Writing for free is a contested practice, and the contest is worth examining. On one side is the argument that writers should always be paid — that writing has value, that unpaid work devalues that value for all writers, and that the request to write for free is an exploitation of creative labour that should be refused. On the other side is the practice of most writers at most points in their careers, who write for free regularly and for a range of reasons that are not all the same and do not all deserve the same evaluation.

The binary of paid versus unpaid is not the most useful frame for thinking about writing for free, because it treats all unpaid writing as equivalent when it is not. The essay published on a personal site and the article written for a platform that profits from the writer’s labour are both unpaid, but they are very different things.

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