“How fast do you type?”

That’s what the buyer wanted to know. A better question for a writer or programmer would have been, “How fast can you think?”

I’m writing this on a legal pad while sitting in a tow truck. The time between calls is ideal for quick notes. I’m calling it ‘writing’, but an observer would see me staring off into space and only occasionally scribbling a few lines. All the important stuff is happening in my head, invisibly.

Buyers who aren’t also writers don’t understand this. They don’t understand that writing isn’t like car assembly or cutting the lawn. This is a real mismatch between what I do and what they think they are paying for. What I do is create. What I bill for is my time. Unfortunately, that time is often 10 minutes in the shower wondering how to structure an article on flower arrangement, or 15 minutes while waiting for a tow call.

I can’t and don’t bill my time directly, one to one. For fixed-price jobs, this isn’t much of a problem. I bill for the entire job, no matter where or when I had my ‘browsing cow’ face on. For hourly jobs, I charge a higher hourly rate and then keep my on-the-desk time short. That’s an example of matching what I actually do to what buyers expect and understand.

Our marketplace isn’t just shaped by what we want to do and how much we want to get paid to do it. Buyers’ expectations have to be understood, considered, and fulfilled.

Why they want bulk.

Buyers for volume content are usually out to increase their online visibility. Bulk articles do this when posted in a blog or a series of pieces written in the same general subject area. When a single domain contains multiple pages with related content, search engines will rank that domain higher.

And that explains the question, “How fast do you type?”

A buyer looking for short, low-cal articles (’article’ seems like an exaggeration) isn’t focused on interesting, informative or compelling content. They want to figure out the cheapest way to get the right words on a web page. Looking through the postings for writing jobs will show you what I mean. Extremely low hourly rates for a very high amount of production. Factory writing. Henry Ford’s ghost come to plague us.

Unfortunately for me, I like to ease into an article. I like to get comfy with the topic, do a little reading on it and take whatever time feels right. Because of this, the only way I can take on bulk article projects is as fixed-price jobs, or fudge my oDesk time to meet the buyers production schedules.

In part 2 of this series, I’ll tell you how I managed to speed up my writing for bulk article jobs.

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• Reselling Your Way to Bulk Happiness
• Bulking Up: production writing technique
• Getting and Keeping Clients
• Money Flows Towards the Writer
• oDesk Diary