On working for exposure

It’s insulting to ask anyone to work for free unless they genuinely want to volunteer. I volunteer quite a bit, on my own terms. And that’s the thing. Working “for exposure” is volunteering on someone else’s terms and usually for things you can’t even really put on a resume, right?

Today, I had a somewhat visceral internal reaction to being asked to look at a long manuscript for a writer I don’t know to, “see what I think.” It didn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d want to pick up and read for fun. Honestly, I have a stack of what I want to read for fun going already and I’m reading through that on my own terms without deadlines because a deadline on something I want to read would be weird.

I realized that there was an expectation in the, “perhaps you’d like to read this to see what you think.” The expectation was that I’d offer a formal critique, maybe some editing. Obviously, I’m not editing this OD entry, it’s a stream-of-consciousness thing. The ask wasn’t even well-thought-out! It was a type of writing that I neither read, write, nor edit routinely. I’m literally not the person for the job.  I have a notion of some stylistic/formatting norms in that type of writing, but I suspect some of that notion is out of date. I don’t update my internal knowledge base on topics I don’t care about.

I literally don’t edit professional work for my best friend for free. Why would I do this for a complete stranger I know nothing about? It’s not like the complete stranger is one of my favorite authors asking me to look at a draft (even then, I actually think I’d ask for some cash, work is work, but they get a “cool author discount” which is only slightly higher than what my best friend pays–and my best friend values my time and actually pays me well).

I’ve decided that if they ask again, my rates are as follows for this manuscript I don’t want to deal with: $50 for a single read-through with brief comments, an additional $100 if they want anything thorough (unless this beast is longer than 30 pages at which point, I contemplate charging by the word per standard rates for whatever their editing wants/needs are). Paid in advance because I’m no sucker.  And I promise you that if the document is 50,000 words or more, it’s going to be expensive for them. This isn’t my problem.

If I’m going to “work for exposure” I’ll find that exposure myself, thanks.