For several years now I’ve been doing odd writing jobs here and there online, just trying to make a little extra cash. It’s difficult to find jobs that I’m suitable for and hours of trawling the Internet, craigslist in particular, usually turn up nothing. But every once in a while I find something that catches my eye and I send an email with writing samples and my experience. Often I don’t hear anything back. But sometimes I’m lucky and I land some work, typically for $5-10 per article. Nothing huge but enough to cover my iTunes purchases and whatnot.
Several months ago I began writing for a website called Modern Man Jack. It’s a men’s website and the pay rate they gave me was respectable if you wrote frequently enough. When I joined up the guy in charge, Tony, sent me a professional info page detailing how they paid and what they expected out of the writers. It all seemed pretty legit.
A month and four submitted articles later I hadn’t been paid for my work. When I sent queries asking about the status of my reimbursement I got late responses or one sentence replies. The days ticked by and my paypal was empty. Tony became increasingly terse in his replies and I grew more and more worried. Eventually we blew up into an argument where he claimed he didn’t have to pay me for 90 days after my work was submitted. A website called Modern Man Jack treats modern men like shit.
I starting googling MMJ to see if it was a scam and after a bit of sleuthing I found the email addresses of several other contributors and asked if they had been paid. None of them had and they claimed that Tony had also treated them poorly when they asked about their payment.
Tony claimed he was making money “hand over fist” as he put it. If that’s true then why wasn’t he paying his writers? If he was waiting for Adsense to pay him or something then wouldn’t it have been wiser to place a hold on incoming articles until he had money on hand to pay? When I brought up some of my concerns to him he gave me a good belly laugh when he claimed that I had a lot to learn about business. If I was in business I’d certainly have the good goddamn common decency to pay people for their work in a timely manner.
Anyway, it’s been about 4 months now and still no payment. I doubt it’s coming. I sent Tony an email asking about it last week but seeing as how he’s likely still butthurt that I had the gall to confront him over his shady behavior, it’s probable that he won’t ever pay me the money he owes me, $40 in total. But I’ve moved on and I’m wiser for it now. I’ll be much more careful about who I take work from in the future.
If any freelance writers happen to read this, share it around. Writers shouldn’t let other writers work for crooks.