How many hours a day do professional writers work?

Some writers on this board find it not difficult to write about 25 to 30 pages a day, whereas for others, it seems impossible. Can the same work be done in 8 to 9 hours a day? How many hours do/should writers work?

"professional writers" work in journalism, copy-writing, publishing, etc... in other words, they have respectable jobs. term paper mills are for hacks, or slumming professional writers doing hack-work.

the basic math is simple when you break it down into an hourly wage: divide quantity by quality.

Let's talk about professional writers working in essay writing industry, who are actually qualified and competent.

A few of us have indicated that we do sometimes write up to 25 pages in a day, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's "not difficult." A more typical day of work for me would be closer to 10 pages or so. Today, for example, I have three short company papers scheduled and one 10-pg private client paper to write. That may represent 6-8 hours of actual writing and doesn't include answering work emails or monitoring company boards all day every day for newly-posted orders every waking hour, even while I'm writing. Switching from writing one project to write a quick rush order due in a few hours is something that happens almost daily too. There's no distinction between day and night or any days of the week, or in my case, holidays, either. It's more hours and harder work than what I did as a "professional" Writer/Editor in federal government or as a Writer in corporate communications in the private sector and the work day never really "ends" the way it does at an office job: if I'm awake, I'm only a few inches from a pc screen anywhere in my apartment, including in my gym and bathrooms. But working at home, usually with the TV or radio on, and in shorts and a t-shirt beats commuting to an office to be at a desk at 7:00 or 8:00 AM and spending most of every weekend just catching up all the sleep you missed during the week, going to the gym because you didn't make it during the week, and running errands like grocery shopping and doing laundry.

Editor is right, professional writers belong to the New York times but nevertheless academic writing remains a trade for which one needs a certain level of competency and stamina. On the matter of pages, my capacity varies. On a normal day when I get to watch television, keep my facebook account logged in and read the latest news or watch YouTube videos, I write an average of 10 pages. I rarely go beyond 10 pages even if I have more work that is pending for as long as they do not fall due on that same day. However, under pressure I can write up to 20 pages within 8 hours and surprisingly, I mostly end up producing better quality work than those days when I only write 10 pages.

...and I left out probably the best part of doing this work: There is no alarm clock in my life and when I sleep it's from whenever I want until whenever I wake up. Having to rush to get to bed on time to try to get the minimum amount of necessary sleep and waking up to that alarm clock 5 days a week was the worst part of a regular office job.

Yes, I understand. Can you estimate how much time, on average, you spend working in a whole day?


Even I work the same way. At times, I feel that 8 to 9 hours of work, on average, is not enough, and that I should work more because I can't write more than 10 pages in a day with such a routine, as far as quality is concerned.

I write in free time. Who care about hours.

Huh? So you work when you are free? I can find anything funnier than this one. Do you mean having fun is all what you do in your life? Lol!

Yes, I write here whem free.

In that case, you should spend time reading the posts, too.

I think it largely depends on availability of information. If you are having problem locating the relevant information, there is a high chance that you will complete a 9-page paper in 2 days.

I disagree. Difficulty in research might cause me to spend as much time on a much shorter paper as I would usually spend only on a much longer paper, but there's almost no paper that I'd agree to write in the first place that would take me longer than one day to write. Almost anything 15 pages or less is done in one sitting with short breaks. Part of doing this for a living is knowing how long a job will take you to do and making sure that you don't take any assignments that you can't produce cost effectively. In fact, half the projects that I decline are papers I could write if I had to but that just wouldn't be worth the time involved on my end for the usual price. I usually refer those to someone who handles those particular topics more than I do or to one of the companies write for with instructions for how to phrase the order or which company writers to request. Occasionally, clients who are already comfortable with me and don't want to start looking for a new writer or company will pay me for the time that will be involved on my end, but more often than not, once I explain that I'd have to charge much more for it than the usual price, they use someone else for that particular project.

As far as estimating how much time I spend actually writing in a typical day, it could be 3 or 4 hours some days or 12+ hours other days. I really don't keep track because I'm always working on and off from the minute I wake up until the minute I go to bed just about every day of my life. Just as an example of my previous account, since writing that post earlier today, I took 2 additional rush company papers also due today. So, even though I already finished two scheduled papers, I still have the same number of papers due later today as I did before. I monitor my computers 24/7/365 except when I'm sleeping or not at home, including when I'm working out or lying out on the terrace getting sun. Most of the time, I start writing something on my calendar as soon as I wake up and take breaks to eat, watch TV, feed the cat, spend quality time with my wife, or workout; but very often, by the time I check the clock, I've already been writing from late morning until evening with only food and bathroom breaks.

