In my time as a freelancer, I’ve used a wide range of third party providers to connect with new clients. Some of those providers have led to reliable income and projects I’m proud to say I contributed to.

But over and over again, I see people who expect me and others to work for basically nothing. For example, check out this post today from UpWork (highlight mine):

I usually average about two hours for 800 words or so. Maybe that’s slow compared to others, but I also try to make the first draft as close to publication-ready as possible. So under this rate, I’d be making $4 an hour.

That won’t even buy my lunch.

It’s not even close to minimum wage.

But here’s the real problem, aside from livability. It’s demeaning. If I see that someone isn’t willing to pay a fair wage, it makes me assume that they don’t value me as an individual. And if I don’t feel like they value me, heck no, I’m not going to trust them. And guess what you need to grow a business. To get stability, retention, loyalty.

Trust.

So if you don’t pay someone a good wage, regardless of your industry, you’re shooting your own business in the foot. The better way is to formulate a solid business plan and get the investors and loans you need to take care of your employees. If you have to bootstrap by cutting pay corners, I’d argue you’re not ready to be in business in the first place. Go back to the drawing board, prove you have a model others will put their money forward for, and THEN hire. Otherwise, the talented, creative people who could have made your company soar will be more than happy to set up shop with your competitors.

A completely fake blog post for your holiday entertainment, folks.

Jeff Bezos, left; Santa Claus, right

Following a record setting Black Friday, there seems to be no sign of stopping Amazon’s Jeff Bezos–unless, of course, you’re Santa Claus. Snow Angel Research Group completed a survey of 6,587 babies, toddlers and elementary-age kids and found they generally were happier with Claus’ service than that provided by Amazon. Speed of delivery was the number one factor cited in customer satisfaction. Currently, Bezos can deliver within two hours for Prime Now, but Claus has technology that allows him to deliver in mere milliseconds.

While Claus declined to disclose the specifics of his operational systems, toy industry experts speculate Claus has been investing heavily in reindeer management.

“Over the past six months, we’ve seen Claus meet with Fly Feed CEO Sherry O’Beary on at least three separate occasions,” says Ima Spyeng, market analyst with Experience Not Stuff Millennial Corp. “At the same time, we also have reports that Claus has been liquidating some of his mid-tier assets and bringing in high-profile agricultural engineers. Those factors in combination suggest that Claus is looking for additional ways to improve the efficiency of his fleet and keep an edge over Bezos.”

But Bezos still might overtake Claus this season with its own initiatives. On Tuesday Amazon announced the launch of its new Something Better Gift Swap Program. The program, which incorporates a full plate of parental controls, allows children age 0 to 12 to swap an unlimited number of toys they’ve received between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day with other children.

According to an Amazon press release issued on the day of the launch, children can go to the Something Better tab on the Amazon homepage and use the order number of their gift to request a swap, similar to a standard gift return. Amazon then uses AI algorithms to make suggestions based on other items returned through the program. Once the child selects their alternative gift, Amazon sends a confirmation email to parents, who approve or decline the request. If parents approve a request, Amazon uses its standard return options, such as UPS pickup, to retrieve and swap the presents.

Carol Ofdabell, Amazon’s director of next-generation strategy, says the program is a competitive answer to Claus’ standard.

“Today’s tech-savvy kids are all about autonomy and choice,” Bell says. “They really understand that the Internet empowers them to get what best expresses their personality to the full extent of their parents’ budgets, and we’re committed to helping them feel confident in who they are through Something Better. We also are hopeful that this will take pressure off parents, who clearly can’t always hit the mark in gift selection. While we recognize the enormous contribution Claus has made to toy distribution through the centuries, we feel the program is a significant improvement to his traditional you-get-it-you-keep-it model.”

The final verdict likely will come on January 2, 2018. Official reports for both Claus Ventures and Amazon will be released to shareholders that morning.

I’ve been an avid Facebook user for years now, and I’ve just recently signed on to the Twitter bandwagon. Most of the professionals I know emphasize the value of social media for social networking and climbing the business ladder, but for a writer, it has other benefits, too.

Social media is valuable to writers first because it serves as an inspiration source. Browsing through the posts on your feed can expose you to news, product advertising and the trails and successes of those around you. That might start you brainstorming about specific topics, such as how to find a babysitter in a pinch or the most creative activities to do with a drone.

