About getting paid

I often have a smile on my face, if I read another of many Facebook posts by Yuko, where she rants about the emails she gets from people asking her to work for free. Or I love the part, where Mr. Bingo talks about the many tries, where people want to have him working for free for a certain project. Lately, at beyond tellerrand in Berlin, Jeff Greenspan gave a lovely and entertaining talk, in which he also speaks about pitches, where someone says how much reputation he can gain from working for this project in parts of it and I could go on listing friends and people, who continuously get asked to work for free. Which in the first place is noting bad at all, but the people/companies asking them are not those who can’t afford paying them in these cases. There are mostly well-known and big companies who earn so much, that they should be able to easily pay those artists for their work.

The reasons for writing this is, that Jessica Hische, who also often gets ask to work for no profit by and for-profit company, posted a great email reply on Twitter. What I like in her reply is, that she is neither going crazy, because she is super angry, getting asked the billionth time nor is she getting sarcastic. She has written a well understandable and calm reply. A good template for everybody who is in a similar position.