A dealer in text, that is. (Why, what did you think?)

A chance encounter with an online friend took me to a pretty awesome site called Text Broker.

It is a pretty simple idea. People who want something written go there and submit a description of what they want. A writer like me comes along, reads the description, and writes it for them. Communication back and forth for revisions etc occur, and when the client is satisfied, a standard per word rate is charged.

It is basically a way to make freelance writing easy to do and easy to buy, and sounds absolutely fantastic. They pay via PayPal, which means that I see eBay purchases in my future.

There are a few psychological hurdles, though. The first one was that the main site, Text Broker, only works for people in the States.

But luckily, they have another site, Text Broker UK, which works for people in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the Republic of Ireland. So all us in the Commonwealth, it would seem.

So I signed up for the UK site. First hurdle cleared no problem. The crowd goes wild.

Next hurdle : on the sign up screen, there are around forty potential “areas of expertise” type categories so I can tell them what topics I am qualified to cover. Eep, I think. I am a total generalist. I am not an expert in anything. This is one of those things where they suddenly expect me to know things.

I’m a writer! We don’t have to know things, we just have to make things up. I mean, I know a lot of things, but it is all eclectic and random. I don’t know enough about any one thing to be considered an expert on it. What now? AAAAAH!

But I manage to talk myself down from that ledge by rephrasing it as “can I write competently about this subject?” And that lowered the bar enough for me to feel comfortable clicking some stuff.

Plus, I found a few categories where I feel totally comfortable declaring myself an expert, namely Astrology (I got mad skills there) and Humour.

Do I know humour? Do fleas love a dog’s nuts? (No seriously… do they? I need to know for my first article… don’t ask why. )

And other things, like Science, are things I am confident that I understand well enough to be able to learn whatever I need to know for an article.

What I don’t know, I can Wiki. Isn’t modern technology wonderful? You do not need to know it, you just need to know enough to learn it and to know where the answers are found.

So I cleared the second hurdle without too much trouble. Might have graced the top slightly, but still, I got my momentum up.

But now I am at that third hurdle, and it’s a doozy, because I have to write a little sample of my writing skills, which will then be evaluated and given a rating.

And that rating will determine how much I get paid per word.

Check out the pay table linked here. I used the US pay table because the other one is… confusing.

Presumably, it goes without saying (too late!) that if they rate your writing at one star, you are not good enough to write anything for anyone. You probably have your caps lock key on all the time, speak entirely in text message/meme patois, use quotes for emphasis, and currently have drool soaking through the straps of your safety helmet.

So it starts at 2 stars, which is described, inaccurately, as “legible”. That is a word that usually only applies to handwriting. As we are all typing words for fonts to render on a screen, all our words are equally legible. On a letter per letter basis, we are all just as easy to read.

It’s when you get up to the word level that differences appear.

The differences between 2 stars, 3 stars, and 4 stars are not that big, although of course, I would be downright humiliated if I got a 2 star rating, apart from making only 0.7 of a penny per word!

But then they dangle that five star rating out there, where I could get five cents per word instead of the next rating, which is only 1.7 cents per word.

That is almost three times more. So I kinda want that five star rating bad.

But in order to get it, I have to first write 120-250 words on these fascinating topics :

-Sightseeing in your city (or your favourite city to visit)
-Party locations in your city
-Objective description of a technical object
-A description of your favourite shop, business, or brand

Wow, so many stimulating ideas, how could I ever choose?

But that is what freelance work is like. This is not art, it’s craft. It’s work.

It’s money earned via writing.

So it is not like the assignments I will be plucking will be any better. And they are all the sort of thing that tests how good someone is at the nuts and bolts of writing. Clarity, descriptive ability, concision, engagement, understanding of topic, understanding of market, and so on.

You know, the really tedious and boring stuff that happens to also be super relevant and important to whether your writing is any damned good, let alone whether anyone should be willing to pay for it.

So that is the final hurdle : having my writing judged for monetary value. Super eek!

Luckily, your rating is not set in stone, but updated with everything you write. So it is not like I get one shot and that is it for life.

Still, being a highly sensitive artistic type, I am a tad nervous about being judged like that. I just know that if I do not at least get a 4 star rating, I will be very depressed.

And I want that 5 star rating so bad I can taste it.

My god… is this what having ambition is like?