The Price is Right
Wrapping Up the Beginner’s Series
It all comes down to money – whether we write because we love it or we write because we can, we also expect to be paid for it. In the coming years of your freelance career, you will continuously face the question of price. For you as a beginner, it’s critical that you learn now how to price your work, and how to present it to the potential client. More importantly, you have to learn how to turn down work that isn’t in your best interest.
Most beginners think they shouldn’t be charging top dollar. Okay, there’s some logic to that. But where on the sliding pay scale are you going to start? If you say you’ll write for $4 an article, give me your address right now, for I need to come by and slap you personally. If you say your first job will be priced at $100 an hour, hand over that address again. You certainly can expect to earn that much and more per hour, but not fresh out of the gate. In fact, you should opt for somewhere right in the middle of those two extremes.
How much? That depends. What are the typical salary ranges for “real” jobs in your area? In my old stomping grounds, I was surrounded by steel mills and coal mines (go on, guess where!). The cost of living was low, as were the prices of the homes and of the things we bought. If you can buy a nice home in your town for $60K, it would be smart to price your writing somewhere around a $50-an-hour fee for regional clients. You can go higher for national clients. When I say that, people look at me as though I’m price-gouging. Not at all. I’m remaining competitive. If I went into Manhattan and bid $35 an hour for a writing gig that Manhattan-based writers would charge $125 an hour for, I’d look like a rube, as well as come off as an amateur. When in Rome, price for the conditions.
More often than not, clients will come to you with a price in mind. If it’s disclosed up front in the ad, consider very carefully the amount of work required against that price. Always break it down into price-per-hour terms. It’s the only way to really see how much you’re getting (or not getting) with that price.
If the price is not disclosed, it’s impossible to predict if the client expects a 200-page edit to cost $900 when in fact you charge $3,000. That’s a rather large gap in your expectations. It’s not an impossible situation, however. You still have one or two options left to you.
First, as I mentioned in another post, you can offer flexible payment terms. How flexible those terms are is completely up to you. I’ve used a three-payment method in the past: one-third at the outset, one-third at a specified point in the project, and the last third at delivery or a specified date, whichever comes first. Make it hard for your client to say no to your fee. Make your skills affordable – accept credit card payments, PayPal payments, etc. Anything that makes it easy to pay in installments is an additional selling point to your price.
One way around it would be to offer a discount. I’d go no lower than a ten-percent discount for new customers only. That means your client gets a one-time break, not a continuation of fees that are too low for you to justify sticking with the project.
I’ve said in the past that it’s a bad idea to negotiate your fee. I still believe that. Even though you’re worlds apart in price, you’d be doing yourself a great disservice to take on work you’re being undercompensated for. Still, there are times when all of us face the “should I lower my fee?” question. Ask yourself a series of questions – How much work is this going to be? What’s the per-hour-rate of the proposed fee? Is this a reasonable reduction? What percentage discount would it represent? Can I do it for that, or will I resent the lower payment terms too much? If you come away with answers that don’t satisfy you, turn the project down. Do not burden yourself with a project that is a win-lose proposition, with you as the loser.