Resident Contrarian Writing Services

I'm the Resident Contrarian and I do writing-for-hire.

My justified use case

I'm necessary when you need both of two specific things:

  1. Excellent prose. If you are looking for me at all, chances are good that you have an education and can write reasonably well. If you need me anyway, it's because you need or want someone who writes even better than that.
  2. A writer who understands things well and quickly. You are communicating information about complex products or subjects, and need someone who can talk about that subject matter with minimal guidance.

There are writers and subject matter experts who can match me in one of those two categories, but fewer who can do both. If you need someone who can come in, pin down the tone you want, and talk about your product/people without monopolizing your staff for a week, I'm the guy.

Specialties

I dominate in a Conan the Barbarian sense at:

  1. Company culture and employee value proposition
  2. Product feature announcements and product use walk-throughs
  3. Team member profiles and other types of pieces requiring a written interview

Improvements

There's a category of things I can make better, but which usually require more team member involvement to create work both of us will be happy with. Some examples:

  1. Website copy. It's not incredibly difficult to write, but you'd usually want me working in conjunction with your marketing team on this.
  2. Engineering blog posts or other writing involving significant specific expertise. I'm not a software engineer, but I can work in conjunction with one to making something better than either of us could alone.

Contraindications

You probably don't want to use me if:

  1. You are populating your content in a place where it honestly doesn't matter much - i.e., filler text on a content page and other low-impact situations. Realistically you can do this kind of work yourself, or hire someone cheaper.
  2. You have no time to offer guidance to me at all, in a literal sense. I'm going to do as good of a job as anyone in this situation, but I can't ensure good outcomes if I'm working blind.
  3. Very formal and non-technical writing (again, like purely functional website copy, or a simple listicle). It's not that I can't do a good job on this type of work, but you can probably find someone who is decent for cheaper.

Pricing

I work out pricing case-by-case based on client needs. I don't charge by the word, but a good rule-of-thumb is to think of an article as costing about $0.60 per word.

Contact

Email: residentcontrarian@substack.com

Discord: GearRatio#1059