How much to charge for freelance writing
Darren Krause

When you first start freelance writing, you are probably wondering how much you should charge for a project. You don't want to price yourself out of the freelance writing market, but you want to get paid for the quality of your writing. So, what do you charge? This is a question that gets asked hundreds of times by new freelance writers. They just don't have the experience yet to figure out what they should charge. And that is why I am here to help. You can go about pricing your project in a few ways, and I have provided a glimpse into each of those ways. Before we get into that, the first rule of thumb is this: Don't ever sell yourself short!

How much do you want to make?

This would be my first question. Freelance writing isn't necessarily a cut and dried business where someone with a certain amount of experience and colorful credits behind their name gets a specified amount of money. You can set how much you make by coming up with a rate per hour that you would charge. Then, when bidding on a job, you will estimate how many hours it will take to do that job and voila! A price! And how do you come up with a price per hour? Here's how I would do it.

Figure out how much you want to make freelance writing over the next year. Let say you want to make $30,000 annually. You will probably work 250 days per year - if you are lucky, maybe around 200. For arguement's sake, we'll use 250 days of work per year. If you divide the $30,000 per year by 250 days, you need to make $120 per day. How many hours of work do you want to do in a day? Let's say seven hours are dedicated strictly to freelance writing. So, take the $120 per day, and divide it by the number of hours - which is 7. There is your hourly rate - about $17.25 per hour. That's a little bit low for a per hour figure as a freelance writer, but to illustrate the example, it will work.

This is a formula that will work for you if you have the potential for steady business, but also as a backup when you are asked to bid on a project that just can't be priced any other way (per page, per word, etc.) Note: Most novice freelance writers would be safe charging between $20 and 25$ per hour for large project work. With that said, your price may vary depending on the scope of the project or any other curveballs that might be thrown in. Follow up note: You can literally throw these rates out the window if you are bidding for projects on freelance writing services like www.elance.com. The pricing there is an all-out bidding war, and in many cases, the lower-middle prices win (for new providers). I will talk about pricing on bid services a little later in this article.

The price is set for you.

If you have queried a magazine about an article and it gets accepted, chances are they pay freelancers a standard rate (especially new freelancers), and you are likely going to have to stick with that rate for the first few articles you write for them. It is impossible to give you an accurate idea of what many of the magazines pay because the range is from $.05 to $2 per word and up. You can check with such resources as www.writersmarket.com, and they provide the current rates of most magazines in North America.

Once you have done a few articles with a particular magazine, and you have built a good rapport with an editor, don't be afraid to up the ante. They obviously like your work, and you have paid your dues to become one of their reliable freelance writers. You are well within your right to ask for an increase in your per word, or assignment rate. If they have been paying you $.50 per word, there is no reason why you can't ask for $.55 or $.60 per word. In most cases, editors are happy to have a quality writer working with them because it is one less thing they have to worry about.

You may also run into projects that have a specified budget. These are good projects, because you know your price isn't going to get ground down to the bare minimum. What you have to decide is whether or not you can do a job for that price. If the job budget is $1,000 and you would estimate it might take you 50 hours to do it properly at $25 per hour, that's $1,250. You might just take a chance on it and hope you can trim some hours on the job by working efficiently, and make your hourly wage. But, if you think that $1,000 job is going to take you 80 hours at $25 per hour for $2,000, you are going to want to leave that one to the vultures.

Winning the bidding war.

Freelance writing has definitely evolved over the past several years, with many entry-level freelance writing jobs being bought and sold over the Internet. With sites like www.elance.com buyers can post jobs and have potentially dozens of people bid on them. Don't make a mistake thinking that this is anything like auctioning on E-bay, where those projects in demand have a price that rises like a kite on a blustery day. Instead it has the opposite effect. It is bordering on cutthroat for many of the jobs on Elance, with up to 30 or 40 people bidding on one project, most of whom are driving the price of writing down. Many good full-time freelance writers who helped build Elance into what it is today are being somewhat choked out by "freelance writers" who are in it for a quick buck over being a pure writer. But, you can't fault someone for trying to make a living, I guess.

Here are a few tips: Despite some jobs being price lower than fair market value, Elance still has quite a few good paying opportunities - you just have to find them.

* Always look at the average price per bid. This will give you a ballpark idea of where your pricing should be. A slight majority of buyers will opt for the middle price, rather than the lower one.

* Look for the jobs that are about to close. Then look at how many people have bid on them. If you can find a job that few people have bid on, and the bidding time is coming to a close, you might be able to sneak a bid in that is a little higher priced than the others. This is an especially good way to get jobs if you already have a few jobs under your belt.

* Make your description stand out. Too many of the freelance writers put a standard greeting for every job they bid on. BOOORRRRIIINNNNGG!! I have found success right from the very beginning by writing bid descriptions with the same gusto I would write the material with.

I can't give you all of my secrets, but there are a few you can work with to start. I have sown my seeds on Elance, and there is no reason I can't pass this knowledge on to others to help them find their success as a writer.

The price is right.

After you have a few jobs under your belt, and you know how much time and effort is involved in doing a project, you will have a much better idea of what a job is worth. This is probably going to be the best measuring stick for pricing future jobs. You are still going to land jobs that are worth much more than you are being paid, but hopefully with experience you will have just as many that you are well paid for, with less work than you thought.

For more information and a guideline on your projects, you can check out my pricing page.