![]() $1/word is a sort of classical benchmark for really decent print journalism rates - a journalistic gold-standard per se - but there’s nothing saying that they don’t stretch as far as $2/word and above. Now let’s take a look at the other end of the spectrum. At that rate, the sentence you are reading would earn me $0.55 - (that’s up to the figure itself!) And I’m sorry to say this, but if you spend enough time on Upwork, you will eventually come across just these gigs.īut let’s peg the bottom of the market, slightly less depressingly, at $0.05 USD per word. You can technically be paid in the smallest denomination of legal tender in your country. While that may seem straightforward, the range of income possibilities that this pricing model produces is actually rather massive in scope. If you’ve ever freelanced for a print publication - especially a magazine - then you’re undoubtedly familiar with the concept of pricing writing work by the word. Model 1: Pricing Per Word: The Print Journalism / Magazine Standard Last year, feeling a little overwhelmed by the haystack of information - but convinced I could land upon a needle or two - I decided to swap my keyboard and desktop for a pen and paper and try to mentally sketch some sense out of the various common pricing models one can apply. To find those, hammer ‘freelance writing rates’ into Google and try to make sense of the mess, the plurality of opinions, and the wildly different rates commanded by writers in different parts of the world. Personally, I have found Carol Tice’s pay surveys and commentary extremely insightful and digestable. And increasingly is a resource for both anonymously disclosing rates and evaluating the overall experience of working freelance with a company.įinally, there are the random musings on the subject of other non-household-name authors such as this one. Writer’s Market is sometimes thought of as a gold-standard in that respect. Some of these are compiled and promulgated by well-known authorities. ![]() To add to the list of complications even further, there’s an entire encyclopedia-full of guides on this very subject to read through online. ![]() Price too high? You’ve just lost yourself a prospect.īelieve me, there are prospects out there that are going to devalue you and your work and move on to the next suitor in line who has worked up the courage to ask for more. What if your client wants to also turn that speech into a white paper - but you’ll only have to do the editing and not the (usually) difficult work of writing the text and making time to ‘download’ information from your client’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)?īelieve it or not, these are all projects I’ve had to come up with quotes for in the past twelve months - along with plenty of others.Īnd I have no doubt that many of these I have - let’s just say…royally screwed up.īecause, if nothing else, pricing - besides being difficult and highly variable between markets, clients, and industries - is fickle, fickle business. ![]() How high should you go for a 45 minute keynote speech at an industry conference on an abstruse topic you’re going to have to research from scratch - with 200 executives and prize-winning scientists in the room ready to pounce on your every mistake - and potentially damage your client's credibility? Or maybe “just” an e-book or a white paper? How about writing an entire book for a client? What about something that they’re just going to circulate on their blog, on Medium, or on LinkedIn? How much should you charge for an article which your client is having published in a top-tier trade media outlet (assuming they’ve already got the publication’s buy-in)? ![]() I'll try to lay out the pros and cons of each in this post.Īnd then there is a massive and ever-changing variety of projects out there for us to work on. Most freelance writers would agree that pricing is just about the hardest thing to get right in this job.įirstly, there are several commonly used pricing strategies: per word, per hour, and per project. ![]()
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