Today’s post is another from one of our regular guest bloggers, Ruth E. Thaler-Carter. Ruth will be blogging monthly on various topics in the area of freelancing. Look for her posts under the main title of “Freelancing Basics.”
One of the biggest challenges for a freelance tech communicator is setting fees or rates for your work. Here are some tips for handling this aspect of having a freelance tech communication business.
Fee-setting models
There are several ways to set fees for your freelance services.
Most writing work is paid by the word. You can’t get more straightforward than that! With a writing assignment that has a word count, though, don’t assume you can make more by submitting more words than assigned. Editors assign word limits for a reason—they have both space and budget limits, and don’t appreciate freelancers who submit excess verbiage to increase their pay.
The most common model appears to be an hourly rate. That has the advantage of being relatively easy to calculate or set and even easier to track. With an hourly rate, though, you don’t get rewarded for working faster or more efficiently; in fact, you essentially lose money by increasing your editing speed, although working faster might free up time for other projects.
As my colleague Rich Adin, owner of Freelance Editorial Services and a generous blogger on freelance editing matters, says, if you charge $50/hour, all you will ever earn is $50/hour.
Per-page rates are also popular. Working faster works to your advantage with this model—the more pages you edit per hour, the more you get paid for that chunk of time. Finding ways to work more efficiently—such as using macros, search/find-and-replace, etc.—makes this model even more profitable.
Finally, there’s the project- or flat-rate model. That’s harder to establish, but colleagues say it tends to be the most profitable way to charge. To establish a project rate, you need a good sense of how fast (or slowly) you tend to work, so start tracking your time on current projects in case you want to develop a rate structure using that model. You also need to know what a project looks like before committing to a flat rate—insist on seeing an entire manuscript, site, or other project before setting the fee (or accepting the deadline). And never believe a client who swears that a manuscript “only needs a light edit/proofread”!
The potential headache with flat rates is that a project that initially looks pretty straightforward can turn into a huge nightmare, with requests (or demands!) for revision after revision after revision, or extensive additions to the original scope of the work. To protect yourself from working for pennies rather than dollars, include language in your contract or agreement along the lines of, “Requests for additional revisions or changes beyond the scope of the original assignment will be billed by the hour.”
Be prepared to use different payment models for different projects and clients. Don’t lock yourself into only way of setting your rates, or you’ll lock yourself out of some projects with clients who only use other models.
Calculating fees
Establishing a payment model is one thing. Coming up with actual dollar amounts is another—and much harder.
It isn’t always up to the freelancer to set fees or rates. Some clients already have rates in place, and the freelancer has to accept what’s offered or look elsewhere. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it makes the fee-setting process easier, by removing the need to second-guess the client or negotiate, and the client’s rates may be good ones, or good enough to start with. Some clients will increase their rates after a freelancer successfully handles a first project, after several projects, annually, or at the freelancer’s request. It never hurts to ask!
And there are times when you can negotiate up from a lower-than-desirable rate. Some prospective clients can be convinced that an experienced, skilled editor is worth more than whatever initial rate is. Again, it never hurts to ask.
A skilled, experienced tech communicator should be able to command $1/word for writing assignments, but competition is so intense these days that it can be a challenge to get that or more. Keep in mind, too, that something you can write fast at a low per-word rate can still be profitable if you recast it in other terms. A 1,500-word article at only 15¢/word gets you $225; if you can write it in an hour, that’s a pretty good hourly rate! Even if it takes you two hours, it’s still a bit more than $100/hour; also not bad.
Editing and proofreading rates are all over the map, but $25/hour seems to be a reasonable starting point for someone with at least a little experience.
You can always poll colleagues to see what they charge, although not everyone will share that information. I don’t see what I charge as necessarily relevant to what someone else might charge—I base my rates on a combination of my skills, experience, topic knowledge, and chutzpah, none of which is going to be the same as most other freelancers. I balance those factors by the client’s budget (if known) and willingness to negotiate, and every client is different.
That said, there are resources for how freelance communicators might set fees for their work: http://the-efa.org/res/rates.php, www.kokedit.com/ckb.php, www.copyediting.com, www.writersdigest.com/pricing-guide.
Here’s a formula that I, a somewhat math-challenged individual, find easiest to understand and apply to setting an hourly rate.
Take the dollar value of your last or best-paying full-time job. Add in the dollar value of benefits, from health insurance to worker’s comp to vacation time to Social Security input. Divide by 1,950, which is one of the standard numbers of hours per year worked in the average full-time job. That gives you a rough version of your current or best income on an hourly basis. Then, depending on your chutzpah level, double the result and use that as your hourly rate. The idea behind doubling the figure is that you have to cover not only the time you spend on work, but also all the other aspects of having a freelance business—marketing, filing, billing, client interaction/hand-holding, supplies and equipment, and anything else that comes as part of the package with a full-time job beyond the items used to calculate the value of that job.
STC member Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is a long-time, award-winning freelancer; author/publisher of “Get Paid to Write! Getting Started as a Freelance Writer”; author of “Freelancing 101: Launching Your Editorial Business” for the Editorial Freelancers Association; and owner of Communication Central, which presents an annual conference for editorial entrepreneurs every fall.