Minute 02: Should you work for free?
This podcast dropped on March 17, 2020 and was 1 minute 52 seconds long. You can listen to the podcast here.
This was one of the funniest pictures I saw in recent memory, and very true. Working for exposure will kill you, but it can also be a very useful tool when used properly.
Don’t feel guilty about working for free
If you decide to approach someone and offer to work for free, and you think the long-term results will outweigh the short-term costs, and it’s something your comfortable doing, then you should not feel guilty about doing said project.
In this instance, where you are making the offer to work for free, there could be benefits:
Experience/knowledge/education
Connections/networking opportunities
Volunteer/charitable donation (it could be tax deductible if you do this for a proper charity or non-profit)
The aforementioned exposure (not all exposure is bad)
If it makes sense financially and professionally to make this move (and only you can answer that), then go for it, and don’t worry about what anyone else says or thinks. Only you can decide what’s best for your career, and no one should tell you to ignore opportunities or insist you take the road that they prescribe to get there.
Ignore the naysayers. Here’s why:
There is a lot out there in the voiceover universe about gig sites like Upwork and Fiverr and other pay-to-play sites and how they are driving rates down. Depending on who you talk to, there can be a fair amount of derision tossed your way if you use one of these sites.
Now I’m not going to argue about whether rates are dropping or not. I don’t know enough about it and the history to make an informed statement here. But I can say this:
If someone doesn’t have the budget to pay me the “going rate” for, say, producing an audiobook (the going rate on the minimum is $80 per finished hour, whereas I bill out at $150 per finished hour, meaning that a 10 hour long audiobook would cost the author/rights holder $1,500), then they were never really going to be my client. They weren’t, as we say in sales, a qualified lead.
But the internet democratizes processes. And if there is an audiobook narrator who is willing to produce that book for $50 per finished hour, and the author does have a budget of $500, then that’s fine. Odds are that the narrator isn’t doing this full time, or may be new to the gig and is just looking for experience. A voice actor who is trying to pay the bills isn’t going to take that gig, and, as mentioned before, that author was never going to be able to hire them. So everyone wins.
You need to decide what works best for you.
A caveat: If you want to run a business that undercuts everyone else out there, I mean, OK, I guess, but know that this isn’t a path to long-term success. Especially in a field where you need to make things. Being the cheapest option around will eventually catch up to you, and not in a good way. Because here’s the kicker: good luck ever raising your rates with repeat customers.
Short-Term/Long-Term ROI
Before you jump on this tactic or doing free work or reduced-rate work, however, make sure that you’ve done some analysis of the long- and short-term effects.
It will likely cost you money (in terms of the time you spend on this project versus a paying project, or spending the time seeking out paying work, or the materials required to complete the project, etc); can you afford to do that?
And long-term, what will you ultimately gain from doing this project for free? And will what you get be more than what you are giving up? Again, only you can decide what this metric should be (knowledge, contacts, experience, exposure, joy) and only you can decide on if there will be a net gain.
Real Life
For example, I had an author come to me, asking me to fix the editing (as a paid gig) that a previous audiobook producer grievously botched. After getting a few hours into attempting to fix it, and after seeing how this producer utterly decimated the project, I offered to re-record and produce the book from scratch, and that I would do it for royalty share*.
If they (the author) had said yes, there was a strong possibility that I wouldn’t make any money off of a book that would have taken me close to 30 hours to produce; but when I weighed my options, it made sense. It would be one more credit under my name (I was still just getting started in voiceover and audiobook narration), and I would be doing a huge solid for an author I wanted to work with. I did the math, and the long-term net gain made sense.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a great video from Gary Vaynerchuk interviewing John Tapper (Bar Rescue) about this very thing. There’s a great quote at the end:
“Don’t discount. People get addicted to discounts, they don’t get addicted to free.”
- John Tapper
(Post script: In the end, the author thanked me, and decided to just have me edit the files, but since then I’ve worked almost constantly with this author, and not only has it been a great working relationship, I also now count them as a friend. Additionally, I’ve gotten to work on some awesome projects, and I’ve gotten to read some awesome fantasy work. It’s a huge net positive.)
Don’t feel guilty about asking to be paid for work
By the same token, don’t ever feel guilty about asking someone to be paid for the work that you do. A common adage is that they (the client) aren’t paying for what a client may deem an “easy” or “simple” or “quick” job, they are paying for the years of training you went through, the equipment you use, your knowledge, your blood, sweat, and tears that got you to where you are right now: positioned to be able to do this work.
And it doesn’t matter where you are in your career; whether a greenhorn or a veteran, it’s OK to ask to be paid for work. Granted, you may not be asking for the same rates, but just because you are new doesn’t mean that you’re rate should be $0.
If someone is attempting to pressure you into working for “the exposure”, run, run, run for the hills. Someone who is pitching this to you is almost never going to appreciate the work that you’ve done, they will likely not spread word of your work far and wide, and the second that you ask for money (now or later) they will simply move on to the next freelancer and make the same pitch.
Real Life.
I worked in media, and I saw this happen constantly. Rather than paying freelancers of all ilks for their work the pitch was always, “We don’t have a budget for that, but we can offer you exposure.”
As a media company, you would think that maybe this was not such a bad deal, but as I mentioned before, once the work was done, that was it. There was no further promotion of this person via advertising or social posts or anything like that. It was just a tactic to keep costs down and make the profit margin look good.
To reiterate:
When it’s your choice, never feel guilty about working for free. And never feel guilty about asking to be paid a fair rate. You are the only person who has the right to make any judgement on how you run your business.
* The ACX website, where rights-holders (often the authors) and narrators can connect to produce audiobooks that will get distributed to Audible.com, iTunes, and other locations, has a royalty share option where authors can contract with narrators to produce the audiobook for no money, but they will split their royalties 50/50 with the narrator. It’s a bit of a gamble: if the book sells very well, it could end up netting me more than my usual PFH rate, but it could also not sell at all, in which case I get paid zero.