You Can’t Sustain As A Freelance Writer If
If you write more than 2000 words per day — 6 days a week, you can’t sustain the quality of your writing. (See Evidence Below)
One of the curses of the pay-per-word paradigm is that people tend to aim for quantity, instead of the quality of words. I call it ‘The Quantity Curse.’
The Quantity Curse is plaguing not just the freelance writing world. Today, people aim for more likes and comments. So, instead of providing value, the social media users post mushy motivational stories, polls and what not — creating a giant echo chamber out of the whole social media world.
5000 Words Per Day! Whom Are You Kidding?
I’ve been a content writer for three years now. Trust me, it looks easy but it isn’t. Some might say, “Man! You just read all that’s written on the web and rephrase it.” Nothing can be farther from truth. Creating a content requires hours of research. You create a giant, heavy rock out of these information that starts weighing you down. Your next task is to chisel this giant rock and make a beautiful statue out of it! You literally get drowned in the ocean of information. You have to separate the true information from personal opinions. And then, you start making sense of the information. You start creating a content adding your own findings, objective opinions. You incorporate the ‘voice’ of the client’s company. And then, there are those usual SEO tasks.
Now if a freelance writer says that he can do all of these and still write 5000 words per day 6 days a week, I will worry about the quality of his writing. People, who romanticise this, tell me that they can do so because they are the experts in the topic they write about. Even in that case, one will still need to make sure that the quality of writing is decent enough to be read by the strangers. A subject matter expert will still take at least one hour to complete a one thousand word article. So that means, he will spend 5 hours per day everyday to write 5000 words. Well, good luck with that!
Enough Subjective Opinions. Time For Some Proof
When I talked about the same topic on Reddit, the Redditors wanted proof. So, I thought why not examine the Reddit posts and create an evidence-based article on this topic.
I examined three Reddit threads where the OPs asked how many words can the freelance writers write. The freelance writers on Reddit responded mentioning their own personal capacities. I listed all of them to see how many of them write more than 5000 words per day. (Links given below)
As expected, 12 people said that they write upto 2500 words per day. 2 people said that they write 3000 words per day. Three of the respondents went for 4000 words per day. Only 4 people said that they write 5000 words per day and above.
THOSE WHO SAID THAT THEY WROTE MORE THAN 5000 WORDS PER DAY ARE NO LONGER ACTIVE ON ANY WRITING RELATED SUBREDDITS!
But those who said that they wrote 1500 to 2500 words per day are still active on various writing related subreddits.
Here are the three Reddit threads that I consulted -
And here’s the finding —
You can go to the three links above and see for yourself if I have cherry-picked or not. Also don’t forget to examine how many of the 5000 words per day proponents are active on Reddit lately.
Why This Rant?
A lot of you might be wondering — ‘What’s the problem with this guy?’ I’ll tell you what’s the problem. Some of us are in the freelance writing world for the long haul. And when these people with short term vision start writing 5000 words per day, it increases the expectation of the client and agencies as well. This creates a problem for those of us whose main profession is content writing. These 5000 words people will leave the content writing world after two or three years, but we — the truly professional writers — have to keep on explaining to the clients why we can’t write more than 2000 words per day.
So if, like me, you don’t write more than 2000 words per day, be proud of that. Remember — You are here for the long haul.
