You know what I love?

I LOVE when a luxury company that charges $175 for a single necktie tells me that it would like me to write a play (!!!) for its upcoming marketing campaign, but that I will not be compensated for my work or my time, thankyouverymuch.

Uh, say what?

I told them where they could stuff their neckties.

Sadly, I receive emails like this weekly. There’s an endless stream of companies looking to exploit writers by suggesting that — in this economy — writers are lucky to just “get their work out there, get seen.”

It kills me that they’ll have no trouble finding someone to write for them under this ruse.

Until writers take themselves seriously, ain’t no company going to bother to do it.

I don’t know if the advent of the Internet more than a decade ago is to blame for this trend entirely, but it hasn’t helped. Online, there are reams of unpaid, crap “content” (and bots that steal content and regurgitate it on other sites). Companies now lay off writers first, because the higher-ups seem to believe — erroneously — that pretty much everyone can string a few good sentences together. Even monkeys!

Not so. The amount of lousy copywriting online and off is staggering. But no one except Us Writer Types seems to be too bent out of shape about that. Misspellings? Typos? Incoherent thought processes? Whatever. Chill, baby. It’s all cool.

Fortunately, one thing is generally still true: You do get what you pay for.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be noticing that that’s still true.

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