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The publishing world is not known for its transparency, and being a freelance writer is a tough gig these days. Pay for writers has stagnated, and major magazine publishers like Conde Nast pay less than 2 percent of their revenue to their writers. Denver-based WordRates hopes that a little transparency in the industry will go a long way in changing that.
Think about it like this. If you are a freelance journalist today, it can be hard to know which publisher to pitch your story to. Some don’t pay on time or cover a writer’s expenses. Some can be an overall headache to work with — others are a joy. But ironically, in an industry that is, at its core, the sharing of information, there is no centralized place for writers to talk about their experiences with publishers. This leaves writers — who are kind of notoriously bad businesses negotiators — to make their pitching decisions in the dark.
WordRates, which officially launched this morning, is a platform where writers can rate the publishers they work with. Writers give publishers a Yelp-style star rating, and have an opportunity to wax poetic about their experiences with the publisher, the editor and everything else. The site publicly lists things like publisher pay rates, kill fees and how much the publisher is making off ad revenue. With a $50 a year premium account, you can also have access to the publishers’ contact information.
In addition to WordRates, the site also features PitchLab, which is designed as a place where writers can pitch their content ideas and receive professional representation for their work. Basically, if you have a killer idea for a long-form article, you can submit it to PitchLab. If they think it has potential, they’ll pair you with a 'mentor' and help you make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck. Their mentors so far include writers from the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Rolling Stone, and Bloomberg-BusinessWeek.
PitchLab is only interested in high quality, long-form pieces, however, so it’s probably not worth submitting that fantastic cat listical you wrote over lunch.
The idea behind WordRates came from Scott Carney, an investigative journalist who now lives in Denver. Carney launched a Kickstarter to fund WordRates, which ended up taking with almost $10,000.
WordRates has only been collecting data for about a day, so the sample size leaves a lot to be desired, but it turns out that Playboy is among the highest rated magazines to freelance for. Maybe people really do read the articles.
