The Mathematics of Freelancing: What's Your Hourly Rate? By Rich Mintzer

How much time are you putting in for X dollars? This informative article by Rich Mintzer helps you break down what you do as a freelance writer, and how you should be charging for it.

Link: The Mathematics of Freelancing: What's Your Hourly Rate? By Rich Mintzer.

Freelance writing is a business, and like all businesses, if you are doing this full time, you should always be cognizant of the bottom line. To do this effectively, you need to first have a realistic assessment of how much work you can generate and how much money you are hoping to earn in a given year

Comments

[Chris B]

Hourly is a pain, but required in many cases. However, myself, and others I know have been moving away from hourly rates. For so long, many consulting and other books said to be super leery of doing "project" based work, or fixed fee, etc. I do some fixed-fee, when I'm comfortable about the time frame, or when I think it's appropriate but myself and some others are also moving more towards a daily fee, instead of an hourly fee.

Hourly is really kind of bogus anyway. And, we're going more after the value of the project, and less the hours it takes to do it. A lot of it may come back to an estimate of hours for the work, but tracking the hours is a pain, and it's really not always that accurate. So, I also recommend looking at alternatives to hourly rates so as to make your life easier, and often, it's actually better for the client as well.

[Anthony St. Clair]

I'd been seeing that too. How much of moving away from hourly is just trying to have a pretty tight plan/outline of what the project is? Offhand, it would seem the more specific that is, the better things can be priced out.