At the beginning of this month, with much trepidation, I decided to give a bidding web site a chance.

I signed up for E-lance with every intention of giving it an honest shot.

I’ve bid for several projects, placing mid-ranged and reasonable bids.  All went to outrageously low bidders.

Today, after three weeks, I’m canceling my E-lance account.

Here’s why:

These are snippets of jobs from the today’s daily email notification:

• Looking for writers to do 10 articles of 400 words regarding tattoos with different topic. Paid via Paypal at $1 for each article. No plagiarism whatsoever and must be 100% unique.Please submit a sample.
• I have a series of 14 articles of 1500-2000 words on management and leadership that I want ‘chunked’ down into 400-800 word articles. I don’t mean ‘edit’ as in boiling down the 1500 words into a 400-word summary – I mean breaking the 1500 word article into sub-topics and making each a standalone article.
• I need around 200 Articles about great Programming Scripts and semi-reviews of tutorials they dont need to be to long maybe 1-2 paragraphs. They need to be original. You dont need to do them all at once.  I would need about 3 a day until all 200 are complete. I will pay 50-75 cents per article as it should take more then ten minutes to write one article as information on scripts and tutorials is in overstock on the internet.
• I need 100 articles written and submitted to ezinearticles.com  Article topics will be on “Acai Berry For Men”
  Article length: 250-300 words I will give you a keyphrase for each article which must be used in the article title aswell as the article 2-3 times.  You will need to submit the articles to ezinearticles.com with YOUR own account. If you dont have an account, you can open one easily. I will provide pre-written resource boxes. An article will be deemed “completed” once it has been reviewed and accepted into ezinearticles.com If articles are not accepted, there is usually a simple problem which needs to be fixed and they can be resubmitted – this will be YOUR responsibility. Shouldn’t happen much though   I am looking to pay around $150 for the job.
• Job simply involves writing 100 little blog snippets a day – each post will be 100 words. This is easy to do and 20 an hour is very achievable. Flexible in terms of the days worked and looking for about 400- 500 snippets a week at approx $60 per week.

Now I don’t mean to pick on Elance.  As far as bidding sites go, they seem to run a pretty good operation.  My beef isn’t with the bidding sites so much as it is with the writers.

As long as writers are willing to whore themselves out for less than one-half a penny a word,  things will never change.

I know that there are folks bidding from other countries that are ok with that kind of wage, but in looking at the bidders, there are far fewer of those folks than one would think.

I wish I could organize a freelance writer’s strike.  What do you think? Writers Opposed to Piss Poor Offered Rates (WOPPOR)  How about organizing Writer’s Tea Parties?  Maybe some folks could draft a Writer’s Declaration of Independence? – Alternatively, we could go to our windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!!!”

I may starve for a while, but I’ll keep my dignity in tact and perhaps make a small contribution to putting an end to this despicable smudging of the craft.