Thread by @Delafina777

Just finished up a convo with a beginning freelance writer and, look, freelance writers, we gotta talk about what you're doing to yourself charging a per-hour rate. My sweets, no no no.

Okay, so I've been paid for freelance writing since I was in middle school, and maybe it's BECAUSE I started in middle school when this obviously couldn't be A Job--articles were a thing I sold, a product.

I see a lot of writers treat freelance writing as if they were contractors--as in, non-employees who still show up at an office and do a job for a particular number of hours per day. If that's what you're actually doing, sure.

But if you're at home, working for a bunch of different clients, what you are is, basically, a *vendor.* You're not being paid to Do A Job. You're being paid for a product.

So per-hour rates are, likely, going to screw you over. But more on that in a minute.

Writing's a little different since you usually agree on a price before you start working, but you're still selling a thing. As long as it's done before the deadline, how many hours it takes you is not something the client needs to know, so long as they're happy with the quality.

Because when you walk into a store or order something online, presumably you don't demand to know how many hours it took the person to make. You look at the product, look at the price, and decide if it's worth it to you.

When you're working in an office, you're getting paid for a lot more than the work product you put out. You're going to meetings, talking with coworkers, etc. And that gets covered by your salary, or your hourly contractor rate.

If you're doing freelance creative work, though, presumably you're NOT charging them for the time you spend thinking about what you're writing in the shower, or while you're walking, etc. And most aren't charging for time you spend invoicing, answering email, etc.

But even leaving aside all the non-writing work you do as a freelance writer, what it boils down to is (assuming in all cases that you write *well*), with a per-hour rate:
--if you write fast, you're getting screwed
--if you write slow, the client's getting screwed

Let's talk about the math. The three main types of freelance writing I do are game writing, technical writing, and marketing copywriting. Let's look at technical writing first.

I've never been a salaried non-game technical writer, so I don't have personal salary data. Let's head over to PayScale and get some data. It says the average salary for a technical writer is $58,217. payscale.com/research/US/Jo…

Which, sidebar, technical writers: HOLY SHIT THAT SEEMS LOW, given that the pharmaceutical technical writers I know all have fancy science degrees and most of the tech industry writers have comp sci or engineering degrees, but okay.

Benefits are generally valued at an additional 30%ish of your salary. So including benefits, your average technical writer salary is, roughly, $75,000. Assuming an average of 2 weeks sick time/2 weeks paid vacation, that works out to about $39/hour.

When you're a salaried writer, with meetings and office distractions and all that, in my experience you're lucky to get 2000 words a day written. So, in an 8-hour day, that averages out to about 250 words an hour (obviously, that's not how it's distributed, but).

We'll come back to per-word rates in a moment. But okay, so if you're doing freelance technical writing, paying for your own insurance, paying freelance taxes, etc. you want to be making at least what a salaried writer is making per hour.

(More, really, since self-employment taxes are brutal.) But honestly, that should be your MINIMUM, because again, your client is paying for your *product*, not the hours they have you in their office.

And if you're limiting yourself to what a salaried writer makes per hour, all the work you have to do as a freelancer (finding clients, invoicing, email/phone calls, etc.) isn't getting covered unless you agree that they're paying you for that time and not just writing time.

So, a salaried writer gets maybe 2000 words done in a day, and makes ~$312 per day. Great. On a slow day, I write 1000 words an hour, and on a good one, I write 2500-3000. So sounds like, by that measure, I should make at LEAST $300/hour.

Every potential client out there just felt themselves die of sticker shock.

And if you go to most freelance writing websites, they'll quote you rates that average out to about $50/hour. See, for example freelancewriting.com/freelancing/ho… or clearvoice.com/blog/how-much-…

That's not enough, unless you've got a family member with a nice insurance package. And again, a lot of the actual *work* of writing isn't writing. It's research, thinking, communicating with people to understand what they need, etc. You need to be paid for that work too.

Smarter freelancing advice sites will tell you to calculate a per-word rate for yourself, even if you translate it into a per-hour rate for the client.

I think it's more figure out how much you need to make in a day, translate that into a per-word rate, and translate THAT into a project rate for the client. You can share the per-word rate with them, but also point out the research, etc. involved, esp with technical writing.

That's even MORE crucial with marketing copywriting, because marketing writing is probably the purest distillation of the creative process I've ever had--in that either it's effortless or it's impossible.

"Look at this product and come up with a compelling 5-word slogan that distills the lifestyle the ideal consumer of this product aspires to."

Yeah, either it comes to you in a flash or you got nothing.

That's the extreme example, of course, but when it comes to that type of marketing writing, 90% of the work is pacing around, saying things out loud until inspiration hits and you come up with a perfect phrase.

Marketing writer average salary: $67,410. So, with benefits, roughly $87,000, or ~$45 an hour.

Game writing? Well, here's personal data. First salaried job, 10 years ago, started at $55,000. About 6-7 years ago, started at $78,000. Most recently, started at $100,000. So, 10 years ago as a newbie in games, ~$37.50/hr ($44 adj for inflation), to now, ~$67.00/hr.

So you can work out the per-day math. 2000 words a day is pretty good for a game writer (again, most of your time in the office isn't undisturbed writing time, and some days you may not get to write at all).

So there's the dilemma of if you actually ask for what you're worth on a per-hour basis, your client is going to get sticker shock. If you base it solely on a per-word rate, you're likely not getting compensated for the non-typing-actual-words work you're doing.

Hence, go for a per-project rate, and negotiate with the client for something that seems fair to them for the product being produced. They don't need to know how many hours you spend typing.

And that may well work out to you spending two hours in a coffee shop typing and getting paid $500. But that's not the extent of the work you're doing. And in a salaried job, you'd be getting paid for that other time you spend.

You're WORKING when you're checking your email, googling subject matter information, walking around trying to figure out how to best put something into words, getting new clients, etc.

And while a $175-$300/hr rate that a project might work out to if you write fast might seem exorbitant, the truth is as a freelancer you're rarely going to have 40 hours of freelance work per week.

Plus, freelance work is *concentrated* in a way salaried work usually isn't. You're usually focusing for a few hours in a way that would be unsustainable 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks per year.

So, if you're already doing freelance work at a per-hour or per-word rate, pay attention to how long you can concentrate per day, how much time you spend doing related non-actual-typing-words tasks, and start gathering data.

Then figure out how much you need to make per month, with insurance, taxes, etc. That's the information you need to understand yourself in order to negotiate per-project rates.

Because you may only be "working" -- as in, sitting in front of a keyboard writing copy -- 2 hours a day, but you're *working* a lot more than that. Make sure you're getting paid for all of the work you're actually doing.

And now I'm going to a coffee shop for a couple hours to write. I'll spend a half hour walking each way. On the way there, I'll be thinking about the project parameters and how to approach turning a bunch of engineer words into something a layperson can absorb.

On the way back, I'll be reviewing what I wrote. When I get home, I'll probably reread the initial specs, reread what I wrote, then spend a half hour polishing based on that mental review.

That's about 4 hours of work. If I were charging per-hour, I'd get paid for 2.

Anyway, every person works differently. But remember that as a freelance writer, you're selling a finished product, whereas as a salaried writer, you're selling in-office time. Either way, charge accordingly.