5 Things I Learned From Writing Academic Essays For Money

I spent ~4 years after university writing academic essays for money. It turns out that – surprise, surprise – if you spend 3 years of your life reading books, sitting in tutorials and lectures, and writing 3-4 essays a week, you’re pretty well suited to then write essays for money after you graduate.

I’ve been paid to write literature essays, law essays, psychology essays, biochemistry essays, political essays, economics essays, computer science essays, sociology essays, business essays… You name it, I’ve probably written it in exchange for some cash. 

I don’t really write academic essays for money anymore (unless the price is super interesting) but I did take away some lessons. Here are 5 things I learned from writing academic essays for money.

1. Your clients can’t screw you… but they wish they could

I’ve done A LOT of freelance writing work these past years. I wish I could say that all my clients have been awesome and I’ve never had a problem. But I can’t…

I’ve lost count of how many people have screwed me over. I’ve lost money and time and sleep because of morally bankrupt clients.

However, writing academic essays for money is different. 

Your clients can’t really screw you over because….

• You know their name
• You know their school 
• You know their address
• You know what they look like
• You often know the names of their tutors

Ultimately, you have proof that they are cheating and you could get them kicked out of their university VERY EASILY.

They know this. 

As such, clients in this area are actually very well behaved.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t wish they could screw you over. I’ve seen every trick in the book from people who are trying to screw you in a way that won’t end up with them being expelled.

• I’ve had clients insist they paid my deposit when I know they haven’t. 
• I’ve had clients that have paid via echeque despite me repeatedly refunding them and demanding instant payment (echeque is dodgy so don’t accept it)
• I’ve had a client contact me YEARS LATER and demand a refund because they didn’t get the grade I promised. My essay got them a first. But they wanted 100% and insisted I promised that. I didn’t. I make no guarantees but inform them that a 2:1 is highly likely (and I almost always get firsts).
• I’ve had clients give me a lesser amount when paying the rest of the bill and pretending they forgot the real price.
• I’ve had clients try to micromanage every sentence of an essay (that’s right, every sentence) and release the money CENT BY CENT as I complete the work. 

Clients like this are annoying as hell but they have never been successful in screwing me over.

I’ve been screwed over working for independent authors, real estate agents, copywriting agencies, and so on. But never with an academic essay client.

Lesson: Have leverage and you won’t get screwed. The leverage here is the unsaid threat that if I don’t get paid, I’m contacting their school immediately. 

2. University is a scam

I’ve already written a list of better things to do than go to college. 

Writing academic essays for money has only confirmed what I knew: university is a big fat scam.

It’s a scam in two ways:

1. You can hire someone from the internet to write your coursework assignments and earn you a bit of paper that says you are qualified…. When, really, you are just a fraud.
2. You can learn anything you want to learn right now. You don’t need to pay some institution thousands of pounds and waste 3-4 years of your life.

I won’t elaborate on the first point because it speaks for itself. But the second point is interesting.

I am not a lawyer or a beauty therapist or a sociologist or an economist…. But I have written academic essays on all those areas and have earned my clients top marks. 

Unless you give me a massive dissertation, your essay is typically only going to take me 3-5 days to complete. Sometimes I will do your essay in a day. That’s with no prior experience in your area. But, armed with an internet full of information and a curious mind, I can very quickly become a mini-expert on your area of study without paying a dime. In fact, YOU are paying ME to learn. That’s pretty cool.

3. The clients aren’t bad people. And neither am I.

Although I’ve had my fair share of bad clients, it’s actually worth pointing out that the majority of the clients asking you to write academic essays are actually super nice. 

Pretty much all of my clients are intelligent and perfectly capable of writing the essay themselves. But life gets in the way.

Here’s an example of the type of clients I work with:

• People who run 3 businesses simultaneously while going to school and raising a family. They are extremely knowledgeable about their subject but they literally don’t have a second to spare in their day. So they hire me.
• People who work for the police force, hospital, fire department, army. They go to school to learn from the lectures and tutors but due to the spontaneous nature of their jobs, they also sometimes can’t make a deadline. So they hire me.
• People who were A-grade students their entire life but suffered a big tragedy (hospitalisation, illness, death in the family) and now they can’t make their deadline. So they hire me.

