I could use some help with finding work. I’ve been trying to break in with writing/editing and I have not had any luck. I can’t seem to find sites that are willing to pay for articles, or reputable places for performing editing services.
Writing/editing survived the internet?
You need a vacation on the beach! Take the family, learn to sail, win a regatta! Summer Rental is the sum of my experience with air traffic control.
What sort of writing and editing? Any subject matter? Also are you located in a big city? Used to do research/editing for an online publication and I can attest that networking can be pretty powerful in catching your first break.
The dream would be writing articles about video games, which I know is pretty much a long shot. At this point, even something as simple as writing product descriptions so that I can bring in some money would be good. For editing, it would be for writing, style, sentence structure and grammar.
I’m in South Jersey and have been doing some freelance transcribing, but it’s not good money.
I feel for ya, man. I am sure it’s difficult. I was talking to a friend over the weekend, and she works for a big government contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) and is in charge of their Design department, where they produce graphics and do editing for proposals that the company writes. So that’s a job editing, though it’s technical stuff and might seem like a super boring job to you, I dunno. I definitely doubt they write much about videogames.
Freelancing work, though, that’s got to be tough. Especially since I’m sure every yokel with a keyboard thinks they can write beautiful copy. And will do it for $2 and article.
This recent article from Nature may shed some light on the situation:
Healthy aging can lead to impairments in learning that affect many laboratory and real-life tasks. These tasks often involve the acquisition of dynamic contingencies, which requires adjusting the rate of learning to environmental statistics. For example, learning rate should increase when expectations are uncertain (uncertainty), outcomes are surprising (surprise) or contingencies are more likely to change (hazard rate). In this study, we combine computational modelling with an age-comparative behavioural study to test whether age-related learning deficits emerge from a failure to optimize learning according to the three factors mentioned above. Our results suggest that learning deficits observed in healthy older adults are driven by a diminished capacity to represent and use uncertainty to guide learning. These findings provide insight into age-related cognitive changes and demonstrate how learning deficits can emerge from a failure to accurately assess how much should be learned.
This can be a chicken and egg situation. Until you’ve published, nobody wants to publish your work. One thought – and I’m completely out on a limb here – would be to ask Tom if you could write a few articles for Qt3. I have no idea whether he would publish them for you, but if he did and you were willing to do a few pieces gratis, you would at least be able to point to them as examples of published work about gaming.
A few years ago, I did some Twitter analysis about the Xbox and PS4 and worked with Tom to publish them here. While I did it just for fun, they still occasionally come up in discussions about my analytics work and writing. If nothing else, they stand as historical evidence that I’ve been involved in the analytics space for a while.
I’ve been getting pieces crossposted around the Internet. There are a few up here, on Gamasutra and some smaller sites. But I just can’t seem to find a place that’s looking and paying for articles.
What an excellent post, and it is very informative. I’ve never really concerned the “uncertainty” aspect of the profession, but it truly does rely on the principles that you’ve brought to light.
The posting is over. Hopefully we gather the 1400 that we were aiming for with no Whiskey Oscars.
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Yeah, there are quite few of us here who use to be regular freelancers (and some were editors) in the computer gaming mags and websites. It was a great gig, a lot of fun, a lot more hard work than most people realized, and you could make decent money. Since the mag is gone now, probably no issue with saying when I wrote for CGW, it wasn’t unusual to get $750 to $1500 for an article (depending on the page/word count.) I’m sure other writers may have gotten more. I was working full time in an R&D Director role for a global company, so I couldn’t write as much as I would have liked, but I’d average an article or two per month for mags like CGW and CGM (CGS+) and occasionally, later in my writing life, a couple of websites like Gamespot. Once you were established, it was pretty straightforward to get assignments from various outlets.
But then everyone and their cousin decided to put up gaming review websites (most with horrific writing, BTW - a truly good editor and a wordcount limit, though many of us chafed at both at times, resulted in better writing IMO) and Youtube became a thing and gaming forums like this one popped up, and next thing you know, the magazines went under. I’d gotten burned out before the magazines went completely away, and it showed in my writing :( , and quit writing for the gaming market, but later, when I decided it would be fun again, and I could use a little extra cash, I found the rates were ridiculously low. I had a friend who’d been an editor at one of the mags approach me to write for his new site, but the rate was something like $25 for an article. Reviewing a program and doing a good job of it is hard work, and I wasn’t willing to do it for that small amount. Even my very first article for CGS+, back in 1995 I believe, a half page “audition” review of a pool tournament sim, paid $125.
Summary - I could be wrong ,but I think reviewing video games is just not a viable writing market (in terms of pay) today.
Do you have any ideas of places I can try for writing or editing other content? I’ve tried a few job boards, but a lot of them want you to pay upfront or per job, and it’s hard to know which ones are legit.
There are a few legit Freelancer job boards like eLance in which you enter your qualifications and they list a variety of assignments that people have listed. I had some directed towards me, but for the ones I looked at the pay was low enough it wasn’t worth my time.
I haven’t done this in a while, but the source I used to turn to was the Writers Digest “manual” - a very thick book filled with just about every market you could think of, requirements for submission, pay rates, what they are looking for, etc.
TechReport are looking for writers…
http://techreport.com/news/30585/the-tech-report-is-looking-for-news-writers
What the hell is a coffee hacker?
Obviously someone who wanted to be a writer.
7 months unemployed, ~ 150 jobs applied for, ~ 4 phone interviews, 0 face to face interviews, 0 offers. That’s with a degree from USC, 8 years at a major corporation (Yahoo), glowing recommendations from former coworkers/bosses, etc.
It’s basically impossible to understand how soul-destroyingly shitty this feels, unless you’ve been through it.
Not asking for advice. There’s plenty of that upthread & I have already received more from friends/family/ex-colleagues/blogs/random news articles/shrinks/etc. than I have been able to process. Just venting here, because it’s less visible than Facebook, where my complaints just make all the happy people feel awkward. As near as I can tell, if you’re not posting about babies or bacon or beer, Facebook doesn’t want you.
Right now it’s taking about half my psychic energy per day just to try not to be a perpetual spout of gloom and doom around my wife and daughter. Which I probably am, anyway.
What type of job are you looking for?
Web content manager, web producer, writer/editor, social media manager, all of which were subsumed under my vast and amorphous job description at Yahoo.