When you receive a collaboration proposal, how should you negotiate pay? Utsudo has received all kinds of proposals—character design, chatbots, interviews, radio, commissioned novels, endorsements—but a proposal isn’t a deal, and many fall through. She has also taken essentially unpaid work that raised her profile. Still, she reminds creators to assess their own situation first: charging is nothing to be embarrassed about, and clients who take your labor for granted are the ones to avoid. If you start unpaid, agree in advance on future revenue sharing.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

All sorts of proposals

These projects are all over the place: character design, chatbots, interviews, radio programs, commissioned novels, book endorsements and more. Receiving them makes me feel valued and happy, but some fizzle out once we start talking—maybe the tone isn’t right, the pay is lower than expected, it’s beyond my abilities, or occasionally we just don’t communicate well.

When that happens, the project may fall through and all that excitement comes to nothing QQ

An offer that made me feel like a hired writer, not a novelist

I once had a Hong Kong company ask me to write a novel. They already had the planning and settings done and wanted me to write it, with a deadline of about a year.

Of course I was happy to get a novel project. But since everything was already planned, it made me feel more like a hired writer than a novelist. I’d never created that way before, so I decided to pass—even though Hong Kong’s terms would surely be much better than Taiwan’s, and they mentioned adapting it into many things…

Is unpaid work worth taking?

That said, I’ve also received plenty of work that was essentially unpaid. But more or less, it could raise my profile, so I didn’t mind much.

After all, you have to look at the long term. Since I’ve decided to build my own brand, I need to look to the future. Pay matters, but compared with immediate gains, future opportunities matter most.

But I’m not saying you should become free labor and do whatever people ask. Assess your current situation. If something would take too much time or cost too much, make sure to bring up fees. We’re all human and need money to buy food.

If you can’t survive the present, how can you have a future, right?

Charging isn’t something to be embarrassed about

Charging fees isn’t something to be shy about. On the contrary, clients who take your labor for granted from the start are the ones to keep at arm’s length. You owe each other nothing—why should you provide your expertise for free?

Unless you’re looking far ahead and agree that even if it’s unpaid at first, you’ll share revenue once the project launches. It depends on the project’s prospects; if you can accept that, being unpaid for a while may be workable.

Either way, this isn’t mutual help between friends, so pay must be settled. Of course, if you’re collaborating with friends on a bigger project that will earn revenue, discuss how to share it too, so there are no disputes later that turn a happy collaboration sour or even cost you a good friend.

Friends are worth more than money

When it comes to friendship, I think any collaboration is secondary. Friends are worth far more than money—unless that money is a few hundred million, of course (X

Of course, projects worth hundreds of millions don’t come along easily, so cherish your partners. Going the distance together is best.

As for the stories behind the projects I’ve taken on, I’ll share them bit by bit later!

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #187: The Weight of Responsibility
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.