“WORKING FOR FREE” IS FINE, AS LONG AS YOU ARE WORKING FOR YOURSELF!

As a performing artist, I occasionally get solicitations from people who want to provide me with an “opportunity” to work on their passion project, which they may or may not turn around and use for profit. This idea is known in the industry as exploitation, yet for some reason, the solicitors don’t see it that way, because they have the idea that just because artists enjoy their jobs, we are willing to do them for free, or that we are looking for “exposure” in order to get better paying jobs in the future.

You would never call up an accountant and say “hi. I have a fun accounting project but I can’t afford to pay anyone to do it for me. Would you be willing to do it and in return I’ll refer you to my 5 friends who might need an accountant in the future?

If you’re reading this and thinking, but that’s different. Performing and creating is fun, while accounting is a “job” job. First of all, performing and creating is not always fun, even for someone who loves it. It always depends on the actual job. And the opposite is true as well. I play a game called “nerdle” that involves arithmetic. The game is fun for me. I shouldn’t expect that therefore, people who do math stuff for a career love doing the math stuff all the time, even for free.

So what do you do if you want to become a professional in an artistic industry, but you don’t yet have a portfolio? There are the lucky few who get a so called “big break” early on in their career, and therefore don’t live the life of a starving artist for long, but the vast majority of creatives don’t get so lucky. Sometimes they have a hard time building their portfolio, because in order to do so they might have to work for free, and they won’t work for free, because they don’t want to be exploited.

But the terms: “working for free” and “being exploited” are not always interchangeable.

We’ve all heard the phrase “you need to spend money to make money”. If you want to open a restaurant, you take out a business loan, and take a loss for a while before turning a profit. If you want to open a hair salon, you do the same, maybe even offering free haircuts to the first few customers as a marketing ploy. If people in “job” jobs are willing to work for free for awhile, or even invest money in their business, then so can a creative freelancer. If you’re an author, you can self-publish. If you’re a musician, you can play music on Tiktok, Youtube, or various other platforms. And if you’re an audiobook narrator, you can find a book in the public domain, and publish the audiobook yourself. You might have to share a percentage of your royalties with the retail platforms in order to do so, just like a restaurant owner must pay rent in order to have an actual place of business, but when you are publishing your own content, you’re working for yourself.

You can’t exploit yourself.

Thanks for reading!

Rebecca H. Lee- Audiobook Narrator

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