I've written a couple of articles for LWN (I waived the fee)[1][2]. It's quite an involved process going through many rounds of editing. You have to stick to the house style and use the house markup. The results are excellent because of this consistent attention to detail, but I wouldn't recommend it as a way to make a quick buck :-) The whole process for these two articles took two weeks from proposal to publication and involved 30 emails as well as many edits in their CMS.
I've recently started writing for LWN and have written nine articles now: https://lwn.net/Archives/GuestIndex/#Hoyt_Ben It's definitely a stringent style and editing process -- I find it good discipline. Most of my articles have taken a full day to write (8-10 hours) plus an hour or two of editing, though a couple of them took two days. So not a get-rich-quick scheme, but also not bad (or you can think of it as them paying you to research and learn :-).
I've really enjoyed the process. It's nice to have an article done and dusted, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. Unlike code, which keeps breaking, you have to maintain it, deploy it, add features, etc. Code is never done. But an article gets published, and (apart from reading a few comments) that's the end of it.
So I highly recommend subscribing to (or writing for!) LWN. It really is quality content. And I'm not even an avid Linux person. It's really inexpensive for what it is, and they're just a small shop so they deserve it (I think they only have 3 or 4 full time writers).
Agreed! I'm also an LWN subscriber, even when I'm checking LWN just occasionally. I support their high quality content, which is so much missing on the internet of today.
Ben, just wanted to say that I especially liked your articles and it pushed me to resubscribe to LWN again. I like the topics you write about, because they really interest me. Good job! I really like AWK, Lua, Go and everything around it, so I'm looking forward to more articles from you.
Interesting read. I remember having to write a RISC-V implementation in BSV as class project Junior year in college. What a ride that was. It truly is a simple design though, implementing x86 would take more than an an undergrad.
Lwn.net is without any doubt the greatest free and open source publication in the world, to me at least. Very high standards both technical and ethical.
I highly recommend subscribing!
P.S. I am a subscriber, but otherwise not in any way affiliated with lwn.net.
Many VPS providers are offering similar terms. DigitalOcean has its Write for DOnations program (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digit...) which pays $300 for a new tutorial, for instance. I'd imagine the cost must pay itself off, I've seen many people sign up for DigitalOcean because they wanted to follow one of the tutorials (even though you don't really need DO to follow them).
I don’t know if it pays for itself but I can say that my decision to be a customer for the last 4 years was probably influenced by the goodwill generated by those tutorials.
I've seen some very successful consultancies going with this tactic as well. You go on their website and it's not just contact us page but a plethora of articles on how to do things.
If you are referring to writing useful articles (and not referring to paying for articles), Slicehost and Linode definitely started this way earlier than DigitalOcean.
We are always looking for writers who can create quality articles and aren't afraid of writing for readers who know more about the subject matter than they do (or anybody else does, for that matter). We're interested in news from the free-software development community; we don't do how-to articles or "five reasons your company should be using DevOps".
The cited rate is our entry rate; we try to bump things up fairly quickly for authors who do good work for us. As others have noted, we care deeply about the material we publish, so there is definitely some time to be spent in the editing process.
FWIW this is in the normal range for what a good blog post costs any business. My first job paid me $50 per blog post and I churned out a few a week. My second job did $1,000 for three very high quality ones per quarter. (Blogging is no where near my day to day job).
All were just posted on the corporate blog for seo, building the brand as experts, etc. One of my posts was reblogged by some major outlets, so definitely worth the cost for my employer.
Hard to overestimate the value of a high quality, viral blog post for SEO and business development. A lot of engineers don’t understand how important these are.
Unfortunately, there are way more companies and engineers who understand the importance than ones able to produce high quality blog posts, so you end up sifting through tons and tons of almost useless, often outdated hello world tutorials when looking for in-depth knowledge on any popular topic.
It would be cool if such an aggregator had a commenting feature so people can discuss the title of the article without even bothering to read the article!
Posts I write for my personal blog would also cost around $1k on my rate. I do it to build personal brand for consulting. So far it was worth it. Some customers referred posts I wrote almost decade ago.
Blogging is partly a numbers game. Not every piece of content is successful. But if a blog post does rank well/go viral, it can make up its costs 10-100x.
I maintain a collection[0] of places with programs like this (I'll add lwn later today).
As others have said, producing a good blog post takes time, so the money isn't as good as it initially seems if you aren't doing it for reputation or fun too.
I also recently launched ritza[1] to scale production of this kind of content as it's definitely a growing demand trend. Happy to chat about technical writing with anyone - details in profile.
If anyone wants to write detailed, high-quality articles about automotive engineering on a similar basis, drop me an email. Explaining concepts from the basic to the advanced in an easy-to-understand way.
> If anyone wants to write detailed, high-quality articles about automotive engineering on a similar basis, drop me an email.
Will you also match LWN by paying $300 and up for accepted articles?
Not sure why you were downvoted, but it might be a good idea to put up a page explaining your goals and perhaps do your own Show HN so more people can see your offer.
It really depends on the topic (probably not for Linux), but Medium seems today the best option if your goal is to earn money.
My last 2 articles in Medium generated $500 and +$800 (and growing) for a total effort of around ~6 writing hours per article, so I think it is a very viable way to make a living writing 100% online.
Sure. Medium paywall works surprisingly well. You simply need to publish your article and activate Medium paywall after a very simple KYC.
The point is that if you don't have an audience/publication, no one will find your article. That's why it is usually better to publish your content under a publication focused in the same topic than your article. If you are lucky, Medium will also promote the article in their newsletter and in Medium homepage and visits will boost.
Then Medium pays you a fee based on the article performance. It is not clear what parameters they consider to calculate the fee, but it seems to be a mix between views and reader time.
Based on my limited experience, they key metric, apart from views, is the total reading time. If the article is short but has lot of visits, revenues will be low.
As a writer, you simply need to sign up for Medium Partner Program (and complete the KYC sending your ID, bank account details, etc.). They pay quite well (the first week of each month).
Medium gets revenues from premium users who pay $5 per month and distributes all the revenues based on views, reading time, etc.
I write content that straddles marketing and technical writing for a living. Clients find me through referrals (best for me) or the marketing agencies I have established relationships with (more reliable but less money). In the decade I’ve been doing this, I’ve never so much as created an account on Fiverr or Upwork.
A lot of published work is substandard for two reasons: businesses aren’t willing to pay enough and they have no expertise in editing. Even the best writers benefit from an editor who can knock their work into shape and keep them on the straight and narrow. Publishers know this, but the average marketer or entrepreneur does not, or, if they do know it, they are not willing to pay for high-quality editing (running writing through Grammarly doesn’t count).
Do you know any services which offer that? I have some work I would like to polish up but beyond having a relative of friend look over it I am generally lost.
MSDN Magazine was no where near LWN, at least not for its last few years of existence. It was very high level with almost no technical insight. I only remember seeing not very helpful or in depth tutorials and a rant or two by people who seemed fairly uninformed in each issue.
Great to see that there are still publications that care about having high standards of editorial and that actually pay their writers a reasonable amount. These are very few and far between.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/749185/
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/749443/