So if you want to know what a typical day is on my end, I guess I just worked about 7 hours. I'm going to hit the gym now and then write one more 10-pg paper tonight (overnight) before I go to bed sometime in the morning. That paper might take 3 or 4 hours, so that makes about 11 hours of work in a day. If another short rush paper pops up during that time, I'll probably take that and also do that one before I go to bed. It's not something I normally track, but I guess I just work pretty much all day most days and squeeze the rest of my life in around writing these papers. Still beats going to bed on schedule, waking up to an alarm clock, and commuting back and forth to work in an office.

So what do you do with the theses/dissertations? You don't take such orders, right?


"I can't find ......"

I guess its a lifestyle thing for most full time writers, there are no set hours for many and there is a lot of work which isn't solid writing. I pretty much have my computer on watching the boards and biding on work any time i'm not in bed or out on the bike. As for actually writing is can be anything from just a few hours a day in the slow season to a full eight hours or more in the peak season. However, as I say its a lifestyle thing rather than a job, days merge into one another unbroken by weekends or holidays and I write at what ever time I have the desire day or night makes no difference.

Sorry if I was unclear. I meant there is no 10 or 15-page order that I would take if I couldn't do it in one day's work. I've written a few dozen 50-pg assignments, about half a dozen 100-pg assignments, and as I mentioned earlier in another thread, one recent 300-pg thesis on a topic in American constitutional law. Obviously those types of assignments take much more than a day to write. I was responding to a post about a 9-pg paper taking two days to write because any paper of that length that I couldn't do in a day would not be worth the time on my end unless it was for a much higher price than I usually charge. In those cases, I refer them to one of two other writers I trust or to a company I trust.

It then comes down to how much you make per page. The trick in the business is to keep your CPPs decent so that with an average of 10 pages a day you can live comfortably. I am not saying that you shouldn't write more; you can but let that be optional. For instance, if work 3 consecutive days writing an average of 10 pages a day, I am able to cover all my basic needs (house rent, food and utilities). It will not afford me a holiday, frequent night outs and so on but those are just 3 days of my month, which is much better than my colleagues in formal employment. So for me I rarely write more than 10 pages unless there is motivation to do so (read very high CPPs) because I prefer to have sometime off the computer and that is not possible given that I have a slightly lower rate of writing.

Many writer cheat. They say they work but post Facebook and Twitter or read online gossip newspaper at same time. Some eat all day or watch pr0n too.

Writers who say they 'work 10-15 hr a day' in real work maybe 4-5hrs. Rest is no work by high standards.

It depended on the time of year, but I could imagine finishing several essays in one day, which might be 15-20 pages. That was when I was still doing this work.

Incidentally, I never regarded it as "professional" writing but an absolute disgrace. It was a job and that's about all I can say for it.

For the most part, essay writing services are just there to provide papers to students with poor English skills, or those with limited academic qualifications who should not be studying at the university level in the first place. I would say that the most common type of customer was the former, though, and just had great difficulty writing a coherent sentence in English.

Colleges and universities make a great deal of money off these foreign students, which is just another corrupt scam in its own right.

Not really. There are some assignments which appear difficult to some students (both ESL and Native), and as a result they seek essay writing services with the aim of learning how they are done. Examples include accounting and mathematics assignments.

Those students are certainly well represented but many customers don't fit that mold at all. I get many working professionals pursuing higher degrees in their fields. Nurses seem to use writing services a lot and I get as many projects from working teachers and working education administrators pursuing advanced degrees in education very regularly. I've also written for more than one working professional whose previous degrees were from Harvard and several working physicians pursuing business or law degrees. Also, deployed military personnel and management-level civilian government employees. In my opinion, there are a lot of academic programs that require much more writing than people who are already perfectly competent in those fields or who have no problem passing their in-class tests in those course are comfortable with...or have time for. In most cases, those writing assignments neither test anything nor teach anything necessary for those people to become successful professionals in their chosen fields.

In any case, I was ashamed to admit to anyone that I even had a job like this. There was a time in the past when people who did these things would have been expelled from any university, but I guess things aren't as strict now.