Many of the people I wrote academic essays for were some of the nicest people you could meet. Many of them tipped me and referred me to their friends and sent me tokens of their appreciation.

Many of these people also felt the need to defend themselves. They felt the need to justify why they were hiring someone to do their school work. I always thought it was strange that people were justifying themselves to me. After all, I’m the one writing their essay. Clearly I don’t care that they’re using my service. But I think they were really trying to justify it to themselves.

My clients didn’t want to think they were bad people for getting help with their homework. It’s sad when you notice just how conditioned we are to respect university institutions. I don’t feel bad about writing essays for money because (see point number 2) university is largely a massive scam.

I went to Oxford for 3 years. They raped my bank account (and my family’s bank account) and put me in debt. They also ruined my mental health and it was very clear that the institution did not give one flying fuck about me. They were just a money making machine and I was a cog. Now I get hounded several times a year to make big donations so they can put another statue or bench in their college courtyard. Dear Oxford (and all other universities): bite me.

So, no. You are not a bad person for hiring someone to write your essay. And I’m not a bad person for earning money from the service and using it to pull myself out of student debt.

4. Everybody does it

Okay, not everybody. But it would surprise you how many people are looking to get an edge. We won’t call it “cheating”. We’ll call it “getting an edge”.

Even though it is technically cheating…

I’ve had clients use my services, get great marks, and then return to me with boatloads of more work… For other students. 

They give me the questions and basically sell my essays on to their universities colleagues. This has happened with multiple clients. 

If you’re currently in university and looking to make a bit of easy dough, this is a great idea. Become a middleman. Hire someone like me to write essays and then bring the service to your friends and associates. You’ll skim a little off the top. They’ll get a great mark. You’ll get a reputation for being an academic drug dealer. And I’ll still get paid. We’re all happy.

I even remember how prevalent this “edge/cheating” thing was when I was in university. I never outsourced my essays myself. I’m a writer. I love writing and couldn’t bear to use someone else’s work. But I saw plenty of people who did this. 

I also saw a lot of chemical assistance. Modafinil was benign. Adderall/concerta was the next level. Cocaine the next level after that. 

Yep, that’s right. There are nerds in Oxford snorting cocaine to help them study. Crazy world.

5. Stay away from freelance sites

This is good advice for all freelancers, whether you write academic essays or not.

You might need to use them for a boost to get your first clients in the beginning. But try to get off those sites AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

You know the sites…

• Upwork – where they recently decided that butt-fucking their clients with 10% commission wasn’t enough and gave themselves a pay-rise by changing it to 20%. Upwork clients are the lowest of the low. They will lie and cheat and outright steal from you. I’ve met cool people on Upwork but they weren’t worth the headache. Almost ALL of my freelance woes came from Upwork. 
• People Per Hour – where they decided to ban my academic services overnight, effectively cutting off all my income right when it was getting super lucrative, because…. Well, they actually couldn’t give a reason. Their customer service is infuriating. One of the worst I have ever seen. And different representatives gave me different reasons for cutting the blood supply to my livelihood. The clients aren’t as bad as Upwork, which is just bottom-of-the-barrel bargain shoppers and micromanaging slave drivers, but they’re still pretty shitty.
• Fiverr – I’m not even going to address this one. Go work for a fiver and see how long you can keep food on the table. 

Once you’re off the freelance sites, you’ll have a lot more peace of mind. You can then work on getting referrals, which is more likely to result in better quality clients.

There we have it. Those are my learnings from the underworld business of academic essay writing

As I already mentioned, this isn’t a service I regularly offer anymore. I’ve had to phase this out as I concentrate on more fulfilling forms of income. Writing books, consulting, and building up honest businesses. But if you’re looking for a way to make some money online and you have a flair for the written word or you just want to put those years of university to some good, I would totally recommend this as a good way to make some cash, learn some new things, and meet some cool people.