Freelance academic writing is a relatively new way of earning that came to Latin America about 10 years ago.
Coming mainly from Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, freelance academic writers offer their services in a wide area ranging from writing summaries or small essays to making theses and dissertations. As more and more students are going for getting their homework done by professional writers, the numbers of professional academic writers are also increasing.
However, getting appropriate and exact demographic data of academic writers worldwide and in Latin America is often impossible for a number of reasons. Firstly, most academic writers don’t acknowledge that they are actually academic writers. It is so because many people look down upon this profession and think that writing assignments on behalf of students is illegal and immoral. Secondly, there is no international organization or forum for academic writers. EssayLancers.com – the only project that could serve as a meeting point of freelance academic writers in the future – is still in its bud. And thirdly, academic writing companies keep all the information about their writers in private because they don’t want a direct contact of the student and the writer. So, freelance academic writers usually remain behind the scene.
According to Freelance Industry Report (2012), most academic ghostwriters are between 30 – 50 years of age. The report further states that nearly 71% of freelancers are females. Income of freelance academic writers varies greatly and depends upon the following factors:
- the company for which they work;
- how much they value their time;
- how many hours they work;
- writer’s writing speed;
- how creative they are.
Since these factors vary from a writer to write, the income for academic writing varies likewise. Freelance academic companies usually offer $10-20 per page. The writer’s part often constitutes 40-50% of the announced price, which would be $4-10 per page. The other kind of academic writing service, ThePensters.com, offers the bidding approach to orders. Thus writers estimate the difficulty of the order on their own and fix their own margin per separate order.
According to Freelance Industry Report, 2012 of Ed Gandia, one third of the freelancers that have been working as a freelancer for more than three years listed their hourly earnings as $70 per hour or even more. The remaining 23 percent reported their hourly earnings as $50-70 per hour. The results of the Ed Gandia’s report can be generalized for academic writers since the report says that 40 % respondents were editors and writers.
Though, hourly earnings of academic writers is eye opening, annual income is not as high as hourly. That said, there are many academic freelancers who are making a six digit earning a year.