Secondly, social media is a highly cost efficient way to post what you publish online, either through links or direct text. If you use the former option, you can up your rankings with Google and other search engines. In many cases, you can share what you write in other applications/sites via Facebook or other channels, simply by clicking a few buttons. This process gets your work more views, which can translate into more revenue, either from your work catching a new client’s eye or from pay based on the number of views for the work.

Social media is terrific for getting feedback at any point of the writing process. For instance, you might ask your followers or friends to throw some random writing topics at you, tell you which headline they prefer or read a work you’re about to publish an objective set of editorial eyes.

Lastly, social media can work as sales channels. You can announce you have new works for sale, that you’re having a writing event (e.g., a book signing) or even link to retailers that sell your work.

In this technological age, social media is transforming business dramatically. There’s no reason it can’t transform your writing activity, too. Be careful about security preferences, but take the time to create and connect multiple social profiles–the creative and financial rewards might surprise you.

These days, one of the most popular sayings is “Come on, it’s [year].” The implication is that modern individuals have progressed and are more accepting, and that equality and tolerance have made leaps and bounds from the past. In writing, women are finding that this is not necessarily the case, experiencing discrimination that forces them to make a heartbreaking choice: hide their real identities to let their work thrive, or be true to who they are and watch their careers never get to first base.

In the past, when it was beyond clear that a woman’s place was to be in the home and raising children rather than spewing her own opinions to “polite” society, women who wanted to write routinely worked out deals with publishers to get their words on the printed page. To make sure that their writing was not dismissed as female dribble, they took pen names and portrayed themselves as male to their audiences. For the most part, this strategy was enormously successful. Writers such as Emily Bronte and Louisa May Alcott are just two well-known authors who tricked the world by writing as men to be taken more seriously.

Little has changed in this century. Not convinced? Joann Rowling was told boys wouldn’t respond to a book written by a girl, hence the publication of the famous Harry Potter series under the more gender-ambiguous pen name, J.K. Rowling. Nora Roberts, famous for her romance writing, wrote as J.D. Robb to enter the male-dominated genre of detective fiction. Christina Lynch and Meg Howrey worked together under the male name Magnus Flyte to produce City of Dark Magic, specifically citing their worry of not being published or losing readers as female authors as the reason for their choice. The problem doesn’t just affect fiction writing, either. A recent 2012 study from the University of Washington showed that women are not as likely to receive primary credits as senior authors on scholarly papers, and that women are less likely to publish than men.

Now, you might argue that much of the blame lays with publishers. After all, it is often the publisher that makes the final call about what will make the book successful, who convinces a female author that her writing quality and style alone is not enough to garner praise. This attitude, however, ignores the fact that publishers are responding to their own perceptions of what audiences want and will do–that is, the gender gap in writing is reflective of a still-pervasive overall gender gap in society. To close that gap requires the shifting of cultural norms, which is both complex and difficult to do.

The old saying is that, to be a really good writer, you write what you know. The idea is that you write based on your experience, because those experiences allow you to provide details and emotional nuances that establish a sense of realism.

This was how it worked “back in the day,” at least. Although some freelancers admittedly are in a position to sit back, leisurely sipping coffee as they let their fingers fly on their laptop, most aren’t. The majority work project to project, hoping they’ll find enough jobs to stay in line with their set budget. That means most wordsmiths take an entirely different approach to this colloquialism.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Today, I started my day out writing about the definition of discourse communities. (Yay! A language-related article!) After breakfast, I moved on to the benefits of chiropractic care. This was followed by articles on why cats spray, types of rice cookers, and lastly, the best exercise DVDs. Naturally, I am not an expert in all of these topics. But I know how to research. So for each article, I diligently used the Internet, scouring page after page for relevant information. After taking notes, I knew enough to be able to construct a decent, coherent piece for each topic.

The modern writer generally no longer can draw only from a specific or previous knowledge set to be successful. He has to be a continuous learner, or the number of projects he can complete will be ridiculously slim (slimmer still, when you consider writers don’t get all the projects on which they bid). What’s more, given the proliferation of information online and through other sources, he has to be highly analytical, having the ability to discern very quickly what data is most relevant or pertinent to a reader. In other words, writers are no longer just writers. They are also researchers and decision makers. This is important because research and decision making are not necessarily skills a person has in addition to command of linguistics. If you aren’t good at them, you might need to hone those skills before your writing process truly becomes efficient and your content is of exceptional quality.