When I started working as a freelancer, my first few jobs were for a publisher. I had the security of knowing that everything I touched was guaranteed to make it into print — security I needed as I worked to build my resume — and I knew that I’d be earning the same fixed rate of pay that all that publisher’s other freelance editors got, which offered little room for negotiation. This was also good, since I didn’t know what editors charged, or what my skills were really worth.
Soon enough, though, I had some happy clients through the publisher. Through a friend of a friend of a client’s friend, I got my first query about an independent project. I took a deep breath and said, “Well, my rates depend on a number of factors,” and stalled; cornered, I had realized that I had absolutely no idea what to charge.
I’m fortunate to have self-employed friends and family, and they were able to give me good advice. The best and most important advice I received, was this: Charge what you want to be paid.
It’s profound, yet simple. Choose the hourly (or yearly) salary that you feel is reasonable, and back-engineer your rates so that they provide it.
Do so realistically, of course. As much as I want to make six figures a year, I don’t believe that I’m in a place yet where I can reasonably demand to do so. I aim for a salary slightly higher than the one I finished with at the large publishing house I worked for, and that puts my rates well within the industry standard.
That leads quite handily into the next question: What’s the industry standard?
To determine this, I started searching the web. (What did we ever do without the web?)
I found a couple of useful guides, such as this pdf article on writersmarket.com, written by Lynn Wasnak and based on an annual survey she compiles. (If you’re a freelancer, go to her site and add your data for her 2009 survey!)
They helped a little, but they didn’t help much — Copyediting is worth $1 to $6 per page? That’s quite a wide range! — but they at least gave me the ballpark. The rate I’d decided on was toward the lower end of the scale, as was appropriate for a beginner, but it was still within the scale and not off the bottom or the top.
The Editorial Freelancers Association has a guide to industry standard rates as well, broken down clearly into pace (pages per hour) and hourly rates. It’s easy enough to convert those numbers into a per page rate and see the relationship.
Some freelancers charge by the hour, but I’m more comfortable charging by the page. The hour is too subjective a measure for me. You don’t know that I’m timing only the minutes I spend on your project. I could tab away to check my email or respond to an IM and leave the clock running. You’re reliant on my reading speed, and I can’t itemize every minute of work in a way that proves I’m working honestly. Plus, on an easy project, if I’m efficient then I’m only cheating myself. If I’m not, I might be cheating you. I’d rather remove that ambiguity.
By charging per page, with a finite number of Microsoft Word document pages and the knowledge that without substantial cuts or additions, that page number isn’t going to change much, I feel that there’s a much clearer expectation on both sides as to what the final cost of the job will be.
My rates still depend on a number of factors. Namely, how long I reasonably expect to spend on each page. For a simple, clean manuscript that needs very little editing, my rates will be lower. For something that requires more work (whether recasting awkward sentences, making more spelling and grammar corrections, or doing more research or fact checking, or something involving significant rewrites), my rates will be higher. A short deadline will push my rates up, as well. I can usually determine within a few pages how difficult a project will be; often, the first page is illustrative enough.
How to translate that into money, though! For my own use, I worked out a simple spreadsheet that shows me rate per page, and how that translates out into hourly (and daily, weekly, monthly and yearly!) rate based on number of pages per hour. This is a very handy tool. Industry standard assumes a 250 word page, and the industry standard editing speed is between 5 and 10 pages per hour, depending on the complexity of the work. If you think about the difference between 5 and 10 pages per hour, at the same rate per page… $20/hour at 5 pages per hour = $4/page. $20/hour at 10 pages per hour = $2/page. (Assuming a 200-300 page manuscript, you can quickly see how giving your editor a clean manuscript is to your benefit!)
Now, before you think that I rush off to up my page count and make myself rich, slow down! This doesn’t mean that I pay less attention and zoom through my work. It means that I can use that scale to pick the page per hour speed that I think is realistic for the job, and I can choose my rate from there, targeting the right overall figure. I can charge twice as much for a harder, 5 page/hour job, as for an easier 10 page/hour job. I’m not charging an hourly rate, but I’m still getting a standard hourly rate, and it’s the rate I feel comfortable targeting. This way, I don’t aim too high, but I don’t sell my own skills short, either.
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