It’s Time to Get Paid for Your Writing
By: L.D. Burnett
Tags: Publishing, Creativity, Freelance Economy, Fulfillment, Writing

It’s Time to Get Paid for Your Writing

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Writing can be its own reward, but the workman is worthy of a wage. If you write, and you’re getting good at it, you should find a way to be paid for your work. Finding an outlet that pays for well-crafted, creative work, even a little, is something we all deserve in 2021. I have been looking for such an outlet. I couldn’t find exactly the right publication I was looking for, so I decided to make one: The Mudsill, with our first issue premiering on January 1, 2021.

Now, if you’ve followed me across various platforms on the internet, you know I’ve been writing on here for a while — for about ten years, now, as a matter of fact. And, like a lot of people, I’ve mostly been writing for free. I have been one of those people who write for the pleasure of putting words out into the world that, like Noah’s dove, find a landing place in the heart of even one reader.

That’s not quite how I started.

At first I blogged simply as a way of keeping my sanity while working on my dissertation. Writing begets writing; blogging for readers unknown helped me figure out how to write for the committee of readers I did know. Then my online writing became a way of contributing to my field, U.S. intellectual history, and then, via Twitter, a way of joining conversations that were new to me and meeting people who have since become dear to me. And through this process, writing for a readership did indeed become its own reward.

But my writing rewarded other people too, people beyond the readership for which I was glad to write for free. All this time, I had been “creating content,” though I never viewed it that way. I viewed it mostly as connecting — finding fellow writers, finding fellow readers, finding kindred souls for this pilgrimage of life in which we all participate. I didn’t mind that my work was being “monetized” — by Twitter, by feed aggregators, by journalistic outlets who used my essays for historical background — because I was rewarded richly for my work by thoughtful readers who helped me hone my writing voice while I was gainfully employed in a related line of work: teaching.

I am still gainfully employed as a college professor…for now. But this past fall I became (briefly) internet famous for a tweet of which my employer disapproved, and I and my colleagues were led to believe that some sort of (completely illegal) disciplinary action against me would follow. (You can read about this nonsense here and here.)

I had to face the question: what would I do if I lost my job? How could I replace my income? What skills do I have?

It’s a very short list, but at the very top of my skills list is this: I can write like a sonofagun.

Indeed, over the past ten years, I have been paid for a few freelance pieces here and there. But until this year, the last freelance piece I’d written for pay was published in 2016. Then last fall, an editor from Slate asked me if I could write a quick piece explaining the hullaballoo among historians over Donald Trump’s cockamamie “White House History Conference.” I wrote the piece, and they ran it, and I got paid. First paycheck I had seen for my writing in four years.

I had forgotten how good it felt to get paid for what you do best. (I am an excellent teacher, but I’ve had a lot more practice writing than teaching.) Still, I didn’t expect that a single piece in Slate meant that I would now begin writing regularly for pay. Not that I couldn’t write regularly — I was already doing that — but where would I find a paying gig? Where does anybody find a paying gig when so many people — people like me! — are putting up good content for free?

Well, every once in a while, a paying gig finds you. The one-off Slate piece found me because the editor knew from all my free writing that I could turn around a piece on internecine history quarrels quickly. Still, how much reader demand is there for a blow-by-blow account of intellectual fights among historians?

Once in a while, a good gig finds you but you mess it up. For example, a few years back, when I was still blithely writing for free, the editor of ArcDigital asked me if I’d like to write for their new magazine. I said I wasn’t sure my politics would line up with the editorial line they were looking for, and I turned down the invite.

Boy, was that dumb. Maybe the third-dumbest decision I have ever made as an adult. (Nope, not talking about decisions one and two.)

Then, amid my brief brush with internet fame this past fall, I put out an APB on Twitter, asking if there was any editor out there for any outlet at all who would pay me to write about what I was going through. I got a ping from the editor of the Chronicle Review, so I wrote a piece about my experiences there.

And, wonder of wonders, I got a renewed invitation from Berny Belvedere to write for ArcDigital — not about my recent ordeal, but about whatever I thought might be of interest to the publication’s broad and ideologically diverse readership.

This time I said yes.

That was a good decision. It felt so good — it feels so good — to have someone value your writing enough to pay you for it.

I was only about a month into writing on the regular for ArcDigital when I thought to myself, in full diva mode, “Money is like manure; it’s no good unless you spread it around, encouraging young things to grow.”

What have I secretly wanted to do, all my life, since I was a seven-year-old kid playing Big City Editor at my single-pedestal child’s desk in a wood-sided ranch house in the gray winter quiet when tule fog blanketed the San Joaquin valley, chill and damp, and my feet sought the almost intolerable heat of the floor vent bringing warm air into my small, messy room? I have wanted to run my own magazine.

Now, thanks to my paying writing gig, to the marvels of the internet, to the emergence of various publishing platforms, to my own existential crisis about who I am and what I want to do in life—thanks to all this, thanks indeed to 2020, I finally had the time, the technology, the clarity, and the seed money to live the dream and start publishing a magazine that pays writers.

So that’s what’s happening, starting on January 1 of 2021: Volume 1, Number 1 of The Mudsill.

You can read more about how to submit to the magazine here. In the meantime, please sign up for the email list so that our writers can find their readers.

The pay is not much — I’m offering $15 per piece, on publication, via PayPal, because that’s all I can commit from my own earnings and from paid subscriptions. But as we get more subscribers, the pay per piece will go up. I want the people who write for The Mudsill to know that their work is not just worth reading, but worth paying for.

Either this venture will take off or it won’t, but this is the leap of faith I am taking in 2021. For all I know I’ll be out of a job myself six months from now. But my contributors will get paid just the same, even if I have to keep writing like a sonofagun to make that happen.

Honestly, I think I would enjoy that.

If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the talent and the time.