Doing work for no reward

Conventional wisdom states that you should never work for free: after all, if you don’t value your own time, no-one else will. But sometimes, perhaps there are good reasons to give our time away for no obvious reward.

Firstly, let’s define “working for free”. I’m talking about our regular creative work (writing, designing, coding, whatever) that we would normally charge for. Volunteering or similar activities don’t count.

So what work would I choose to give away for free? In the past I’ve chosen to design/build websites for friends/family/local groups over the years, and more recently I’ve designed a few free book covers as part of a possible career change.

Websites

The websites I made for friends were almost never used. I spent a lot of time on them and gave them the same care and attention I’d give to paid client work. It was very disappointing to do all that work for it to go unsued. I shouldn’t have been surprised though. I re-learned what I already knew: when people get free stuff, they just don’t value it. It didn’t matter whether it took me 5 hours or 50 to create a friend’s website: as they weren’t paying for it, they were taking no risks, and therefore were not properly invested in it.

These days if someone asks me to make them a website, I just point them to Wix or Squarespace. There’s very little I can add to the process anyway that isn’t already extremely well covered by these options.

Book covers

When I left my last job at the end of 2016, I wasn’t sure what to focus on. Freelance web-design was becoming less valued making it harder to find new work with my ‘old-school’ skills.

I thought about changing career and decided to spend my spare time practising the design of book covers. It turned out I didn’t suck at it and thought about marketing myself as a cover designer.

I made contact with a small indie publisher, Burdizzo Books. They produce horror anthologies for charity. I really wanted to help, so I offered to do their book covers for a year. So far I’ve created 2 covers which they loved.

Of course, my motives weren’t 100% altruistic. I figured that if I had some book covers in the wild it could help me get noticed. The classic “exposure”, which everyone says doesn’t work, and which I tended to agree with too. But I’d never tested it for myself and thought I should try.

Did I get any work from this exposure?

Nope.

The outcome is exactly what everyone says: getting exposure from doing free work just doesn’t happen most of the time. But I was OK with that as I’d done this work for practice and to help a good cause.

I also did a couple of other free covers after running an introductory offer. These were great fun to do, I learned loads about formatting for CreateSpace and Ingram Spark, and the covers were loved by the clients. But again, no noticeable results from this “exposure”. Perhaps people were nervous about commissioning me as I was too inexperienced. Totally understandable, I’d be cautious too.

A year later, I’m finally starting to get noticed. I’m practising all the time and when I post up new practice work, I get more confident and a bit more noticed. It really is incredibly difficult to get noticed for creative work on the web. I’m up against extremely talented artists and designers who have been doing book covers for years. But I know that continual good work is what will eventually get me there.

Conclusions

I could only afford to do free work because of all the paid work I’d already done prior. A decent savings plan had given me a buffer to work within. I would advise then that you shouldn’t do free work if you’re already struggling for money.

I would also advise that if you choose to do free work for friends/family, you might be disappointed by the outcome. It’s hard not to feel a bit used when we invest so much time, effort and care into something that our friends or family don’t seem to value.

But the free work I did on the book cover design was great. Sure, the “exposure” hasn’t given me anything back yet (no new clients have approached on the basis of that work), but I loved the learning, the creativity and getting to know the contacts I made. Those things have been very valuable to me.

So, “Don’t do free work.” Yes or no?

I would broadly say “No”, for these reasons:

• Free work undervalues our skills.
• Free work can only be done when there’s no fundamental risks.
• Exposure is definitely a myth and doesn’t yield results (unless perhaps you’re very good at marketing and networking.) Remember, people can die of exposure…
• The time sink can be considerable, and you have to be happy with the outcome of getting nothing back for your efforts.

However, if you have something specific you want to get from doing free work, if you can fund it or somehow support it without going broke, then I say: Why not? You might be surprised what you get out of it.

Final words

This was my personal experience, with a bunch of reasoning and factors that may not apply to anyone else. Your mileage may vary, etc.

Be cautious, be sensible, pay your bills.

But above all: never stop trying new things.