There are also a lot of online universities that provide a lot of customers for these writing services, but they are nothing but diploma mills.

My father was a career educator (nuclear physics professor) and in the last years of his life he really enjoyed reading some of my papers that I wrote for work, especially about periods of history that he lived through. I was more embarrassed to show him some of the garbage they paid me to write in private-sector corporate communications. When people find out what I do, they're usually impressed that I write so much in so many different areas and so fast, because most of them remember the few major papers they wrote in college as a horrible experience that they dreaded and could never imagine doing on a daily basis for a living. If they want to discuss any ethical issues involved, that usually leads to a good conversation too.


Phoenix Online University probably accounts for 25% of my annual salary.

Cheat who? This is a freelance job for which pay is directly related to how much one can write. While I agree that we are not as efficient as we should be I still don't see how I am cheating anybody because I only get paid for what I write.

stu4 is just bitter and probably guilty about how he feels he has to rob his own writers, so he makes it seem like they're the bad guys.

Themself. Many writers tell family or friend they work 10-14 hr a day but in truth they really work 2-4hr. Rest is facebook, online papers and games, p)rn, and other bull*hit.


They not bad guys. But many are big word and BS but lazy inside.

In the busy season, I often worked all day, every day, until 5 or 6 AM, then woke up and did it again. At this time of year, of course, there were very few assignments, but this is a seasonal business.

Needless to say, it got very boring and tedious after doing it for five or six years.

In light of this, what do you do nowadays?

My father died and left me all his money. He was quite elderly and fortunately went very quickly from a heart attack, which is how I want to go, rather than from something slow and painful. I was the only child, and no longer all that young myself, so I'm taking it easy now.

The number of hours a professional writer works depends on his dedication and the amount of work the person has.

Freelancewriter and anyone else who does this full-time ... can you say what the approximate annual income potential is for someone working th kind of hours that you do? I am considering entering this field myself. (I am already taking a few clients in my "free" time.) But this type of schedule seems hectic. Is it worth it?

It would be very tough to make the equivalent wages of a decent fulltime job doing this just 5 days/week for 8 hours/day. If you're naturally inclined to be a hermit and don't mind being "on call" and prepared to work at any time close to 24/7/365, working at all times of day or night (including holidays), almost always having multiple overlapping deadlines pending, and never really being away from your computer for any length of time, you can earn about what you might at many decent fulltime jobs that pay in the mid to high 5 figures. There's also a burnout factor because your maximum output over years can't possibly match your maximum output over a much shorter time period.

Well, have you ever thought about assembling a small team of writers and outsourcing your work? Forming a small essay firm? That is one way I am considering approaching it, if I can find some good writers. Of course, then I would be out marketing to get our own clients, not going through other companies.

Also, isn't it exhausting? I mean, it sounds like you couldn't have reliable sleep patterns. You must be pretty young? Sorry for all the questions; I am just fascinated by this. I know there is market demand, because when people found out I could do this work, word spread and I started getting tons of requests unsolicited. Just wondering if I can leverage it into something more than sitting hunched over my computer for hours churning out the pages. So that's why I'm thinking a small essay firm might be the route to go.

It all depends the management skills you employ to discipline your work-and-life balance. If at times, the essay writing work can be VERY exhausting, if managed well, there is no other job better than being an academic writer. The most advantageous thing working as an essay writer comes in the form of flexibility of time and the monetary return is also great. Thus, those who love to write and refuse to go by the 9-to-5 routine, will be more successful in this domain.

Nope. My natural talent is thinking and writing, not any kind of business. I'd rather just write assignments than deal with all the other stuff necessary to maintain a business. In my opinion, it would be very difficult to try to compete with any of the big essay companies doing the same thing that they do and it would require a substantial investment to get off the ground and maintain. The fact that the guys who run the companies for whom I do most of my company writing are still involved in day-to-day operations after more than a decade suggests to me that it wouldn't be a realistic way of establishing a "passive" income stream without a lot of work and as long as I'm going to be working, my "thing" is just writing.


