The professionals and cons of various pricing fashions.
When you’re a writer-for-hire, that shopper pricing is remarkably opaque. Except different freelance writers or do loads of analysis, it’s onerous to understand how a lot to cost shoppers — particularly when you’re simply getting began.
Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 per phrase by {a magazine} in 1936, the equal of a whopping $22 per phrase in immediately’s {dollars}. Apart from high authors commanding multi-million-dollar advances, I don’t know anybody being paid $22 per phrase immediately.
However what’s equally intriguing about Hemingway’s price is the pricing construction: per phrase. Once I first grew to become a contract author a couple of years in the past, extra skilled writers urged me to cost per venture. I additionally know writers who cost per hour and have seen job postings that record the identical.
So what’s the most effective pricing construction? Per phrase, per venture, or per hour? I’ve experimented with totally different pricing as a contract content material marketer and journalist and located that probably the most advantageous pricing comes right down to how you work.
I feel charging by the hour is the least interesting for a number of causes. It punishes quick writers: you’re paid much less for a similar work as somebody who writes extra slowly. And a author’s velocity typically has nothing to do with the standard of labor.
If I had been to cost hourly, it doesn’t mirror my experience. I can write quick about monetary expertise (my area of interest) as a result of I’ve been within the trade for greater than 15 years. Subsequently, I don’t must do as a lot analysis for every article in comparison with somebody with much less expertise. An hourly price diminishes the data I’ve collected in my head.
On the flip aspect, when you write extra slowly, shoppers could query why it takes so lengthy. Total, it’s additionally onerous to maintain observe of the time you spend. Do you embrace your “considering time”? As a result of I typically stare at my laptop display screen for quarter-hour, attempting to determine find out how to phrase a particular sentence. Would a shopper be billed for that?
A really notable exception to my resistance to per-hour pricing is modifying work. Most editors I do know cost…
