lwidmer | Words on the Page

Freelance Artist or Just Freelance?

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I was talking with a writer chum yesterday about some reno work she’s having done. The contractor doing the job suggested a trim board that he said would cover a problem area and look great. Then she saw the piece of trim. Let’s just say the guy is better at repairing than planning. It’s also…

Freelance Game Plan: Create a New Routine

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October already? Lord, that summer went by quickly. Here we are in our 10th installment of Freelance Game Plan. How are you finding your results for 2021 so far? You know those moments where you have no work in front of you and you want to be doing something, but you feel more like you’re twisting in…

Saying No to Freelance Writing Prospects

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A conversation I started on a LinkedIn forum went something like this: This has been on my mind a while. And with so many writers struggling (some of them for longer than imaginable), I thought this topic might be appropriate. Writers, it’s time you become picky. Ask yourself these questions: 1: When was the last…

How to Lose a Freelance Client Prospect in 4 Moves

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We talk a lot about how to find and win over potential clients for our freelance writing life. What we don’t talk much about is probably more important — How you might be losing that client before you even win them over. But Lori! I sent out a letter of introduction! I told them all…

We Should All Be Anti-Racism Writers

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Are you sick of racism yet? I don’t mean sick of talking about it — I mean sick of it being. Every single white person I know has heard the same things I’ve heard: racist remarks that demean another culture, race, or religion. I’ve heard it since I was first able to comprehend what was…

Clarifying Your Freelance Writing Project

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I saw this tidbit in Michelle Garrett’s newsletter this week: Did you hear the mic drop right there? Or was that your head nodding wildly? I know for me, it was the moment I went “YES, thank you.” Because like you, like nearly every single freelancer who has ever worked for a client, I have…

A Freelance Decision You Don’t Want to Make (but should)

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Something happened a while back that’s been sticking in my mind. It’s not one of those “Look what that nasty client did to me” events, either. It was subtler than that. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed. It was when the work outpaced the pay. The client was a fairly new…

Freelance Game Plan: Creating Simple Freelance Systems

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Welcome to September. It’s been a wild month here, and it’s only the 3rd. Hurricane Ida came through yesterday, and we spent the afternoon removing some of the ten inches of rain that found its way into the basement. With that amount of water in a short amount of time, there was no way we…

Writing Without Racism

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This shouldn’t be a difficult post to write. And yet, it is. In 2020, we all watched it happen. As we watched a man murdered, we watched something else happen, too. Our world woke up to what millions of people have already known — racism is alive and festering. Worse, in the last decade, it…

Freelance Follies: This Job, Not That Job

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And the madness continues. In a slow month in which I’m poised to earn over $10K, there is still proof that some job posters think that writing is a fire-sale endeavor. Thanks to my chum Sharon Hurley Hall, I was alerted to this job. Well, let’s not call it a job. It’s more of a…

Gabriella

Oh, ffs.

How low would I go? As you did, Lori, in evaluating that crappy job, I think writers have to look at their hourly rate.

I have a client for which I write seven 750-1,000 articles a month–been doing it since 2008; he’s my longest-term client–and I get paid $2,147. Sounds low. It’s not.

I have a great system for these articles. I interview four sources, each for a half hour, who speak to all seven topics. So that’s two hours. Maybe add another hour for finding and arranging interviews with the sources. Then it takes me a day to write all the articles and about more two hours to proof them.

So that’s two business days max on this work at more than $1K per day, which roughs out to well over $100 per hour.

What needs to be there to take a lower rate? Great systems. If you’ve been at this a while and have great systems that allow you to work really, really efficiently, you can entertain offers that don’t, on their face, hit that $1 per word writing baseline most people use.

By the way, I took that client three years after I began freelancing, and I took it after turning the guy down first. He offered me too little. I stuck to my guns and politely told him I couldn’t take such low pay (I don’t even remember what it was at the time). A few months after I turned him down, he came back and said he’d pay me what I asked. It was lower than I’d wanted at the time, but I thought I could do the work efficiently, and I saw value in having regular, monthly work instead of chasing one-off assignments.

Best decision I ever made. Over the past 13 years, he’s broadened the work he gives me. I also moderate a monthly webinar for him, for which I also have a great system to get the work done. I choose the topics, find two panelists from among the sources I’ve cultivated over the past 13 years, and then moderate the hour-long webinar. About three hours of my time, for which I earn $600. I oversee another writer’s work for that client for $150 a month. Takes an hour to review her proposed topics and review the turned-in copy to provide feedback.

Long story short, I’ve earned more than $300K from this guy (much more, but that’s using a $2k per month baseline for 13 years). I was able to do that by sticking to my guns on my value and creating great systems.

On the straight-up word-count articles, my lowest is $1 per word.

How low would I go? Hard to say. But it ain’t $15 an hour. Sheesh.

P.S. Sorry for the long-winded example, but you got me going on this Monday morning!

1. lwidmer
  
  Gabriella, I absolutely love your reactions to these posts. 🙂
  
  You sure did make a great decision there. Great system, too. It makes your life, and their lives, easier. Pretty sweet! And look how that’s turned into more work. How great is that? No apologies — your example is one we should all be following.
  
  I had a job not long ago that paid $1/word. Great! Except it took me four solid days to finish it. The actual payment based on my time put into it was more like 4 cents a word. That $1/word wasn’t really paying off for me. It turned my $150/hr. rate into a $23/hr. rate.
  
  Conversely, another job I have monthly pays $900. It’s a three- to four-hour investment. So while the pay is lower, I’m actually getting paid more for it because I’m not spinning my wheels for days — correct my math if it’s wrong, but I’m figuring $225/hr. Plus, this is the client who gives me special projects on top of that, so I can expect roughly $14K annually from this one client.
  
  Yea, I’ll keep that one over the first one.
Sharon Hurley Hall

That pay rate was unbelievable, Lori. As a freelancer, you definitely have to work out how much you’re actually earning. An easy job with sa system like the one Gabriella describes can work out to a high hourly rate. Another job that looks good on paper, less so.

Gabriella

Lori, that four solid days for a 1,500 article? That’s awful. I know you. And I know that wasn’t due to you. Ugh.

Paula Hendrickson

I earned more than $45 per article when I first started freelancing in the pre-internet dark ages. And that was writing profiles and human interest articles for a small, low-budget weekly paper. They gave me solid clips that I used to start working my way up the food chain.