how we decide what to charge
By Dale Van Ollefen | August 23, 2023
Earlier this week, I had to set my laptop down and leave the room because I was frustrated. Why? Because I had just spent 20 minutes looking through freelance job listings, and it was clear that most of the employers had no idea what they were asking for. They were offering way too little money for the work they wanted.
We get most of our business through networking and word of mouth, but I always find it interesting (if not a bit infuriating) to peruse these listings to better understand the current market for editors and writers. And let me tell you, if these job boards are any indication, it’s bleak right now.
To my fellow writers out there: would you write a 750-word blog post on law for $20? How about research, write, and edit a 3,000-word post in one day for $200? These are just two of the many listings I saw with absurdly low rates, high asks, and quick turnaround times (just so you know, the second one is about 20% of what I'd expect to get paid for that long of a post, and the first is less than 10%).
If I sent our rate card to the people who put up these listings, they would probably be angry—but that’s because they don’t understand what they’re paying for.
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So, I’d like to set the record straight: As experienced professional freelance writers and editors, how do we figure out what to charge?
There's a lot to think about, and deciding on a price is something we do together with our clients. But here are the main things we consider:
our skills & knowledge
There are many employers on the job boards looking for more than five years of expertise in technical subjects such as math, science, and law—and then offering close to minimum wage rates. What these employers don’t get is that the pay they offer will match the quality they receive.
Together, Lauren and I have more than a decade of experience writing and editing content about marketing, higher education, technology, language services, finance, retail, politics, criminal justice, and legal services (and the list goes on).
We've done a lot of work, we're good at what we do, and we understand many technical or specialized industries. And we do more than just edit typos—we offer creative solutions and suggestions.
Our clients reap the benefits of our expertise. Given the unique value we offer, it's fair for us to be paid well, especially for complicated topics.
industry standards
Professional writing and editing associations, such as the Editorial Freelancers Association and ACES, publish average rates for different services on their websites. These rates are a great baseline when it comes to setting our fees for certain projects—and I say baseline because we often go lower or higher based on some of the other considerations in this list. Every project, every client, and every request is different, but these average industry rates are a good place to start.
types of work
People tend to think of writing and editing as umbrella concepts; a writer writes and an editor looks for typos and fixes them. But in reality, there are many different types of writing and editing projects. Each project type requires different skills—and different rates. Here are just a few of the types of projects we take on (with most projects involving two or more of these):
Fixing mistakes (proofreading)
Making writing better (copy editing)
Big changes to the writing (developmental editing)
Writing words from scratch (copywriting)
Writing for search engines (SEO writing)
Writing for someone else (ghostwriting)
Turning speech into writing (transcribing)
how fast we work
Given our level of expertise, we’re able to work quickly while maintaining quality. This is great for our clients, but when it comes to hourly work, it means we actually make less money. We also work on several different projects at once, so we have to shuffle things around to accommodate last-minute requests. For both of these reasons, we often institute rush fees or one-time project fees for requests with quick turnaround times.
expenses
We do this work because we love it, but also because we want to make a living. We have revenue goals—and we know we’ll never be Bezos rich, but we do have to take our livelihoods into account when we set our rates.
Being a remote business with only two employees, our overhead costs are low, but they do exist. We also have to save money for taxes. This means we each only take home about 25% of what we invoice.
Here’s what it looks like in practice: If a client pays us $20 for a blog post, we have to save $6 for taxes and $4 for expenses. We then split what’s left. So after writing that 750-word blog post, Lauren and I would each take home a whopping $5. Our time is worth significantly more than that.
client budgets
To put it bluntly, big companies have more money to spend on freelancers. But Lauren and I enjoy working with nonprofits and small businesses and we recognize that our corporate rates might be out of reach for them, so we take their smaller budgets into account in our proposals.
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In the end, setting rates should always be a transparent process. We think about how much we can do and how hard it is, but also how much our clients can pay. Finding the right balance between what we're worth and what's fair for clients is always going to be tough—but that’s why we have different rates for different situations.
If you want to know more about what we charge, reach out. But I can tell you this for sure: we won’t ever write a 750-word blog post for only $20.
