Freelance Writers: How to Set Your Hourly Rate
What’s the going hourly rate for freelance writers?
That’s the wrong question. A better one: What’s the hourly rate you need to reach your income goals?
Getting what you want
All too often, freelance writers approach their worth as something to be established by the market. Magazine A pays $1 per word; Company X pays $400 per blog post. Client Z offers $100 per hour. Publisher K gives advances of $5,000 for books.
I think about this reliance on the market to set the value of our work whenever someone asks for “the going rate” for a specific kind of writing job. The question pops up on online writing forums and in conversation all the time. The problem with setting fees based on going rates is that we fall into the trap of earning only what clients comfortably want to pay, which is bound to be too low. It’s true that market forces affect our earnings, especially when so many people call themselves freelance writers and are eager to be published. Publishing has always operated in a buyer’s market. But we are not defenseless against those forces. It helps to consider how much we must earn, and how much we want to earn from our writing. If we fail to set our fees in accordance with our income goals, we will never reach those targets.
