days.

So now, instead of having to be one of our creative professional partners to earn thank-you payments for sending a client lead to Thompson Writing & Editing, everybody can!

Here's the skinny: 

If you talk to someone who could benefit from any of our book ghostwriting, editing, or author marketing services, just e-mail Lynn with the information. She'll follow up with the prospect, discuss their needs, and see if we can help them. If they hire us, as soon as we get a retainer fee, we'll send you a check for 10% of that amount.

But the money for you doesn't stop there! For each subsequent payment from the client on that project, we'll also send you a check for 10% of the total amount. Most larger projects are billed in three similar-sized payments, so you should get a couple more checks similar to your first one.

Still want more cash? 

Here you go: if the same client hires TW&E for a second project, we'll also send you a residual referral bonus of 5% on that project's payments.

Not concerned with the cash? 

Here's another option for you: you can bank your referral rewards with TW&E, so that when you're ready to write, edit, or market your own book, your payments could be much lower! Refer enough clients to us and your fees could even shrink to $0! Just note in your e-mail to us when you refer the client that you'd like to bank your referrals instead of cashing in, and we'll keep a tab running and let you know how much you have in it.

So, there you have it. Surely you know someone who should be writing a book, or who has one written and needs it edited or marketed. Your boss, a client of yours, your Aunt Edna...

We've also just launched a beta test of our new website format; check it out here and give us your feedback! There's a page on it that talks about the new referral rewards program...or just click here to e-mail Lynn with your referral right now!

Who Owns Your Work?

This is a question that has plagued writers and other creative professionals for generations. If you've invested the time, money, and energy to hone your artistic skills, shouldn't you be fairly compensated for them, just as someone who's honed their skills as a physician, accountant, or attorney is compensated for theirs? Of course you should. But when you're selling an intangible product, the quality of the work becomes a factor in determining value, and how to measure that quality has largely been left up to whoever's paying for it.

Increasingly in recent years, writers who focus on magazine articles have been faced with contracts from major publishers demanding "all rights" to an article, or they won't do business with you. These include reprints, electronic versions, and any other way they want to use your work, effectively prohibiting you from selling the same article to other publications without major revisions.

Since no magazine publisher pays well enough to reimburse you for the many hours required to research and write a quality story, this was a major impediment to earning a living writing for magazines. The only way a writer could hope to earn a living writing articles was to resell the same article to multiple publications. But with these all-rights-or-nothing contracts, you couldn't even republish your own articles in book form without permission from the publisher that owned all rights to them! For magazines to use their muscle to bully writers in this way is, from the writer's point of view, wrong.

From the publisher's point of view, however, it was seen as a way to protect an asset for which they had paid. With e-publishing a necessity in today's online world and e-articles easy to copy and paste into other people's sites, publishers are increasingly looking for ways to protect their content from piracy. Writers who self-publish are facing the same thing. And since publishers typically have armies of lawyers to sue people, they've taken their fight into the courts. This has brought up the issue of "fair use" of published material, refining its interpretation under the law...or even provoking lawmakers in D.C. to propose new rules governing piracy -- you may have heard a lot recently about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, currently under consideration.

One ongoing lawsuit was filed by publisher Righthaven against the Center for Intercultural Organizing, which republished an article from Righthaven's Las Vegas Review-Journal in its entirety, without obtaining permission or paying a royalty. A local judge found in favor of the CIO, and the case is currently being appealed to a higher court. Internet giants are weighing in on the case, as well as on SOPA, as these could have a drastic effect on their business. You can read about the Righthaven case here.

So what does constitute "fair use"? If you're a blogger, this could have an impact on you. Just how much of someone else's article can you republish in your blog without getting sued? Suppose someone else republishes one of your articles completely without giving you credit or paying you a royalty; should you sue them?

Interestingly, Google also comes into play in the answer to this. With the release of Google's Panda algorithms in 2011, duplicate content on a website is frowned upon. Google wants each site to offer something fresh, new, and unique. So if you blog, you may refer to another article you've read, as I did above. You may link to it, so people can read that article in its entirety. But reproducing it verbatim on your blog will actually hurt you in search results. Google has now become the Karma of the Internet.

If you want to read more about how the law views this topic, here's a link to the U.S. Copyright Office's page on fair use. Wikipedia also has a fair use entry, as well as one on SOPA, and there are numerous articles on fair use from various universities and legal organizations. Just do a search (using whichever search engine you prefer) on the terms "fair use" and "stop online piracy act" to find them. The conclusion? Definition of the term "fair use" is still pretty much up in the air. And, depending on your viewpoint, that could be good or bad for writers.