Actually, I found working a regular 9-to-5 (or 7-to-3 by my choice to get done before rush hour) to be much more exhausting and I sleep much better (and more) now. No matter how much I work now, I still decide when to work, and (most importantly) when to go to bed and there is no alarm clock in my life. Working a regular job meant always having to rush to take a sleeping pill just to get in the minimum necessary sleep and then spending my whole weekends mainly just doing errands most of which were still related to work somehow (like laundry or food shopping or dry cleaning). Once I go to bed, I sleep until I wake up and I can just roll over and keep sleeping if I want to. It really all depends on what's more of a pain to you; in my case, getting up 5 days a week, trying to fit my workouts (and life) in before rushing to bed during the week or over the weekend was way more stressful than doing this. Sure, that means sometimes I go to bed at 8:00 AM, but I tended to stay up all night or most of the night sometimes and sleep until late afternoon even before I did this for a living, which is partly why regular jobs don't really fit my natural lifestyle. And I'm not hunched over because I have computers in every room, by every chair, and even work outside on the terrace in the sun sometimes. In most cases, I can also watch TV or listen to the radio while I work, too. Ironiccally, now that I work almost all the time, I feel like I have a life, whereas when I had a traditional job where I left my work in the office and never thought about work elsewhere, it felt like my entire life was nothing but working or preparing to go back to work in one way or another.

Thanks for your detailed reply. Very interesting and helpful. Do you do any marketing on your own? Have your own website? I am getting business purely by word of mouth, and it's more than I want, although I am also working full-time in a regular job, so I don't have much time. It basically amounts to a few extra dollars in my pocket, but a severe lack of sleep.


I would think that their goal is high income, not necessarily passive income. I bet they're earning a pretty good amount.

I have a simple information page that doesn't have any functionality. We're not allowed to post that kind of thing here but I've posted it on essaychat a few times, where it's allowed. It doesn't attract customers who haven't already inquired but it saves me time to respond with a link to answer most of their questions. After doing this for years, I've cultivated a pretty steady customer base who use me regularly for many months, and in some cases, for years. New clients generally come along at about the same rate as the attrition rate from graduation or program completion. Between company essays and that private work, I usually have as much work as I need or slightly more, so I don't really put any heavy effort into promotion.


I'm sure they do very well. I'm just saying that I'd rather write essays than run a business (of any kind) and that the main value to me of doing anything else besides writing would be to generate a passive income. As long as I have to work for a living, writing is what I do best and what fits my lifestyle best.

If you were serious writer, why you dont writer for serious (or even not serious) newspaper or dont do a serious book? Coz you know only uneducated student think what you rewrite is good.

I'm not knocking it. Sounds like you've carved out a good niche for yourself and can make as much or more than your average white-collar worker. And I'd say it's pretty stable, since I don't imagine that all of these customers are suddenly going to want to start writing their own papers some sunny day.

I didn't consider it a knock and was just responding honestly. You can't get rich doing this for a living, but if it suits your life and you're good at it, you can definitely match a pretty good white collar job earning-wise and it has a lot of advantages for me.


The U.S. government seemed to think I write well enough to have put me in charge of writing and editing agency reports in three states for a component of the largest U.S. federal agency and to have sent me all around those states to give writing training to managers and other senior personnel. The law professor whose letter to me I uploaded here in response to your unfounded allegation that I never graduated from law school also seemed to think that I wrote well enough as a student that he took the time to write me a 2-page letter about a paper I'd submitted to him long after the course was over.

I'm just trying to have a genuine conversation here with someone who expressed an interest. I don't come here to fight with you and since I'm no longer allowed to discuss any of the essay companies I still write for that you always lie about because that's the only way you can hope to compete with them, I really have no argument with you about anything anymore. You've previously admitted that you've never seen anything I've ever written and I think it's fairly well known here that I do this pretty successfully for a living, yet you pollute this forum with these stupid personal attacks when there isn't even any argument ongoing and I'm just having an honest discussion with someone who asked me a question. It's also apparent to anybody who speaks English fluently how ridiculous it is for someone who speaks and writes in English as poorly as is evident in every single one of your posts for you to presume to judge or criticize my writing skills in any respect. In any case, if you're involved in this industry, we both write for the same clientele generally, although I feel pretty safe saying that none of my clients would ever pay money for anything written by someone whose language skills are represented by your posts anywere on this forum.

Nevertheless, as far as I'm concerned, this forum is big enough for both of us to coexist here without going out of our way to insult one another and if you haven't noticed, I never respond to any of your posts about anything except when you continue to try to insult me without any provocation from me while I'm just trying to have a peaceful conversation with another forum member.