Since many people have questioned and commented about having trouble getting accepted to Scripted lately, I wanted to share my own personal experiences. I’ve been freelance writing for close to a decade now and this sounded like decent income, so I submitted the application about two months ago.
The first problem is that once you’re accepted, there are no real guidelines, no help tutorial, and nobody to contact. Their help file is all very basic information on how to gain specialties (now called Industries), but the actual process of getting jobs is completely left to the imagination.
So I applied for 5 industries; Education, Business, Internet, Tech Hardware and Lifestyle/Travel. Lifestyle accepted me within 24 hours, and Internet/Software replied with “invalid” about a day later as well. Several weeks later I was finally accepted into Education but I was rejected for business and Tech Hardware. In both rejection letters, it was the exact same generic cut/paste comments that lets you know that they really didn’t bother to even look.
Since I was approved for Lifestyle immediately, I saw that they had hundreds of topics available at $49 each. The guidelines were very misleading, however, so I sent in a support ticket to ask questions before ever trying to claim anything. A day passes, then 3 more days, and then another week before I hear anything back. What was their response? “Please follow the guidelines attached to each article.” Okay...
Waiting 11 days for a generic response (that completely ignored my question) should have been enough of a red flag to walk away, but I was evidentially dead-set on making it work. So I claimed 5 articles, cranked them out, and then submitted them for review. The system says that they generally take 3-5 days total to edit the document and then get approval from the client, so I went back to the waiting game. One week, two weeks, three…and finally I get a request from the “editor”. What was the request? One of the sub-titles didn’t make sense for the paragraph following it. So I changed one word, which was obviously WAAAAAY more editing than their staff can normally handle, and I started the waiting game again. Another week, and another week…do you see the pattern forming here?
Meanwhile, you have to remember that I’m a brand new writer that they thought enough of to give a very high starting score in Lifestyle, yet the company hasn’t said a single word to me about anything in six full weeks. I had close to a dozen completed assignments that were just sitting in limbo as well, and every single one of them was returned by the editor for 15-30 seconds of total changes. I’m not talking about re-wording entire paragraphs, mind you, but very simple edits like changing a sub-title or adding a word here and there. It was absolutely ridiculous and half the changes didn’t even have anything to do with the guidelines…it was just a variety of editors collecting paychecks for not editing a word.
Did I mention that your edits have to be turned in within 24 hours or you forfeit the assignment? That’s right; you wait two months to get to work as your own editor, and then you’re threatened to lose the job if you don’t get to work immediately. So as a writer for this company, you are also the lead editor, the customer service, the technical support and the company spokesman… you just don’t get paid for any of it.
Eventually I did get approval for my first article though, and it was paid at the 6 week mark. Now, you know as a freelance writer, waiting 6 weeks for payment just doesn’t work for anyone, so I had already given up on this site completely. Seven more articles were paid at the two month mark and I still haven’t received a word of encouragement or advice from anyone. In fact, I still have request tickets pending from my 1st week on the job; that’s how little they think of their writers.
So if you’re thinking about writing for Scripted, I highly recommend that you save yourself months of frustration by finding another site. These people don’t care about their writers at all, and the entire application process is far too difficult. Even though I made it a lot farther than others, I ultimately got the short end of the stick. I would have been much better off getting rejected like many others have shared.
Hopefully that helps you guys out…don’t apply for Scripted unless you can wait for weeks for even the most basic of responses. I believe that they will eventually pay you for any work that you complete, but it wouldn’t be worth the headaches for 5x the pay. Their customer service and support is literally the worst that I’ve seen from any company in the past 4 decades.
