Prologue: The Author

Look at him, all smart and stuff

George Osborn is a writer, app marketer and person who has existed on this earth for roughly 24 years (give or take an appropriate time unit). He’s the founder of The 30 Coffee Project and is embarking on a quest in 2014 to meet 30 random people for warm drinks in return for advice, enlightenment and schedule filling. His favourite Beatle is John Lennon and his drink of choice is a Decaffienato Lungo from the Nescafe range. The poseur.

This piece is an in depth interview conducted by Blunt George, one facet of the Author’s Psyche; the results of which were a little odd to say the least…

Pay versus Exposure: A Coffee Drinking Freelancer Writes

I have been thinking about the value of unpaid writing a ever since I set up the 30 Coffees Project and my thoughts have been gathering momentum these past few weeks. There has been a lot of talk recently about whether plebs like me, you or anyone else not in possession of a wealthy life giver should take unpaid work writing, with answers ranging from “Of course you should, you unskilled pleb” in The Independent and “No you shouldn’t you mad person” in The Independent (depending on what day of the week you read it by the looks of things).

Yet despite all of that, I’ve not really been satisfied by any of the answers to the whole question of “should I be paid for everything I write?”. For one thing, I’m a narcissist who loves the sound of my own voice (even when it’s put on paper) and haven’t put my thoughts down yet. But on a broader, and what I hope is vaguely important, point I think the whole discussion has been really poorly defined as of yet. We’re witnessing a theoretical battle defined by combatants cloaked in black and white stood on either side of a very grey and smudgy no-man’s land, when the truth of the matter (in my books at least) is that it is in that most of us are slogging around in ill defined middle ground between the banner swinging forces in search of an answer.